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It can often be hard to determine what to put in a sideboard in Magic: The Gathering. Occasionally, though, a card comes along that simply must be used in nearly every sideboard, no matter what. These are known as staples, and MTG’s Dominaria United just released a must-have Mythic Rare.
Karn’s Sylex is a Legendary Artifact that can put a halt to several strategies involving paying life for spells, and also puts a number of other strategies to rest. It is an incredibly powerful card, and all players should try to own it.
Karn’s Sylex is a must-have sideboard staple in Magic: The Gathering
This colorless artifact answers a variety of needs in Magic: The Gathering, making it important in the upcoming meta shift. With Dominaria United continuing the slow trickle of Phyrexian-themed cards, cards that can pay for abilities with life are going to be more common.
What can this card do, though?
Karn’s Sylex
- Cost: 3 mana (colorless)
- Type: Legendary Artifact
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- First Ability: This card enters play tapped
- Second Ability: Players can’t pay life to cast spells or to activate abilities that aren’t mana abilities
- Third Ability: Pay x, tap, exile Karn’s Sylex: Destroy each nonland permanent with mana value X or less. Activate this only as a sorcery.
Phyrexian cards often feature Phyrexian Mana, which can be paid with life instead of tapping for mana. Karn’s Sylex completely negates that feature, slowing those decks down considerably.
It is also not uncommon to see Commander decks and other Standard decks offer abilities that are paid with life. One card that is often looked back on is Gristlebrand, which can pay seven life to draw seven cards.
This is not the only great feature of the card, however. The final ability allows the player to tap this card, tap X mana, and destroy all nonland permanents with a certain cost or lower. This might sound expensive until players realize that they can tap 0 and use it to destroy all token creatures in play.
With this revelation, the Magic: The Gathering card has even more power. That is why it comes into play tapped. It would perhaps be far too powerful to allow it in play untapped, as an immediate response to token removal.
With enough mana lying around, this can be used as a powerful board wipe and one that you control. The player, as the wielder of Karn’s Sylex, can make sure that only their opponent’s cards are removed, with some planning and patience.
It is interesting to see this card show up, as it is a callback to a classic card from Antiquities, Golgothian Sylex. That card removed from play all cards from the Antiquities expansion. It might be a little costly (3 mana) for Modern decks, unless they run the right mana rocks/drops, but it has definite uses in Commander.
In Magic: The Gathering Arena, this could also be a major threat in the Eternal formats, to stop decks like Bolas’s Citadel. The baseline ability of the card is solid in Standard, but the ability to have a controlled board wipe is going to be a major threat.
It very well could become a must-include in Commander decks as well, given that it has so much potential to influence a game. Eternal formats are likely going to hate this Magic: The Gathering card if it gets into play as well. It may not be the most powerful card in Dominaria United, but it’s showing a lot of promise right now.
From a lore perspective, it is a fascinating card. The Golgothian Sylex was used by Urza to banish Mishra. This ended the Brothers War, but also began some terrible times, like the Ice Age. Karn likely saw potential danger in it and perfected the Sylex.
Dominaria United will be released in MTG Arena on September 1, 2022 and will see a tabletop release on September 9, 2022.
