MTG Salvation

Holy shiz!!!! This is awesome. Amazing new Gods!

EDIT: Green God still the best

Oh my goodness. That's quite the god.

I think this is the only one of the five whose ability is guaranteed to allow it to attack and block. Each one makes progress towards their trigger, but there are situations where each one won't turn on, except this one.

And you're in black? How many turns is something not going to die under your control?

Absolute garbage and an utter disappointment. I'm actually heartbroken right now. Hands down the worst God.

I'm also a big fan of grindy decks. But I want to have good reliable cards in them. The Gitrog isn't janky at all. He's fantastic.

I think you're focusing to much on the edh implications. In edh you want your resources to most times provide instant value and/or have incredible resilience. You want this because you have multiple opponents who might answer your threats so if you're not getting immediate value and it doesn't have staying power then you don't want that in your edh deck. So if we are talking in the perspective of edh you can say that this god is not what you were hoping for.

Now if we are talking in standard's perspective, I think he is great. He is really cheap to play, fills multiple slots in an aristocrats esq deck (sac outlet, big beater), and can be pretty hard to remove. The fact that his sacrifice effect costs 2 mana I do think is a drawback, but in standard if your playing a deck that doesn't have a lot of card advantage then his ability to scry 1 becomes very relevant because once you get empty handed you want to be hitting live draws. Also once you get empty handed you're not as much mana per turn so you will still have mana left open to use his sac effect.

In my opinion I think he provides something that not a lot of aristocrats decks have had for a while. A really big beefy creature that is hard to remove to where as you don't need a big set up to get it big (last one I remember was Falkenrath Aristocrat). All it needs is one of your own creature's death to become activated. Then you can beat in for 4 damage. The requirements for activating him are very low when all it is, is having another creature. This with Hidden Stockpile, Liliana, Death's Majesty, and Nissa, Voice of Zendikar are just a few cards to name that will give him sac fodder every turn.

Another thing I think that needs to be noted is that you focus heavily around the fact that it does nothing immediately. I disagree I think that when he lands he gives you a sac outlet(albeit 2 mana sac outlet on top of the 3 mana casting cost is a lot), and he gives you an incredible blocker(it shouldn't be hard to activate if you have either stockpile or yahenni out). Also I feel that for a 3 drop big beater in standard that acts as a piece of the aristocrats engine he shouldn't be doing much the turn he drops. He should be providing more than enough value through the turns after he drops to be worth while.

Personally this card lines up pretty well with how I like to play magic, which is grinding out as much value I can from cards. I love playing cards that let me abuse their abilities throughout the game multiple times. Cards that excite me are like The Gitrog Monster, Crawling Sensations, Sage of Hours to name a few. When you see what I like you are probably thinking " slow, janky and inconsistent", but I see fun, and potentially super strong. I as a fellow marchesa edh player love that deck because you can reuse cards a potentially endless amount and just grind your opponents out of the game because of the crazy amount of value, and I see this being a component in a standard deck that kinda does the same thing of grinding out value till your opponent is dead.

No I'm not. That's why I was using Bloodghast as a talking point and it's why I brought up sacrifice. Free sac outlets are what you want as "catalysts". One of my favourite EDH decks is Marchesa, the Black Rose. There is no way I'm taking out a free sac outlet for this nor am I going to take out one of my creatures with a sweet etb effect. Meren is another good sac/recursion general but I don't think she wants it eithor. You should be focusing on making the sac/recursion loops more consistent rather then diverting resources on something contingent on the sac/recursion loop.
If you guys can show me a list that wants to use him where he is genuinely ideal then I will concede.

THis works perfectly in any deck built around saccing stuff.
Seems like you're thinking of trying to force it into a deck that isn't built around saccing stuff.
If saccing something only triggers a single card effect, you're not using Bontu correctly as he seems to be built around being the catalyst, not the threat himself.

The Green God is the same on points 1 and 3, but the Green God is fantastic in the deck it's made for, which you're not factoring into analysing this card. Put this in a recursion type deck, zombies, etc. and you've got a card that smooths your draws, drains, swings with pseudo-evasion for 4, for 3 mana.

tl;dr Synergy is important in Magic.

Let me try to put this into perspective.

1. This card is dependent on another card to do ANYTHING. It can't do a single thing on its own.

2. Even if you have something like a Bloodghast to sac do you really want to destroy your tempo by spending 2 mana on this terrible activated ability every turn? Probably not. Now you need a better sac outlet, preferably a free one.

3. The card does nothing relevant the turn it's played

4. Once you sac your creature your opponent now has the ability to essentially 2 for 1 you by exiling Bontu.

Any deck that tries to make this God work is going to be slow, janky and inconsistent.

I truly hope I'm proven wrong but I can't imagine a single format that will want to use this.

Blood Artist and Cutthroat aren't 4/6 with evasion or resilience for 3..this feels like a troll post.

No I'm really not. If I wanted to make a deck like that this garbage wouldn't be anywhere near it. It's trash. Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat are a million times better as win cons for that type of strategy and there are far greater sac outlets too.

I see you're disappointed. I also see you're not evaluating this God fairly. Design a deck with sac fodder and you have a pretty powerful card here.

Notable that Hidden Stockpile keeps this going indefinitely. That said, this barely seems worth a card slot outside of very niche decks. Green God is the only one so far that isn't disappointly anemic. I guess it's nice to have a latent ability on the field to nerf targeted removal? A 4/6 for 3 mana isn't that exciting when Constrictor and Rishkar are the baseline (albeit the -1 counter theme will nerf that).

Yeah the red one seems pretty cool potentially - I like it with Collective Brutality. I guess the main thing is that these are mostly "build around me" cards but the payoff is questionable. M:TG has a great way of surprising us all though, so I guess we'll see.

I think most people are underestimating the Red god. It's my personal fav but I agree that the green one is probably the best one.

I agree that this card is not likely to see any real play at a competitive level. As was stated before, it does nothing the turn it drops; its sac cost is too high to be reliable without losing tempo. You'd think a 4/6 with these abilities for this cost us low, but power creep is real and better things already exist and this fills no slot.