Could the people of Thraben ever have expected a horde of Zombies to be a welcome sight? When an Eldritch horror looms over your plane, sometimes heroes
come in unexpected packages.
Relentless Dead’s long wait is finally over.
Dark Salvation may appear at first to simply function like any other X spell: having a bunch of mana generates a powerful effect and the card will be
relatively useless before then.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Check out this sequence:
Turn 1: Cryptbreaker
Turn 2: Relentless Dead
Turn 3: Dark Salvation for 1: Kill an opponent’s Sylvan Advocate. Tap my three Zombies: Draw a card.
That’s an explosive start with a ton of built-in resiliency and card advantage.
Dark Salvation’s strength is that it can be efficient or scale appropriately. The fact that it has this versatility is a huge testament to its power level.
As long as you’re playing Magic and unearthing Zombies, Dark Salvation can simply serve as the best Dead Weight ever. Maybe we can’t invest two to four
mana in making incidental Zombies on a given turn, but the fact that we have the option to cast our other spells and then leverage our horde’s presence on
the battlefield for a single black mana to kill an opposing creature is huge.
Cryptbreaker and several of the other new Eldritch Moon “Zombies matter” cards are critically important to Dark Salvation’s ability to function
at all stages of the game, and the fact that many of Liliana’s namesake spells create Zombies makes supporting this card in any base-black deck incredibly
realistic.
I could even see taking a “spell-heavy approach” and using Dark Salvation alongside From Under the Floorboards and Rise from the Tides as a means to
improve your instant and sorcery density while incorporating another threat and removal spell simultaneously!
Amusingly, Zombies are also fickle animations. It may not be particularly intuitive on first reading, but Dark Salvation is also quite effective against
Zombie players! It is possible to target your opponent and kill their creatures on the cheap, should they be calling upon the darkness as well.
It is not often that an effect like Dark Salvation deserves to be a four-of in a deck that wants it. Too often they clog up your hand and prove to be
impossible to cast effectively.
Salvation by Lilliana will be nothing of the sort. This is the powerful role-player that Zombie decks needed to utilize their numbers.
Eldritch Moon
may come to prove in time that the Zombie apocalypse is inevitable.