Making Elves of Deep Shadow sad

Yeah... I guess Elves of Deep Shadow can have the damage reduced by effects like Urza's Armor? :)

IMO this is just too good of a mana dork for - see Blood Celebrant and Vesper Ghoul for example. Mostly I dislike how good it's at mana fixing. Black is usually the kind of color that wants you to go "all in" with it why it's the color with most color intensive mana costs in its cards.

Couple of ideas of black mana dorks:

• Heretic Hermit
• Evernyx Raven

As for mana fixing, I would like to color shift Viridian Acolyte into .

In reddit, you can find "Magus of the Confluence" which is (unsurprisingly) a legendary version of your card... Looking at the comments though, some people do indeed think it could work as a black card, but I'm not personally really buying that.

Also Blightsoil Druid (and maybe Gnarlroot Trapper.) I'm not trying to make a point. I just figured we might as well march them all out.

Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. I sorta wanted to do a take on Deathrite Shaman and ended up with an Elves of Deep Shadow crossed with Birds of Paradise.

I definitely wouldn't want this guy over Deathrite or Birds at their respective jobs but I though he was an cool '3rd' mana guy in that vein. Thing I'm thinking of to address 'too good at fixing' though Deathrite still beats this guy by a mile:

": Add to your mana pool one mana of any color that a Swamp could produce."

Then he sort of becomes a black centric Arbor Elf. I suppose I could also just make him Arbor Elf in black. That seems okay too... Hm.

While Deathrite in generally beats this it still needs to exile cards from graveyards to do its thing. Still, Deathrite is basically 1-CMC 'walker which is pretty much a mistake. And the only things that get played in eternal formats are development mistakes so there's that. I think WotC pretty much pushed it out for legacy (and modern, funnily enough) in mind. As an example, the whole thing with "cracking fetches for shocks" is pretty absurd in that it makes the mana bases A) too flexible to do whatever they want B) way too costly in $. Then all the ridicously stuff you can do with reanimation (which also all should have some kind of upper limit in CMC as to what they can bring back) and other such nonsense makes thenT really fast. Deathrite obviously was crafted to play into those themes. I wouldn't look it as a poster boy for where the color pie headed. So I reiterate: it's an one-of rare pushed specifically for eternal formats (likely even for legacy since that's where the color pie is pretty much dead), possibly as a tool to keep check on certain decks (and to sell packs at the time).
/rant

Just adding to this guy...

> ", Exile a card from your graveyard: Add ..."

... would make it much more acceptable. Adding mana by exiling cards from grave could be argued to be a thing for .