Doomsday Excruciator is a new Demon Creature from MTG’s upcoming horror-themed world of Duskmourn, and it can be a real nightmare for any player to deal with after it exiles almost every card in their deck.
The rest of MTG’s 2024 releases are sure to delight, with many players already raving about the adorable woodland critters and fantasy theming of August 2’s Bloomburrow. However, once Bloomburrow is in the rearview, things will take a darker, even more thrilling turn for Magic with Duskmourn.
Duskmourn is set to prove that Magic can theme more planes around horror than just the classic, fan-favorite setting of Innistrad.
If Duskmourn’s more modern style of horror can stack up next to Innistrad’s Gothic, Lovecraftian, and Folk-horror-inspired sets, Magic fans will be in for a real treat as well as a handful of tricks.
Doomsday Excruciator is one of the first cards to be revealed for Duskmourn, and this black-mana demon makes an incredibly strong first impression. This 6/6 Flying Creature costs a whopping six black mana to cast.
MTG players rarely see so many individual pips in a card’s cost, heavily pushing players to run Doomsday Excruciator in mono-black. The card’s main effect is well worth its unusual cost though, exiling all but the bottom six cards of each player’s library on cast.
While this effect is sure to be impactful in most MTG formats, it hits especially hard in Commander thanks to the format’s 100-card deck size. Exiling almost 100 cards can be a real game-changer, helping to speed up a format that is notorious for drawn-out games.
Many of Commander’s most notorious cards, including Thassa’s Oracle, Approach of the Second Sun, and the new MH3 Commander Nadu, Winged Wisdom see players milling through their own decks in search of win-cons.
This solitaire-style gameplay can be frustrating for other players due to taking forever to resolve and – increasingly in Nadu’s case – being protected from interaction.
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Now, thanks to Doomsday Excruciator, these players will get a taste of their own medicine, having their decks cut down to a sliver not by choice, but by force.
It’s important to note that Doomsday Excruciator’s exile effect is actually stacked somewhat against its caster. While an additional card draw in the upkeep is always nice to have, it means that its caster will have slightly fewer turns to survive than the rest of the board before decking out.
While removing the likelihood of opponents drawing into an out if you are ahead is great, Doomsday Excruciator hits especially hard when paired with other effects that can remove cards from opponents’ libraries.
With a few additional sources of mill or exile, other players will lose the game as soon as their next draw step begins. Most of Magic’s best mill cards like Maddening Cacophony and Bruvac the Grandiloquent are locked to blue mana, making a Dimir deck an unwieldy – but not entirely unsuitable – home for Doomsday Excruciator.
Still, players sticking to mono-black aren’t entirely bereft of mill options, with cards like Dread Summons and Breach the Multiverse able to eke out a narrow win before it comes back around to your draw step
Additionally, Doomsday Excruciator can work as a reliable extra source of card draw and damage without risk if reanimated or otherwise cheated onto the battlefield without casting.
While it’s far from the easiest black-mana Creature to cast, Doomsday Excruciator is sure to enliven Commander and other formats when Duskmourn releases on September 27.