Magic: The Gathering as a game isn’t short on cards that let you revive your fallen creatures. Reanimator is one of the game’s oldest archetypes, after all, and pretty much every set brings a new offering to the table to support it. Tarkir: Dragonstorm, however, may have just taken the cake. Perennation, an MTG card that not only resurrects a creature but also makes it pretty much impossible to kill again, has just been revealed.
Previewed in a gloriously apt post by Birds of Paradise Founder Bobbie-Christine Brewer, Perennation is a big, splashy Abzan sorcery of the highest order. While it’s not as efficient as the likes of Zombify, the extra resilience it provides more than makes up for that. It may be pricey, but with the right creature, this card can make victory trivial for the necromancer casting it.
Perennation MTG
- Mana Value: 3WBG
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Type: Sorcery
- Card Text: Return target permanent card from your graveyard to the battlefield with a Hexproof counter and an Indestructible counter on it.
Perennation is the rarest of beasts: a very simple MTG card with a huge range of gameplay implications. At first glance, it looks absolutely atrocious. Six mana is two over the going rate for reanimation these days, and in three colors you’d expect a further discount too. When you consider its subtleties, however, it gets a lot more attractive.
First of all, Perennation lets you reanimate any permanent, not just a creature. There are a few existing cards that do this, like Obzedat’s Aid and Profound Journey, but it’s a very rare ability overall. This kind of flexibility is fantastic. Artifact and enchantment removal gets better with each new set, so having the option to bring back your crucial non-creature engine pieces is great. You can even get a land if you want to. In Commander in particular, getting back something like a Field of the Dead can be solid in the right scenario.
Of course, the big draw of the card is the two counters it adds to your reanimated permanent. An Indestructible counter is one thing; we saw that with Blomburrow’s Season of the Burrow, though the mana cost restriction stopped it from being a true menace. A Hexproof counter is something else entirely. Outside of Slippery Bogbonder, there’s really no way to give a Hexproof counter to a chosen creature like this. This puts Perennation in very exclusive company.
While the permanent you bring back with Perennation isn’t totally impossible to deal with, most decks will struggle. Your opponent will need an edict or non-targeting exile-based removal, otherwise your chosen champion will be back for good.
The Road To Immortality
While six mana is a hell of a lot in modern MTG, there are actually some genuine use cases for Perennation in Standard. Chief among these? Reanimating a Herald of Eternal Dawn to make it literally impossible for you to lose. If your opponent isn’t running exile-based sweepers like Sunfall, or an edict like Pick Your Poison, the game is effectively over as soon as that move is made. You don’t even need to take any further actions. You can just sit back, let your life total fall into double negative figures, and wait for your opponent to deck themselves out.
It’s certainly an impressive combo and one that only needs two cards (and a way to get Herald into the graveyard) to function. While it’s unlikely to get you there post-sideboard, this looks like a devious strategy for best-of-one matches on Arena. If you’d rather be a bit more proactive with your plays, Perennation has you covered there too.
Reanimating a Valgavoth, Terror Eater is another great way to win the game. Valgavoth is hard to kill in the first place, but Hexproof and Indestructible make it nearly impossible. Throw in constant big lifegain and the ability to play all of your opponent’s creatures after wrathing them away, and victory shouldn’t be far off.
There are countless great reanimation targets in Standard right now, from Craterhoof Behemoth to Atraxa, Grand Unifier, and all of them get even better with Perennation. The main obstacle to the card’s success, as always, is the speed of the format. You’ll need solid early ramp and fixing if you want to pull this off, as well as ample self-mill. Standard has plenty of that too, but I still foresee this being a difficult dance to perform.
Eternal Glory
Standard play is far from guaranteed for Perennation, then, but where it will definitely shine is in Commander. Six mana in three colors is trivial for green decks in the format, and access to graveyard tutors like Entomb and Buried Alive makes it easy to set up your targets too.
Which targets are worth grabbing? The list is endless. Nevinyrral’s Disk is a particularly nasty pick, giving you a way to wipe the board of pretty much everything every single turn for just one mana. Normally Disk is balanced by the fact that it also destroys itself, but an Indestructible counter handles that little problem neatly. You won’t win many friends with this combo, but you will probably win a lot of games.
On the more traditional reanimator front, there are countless great Perennation picks in the format. Serra’s Emissary naming creatures should lock up a lot of games, as should the classic Platinum Angel. For lower-power tables, something like Guardian of the Gateless to just shut down creature combat may be a better pick. That said, I suspect few players are going to begrudge you winning the game with a clunky six-mana sorcery.
Overall, Perennation seems like the perfect MTG card for the Commander format. It’s flashy, it’s exciting, and it can legitimately win games in certain situations. Thanks to the sheer volume of quality non-destruction board wipes these days, Toxic Deluge, Farewell, Blasphemous Edict, etc., it’s very unlikely to ever be a serious problem, either. This is a great new design and a definite must-add to any Abzan Reanimator lists going forward.
