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Soulflayer

It’s hard to believe Magic has gone over 20 years and has never had a card called “Soulflayer” until now. We’ve seen nice delve monsters, what do we make of this guy?

This has the potential to be very good in the right deck. You can essentially build a 2 mana Baneslayer Angel depending on the rest of your deck. In limited, he’s likely getting 2 abilities max, but a 4/4 flying vigilance creature is nothing to sneeze at. Your deck needs to be good, but a 4/4 for 6 with delve is fine for limited anyway.

The real question is whether Soulflayer is good enough to be played in constructed formats. This has the potential to be $15 or more the very first weekend the set is legal if good players are building around him and scrambling for copies. More likely he ends up around a dollar to three dollars. We don’t have much to compare him to other thanNecropolis Fiend, a card that saw a bit of play and never went above a dollar. This is a good deal cheaper than fiend and can potentially get several good abilities depending on the deck. Still, the best black decks that fill the yard with good creatures would rather whip them into play than delve them out of the yard right now, so the metagame would need to shift pretty radically for this creature to become necessary. There is always a chance I’m misevaluating this card, but I think this is likely another Cairn Wanderer – cool card but the decks that can best use it would rather be doing something else.

It feels odd to be dismissive of a card that is potentially a 2 mana 4/4 haste or 4/4 flying so I will say this. If this presells for around two to three dollars, there is potential upside. If you have to buy in more than that, you’ll have to believe in the card a lot more than I do. The best home for this could very well be a red black aggressive deck with a lot of haste, burn and fetchlands to power your delve. Even not being bullish on the card, I want these at $5 a playset if I see them at that price on eBay.