Lord of the Void – Ravnica Remastered
Date Reviewed: January 8, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 1.37
Casual: 4.50
Limited: 4.83
Multiplayer: 4.25
Commander [EDH]: 4.38
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
I was shocked the first time I learned how much demand there was for Lord of the Void. Seriously, go look up its price on your favorite card list. I’ll wait. When it first released in Gatecrash, it caught people’s eyes for its cost and stats that recall Lord of the Pit, but with an upside instead of a disadvantage. Even so, by the standards of the time, it was slow to set up and unreliable as to what it would hit. There were some casual trick decks that used it, but it was largely overlooked.
. . . And then Commander really took off, and suddenly it had a place where cards with long setup times have room to shine, and the density of big spells in opposing decks is much higher. And, in any event, you have more than one opponent to choose from, so if one doesn’t have something you want to cast, somebody else probably does. It may or may not have been intended for Commander during the design process, but it seems tailor-made for it in hindsight. Just watch out for the people who think it’s funny to steal it and use it to steal even more of your stuff!
As you can see from our image above, Lord of the Void is one of the cards that got a retro frame version in Ravnica Remastered. This means it’s now a choice for people who include retro-modern cards in their old-border cubes, and if that’s how you play, I think it’s a pretty justifiable choice. It’s true that we’re used to big black creatures in those settings having drawbacks, but at the same time, Verdant Force and Symbiotic Wurm are popular in cubes with ramp or reanimator decks, and in the Premodern context, I don’t feel it’s much better than those cards (if at all).
Constructed: 1.5
Casual: 4
Limited: 4 (even just as a 7/7 flier, it can win)
Multiplayer: 4.5
Commander [EDH]: 4.5
Lord of the Void is anything but subtle. It’s a big, evasive demon that seeks to steal your opponents’ creatures to add to your own army…or, absent that, just shred their library. While the repeated 7 damage will likely kill them faster than the repeated exile will, that you can increase that 7 damage to some frightening heights is certainly a fun approach.
The downside of a card like Lord of the Void is clear: it has no protection baked in and no haste…while black does play well with red to grant itself the haste it craves, you still need to do so. It’s definitely a card that starts a hard snowball if things get going, but costing seven mana has kept it from ever reaching any sort of relevance in Constructed. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s very much a fun card more than it is a good card.
Constructed: 1.25
Casual: 5
Limited: 4.75 (play it as a 7/7 with evasion)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
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