Another new Modern Horizons 3 card is creating a lot of hype, and this time it mainly seems to be the art that has folks excited. The Green card Signature Slam features an epic piece by Slawomir Maniak, showing two gorillas performing wrestling moves on a luckless dinosaur. If you squint a bit, you could easily think you were looking at a freeze frame from the new Godzilla movie.
As for this upcoming MTG card’s effect, it’s a ‘bite’ spell, a type of green removal which deals damage equal to a creature’s power to an opposing creature. This one’s pretty great, letting you place a +1/+1 counter, and then having all Modified creatures deal damage to your target.
In case you slept on Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, the Modified MTG keyword means a creature with a counter, equipment, or aura enchantment on them. So, in the right deck, this card will probably take out anything you target.
The only trouble then, is that three mana isn’t necessarily a great rate for removal these days, even for something like Murder, where you’re guaranteed to kill a creature. The question then becomes how much do you value that +1/+1 counter, and does your deck want fight/bite spells.
Still, we think there’ll be some decks that should run this card – decks with MTG commanders like Gargos, Vicious Watcher or Chishiro, The Shattered Blade. We also think there’ll be plenty of green decks that probably should not run Signature Slam but players will pop it in anyway, just to be able to enjoy that sweet, sweet art.
Green removal cards have a long history of dynamic, exciting art, showing glorious, muscular violence. Signature Slam is one of the best, but it joins a pantheon of great fight cards including Outmuscle, which shows a man suplexing a bear, and Prizefight, which depicts a raccoon taking down a rhinoceros.
For more Modern Horizons 3 content, check out the new face commanders from the upcoming MTG Commander precon decks.