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Moxonomy

Gate to Phyrexia

EnchantmentBlack manaBlack mana

The artifact-hate answer of its era, built around a cost structure that looks bizarre by modern standards and reads as a relic of how the early game thought about repeatable removal. The activation is locked to your own upkeep and once per turn, which means the card is not a removal spell so much as a slow grinding lock: one artifact per turn cycle, paid for in creatures, with the opponent getting a full turn to deploy or use whatever you are about to destroy. Against the artifact-heavy decks of its moment (the Juggernauts, the Mishra's Factories, the various Workshop engines), that grind was enough; against anything faster, the upkeep restriction made the card a parity piece at best. The design logic is visible in the timing clause: Wizards was clearly nervous about a two-mana enchantment that destroyed an artifact every turn, and the upkeep-only, once-per-turn fence was the discipline that made the rate printable. Later artifact answers abandoned the structure entirely, moving to one-shot spells (Shatter, Naturalize) or to permanents that taxed rather than destroyed. The card survives now mostly as a flavor artifact of the Brothers' War block and as a curiosity in the lineage of black artifact removal, a color pairing the game has never fully committed to and which this card briefly, awkwardly, made real.

Gate to Phyrexia (me4)
ME4 · #82uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $53.15
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

Sacrifice a creature: Destroy target artifact. Activate only during your upkeep and only once each turn.
Legalities

Format Status

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

Other printings

1 set
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