Skip to content
Moxonomy

Mountain Goat

Creature — GoatRed mana

Landwalk is the oldest evasion mechanic in the game, the earliest answer to a question evasion would later solve a different way: how do you make a creature unblockable? The first solution made the answer depend on the opponent's deck rather than on the pilot's, and this 1/1 is that idea reduced to its barest form. Its entire pitch is conditional. Facing a deck without Mountains, it is a vanilla body with nothing to recommend it; facing one full of them, it becomes an unblockable trickle of damage. That binary defines the card. Mountainwalk hits hardest in a mono-red mirror, the one matchup where a tiny attacker is least likely to swing a game, and does nothing in the matchups where you would actually want a reliable way through. Later design quietly retired basic-land-walk as a maindeck consideration precisely because it punted the creature's value onto the metagame rather than onto anything the pilot controls. What remains is a clean historical artifact: proof that early design measured a creature's worth by the board it expected to face, before evasion became something you could rely on regardless of who sat across the table.

Mountain Goat (sld)
SLD · #737rare
Pricing
Normal: $9.10
Foil: $12.18
Oracle Text

Rules text

Mountainwalk (This creature can't be blocked as long as defending player controls a Mountain.)
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
N/A
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
Legal
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
Legal
PreDH
Legal
Pauper Commander
Legal
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

4 sets
Quick navigation
move selectesc close