Could Geth, Thane Of Contracts Make Reanimator Tier 1 Again?

Hello everyone!

So we’ve been able to review Lukka, Bound to Ruin, Nahiri, the Unforgiving, Vraska, Betrayal’s Sting, Nissa, Ascended Animist, and Jace, the Perfected Mind as compleated walkers, Kaya, Intangible Slayer, The Eternal Wanderer, and Koth, Fire of Resistance as our heroes, as well as Phyrexian Obliterator , White Sun’s Twilight, Sword of Forge and Frontier, Tyrranax Rex, Capricious Hellraiser, Phyrexian Arena, Solphim, Mayhem Dominus, Phyrexian Vindicator, Cacophony Scamp, Mindsplice Apparatus, and Glissa Sunslayer, but we have even more sweet cards to preview! Today I want to go over one of the coolest reanimator cards we’ve seen in awhile to see if this card has what it takes to bring Reanimator decks back into the metagame – Geth, Thane of Contracts.

So first off, we have a 1BB 3/4 which is a little bit above par in terms of stats, but with one huge drawback – it gives your other creatures -1/-1. If this was universal, this card would be insane, but this is one sided for you which is obviously quite painful. How on earth could we justify playing this? Well, with the activated ability! For 1BB and by tapping Geth, you can bring back a creature from your graveyard to the battlefield with the stipulation that if it changes zones, it gets exiled. This feels akin to Animate Dead as it’s a cheap reanimation ability that shrinks the creature it brings back, with of course, the exile clause.

So this is a decent body with one very painful ability and one relatively strong ability. How does this balance out?

VERDICT

Let’s get the obvious out of the way, giving your whole team -1/-1 is painful. You realistically can’t play any x/1s in your deck, as obviously, they’ll instantly die if this resolves. The definitely limits deckbuilding space, but on top of that, makes everything that you can play weaker too. Rough times all around. However, is this large downside worth the payoff? I think so.

Repeated reanimation is an extremely powerful ability to have, and if you’re not convinced, try to find a card that could reanimate multiple creatures itself. Either the card is very old or it has very large drawbacks. The closest I could think of is Whip of Erebos which was an extremely powerful card, but is much more akin to Sneak Attack than a repeated reanimation engine.

Never the less, Geth comes with a host of advantages for the reanimator deck that can’t be ignored. First off, it lets you reanimate creatures earlier than normal. The normal timing for a reanimation spell in Standard is turn five, sometimes turn four when Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is involved. With Geth, you can consistently reanimate creatures starting turn four. Secondly, this is a must kill creature as the threat of you untapping with it is going to be too large of a threat for most players, even if you don’t have anything in the graveyard yet. Finally, this not only provides another powerful way to reanimate creatures, but as we mentioned before, a repeated way, so each turn that the opponent doesn’t deal with this could potentially yield another huge threat they would have to deal with. Sure, they’ll be slightly smaller, but if you’re bringing back creatures with huge stat lines and/or powerful ETB effects, that’s very unlikely to matter.

While the downside is painful, the potential upside you get from playing Geth should not be underestimated. Whether you go classic Jund for your Reanimation shell or even branch into Blue so you can play cards like Tainted Indulgence and Lord Xander, the Collector, there is a lot of flexibility with Geth and its power should not be underestimated. While it’s hard to say if Geth can pull reanimation back into the top tiers by itself, I think it has a really strong chance of doing so.

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