Pattern Recognition #366 - Sacrifice a Creature

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

8 May 2025

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

As an additional cost, sacrifice a creature.

Not much of an opening, is it? Yet, this is one of Magic's oldest examples of an additional casting cost, right up there with the necessity of paying life in addition to mana. It isn't a common thing over the course of the game, with a mere 74 cards to its name, but the effect is ubiquitous and something that is actually perceived as common nowadays because of the resilience in the cards that are printed.

The first card that has this ability is fittingly one of the few cards in the game that give their name to their effect or some action they have. Like Vigilance. In this case, Sacrifice comes to us from Alpha, where you could cast this spell, sacrifice a creature you control, and gain equal to the mana value of the creature being sacrificed!

Yes, it was exactly as powerful as you could expect. Way back when, you could cast a creature, swing with it into combat, and then pull a nasty combat trick with this card and feed the mana into a Frozen Shade, or a Howl from Beyond, or even just cut out the middle and rock up with Pestilence! Or regenerate a lot of other creatures at the same time. Lord of the Pit was a great choice for combat tricks, or to feed into the machine. After that, you had Demonic Hordes and then Sengir Vampire as the most expensive creatures in the set.

But honestly, your most common target will probably be one of the MV[[symbol:33] cards in the set. Most likely Scathe Zombies as they don't do much. And after paying for the sacrifice itself, you really only gained . It wasn't a lot, but it was something.

In a way, this card was an outgrowth of Dark Ritual, where instead of spending just a card to get an effective up for the turn, you could use a card in hand and sacrifice a creature to (hopefully) get even more!

If these cards were printed in the modern game (which they wouldn't), then DarkRit would be a Common and Sacrifice would be Uncommon to reflect their complexity and probable power levels.

Sacrifice was updated to Burn Offering in Ice Age, as the notion of multi-colored decks, and cross-color support got more support. Now you can convert that creature to mana instead!

Curiously it was in Arabian Nights when got into the thick of things as well. Metamorphosis is a card that you may or may not already recognize as it's the original version of this color's "Sacrifice a Creature to get another Creature" spells and abilities. I'm looking at you, Birthing Pod, ruiner of games and evenings. Curiously, this spell actually refunds you the mana to cast the spell itself, meaning that you don't have to 'downgrade' your creature in the process.

Altar of Bone from Ice Age is the first (but not the last!) card to have this text. I'm not so sure why it's even on the card in the first place, as while this is the colour of searching your library for creatures, tends now to do it by itself. Yes, Eladamri's Call was printed a couple years later, but I can't help but feel that this card was created to fill a tactical gap that the designers of this set felt existed, and I'm really not sold in it as a concept. At all.

Moving on, quickly laid claim to this concept, and you know what? It makes sense!

You see, this is a point that I've had to belabor and point out and teach to players new and old. is the colour of Sacrifice. It is the colour of giving something up to get a something else, oftentimes trading up in the process. And this is part of the process of developing this concept. Sacrifice your creatures for something more.

But this wasn't the only color to have this effect. Moving forward to Stronghold, got into the game properly (unless I missed my set readings again), as well as and . The first colour gained Scapegoat, an interesting preamble to 's on-again-off-again affair with self-bounce. Which is definitely on again if you watched my video a couple weeks back about Mardu Bounce. It can be quite effective!

's first foray into this was ... well... Mask of the Mimic is a thing. You can sacrifice a creature to search your library for a copy of a creature you control and put it onto the battlefield. Now, this was the era when the biggest creatures in the game were , with cards like Polar Kraken existing. And Clone was already a card you could play in this colour. So when you look at it, I can see a though where this was really an attempt to turn a creature you controlled into another creature you already controlled. Just, you know, going through hoops, and requiring you have a second copy in your deck. And skipping all the enters-effects.

