It’s time for another Card of the Day!  This time, we’ll be discussing one of my absolute favorite cards:

This card was originally printed in the Prophecy expansion, a set that was marginal at best.  The main theme of the expansion involved either tapping all of your own lands or sacrificing bunches of them at a time, which, needless to say, never proved itself to be all that much fun (even after the mana burn rule was scratched).  However, the Avatar cycle was one of the highlights of this set, and the highlight of that cycle had to be Avatar of Woe.  True, ten creatures would have to die before you could play her for BB, but once that happened, you had yourself a creature with one of the most powerful activated abilities ever to appear on a card (at least at the time).  The fact that it was tacked onto a 6/5 body with Fear made Avatar of Woe a definite force to be reckoned with.

What makes the impact of this card so powerful for me, though, is the story that is behind the single copy that I currently own.  I started playing Magic around the time Invasion came out, and one of the first things I started doing was tooling around on magicthegathering.com, back when it was essentially just a preview site for new cards, and trying to find out as much as I could about previous expansions.  One of the cards featured on the websites Prophecy page was, of course, Avatar of Woe, and I instantly fell in love (no, not with the picture… that’s just creepy).  Anyway, I wanted an Avatar of Woe more than any other card out there.

A few months after I started playing, I discovered The Gamekeeper, a store in the Great Lakes Mall in Mentor, Ohio.  It turned out to be the best place in town to find Magic cards; they had packs from all over the place in there.  At the time I didn’t have a job, so I only had a few bucks on me.  I saw that they had Prophecy packs, and my brain instantly started trying to calculate the chances of pulling an Avatar out of one pack.  It failed, because I was very bad at math.  Nevertheless, I grabbed a pack of Prophecy and headed home.  In my room, I thought about nothing but seeing an Avatar of Woe at the back of the back.  This train of thought continued as I thumbed slowly through the cards until, finally, I got to the rare slot and saw none other than that multi-armed, scythe-wielding femme fatale staring back at me.

Over the years, the Avatar and I have had our struggles.  I used her in a really crappy deck back when I had no idea what I was doing as far as deckbuilding was concerned, and she wound up collecting dust for a couple of years until I traded her to a friend of mine for a bunch of cards I wanted to build a deck around (that one didn’t work, either).  I always regretted the decision, right up until a few months ago when I was finally able to trade back for her.  I’ve found a spot for her in my Elder Dragon Highlander deck, and it is there that she will stay.

You’ll want to make sure that you put this card into a deck that can kill lots of creatures at once, especially if you’re more accustomed to one-on-one games.  She absolutely shines in multiplayer games (more graveyards = better chance of playing her for 2), especially in the aforementioned EDH format (creatures die like crazy in those games).  If you get her out at the right time, you can really screw a lot of people up.  A good way to use her would be to give her vigilance, allowing her to swing for 6 and off a creature every turn.  Another good idea is to give her haste; one card that should be used alongside her is Madrush Cyclops, a cheap beater that makes all your creatures a turn faster.  Oh, and equipping her with Thornbite Staff allows you to kill as many creatures as you want all at once.  Thought I might throw that out there.

As a last side note, I should mention that the same ability has been printed on one other card to date: Visara the Dreadful.  She really has nothing at all on Avatar of Woe; yes, she evades, and she’s technically cheaper, but the Avatar can be played for 2, while Visara will always cost you 6 (not to mention the BBB requirement… yuck).  I don’t think there’s any question which one of these cards is better.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it; this is probably the best MTG story I have to tell, and it’s a doozy!  See you next time!