Dark Confidant – Ravnica: City of Guilds
Date Reviewed: May 15, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 5
Casual: 3
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
It’s been a couple of years since we last reviewed Dark Confidant, and I know we’ve set a pattern of revisiting this particular class of famous card less frequently than that. But there’s a good reason it’s come up again now: with the release of Final Fantasy, this card will be legal in Standard for the first time in almost twenty years. You might know that after its release, it became a near-instant staple in Extended, Legacy, and even Vintage, and Standard players viewed it as so powerful that it was almost an open conspiracy of sorts. They’d talk about enjoying the novelty of such a format-defining card being in Standard, because it would probably never happen again.
Except . . . now it is going to happen again. And it’s true that Standard is very different now. Sets are designed differently, and rotations are handled differently. Each color does things it didn’t do in 2007 – even blue and green can now address a 2/1 creature – and there are card abilities and strategies that make Dark Confidant’s game text look surprisingly mundane. And yet, its return to Standard is still an epochal shift, because the basic bargain it offers is still good enough even in a world with new mechanics for old and new game zones, expanded card types, and big creatures that act like Swiss army knives. I doubt it’ll break Standard on its own, and that fact is probably going to fuel a lot of people wary of power creep. But it’s going to be important, once again.
Constructed: 5
Casual: 3 (I always give it 3 here because you just don’t need it in casual decks, and it pulls focus from your main theme)
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3
In an unexpected twist, Dark Confidant, a creature originally iconic to Modern and deeper formats before being pushed out, has made a return to Standard for the first time in nearly 20 years. Originally thought too powerful to see a return, we’re about to see if those evaluations are accurate.
The main thing that made Dark Confidant so good is that it was a two-mana card advantage engine, an effect that usually starts at three mana, and it also could put up pressure as an attacker or block in a pinch. The main draw is the card “draw”, so to speak, but Dark Confidant did a lot of little useful things here and there and was an excellent piece in decks that ran low, tight mana curves that would maybe take 3-4 damage at most from it. This was, in a word, excellent, and it was a massive force in both Standard and Extended (and, later, Modern and Legacy).
That said, incidental ping has made it harder for Bob to ply his trade, so a Standard printing is fascinating. It’ll be interesting to see if he still has the old magic (under an Ascian’s guise), or if time has finally passed him by. But I definitely would not underrate this card…one or two turns is often enough of a boost to push you ahead to the endgame.
Constructed: 5
Casual: 3
Limited: 2.5 (has always been a suboptimal Limited card, thanks to the wild variance in mana values)
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.75
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