Ok, we’re doing it. We’re finally doing it.

I have had this particular card on my EDH to-do list quite literally for years now. Actually, it’s been on my never-dwindling short list pretty much since the beginning of this series.

During the last two years I’ve held off mostly out of the concern it may be seen in poor form. A little too on the nose. Maybe that was silly, especially for a game where you barely have to scratch beneath the surface to come across all sorts of flavor and imagery that could easily more unsettling than a nearly 30 year old card having passing association with a global pandemic.

But it’s always been a go-to example in my head of an EDH card. It’s one of the first cards I thought about its inherent value when I learned about Elder Dragon Highlander.

Why? Because it’s card that I already knew quite well what it was capable of, especially in multiplayer. Some of my earliest memories of playing Magic involve this card, both positive and negative, and it went on to be a card I leveraged successfully in several decks over the next 20 years. In one deck particularly it was part of several two-card synergies that proved utterly devastating to creatures of all kinds. That deck, while not fast, was glorious and painful and utterly frustrating to contend with if you didn’t have enchantment removal. So much so that I had to shelve it because people didn’t want to play against it anymore.

To many younger Magic players, the instinct may be to look and wonder quizzically what the big deal may be, exactly.

To anyone old enough to have played during a time when it was frequently used and even more frequently seen, however, reactions exist somewhere between a smirk, an eyeroll, and a minor wince to this day. Because even if you didn’t use it yourself, if you played casually during the game’s first decade – at all – it was inevitable you ran afoul of this punishing card one way or another.

And it’s finally giving its due justice. So to speak.

Today we have: Pestilence

Name: Pestilence

Edition: Alpha through Sixth Edition / Urza’s Saga

Rarity: Common

Focus: Damage Dealing

Highlights: Pestilence is one of those enchantments even to this day I’ve never quite been able to nail down a collective general consensus on. While it rarely saw tournament play, Pestilence was a casual staple in pretty much ever monoblack deck for years. That was partially due to the fact that except for its Sixth Edition printing, Pestilence was a common. A common! With core set starter or booster backs you practically couldn’t not crack one. It was so plentiful that despite being out of print for years until its quasi-reprint in the Mystery Boosters, you can still routinely pick up copies of Pestilence for a quarter.

It was also partially because Pestilence was typically seen as a glass cannon. It was remarkably effective in the right settings but its presence could also be muted and transitory depending on factors such when during the game it was played, whether your deck ran more than one color, and if it was capable of surviving its own plague. Which it often wasn’t.

Ultimately though, there were two big obstacles to using Pestilence. The first was that if you indeed managed to kill off the entire board of creatures, Pestilence would fittingly sacrifice itself, so you either:

a) needed to accept it as a one-turn board wipe,
b) needed to accept it it’d be able to kill small and medium-sized creatures but leave your opponent’s biggest creatures alive,
c) have a large enough creature to survive your own damage, or
d) have enough mana to play a creature afterwards and hope it survives the round.

Second, and possibly even more impacting to its choice of usage was that because Pestilence also damages players, wiping the board also brings everyone’s life totals closer to zero – including your own. When you only had 20 life to begin with, a 5-point wipe to kill off that Shivan Dragon was still a risky move. Less risky than leaving it alive perhaps, but risky nonetheless.

That, coupled with the card’s Black mana only activations, led a lot of players to either use Pestilence sparingly or skip it altogether. Many others (such as myself) continued to use this potent damage-dealing enchantment to great effect anyway knowing its dangers and limitations – especially if we had ways of mitigating them.

Ironically, time may have been the best mitigator of them all.

In the present day, Magic has many more tools in its arsenal than the halcyon days of Pestilence’s usage, particularly in the area of more straight up Black board wipes generally, but I would argue that this card has actually gotten even more useful the Commander era. Because its two biggest drawbacks are even easier to address now.

For four mana, Pestilence is an enchantment stating that for each Black mana you spend, it deals 1 damage to each creature and player. Repeat that as often as you like. This is astoundingly effective at keeping small creatures off the battlefield, as a single mana or two kills off most creatures before they have a chance of doing anything. Moreover, should someone attempt to save or boost their smallest assets, you always have the ability to activate it again in response. Pestilence was one of the first cards that really taught people the process of what would later be reconstituted as ‘the stack’. If all you want to use it for is to keep the board clear of tokens and tiny utility creatures, Pestilence is perhaps its most effective in that purpose.

Woe be to the token makers.

Just as now, however, scaling up to taking on larger creatures requires a decent pool of Black mana and the willingness to take damage to deal yourself chunks of damage that high. In Commander at least, 5 damage is slightly less devastating to a 40 point life total than a 20 point total. It’s still a significant amount, but it’s easier to absorb without feeling like it’s putting your life in immediate danger. There will be occasions when a creature is too large to kill off this way due to mana or life limitations, but it’s still highly effective to the vast, vast majority of creatures in a Commander game. And if you’re willing to curtail upper-tier damage aspirations for the small to mid range size (where most creatures live), it’s even easier to make Pestilence work in a dual color deck than it used to be.

As for its trigger that it will sacrifice itself if there are no creatures on the battlefield, the nature of indestructible creatures now largely offsets that problem. While Pestilence had a knack for picking off smaller creatures with Regeneration back in the day, if you had a large enough regenerator or a creature with Protection from Black, it could circumvent the trigger. In the era of indestructibility that’s even easier to accomplish. Sure, this cuts both ways and means it’s unable to wither away your opponent’s indestructible creatures…but Pestilence doesn’t state it has to be your creatures for it to stick around. If anything, having the enchantment survive because of your opponent is all the more deliciously evil.

Pestilence used to be a ubiquitous card, one from a different era of Magic. But it also works as a terrific example of the spirit of Commander where anything old can be new again – and possibly even better than before. As we’ve all learned all too well, it’s hard to keep a good plague down.

Keep an eye out for us to be regularly featuring other more accessible-but-worth-it Commander cards going forward. In the meantime, we’ll keep the light on for you.

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