Skip to content
Moxonomy

Gate to the Afterlife

Artifact3 generic mana

This is two cards pretending to be one: a half-built engine that only matters because of what it tunnels toward. The death-trigger half is a slow loot machine, converting your fallen creatures into life and selective card filtering, but that text is the supporting act. The real function is the activation, a tutor-and-cheat that pulls God-Pharaoh's Gift onto the battlefield from anywhere your hand, graveyard, or library while bypassing its seven-mana cost entirely. The six-creatures-in-graveyard requirement is the gate on that shortcut: the artifact will not fire until a yard is stocked, which is exactly the work the loot-on-death trigger is quietly doing on the turns before you can sacrifice it. Note that the threshold is checked, not paid: the activation reads six creature cards in the graveyard, it does not exile or remove any of them, so a full yard both unlocks the tutor and survives to feed the seven-drop it summons. That is the elegant part. One half fills the graveyard, the other only needs it full, and the Gift you fetch then reanimates the same creatures the loot trigger fed in. The design lesson is how a deck-defining payoff gets split across a triggered enabler and a sacrifice-tutor, then locked behind a graveyard count that forces commitment to the reanimator plan rather than a generic-value splash. Strip away the named-card search clause and you have a forgettable life-and-loot rock; the clause is what makes the entire shell exist.

Gate to the Afterlife (drc)
DRC · #130uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $0.22
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

Whenever a nontoken creature you control dies, you gain 1 life. Then you may draw a card. If you do, discard a card. 2 generic mana, Tap, Sacrifice this artifact: Search your graveyard, hand, and/or library for a card named God-Pharaoh's Gift and put it onto the battlefield. If you search your library this way, shuffle. Activate only if there are six or more creature cards in your graveyard.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
Legal
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
Legal
Historic
Legal
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
Legal
Standard Brawl
N/A
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
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
Legal
TLR
Legal
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

3 sets
Quick navigation
move selectesc close