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Moxonomy

Vile Entomber

Creature — Zombie Warlock2 generic manaBlack manaBlack mana

Entomb stapled to a body, and the stapling is the point. The one-mana version has always been a glass cannon: it puts exactly one card in the graveyard and then it is gone, leaving you holding a reanimation spell you have to draw separately. Bolting the tutor onto a 2/2 with deathtouch changes the transaction from spell-into-nothing to spell-into-permanent. You pay a steep premium over the sorcery, but you get a creature that trades up in combat, threatens anything it blocks, and (crucially) sits on the battlefield as a second body a reanimator wants: a sacrifice engine's ammunition, a return-two-creatures spell's other half. The search is unrestricted, so the effect never collapses into a narrow reanimation piece; it fetches the combo half, the silver bullet, the missing land into the yard for delve or dredge, whatever the deck's graveyard economy is built to spend. Deathtouch does quiet work too, giving the leftover body a real job once the enter trigger has resolved rather than leaving a vanilla 2/2 as an afterthought. The design tension is time against value: the fast graveyard decks would rather cheat their payoff on turn one and are unlikely to wait four mana for a Zombie to do it, while the grindier builds get a tutor that survives the turn it was cast.

Vile Entomber (mh2)
MH2 · #108uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $0.36
Foil: $0.56
Oracle Text

Rules text

Deathtouch (Any amount of damage this deals to a creature is enough to destroy it.) When this creature enters, search your library for a card, put that card into your graveyard, then shuffle.
Legalities

Format Status

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

Other printings

1 set
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