With the set just a couple of weeks away, Modern Horizons 3 spoiler season is here, and we’re very excited to share our very own preview card with the masses. This creature will be a familiar sight to any snake supporters, any fans of the fang. It’s a reprint of a rare card that can’t get enough of the danger noodles… though its pet ownership skills leave a lot to be desired.
That card is Ophiomancer – which receives its second proper reprint in Modern Horizons 3 and will now be legal in MTG Modern for the first time. This three mana shaman spits out snake tokens with deathtouch, and it can make one on each upkeep step provided you have a sacrifice outlet to feed them into.
Originally released in Commander 2013, alongside the MTG commander Prosh, Sky-Raider of Kherr, Ophiomancer is a perfect fit for EDH decks running an aristocrats strategy. It’s particularly popular in mono black, since this MTG color has plenty of sac outlets and cards with death triggers, but relatively few reliable token makers.
As such, it’s pretty much an auto-include in sacrifice-heavy black decks like Braids, Arisen Nightmare or Yawgmoth, Thran Physician. Four snakes per turn cycle is nothing to hiss at.
A weird bit of trivia is that this card had no official token for nine years. There just wasn’t a Wizards-made 1/1 black snake with deathtouch – you had to make your own or make do.
With only a handful of cards from the set revealed (officially, at any rate) we won’t be making any hubristic attempts at guessing how Modern will look in a month’s time. Perusing the existing archetypes, there’s only one that might get some use out of Ophiomancer and that’s – surprise, surprise, Yawgmoth.
After all, Yawgmoth loves to have tokens it can sacrifice, and if your Ophiomancer can survive a turn, you’re getting three bodies off one card here. The issue is, there’s just so much Ophiomancer is competing with, and Modern Horizons 3 only seems to be bringing more great Golgari options, from Wight of the Reliquary to the new Grist planeswalker.
Ultimately, compared to Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons, which can combo off to wipe the entire board, we have to admit our shaman is the inferior snake maker – at least for Modern.
Regardless of whether it sees any Modern play in the future or not, an Ophiomancer reprint is no bad thing. While released with new artwork in Commander Collection: Black, Ophiomancer’s only major set reprint came in Jumpstart 2022.
Before that, this card was highly susceptible to price spikes thanks to its low supply, jumping up as high as $30 whenever a new combo or synergy reared its head.
For more Modern Horizons 3 content, check out all four face commanders for the set, or the new Eldrazi titans you can ramp to. And don’t miss our guides to the best MTG Commander precons and top MTG Arena decks.