Is Phyrexian Vindicator The White Phyrexian Obliterator?

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, and Solphim, Mayhem Dominus but we have even more sweet cards to preview! What’s being coined as the White Phyrexian Obliterator, today we’re going over Phyrexian Vindicator!

Since this is the White Phyrexian Obliterator, we have a similar cost versus stat line. For the lofty price of WWWW, we get a 5/5 out of the deal, but instead of Trample, we get Flying. Furthermore, like Phyrexian Obliterator, we get an ability that highly dissuades opponents from dealing damage to it. Rather than forcing the opponent to sacrifice permanents, this is a Stuffy Doll effect where you get to redirect all damage dealt to it to a different target! So while Phyrexian Obliterator has a stronger effect when dealt damage, this can’t be killed with damage which offsets the weaker trigger.

So this looks quite impressive, but how strong is this card really?

VERDICT

I’ve seen a lot of buzz on social media about how this card is insane, but I don’t think it’s that good.

There is definitely a lot of upside here: this has evasion, hits like a truck, and is completely immune to damage. That’s definitely quite powerful and gives you a really good card against decks that don’t have a lot of removal or only have Red based removal. However, this biggest issue of course is the casting cost. Phyrexian Obliterator has the same casting cost in Black, but alongside Obliterator, we have good reason to want to do that with Invoke Despair being such a powerful card. White, on the other hand, doesn’t have as powerful of a draw. You do have Invoke Justice, and while I’m personally a big fan of those decks, they are not nearly as popular as the Black counterpart. So beyond an Invoke Justice deck, the only strategy that could use this is a Mono White strategy. We do have Mono White Midrange so that’s obviously not a stretch, but that deck has been falling out of favor. There is also Mono White Aggro, but that’s mostly been overtaken by Azorius Soldiers so that’s not a great fit either, so where do we put this?

While not ideal, I could still see this being an interesting choice in Mono White Midrange. One of Mono White’s biggest issues is closing out the game in a timely manner, and this can definitely do it in a hurry. Attacking for 5 in the air over the course of a few turns is definitely quite scary, and most players wouldn’t anticipate such a strong clock coming out of Mono White. Furthermore, this could be a really potent sideboard card against aggressive decks, so there is some use there.

Overall, while this card shows promise, I feel that it’s not going to be nearly as powerful as many players perceive it to be. There’s not many strategies that could play this, and even those that can, may not even want it. Being a Stuffy Doll esque card is definitely strong, but in a format with a bunch of Black decks running Go for the Throat, it may not be the unkillable menace you want it to be. “Dies to removal” obviously doesn’t mean the card is bad, but the intersection of it not being particularly well positioned and not having decks that may even want to play it definitely lowers the rating of the card in my eyes. This card is super cool, and I’m sure it’ll see play, but I don’t imagine this taking over the format.

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