"Necromantic Selection: Choosing you"

"Necromantic Selection: Choosing you"

by:

Virgilio F. De leon Jr.

Necromancy. The form of magic that allows you to bring things back from the grave.Black is the color of magic that has most number of spells that enable you to target creatures from your graveyard and put them directly into play. Black also has spells like Living Death and Living End that allows Necromancers to take care of existing creatures on the battlefield and have the end effect of a massive creature landing on your side of the board. This kind of removal and necromantic effect is embodied in the new spell from Commander 2014. The spell Necromantic Selection. 

For 3 black mana and 4 colorless mana Necromantic Selection gives you the power of destroying all creatures in play , choosing one, making it black and a zombie along with its other types and putting it into the battlefield under your control. You then exile this card so you would not be able to use it again for the duration of the game. I was honestly happy to see this spell in the Black Commander deck 2014 spoiler because this meant that in addition to Living Death and Living End you now have a third option in controlling the battlefield and getting back your creature army from you grave.

It is a given that Necromantic Selection is a watered down version of the two others in its class. For one it costs two more mana. Second , it destroys creatures rather than make players sacrifice them and three it only allows you to choose one creature to go back from beyond. There are certain limitations that are imposed on the card and for good reason. Destroying creatures is a great ability but due to the prominence of Indestructible creatures or creatures that are made invincible by Avacyn , this card is somewhat limited in its board sweeping, this gives opponents some  hope when facing a necromancer knowing that they have a weakness built in. And unlike Living Death and Living End you only get to choose one creature to return after the slaughter. Most of the time you would choose the biggest creature or a creature that would be best suited to your particular needs. 

So am I saying that as a necromancer that you should not play this card in your current EDH decks? Not really , the redundancy of board sweeping and zombification that this card offers is awesome. It also works quite well with another card. Grave Betrayal.They even have similar art! It basically covers up the weakness of Necromantic Selection since every creature that you do not control that dies goes on your side of the battlefield and even gets an additional +1/+1 counter! Yes these are high mana costing spells but they are both worth it for the necromantic end game that we all crave.