Witch-king of Angmar
A punisher that inverts the usual arithmetic of racing. Most black flyers of this size read as pure clock: a 5/3 evasive body that trades poorly on defense and asks you to be the aggressor. Here the fragile toughness becomes the trap. Attack into it and connect, and each opponent hands back one of the very creatures that landed the hit, chosen by that opponent but drawn only from the pool that dealt combat damage this turn. The trigger keys off damage dealt to its controller, not to the Witch-king itself, so it punishes the swing regardless of whether this creature is even in the block. That reframes the board: opponents can still race, but every point of face damage carries a body tax, and going wide stops being a free way to overwhelm a single blocker. The discard-for-indestructible line is a survival valve for that fragile toughness, and the self-tap is the toll that stops the effect from becoming a repeatable wall: propping it up costs the attack. Feeding it cards to keep it alive turns graveyard-hungry black shells into natural homes, where discard is fuel rather than loss. The Ring temptation stitches the card into that mechanic's broader arc, but the load-bearing design is the sacrifice clause: a deterrent aimed squarely at aggressive boards, printed on a creature otherwise built to be doing the attacking itself.

Rules text
Format Status
More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth#736
- The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth#803
- The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth#565
- The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth#736z
- The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth#114
- The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth#423
- The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth#311






