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Moxonomy

Nezumi Bone-Reader

Creature — Rat Shaman1 generic manaBlack mana

Repeatable hand attack tied to a sacrifice outlet was a deliberately fenced piece of design: turn your dying creatures into a discard engine, but only on your own turn, and only for a single card per activation. The sorcery-speed clamp does the balancing: you cannot strip a card the instant it lands in an opponent's hand, and you cannot eat a blocker mid-combat to fog an attack. That timing restriction also tells you what the card is for: a grindy attrition plan where the aristocrat half (tokens, recursive bodies, things you wanted to sacrifice anyway) feeds the discard half, and the two reinforce each other across long games rather than spiking once. The 1/1 body is almost incidental; the payoff sits entirely in the activation, and a Rat that can spend a creature for a discard every turn does more work than its stats suggest when the fodder keeps coming. The line of cheap black sacrifice-and-discard creatures runs through the whole color's history, but few package both halves of the engine onto a single two-drop. The cost here is the part players underweight: each discard demands a creature and the black to fire it, so the engine is only as good as your ability to manufacture bodies faster than your opponent can rebuild a hand.

Nezumi Bone-Reader (chk)
CHK · #127uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $0.37
Foil: $4.42
Oracle Text

Rules text

Black mana, Sacrifice a creature: Target player discards a card. Activate only as a sorcery.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
Legal
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

3 sets
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