But there is one standout winner in this set, one that has reached Evergreen status, a card that you can find in pretty much any Standard rotation simply because of how good it is! OK. Maybe not that much, but you can't argue that Fling, and Fling-adjacent effects from Callous Sell-Sword to Grab the Reigns to Pyrrhic Blast and to Thud, the idea of saccing a creature to deal damage is nos so ingrained into that it's hard to believe that it really started around this time!

Yes, I am aware that Goblin Grenade came first, but that's not the point!

No the point is that the first card that most modern (but not Modern) players thing of then they look at this clause on a card will be Skulltap and its many many, many variants. Cast the card, sacrifice a creature, and draw more cards.

A long time ago, I talked about the nature of Card Draw for each of the colours. I really should do that again as things have changed a little since then, but the thing I commented about at the time that is still relevant today is that when wants something, the first resource they reach for - if it isn't life - is something to give up in exchange for it. And the most common resource is a creature.

Tossing away a card in hand is more often a thing, but that's something different. Instead, if another colour wanted to do the same thing - draw a couple of cards, then they would typically pay something else. Usually more mana on the spell, as you can check against cards that do the same effective thing.

The sacrificing of a creature to the casting of a spell is a way to reduce the mana requirements of that spell, simply put. This isn't new at all, I must add, as I think I've covered this subject before. I think? Anyways, while the additional cost of sacrificing a creature has stayed consistent, what hasn't is the nature of that creature.

You see, you can divide these sorts of spells and effects into two categories. The first and most common one is that the creature itself doesn't matter. It's just fuel for the fire, a way to reduce the cost of the effect. Now, this used to actually mean something. There were some creatures that were meant to be sacrificed, or because we're talking about one of 's strengths here, have additional effects that trigger when a creature dies. Little things like Dictate of Erebos, or Dire Fleet Hoarder. Different ways to gain additional benefits when something you control dies, and sacrificing just means you have more control over when and what your primary goal is.

But to get back to the point, if the creature that you're sacrificing itself doesn't matter... why should it matter? Because here's something I've seen happen over the years. And only because I'm an Old Fogey who has too much time on his brain. The prevalence of token creatures has changed the internal maths of what the value of a sacrificed creature is. It used to be that in the old days of the game, you sacrificed something that had value to it. Or a Vanilla creature. That you had to give up a card that you cast, a spell that could have done something else in the now or the future in order to get something going now.

I think that a lot of these cards, and I want to say this really kicked in around Ravnica when Saprolings and their creature really hit the table. But I can accept that it probably started before then. I want to say that a lot of these modern 'Sacrifice a Creature' spells and such are printed under the assumption that you're going to toss away a meaningless token, something that is made in bulk and in multiples. That you're effectively giving up really nothing to gain an effect.

My favorite example of this is Plumb the Forbidden, which was designed to work hand in hand with the token:Pest token from the same set. Using the tokens offsets the downside of the spell being cast as each Pest you use cancels out the life loss!

On the other side of things, there are cards where the nature of the creature matters. This is a lot more common in the old days, but still shows up today. These are spells where some quality of the creature is checked for the output of the spell in some way. The spell Metamorphosis that I mentioned earlier checks the mana value of the creature sacrificed to see how much mana you get. One very common factor is represented in Strixhaven, which I note only because the site is still open on the other screen, is to check for a creature's power or toughness. Tend the Pests is a great way to toss something high-power but otherwise low value into in order to get more out of it. You know, Daemogoth Titan or Daemogoth Woe-Eater. Sometimes, they check for color, or ability keywords if you're in Ikoria. And when you check for something like that, using a token probably isn't the best option. You want to sacrifice something with value to it.

Most of the time, you probably don't care about what creature you sacrifice. Sometimes, you do. But when you're in this color, be ready to give up something for value.

I remember when it meant something, and the easy way out wasn't just baked into the game from the start. But sometimes, player-accessibility trumps my desires.

Just don't get rid of your only blocker to draw more cards when I can swing for lethal, huh? Trample is a bitch like that.

Thank you all for watching and reading, and I'll see you all next week!

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