Black Knight
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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Big Apple Highlander Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Freeform Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Oldschool 93/94 Legal
Planar Constructed Legal
Planechase Legal
PreDH Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Black Knight

Creature — Human Knight

First strike (This creature deals combat damage before creatures without first strike.)

Protection from white ((Remember the acronym debt.) This can't be damaged, enchanted, equipped, blocked or targeted by anything white. Anything white attached to this immediately falls off.)

legendofa on Thoughts about magic the gathering …

2 months ago

These are all interesting thoughts and concerns, so please don't take any of my thoughts as saying you're objectively wrong or anything. But I do want to make some points of my own.

  1. The plane of Eldraine's the Arthurian/Matter of Britain/Grimm's Fairy Tales place right now. Throne of Eldraine was a pretty even mix, and Wilds of Eldraine was heavy on the fairy tales side, to the point where each color pair had an associated well-known fairy tale. I'd like to see an Arthurian-inspired Courts of Eldraine set. On a broader note, the design team has been open to making sets based on certain public domain properties, for pretty much the reasons you mention.

  2. I've been having a lot of this kind of discussion recently, and I'm learning that I'm pretty permissive with what themes and styles I'm okay with. The way I see it, TMNT + Spider-Man New York is thematically one urbanization and industrialization away from Bloomburrow, with maybe an Omenpath for the humans, goblins, and random weirdness. If I went to Theros, made a tight roll of copper wire, and dropped a chunk of magnetite or lodestone through it, would it make an electric current? Or would I have to make an offering to Keranos for it to work? How about mashing up charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, putting it in a tube with a lead ball, and lighting it on fire? Fantasy shouldn't preclude technology, in my not at all humble opinion. Also, again turning to the designers, there's a strict boundary between Universes Beyond and in-house story. Jace and Chandra won't be meeting Cloud and Aerith. And I completely agree with this--one of my hard lines is that UB stays its own thing and doesn't interact with in-house. If that happens, I'm done with the story.

  3. How do you feel about cards like Black Knight, or Fog, or Exile, or Festival? These are all simple, nonmagical, yet still evocative names from the early days. If every card is as parsimonious as you suggest, then that almost puts a hard cap on the number of unique and interesting effects that can be made. Complexity creep is definitely a concern, but each new ability or effect that gets made, or each ability or effect that gets interpreted in a new way, will bring additional rules along with it. If the keyword creature ability list was locked into something like flying, haste, trample, first strike, deathtouch, and vigilance, and each creature at most two abilities, you can get just 21 cards out of this list. After that each creature gets at most one of these plus a unique ability, and then you're locked into adjusting the P/T stats. Depending on what you're willing to do with unique abilities, you're going to stretch to get even a thousand creatures. That's about Alpha to Visions. Yeah, there's stuff like Questing Beast, Frenzied Baloth, and Magma Opus, but those come out like once every few years. And some people get excited by big splashy piles of words or weird rules edge cases and try to figure out how to maximize them. I'm still proud of finding (and putting off getting judge confirmation for) a way to use Obeka, Brute Chronologist to lock and take over the game. Weird rules interactions are fun places to explore for a lot of people, including me.

And to add my own thought, it really does break my immersion of a huge, potentially infinite multiverse full of potential and discovery, when it turns out everything is some version of swords and castles and looks like Middle Kingdom Egypt or Age of Exploration Mesoamerica or Jidaigeki Japan or some real-world history. Alara is my favorite plane because it avoids that so hard. Sure, there's some western European + Arabian influence in Bant, and some Mesoamerica in Naya, but Grixis and Esper are pure original fantasy with no real-world counterpart, or at least really worked to hide their sources.

SaberTech on Should the Number of Mana …

4 months ago

From a mechanical perspective, cards with multiple coloured pips are harder to splash in a draft deck. They take more commitment to their colour in your mana base. How colour-intense a spell's cost is can be a tool to help WotC carve out draft archetypes in a set, putting pressure on certain spells so that they are less popular choices in archetypes that they aren't generally intended for. Players are still given the option of playing them as splash cards though. Players just have to be willing to gamble on if their mana base will work out for them when they have those cards in hand.

Even if WotC makes that choice for a mechanical reason it does often give give the flavour impression that certain cards are just more dedicated to the nature of their colour, which is certainly something that WotC has also done. Going back to the early days of the game, White Knight cost two white mana to emphasize that it is a white knight. It's the same with Black Knight. And since their mana requirements are pretty intense for their point in the mana curve, it was harder to play a playset of both in the same deck with the limited amount of dual lands in the game at the time. That meant that you were more likely to see the Knights facing off on opposite sides of the table instead of beside each other, fitting the intended oppositional flavour of the two cards.

All of that to say, more colour-intense mana costs have more of a role to play in card design than just to indicate a card's relative power, although it is fun when WotC does print a particular card as a strong payoff for really dedicating your deck towards a particular colour.

SteelSentry on How is Black Market Connections …

1 year ago

On the topic of Black wanting you to play more black, that's definitely something Rosewater has mentioned. Not just a lot of pip-intensive cards on both the cheap and expensive ends from Black Knight to Griselbrand, but black has a lot of cards that want you to play more swamps; a lot more swamps. Dread Presence, Crypt Ghast, Hecatomb, Cabal Coffers. From the Black episode of his podcast:

And the idea is that black kind of likes to encourage you to play more black. That black is the color that kind of says, “Hey,” you know, that tempts you. Like, you know, the way I always joke about it is, imagine black is trying to, like, you know, pitch itself to the—to the Magic users. “Hey, Magic user, come here. Oh look, we can kill creatures easily, and oh look, we can do discard, and…” Kind of lures you with things that it can do.

