Candelabra of Tawnos – Antiquities
Date Reviewed: December 8, 2022
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.25
Casual: 3.75
Limited: 2.75
Multiplayer: 3.25
Commander [EDH]: 3.50
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Candelabra of Tawnos is one of Magic’s original puzzles – we all learn that mana comes from lands, so are you just going to tap your lands to untap themselves? In defense of the 90s players, though, we usually only knew the cards we’d personally seen, so a lot of people genuinely didn’t know that the Candelabra goes ridiculous with something as simple as the Urzatron or Mana Flare. Nowadays, of course, the stable of lands that produce more than one mana is even bigger, as is the range of artifact mana, so there’s no lack of things to power the Candelabra. I will say that it seems to be almost not worth playing “fairly”, as there’s limited utility you get from untapping basic lands or such, so this might be a go big or go home type of card.
Constructed: 3 (it does show up in Legacy and Vintage in specialized decks, but if you’re not playing those, you probably don’t need to have it on hand “just in case”)
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 2.5 (it was in a draftable Magic Online set with the Urzatron, but little else to do)
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.5
Candleabra of Tawnos is one of the more notorious little trinkets from the early days of the game, making already broken lands even more broken with just a little push. Since this lets you untap lands without any limitation, so long as you have lands that produce more than 1 mana, this will result in a net gain of mana…which made for a lot of fun with Tolarian Academy, to give one example. The Candelabra is a pretty simple card in scaling sharply with the power level of its surroundings: it might not be phenomenal in a tighter pool of cards (though Antiquities did give us the Urzatron lands), but it can make a broken card at least 62% more broken, and sometimes that’s all you need.
Constructed: 3.5 (mostly confined to Vintage, though you might be able to play it in Legacy just fine if you can part with $1000+ for a copy)
Casual: 3
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 3 (lets you play politics, thanks to being able to target any land)
Commander [EDH]: 3.5
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