The Last Ronin

Six mana for a sweeper that hits your own board too sits at the bottom of the rate band, and that floor is the whole reason this card asks the format a real question. TMT's medium speed and its legendary-payoff midrange shells let the game reach turn six with a board worth sweeping on both sides. Chapter I destroys all creatures, yours included, and on most six-drops that symmetry is a tempo disaster. Chapter II is the answer the saga writes for itself: mill four, return a creature from the pile to hand, then recast it. You give back the board you just erased, except only you walk away with a threat.

This is a P1P1 on rate, and the shell it pulls you toward afterward is BG Midrange, the food-and-value deck stitched together by hybrid commons like Putrid Pals and the utility-land splash that TCRI Building and Illegitimate Business enable. It asks nothing in deckbuilding beyond the cost: no graveyard target to seed, no token board to anthem. Chapter III's attacks-alone clause does the quiet work. A wide token deck would want a global pump; the lone-survivor finisher instead rewards exactly the board state a symmetrical wrath produces, and the three counters with trample, lifelink, and indestructible walk the recast threat past Stomped by the Foot and Grounded for Life without flinching.

Shredder's Revenge is the one common that genuinely threatens the plan, exiling the saga before II resolves. Even that costs a card and a tempo turn against a board you have already flattened. There is no honest argument for taking anything over it from an open pack.

Chapter I fires the instant this saga resolves, so the wrath itself is on rate the turn you cast it: the board is clear immediately, and the two subsequent draw steps deliver recursion and then the closer. That timing is what makes this a graveyard-deck card rather than a generic six-mana wrath. You want the board already stalled or losing when you cast it, and you want fodder waiting in the yard for chapter II. That points at reanimator and self-mill shells, not midrange goodstuff.

Meren of Clan Nel Toth wants this most clearly. Her deck already treats its own graveyard as a second hand, so a wrath that mills four and rebuys a creature is on-theme, and the chapter III finisher closes games once Meren has ground the table to a one-creature board. Muldrotha, the Gravetide is the other home: Muldrotha replays the permanents the wrath kills, and the mill on II feeds her recursion. Both are Bracket 2-3 commanders, and this is a Bracket 2-3 card. It is too slow for cEDH, where a saga that needs two more draw steps to finish does not survive the format's pace, and too synergy-dependent to do work out of a precon.

As a sweeper alone it is worse than Damnation or Toxic Deluge on rate (six mana, no flexibility on what dies). What you pay for is the recursion and the closer stapled on. In Meren and Muldrotha lists it competes for the wrath-plus-value slot against running a clean sweeper and a separate recursion piece; the saga collapses both into one card and one timer, which is the case for it. Expect a sub-$10 secondary price. Invisible outside graveyard-matters Golgari and Sultai builds.

A six-mana board wipe stapled to recursion and a finisher, aimed at a Golgari midrange shell in Modern that does not exist at a competitive level. The problem is timing: a sweeper you cannot cast until turn six, that takes two more turns to deliver its payoff, asks for a deck patient enough to want it and that deck plays Damn or Damnation instead. Legal, but yet to register in tracked tournament play, and nothing about the format's speed suggests that changes. Cut from any list with a faster answer, which is all of them.

Legal since its March release, but yet to register in tracked Standard play this season. The gap is structural, not a matter of waiting for the deck to be discovered. Six mana for a saga that wraths your own board on chapter I asks the format to slow down enough to reward a three-turn payback arc, and the current Standard does not. By the time chapter III arrives two turns later with its lone-attacker buff, an aggressive opponent has often closed the door. The card wants a dedicated Golgari shell that seeds the graveyard before chapter II's self-mill so the reanimation finds a worthwhile target, and no such midrange or reanimator deck has cohered around it. Standalone, it competes for the six-drop slot against threats that affect the board the turn they resolve, and loses that comparison. The value engine is real, but it pays out on a timer the format is not respecting.

The Last Ronin rotates in 2027 with its parent block; the exact fall date is pending Wizards' announcement. That horizon matters less than the present absence, because nothing on the announced schedule yet supplies the slower, graveyard-forward shell the card needs. If a future set prints the recursion payoff or the midrange ceiling that lets a three-act saga breathe, this becomes a different conversation. As things stand, it has more than a year of legality and no home in it.

Six mana for a sorcery-speed wrath that also hits your own board is the kind of rate Pioneer's Golgari and Rakdos midrange decks already buy more cheaply, and that is the first problem. The board reset of choice in those decks sits at four mana or below, and the decks that want one have settled there. Chapter I fires the moment the saga lands, so this is a six-mana wrath on turn six rather than a delayed one, but the recursion and the finisher are still two and three turns out, and Pioneer's midrange shells do not have the tempo budget to wait on a permanent they have to protect across that window.

The deeper issue is the engine. The recursion-into-payoff plan wants a shell built to seed the graveyard before chapter II ticks, and Pioneer's graveyard midrange decks do not run their threats through a self-mill plan timed to a six-mana saga. The lone-attacker clause on chapter III also cuts against the go-wide instincts of the green decks that could otherwise stomach the cost.

So it is legal, but it has yet to register in tracked tournament play this season. There is no slot conversation to have, because no Pioneer deck's curve and engine accommodate a six-mana value saga that pays off over three turns. Golgari has stapled wrath to recursion before, always at points on the curve a deck could actually deploy. The archetype that would reward this, a dedicated Golgari recursion-midrange built around saga sequencing, is not part of Pioneer's map. Until one exists, the card stays a clever piece of design without a home.

A six-mana enchantment whose board sweep fires immediately as Chapter I enters, in a format where Toxic Deluge clears the board for two-plus-X and most Vintage decks are not fighting creature parity to begin with. The recursion lands the following turn and the lone-attacker payoff a turn after that, a clock that does not survive a turn-one Lotus opener. Legal, but yet to register in tracked Vintage play. Noise.

A six-mana saga whose only relevant chapter before turn three is the board wipe, in a format where Toxic Deluge sweeps for the cost you need and Damnation arrives at four. The wrath that matters here lands two mana later than the cheapest incumbent, and a saga that has to survive two more upkeeps before chapter II's recursion and chapter III's lone-attacker finisher come online is asking a turn-one-goldfish format to wait. Force of Will gets the whole thing for free, and against any deck applying pressure the sweep itself is a turn or two late.

Legal, but yet to register in tracked Legacy play this season. The bar sits well above it.