Modern Horizons 3’s spoiler season has been accelerated significantly by a collection of leaks. Even today, a flurry of exciting leaks hit the internet, but one leak seemed to shine above them all. Sylvan Library has been a powerful card advantage piece on both Commander and Eternal formats. Capable of stacking your deck and drawing extra cards every turn, Sylvan Library provides an absurd amount of advantage for just two mana, and is rather easy to abuse. Of course, you do need to pay life for your extra cards, but that price is generally one that players are willing to pay.
As you may already know, a prevailing theme with Modern Horizons 3 appears to be the reinvention of old staples with a new coat of paint. A lot of the time, these are being powered down a little to make them integrate into Modern properly. While this is still weaker than Sylvan Library, it enables a different kind of strategy.
Of course, since this is a leak, there is a chance the contents might be fake. As a result, consider this your spoiler warning.
Ripples of Undeath
The Sylvan Library variant that players are going crazy over is Ripples of Undeath. Here’s what it does:
Mana Value 1B Enchantment
At the beginning of your precombat main phase, mill three cards. Then you may pay 1 mana and 3 life. If you do, put a card from among those cards into your hand.
Instead of drawing three cards and keeping some number of them, Ripples of Undeath mills three cards. Sadly, you can only choose one of these cards to add to your hand, and you need to pay one mana and three life to do it. In terms of acquiring card advantage, this is worse than Sylvan Library, but the card is still incredibly efficient.
Obviously, decks that want to mill cards are the ones that want Ripples of Undeath the most. Even if you decide not to add cards to your hand, you’re still milling three cards and adding to your gameplan. This can fuel a ton of different things in the Modern format, including Delirium, Delve payoffs for Murktide Regent, Dredge/Crabvine strategies and even Living End variants that utilize Bloodbraid Marauder as the Cascade weapon of choice.
Another example of a deck that definitely wants Ripples of Undeath is Goryo’s Vengeance. Not only does this get your reanimation payoffs like Griselbrand and Atraxa, Grand Unifier into the bin, you can also find your Goryo’s Vengeance and add it to your hand. Otherwise, you can mill Flashback cards like Faithful Mending for additional value.
Death’s Shadow may also be interested in this card. While that archetype is a rather fringe one, a card that grants card advantage at the cost of your own life sounds like a great way to enable Death’s Shadow. This strategy commonly includes Murktide Regent, which can be further enabled by Ripples of Potential.
All in all, a ton of different archetypes serve to gain something from this card. Even Rakdos Scam could be interested in the card advantage implications of Ripples of Undeath. It can act as a pseudo sideboard option for Living End, able to dump your Dauthi Voidwalkers into your grave.
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Ripples of Undeath in Commander
Honestly, Ripples of Undeath is likely to be an auto-include in any black deck that cares about their grave. One mana and three life is a much smaller cost in a format with abundant resources, and it advances your gameplan otherwise. For two mana, this repetitive effect is absolutely incredible value.
Muldrotha, the Gravetide seems like an obvious home for Ripples of Undeath. Not only does this enable Muldrotha’s gameplan, but Muldrotha can even recast this card from the grave if it gets destroyed.
Another Commander that seems great with this card is Raul, Troubleshooter. Raul allows Ripples of Undeath to do double duty, gaining you a card and milling cards for Raul to cast.
The Wise Mothman benefits from Ripples of Undeath, allowing this to be a fantastic upgrade option for the Mutant Menace precon. Nonland mills will pump up your board, and Ripples of Undeath will generate card advantage. This card has similar synergies with The Master, Transcendent, Sidisi, Brood Tyrant and The Mycotyrant. All of your permanent and creature mills from Ripples of Undeath will generate additional card advantage.
This is Going to be Expensive (If Real)
Ripples of Undeath has some serious potential. Not only are Modern players going to be interested in this, Commander players will want some copies as well. Even some older formats could be interested in giving this card a try.
Demanding interest from different playerbases, Ripples of Undeath is ripe to cause a surge in demand. As a result, if this card is real, we would not be surprised if it had some secondary market value.
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