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Moxonomy

Black Widow, Super Spy

Legendary Creature — Human Spy Hero1 generic manaBlack mana

The forced choice is the whole engine, and it is a genuinely sharp piece of design. Combat damage doesn't just steal a card off the top of the defender's deck; it exiles cards down to the first nonland and hands you a decision between two very different payouts. Take the counter and Black Widow snowballs into a bigger evasive threat, easier to connect with next turn thanks to menace. Decline it and you get to cast the exiled spell, still paying its cost but with mana of any type, which turns an aggressive two-drop into a repeatable theft that ignores the defender's colors entirely. The tension is that both options feed the same clock: the counter makes the attack land more reliably, and the exiled spell converts a landed attack into resources, so neither line is strictly better. What separates this from prior top-of-library theft is that mana clause. Older effects that grabbed the top card of a deck usually stapled you to whatever colors you'd already assembled, so a stolen off-color bomb sat there uncastable. Letting any type of mana pay the cost means the exiled card is functionally always castable, whatever it happens to be. Menace on a two-power body is the delivery mechanism: cheap enough to hit early, awkward enough to block that the trigger fires more often than a lone blocker would suggest. The result is a small aggressive creature whose real threat is not its two damage but the accumulating decision it forces every time it connects.

Black Widow, Super Spy (msh)
MSH · #89mythic
Pricing
Normal: $2.33
Foil: $3.95
Oracle Text

Rules text

Menace Whenever Black Widow deals combat damage to a player, that player exiles cards from the top of their library until they exile a nonland card. You may put a +1/+1 counter on Black Widow. If you don't, you may cast the exiled nonland card until end of turn and mana of any type can be spent to cast that spell.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
Legal
Pioneer
Legal
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
Legal
Historic
Legal
Alchemy
Legal
Timeless
Legal
Standard Brawl
Legal
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
Legal
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
Legal
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
Legal
TLR
Legal
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