MTG Salvation

Seems like an ok army in a can. Has some good interactions. Wish it was 4B as my artifact decks struggle to get BB, but with the recent printings, there's now more incentive to lean heavier into black.

Prob testing, but not confident in it

Maybe I'll give it a shot over Custodi Lich and test if it's better. I don't want to drop my number of removal in black that much because I already drop the 2 mana variant and edict though.

This does look pretty decent but black is pretty tight, will have a deep think for sure.

The etb tapped clause on the tokens hurts army-in-a-can cards so much because part of their appeal is the immediate stabilization they provide when you're behind. That being said, this card has a good power/cost ratio, and the unearth ability is a super nice upside. I don't think this one is for me.

Cool card. Is an artifact, makes artifact tokens (tapped unfortunately). I'd be really excited about this a few years back but I'm unsure I have a slot for this. This set has been pretty crazy.

I think I like this quite a bit. This is so many stats, and as good as the front end looks (5 mana 7/6 on 3 bodies), the backend of 4 mana 4/4 with a pseudo-hellspark elemental is kinda wild. Most of our black decks have tons of self discard, so being able to skip the front end entirely and discard this creature for value half the time on turn 2 or 3 makes this essentially card advantage for aggro and midrange decks.

The tokens being tapped is a huge disappointment (although less so after the emotional blow that was Tainted Adversary tokens having decayed), since it takes away pretty much all of this card's UB control potential, but this having artifact, token, and discard synergies is probably enough to warrant a test.

Also worth noting that most (non-green) fair decks tend to struggle consistently exceeding any more than 6 mana most of the time, so the unearth being 4 mana means you can still manageably get to a point where unearthing the Warden and equipping it with an Umezawa's Jitte or Sword of Fire and Ice in the late game is honestly pretty realistic.

Wish this worked a little better with Opposition since as it stands black is our only color that can't support it, but we'll take what we can get at this point lol

It's a solid card by itself but has great synergy in many different decks. In BW, The unearth ability has very strong synergy with blink cards like Ephemerate, Charming Prince, Touch the Spirit Realm and Parallax Wave as they let you keep the creature. Pod/survival decks can search for this creature and dump it into the bin, then unearth it and pod it into a 6-drop. Welder decks can easily loop it as the tokens it creates are artifacts, and how it creates value from the graveyard makes it a good Goblin Engineer target.

The unearth mode is very reminiscent of Caldaia Guardian: instead of drawing a card, you don't spend one, you attack for 3 instead of 4, you spend 4 mana instead of 3 but you get two tapped 2/2's instead of two 1/1's. Outside of midrange, I like this card in an aggressive deck that can reliably discard it (for value) as well.

The black 5-drop slot is getting pretty full, but I'll at least test this.

The interaction with unearth and flicker/blink is certainly cute

Feels crazy to say, but this seems outclassed in its own release with Chaos Defiler and Necron Deathmark being the five drop black robot kill decks want in this kind of slot. If they entered untapped this would be a house, but I think the tapped part that makes it just miss for me, as much as I wanted this sort of thing.

I want to like this card so bad since I support both Aristocrats and Pod, but the tokens coming in tapped is such a severe drawback in all the decks that Royal Warden would otherwise excel in. I'd have to do a good deal of reconfiguring to make room for this card, so I'll keep it on the backburner for now.

Dunno if these are hard to obtain, but will put this in my artifact
Cube.