As the first spoilers for the upcoming Magic: The Gathering death race set Aetherdrift shoot off the starting line, one card in particular seems to be making some waves. It’s Sab-Sunen, Luxa Embodied – a new Amonkhet god card that has folks feeling a certain way about a big frog.
Sab-Sunen certainly is thicc, but this legendary creature has awesome effects too. First up, it comes with a mighty statline and great keywords: reach, trample, indestructible, 6/6 stats – all for just five mana. Good as this is, the card’s more complicated effects are where things start to get really interesting.
This MTG Aetherdrift card is all about counters, with abilities that reference the ebb and flow of the Luxa river this goddess embodies. You get to put a +1/+1 counter on Sab-Sunen during your first main phase, then draw two cards if she has an odd number of counters. However, like many Magic: The Gathering gods, Sab-Sunen has a limitation on when she can be used in combat. She can only block or attack with an even number of counters.
These abilities are in part a reference to a card named Bounty of the Luxa, from the first Amonkhet MTG set, whose mechanics depicted the river bursting its banks and leaving fertile ground behind.
Sab-Sunen is a very thematically fitting Amonkhet god card. Ancient Egyptians saw frogs as symbols of fertility because they would appear and breed rapidly with the life-bringing flooding of the Nile. There was indeed a frog-headed goddess in the Egyptian pantheon: Heqet.
If you’re running Sab-Sunen as your MTG commander, however, you’re probably not going to go in much for natural cycles. You’ll want to get your card draw and have a badass frog lady punch the enemy each turn. This creates a little minigame; you need to have a way of placing an extra counter on the card each turn so you can attack or block, and still get the card draw effect each turn.
That should be extremely easy in Simic colors, but it’s still a bit more interesting than the usual ramp and draw shenanigans the color pair tends to get up to. I’m reminded of Zimone, All-Questioning from the recent Duskmourn Commander precon, which required the user to hit prime numbers of lands.
Aetherdrift spoilers will be filtering in over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll keep you up to date on the best MTG cards among them. Personally, I’m looking forward to the sexy lion man, Ketramose. And don’t miss our guide to the MTG release schedule to keep up with the latest news.
Source: Wargamer
