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Moxonomy

Tom, Bert, and William

Legendary Creature — Troll3 generic manaBlack manaGreen mana

The trick here is that the sacrifice engine and the death trigger each reward you differently, but the recursion fires only once. Feeding a creature into the 1 generic mana activation converts its power straight into raw card advantage, and the discard clause on the back end is the small tax that keeps a five-power creature from becoming a naked draw-five. What makes the death trigger interesting is that it does not save the body: these three die, come back as an artifact, and permanently lose creature status. The returned permanent can still sacrifice other creatures to draw, but it is no longer something you can attack or block with. The design reads as a Troll folk-tale gag rendered in mechanics: turned to stone, still present, no longer alive. Functionally it is a one-shot recursion built into a repeatable engine, which is an unusual pairing: most sacrifice payoffs either sit on a disposable body or come back cleanly, and this splits the difference by promising a single second life at the cost of everything that made it a creature. The Golgari color pairing is exactly where you want this: a deck already generating expendable creatures gets a mana-cheap way to cash the biggest of them into cards, and the eventual stone-troll artifact is a floor rather than a loss.

Tom, Bert, and William (hob)
HOB · #169rare
Pricing
Normal: $17.19
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

1 generic mana, Sacrifice another creature: Draw cards equal to the sacrificed creature's power, then discard a card. When Tom, Bert, and William die, if they were a creature, return them to the battlefield. They're an artifact. (They're no longer a creature.)
Legalities

Format Status

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

Other printings

1 set
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