Long considered the lynchpin of a Sliver deck,
the Queen contributes surprisingly little.
Neither her nor her spawn grant all Slivers an
ability-- she exists for the hive to serve. All
the various combat abilities the Slivers can
bestow definitely look more impressive on a 7/7,
but to run the Queen effectively, you must build
a five-color deck, which isn't easy. Your reward
for pulling it off is a token-generation engine,
and a horde of Lords who can all power up your
tokens. As far as tokens go, the Queen is better
at generating them than most cards. Usually, a
repeatable token producer requires you to tap
the creature, or at best pay a lot more than (2)
per token. But the work you spent getting the
Queen out, and the additional times and turns it
takes to build up a sizable mass of tokens,
simply made her too slow back in her own
day--she was at best a toy for the kitchen-table
crowd while tournament Slivers stuck to two or
three colors.
Today, Sliver Queen is finding new life in
Commander. As the commander of a Sliver deck, a
player never has to worry about drawing her. And
the format is much better suited to five-color
Sliver decks, as it favors slower-paced games
and the 100-card singleton limit encourages a
Sliver fan's natural inclination to cram in a
copy of as many different Slivers as possible.
Can you believe it's been more than ten years
since the Pojo crew has reviewed the Sliver
Queen? She's only one of the most famous,
iconic, and popular cards of all time, and it's
easy to see why (yes, even if you're one of
those people who asks why she has all five
colors in her mana cost). While she doesn't
offer a power boost like the other legendary
Slivers, she doesn't really need to - if you run
out of such boosts in a Sliver-themed deck,
you're doing it wrong. Did you know that this
card has even made appearances in competitive
Vintage? After all, when your deck is designed
to generate an arbitrarily large amount of mana,
there are few things more fun than overrunning a
Workshop deck with 900,000 Sliver tokens.
Today's card of the day is Sliver Queen which
is a five mana, five color, 7/7 Legendary sliver
that for two mana puts a 1/1 colorless sliver
token into play. Managing the mana cost to
get her into play is the only real issue with
this card and it can conveniently be approached
with Gemhide or Manaweft as they also provide
mana for the effect. With a few effects
like Haste, evasion, and power boosts through
other slivers the Queen provides an often
overwhelming advantage. Various card
combinations exist to maximize the benefit and
this has been and will remain a popular card in
sliver decks across formats that allow it.
In a Limited setting where this is available the
mana cost is a much bigger problem as the easy
mana fixing options are going to be either out
of block or in short supply. An obvious
first pick in Booster for the rare draft, though
actually using it can be difficult as
maintaining a five color deck and slivers to
drive it requires a lucky pool. In Sealed
the chances of using it are even smaller, so it
depends on what fixing is present and the
balance of useful support. Once in play it
can dominate a game with two or more tokens each
turn and almost any other sliver to give them an
effect, which gives strong incentive to force a
deck around it.