And then when you’re there, it’s like “Oh, well, for just a little more black you can have a Black Knight, or you can…” You know. Like, it just sort of—it does the soft sell, and at some point you’re like, “Oh, well my swamps produce more black mana? I should just play mono-black.”

And I like to think that black has the—has the best salesmanship. That like, it slowly lures you in, and maybe makes you want to play more black. And I always consider that kind of a fun—like, that’s kind of black’s nature, that black will like lure you in with some splash, and then before you know it you’re just playing mono-black, like “How’d I get here?”

multimedia on Rakdos, Lord of Riots Demon Tribal

3 years ago

In my last comment suggested a lot of cards to add, now here's some cards to consider cutting. For cards to consider cutting I would start with all the lower mana cost nonDemon creatures. I would simply replace these with other lower mana cost cards that can better enable Rakdos without attacking and reduce creature mana costs without attacking.

Rather than playing a lot of single creature removal spells, rely more on Demons who can destroy or remove creatures? Especially Demons who have repeatable removal effects. You could cut many creature removal spells and replace them with more draw.

Searing Spear, Shock, Disintegrate can target a player to make them lose life, but you have Lightning Bolt for that and you can make opponent lose life better ways then playing single burn spells. Some budget single removal spells are helpful such as Chaos Warp and Feed the Swarm because these spells can remove an enchantment, Warp any permanent. When attacking is important to your game plan these can remove Ghostly Prison, Propaganda and others.

Rakdos can only reduce the mana cost of creatures therefore play very few noncreature high mana cost spells or spells that require a lot of mana to be useful. Spells that need a lot mana paid to make them decent is not really what you want when playing many high mana cost creatures. Could cut these for more draw and ramp.

Rolling Earthquake is a budget spell like this that's worth playing because you can control how much damage each creature is going to take, most Demons including Rakdos have high toughness. You could cut a few of the lesser Demons.

Master of the Feast is really bad card in multiplayer Commander because only your opponents draw. Awaken the Sky Tyrant, Wretched Confluence and Seal of the Guildpact are subpar for the mana costs.

In my last comment I recommended adding a lot of loot effects for draw. Loot is excellent with Blood Speaker and Speaker is a good reason to play Demon tribal since it's a tribal tutor that can be repeatable, return to your hand from your graveyard. Rakdos can reduce Speaker's mana cost to only 1 mana, making it a mana efficient way to repeatedly tutor for Demons.

Loot can be an enabler for reanimation and recursion which are helpful effects to have with Demons. Reanimation is a way to get Demons onto the battlefield without having to cast them, a backup for when Rakdos is disrupted. Recursion is getting Demons back into your hand or casting them from your graveyard. Patriarch's Bidding can reanimate all Demons in your graveyard. Persist and Exhume can reanimate for only two mana.

Chainer, Nightmare Adept has interaction with looting, getting Demons into your graveyard to cast them using Rakdos mana cost reduction. If you discard a Demon using Chainer's ability you can cast that same Demon giving it haste to attack. Rakdos also gains haste from Chainer when he's cast from the Command Zone. Any creature you reanimate gains haste from Chainer.

Chainer has excellent interaction with creatures who can sac themselves for value such as Magus of the Wheel and Doomed Necromancer. With Chainer these creatures gain haste when cast from your graveyard allowing them to tap and activate their abilities right away. Doomed Necromancer can reanimate even at instant speed. Chainer is good with Blood Speaker as discard outlet that can keep coming back to your hand.

Some more budget Demons to consider adding:

Some budget land upgrades to consider:

Temple of the False God is not a good land when you have no land ramp. It will not tap for mana until at least turn five and that's if you make all your land drops. Even if playing green and land ramp such as Cultivate I still wouldn't play Temple of the False God, it's just not a good enough land in the early turns of a game.

smack80 on Block This, You Filthy Casual

3 years ago

I would play Black Knight because it's old school and it's immune to most removal.

Epicurus on Syr Haakon's Big Sister

4 years ago

Ok, made replacements.

Out - Infernal Plunge , Fortuitous Find , Black Knight and one swamp

In - Thrilling Discovery , Sigarda's Aid , Dark Ritual and Buried Ruin

Neotrup on Does a creature with hexproof/shroud …

4 years ago

Slight correction: protection usually doesn't stop board wipes ( Black Knight can be destroyed by Wrath of God ), but protection does prevent damage, unlike Hexproof or shroud, so protection from red can stop red board wipes ( Kor Firewalker is unharmed by Blasphemous Act ).

Xaphize on anujoe765

6 years ago

ok listen. forget every deck i ever suggested. Done? now, just sit back, watch, and be overwhelmed, and an urge to check the price. Rayami. First of the Fallen

- Questing Beast - Banehound - Black Knight - Gurmag Swiftwing - Hovermyr - Kefnet the Mindful - Phyrexian Crusader - Ramunap Hydra - Stonecoil Serpent - Vampire of the Dire Moon - Prime Speaker Vannifar - Priest of Forgotten Gods - Ashnod's Altar

the best part? Its ALL budget!! (except questing beast)

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