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
Coming Soon
Constructed:
Casual:
Limited:
Multiplayer:
Commander [EDH]:
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