From the moment Wizards of the Coast announced a crossover between Magic: The Gathering and Avatar: The Last Airbender, one critical question cast a shadow over the news. Avatar famously revolves around the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air) while Magic is defined by its five-spoke color wheel. So how would the set’s designers compensate?
The answer, as it turns out, is to make black absurdly powerful in Avatar: The Last Airbender to compensate for the fact that it doesn’t have a designated element and form of bending, like white (airbending), blue (waterbending), red (firebending), and green (earthbending). Instead, many black cards in this crossover expansion rely on a sacrifice-focused “aristocrat” mechanic. And based on my experience during a preview event through Magic’s online platform, Arena, this surprisingly makes black the most powerful color in the set.
Aristocrat decks are all about sacrificing your own creatures for extra gain. For example, you might have a creature like Callous Inspector, which gives you a Clue token when it dies. Combine that with June, Bounty Hunter, who gives you a clue for sacrificing another creature, and you’re doubling up on your value.
My favorite Avatar card that feeds into this strategy is Jon Dee, One of Many. The card’s ability makes a copy of itself while also letting your surveil to dig through your deck. As an added cost, you have to sacrifice a creature or artifact; the obvious answer is to sacrifice the copy of Jon Dee you just made, but if you have some other fodder laying around, that’s even better. In one game, I built up an entire army of copies and then overran my opponent to win the match.
Black also has plenty of removal for dealing with whatever your enemy is up to. I particularly like Swampsnare Trap, which costs less if the target has Flying (a fairly common ability in Avatar) and also gets around indestructible creatures by giving them -5/-3 instead of simply dealing damage or destroying its target.
These are all fun cards to play with that work surprisingly well together, but where Avatar’s aristocrat strategy really gets interesting is when you splash in another color. Technically, black-white is the aristocrat color combo of the set, but I found that black-green works far better in the way it combines the sacrifice strategy with green’s marquee feature: earthbending.
Consider Beifong’s Bounty Hunters, a rare creature card with this ability: “Whenever a nonland creature you control dies, earthbend X where X is that creature’s power.” That means if your 2/2 creature dies (or is sacrificed), one of your lands can become a 2/2 creature in its place. Another black-green card that works well here is Long Feng, Grand Secretariat, which rewards the death of any creature or land with a free +1/+1 counter that you can put anywhere. Once you’ve built up a board full of buffed up creatures and lands, swing in with Dai Li Agents to finish the game.
That’s just my experience, but having tried out several of the different Avatar prerelease kits on Arena (there are five in total), I’m definitely most impressed with what black has to offer. Maybe that says more about me as a player, but if you’re intrigued by aristocrat-style gameplay, this new expansion feels like the perfect place to dive in.
