We’ve still got two more days of MTG Avatar spoiler season to experience, but the set is already looking leagues better than MTG Spider Man. Even as spoiler season winds down, we still have powerful anti-combo cards and new Scene Boxes hitting the internet.
In all this excitement, one interesting MTG Avatar rare seems to have gone overlooked. At first look, this Aura may just look like many that came before it, but a lot is going on here that makes Avatar Destiny extremely interesting.
Avatar Destiny
For four mana, Avatar Destiny offers a scaleable creature buff that can be explosive, but isn’t always interesting. That said, in focused graveyard strategies, Avatar’s Destiny can make your creature absurdly huge. This could easily grow a Commander like Teval, the Balanced Scale to a size that randomly knocks out an opponent with Commander damage.
The most important part about Avatar Destiny’s first ability, however, is that it ironically incentivizes your opponent to remove the enchanted creature. This triggers Avatar Destiny’s second ability, which offers the most powerful payoff that this card is capable of. Not only will Avatar Destiny return to your hand, but you’ll mill a bunch of cards and get a free creature alongside it. This both makes Avatar Destiny’s next buff more powerful and gives the enchantment a new target to reappear on.
This makes Avatar Destiny enticing for the Standard Sultai Reanimator combo deck. It buffs a weaker creature, advances your game plan when it dies, and can return a big threat to the battlefield. You won’t be able to do the Bringer of the Last Gift trick this way since you aren’t casting Superior Spider-Man, but Overlord of the Balemurk can return to play and put your combo piece into your hand.
Graveyard-focused Commander strategies are also easily interested in this. Putting a creature into play and returning Avatar Destiny into your hand is straight card advantage, and reverses the biggest flaw that Auras usually present. In longer games where you aren’t being pressured into making awkward plays, Avatar Destiny can create an absurd amount of value over time. You can even pair it with an empty deck win condition like Thassa’s Oracle if you’re afraid of milling out.
While all of these things are exciting, Avatar Destiny doesn’t come without its flaws. Fortunately, there are some ways that you can help fix these.
Maximizing Avatar Destiny
One of the biggest weaknesses of Avatar Destiny occurs when you have no creatures in the graveyard to buff your enchanted creature. In this state, the card can still weirdly act as a way to punish your opponents for removing your Commander, but since your enchanted creature isn’t being buffed, there isn’t a big reason to remove it. In these scenarios, you’ll likely be forced to remove the creature yourself.
Fortunately, Aristocrat strategies often have reasons to fuel and use the graveyard, and want to sacrifice their creatures to gain additional value. This makes pairing Avatar Destiny with something like Altar of Dementia one way to go absolutely bonkers with the card. You can sacrifice your creature and mill yourself twice equal to its power. This should get a massive creature back and allow you to repeat the process.
Otherwise, consistently getting Avatar Destiny into play on a relevant creature can be difficult. Boonweaver Giant, a rather niche card, can fix this by tutoring out the enchantment and putting it directly into play, offering a big body to start the value loop.
If you choose to go in this direction instead of Aristocrats, Avatar Destiny can be used to fuel massive reanimation effects like Storm Herald, Replenish, or Mantle of the Ancients. If you enchant a massive creature with Avatar Destiny, you can easily set up Storm Herald kills with the card’s death trigger.
As long as you can fuel the graveyard, Avatar Destiny seems like an enchantment that will be popular with a whole bunch of different Commanders. The card is a bit of a harder sell in Constructed since too many things can go wrong, but the raw power this card offers means that players will likely experiment with it at worst.
Stick with us at mtgrocks.com: the best place for Magic: The Gathering coverage!