Although not strictly better (since Timeless Witness costs more), this card takes all of the benefits of Eternal Witness and adds more. It's only natural that we feature the spiritual successor to Eternal Witness from Modern Horizons 2: Timeless Witness. ( Timeless Witness | Art by Deruchenko Alexander) Although it doesn't tend to give the same amount of card advantage, and although it's much more difficult to create an engine with it, Holistic Wisdom may just save your bacon should you need to quickly reuse multiple cards from your graveyard. Holistic Wisdom may just be the most flexible card out of this batch, offering several opportunities to recur cards of all types. Like the aforementioned Long Rest and Co., it can also help you recover from board wipes, or maybe just put an interesting spin on the archetype's normal capabilities. The Timmys and Tammys of the Commander community might be enamored by Paleoloth, which can turn the creatures of a green stompy deck into repeatable recursion. It's a little slow, and a little costly, but it's also of a comparable speed to many of the engines that can be created using Eternal Witness. This makes it perfect for graveyard-centric decks that can mill themselves, putting Genesis into the grave alongside a bunch of valuable targets for it. All you need is to get it into your graveyard. Genesis is a much more straightforward way to repeatedly recur creatures. Playing one of these can especially help if you have a bad habit of overextending your board and you quickly need to recover from a board wipe. These spells are especially relevant in their ability to give a large burst of card advantage at once, something green can struggle with without the help of an already-large board state. Featured above is Long Rest, but other contenders in this category are Gaea's Will, Praetor's Counsel, Seasons Past, and more. The ability to get a basic land card into your hand might even save you in a pinch, if you need to fix your mana.įinally, there's a whole class of one-off effects that can recur large amounts of cards immediately. Only returning creatures may be a bit of a pain, but in creature-based strategies, both the recursion and the ability to give one creature flying are incredibly relevant, especially considering green's penchant for big creatures with little to no evasion. This makes it a fantastic fit for decks that utilize Aristocrats strategies, but even outside of that, it can provide life-saving blockers.Įvolution Charm, like Bala Ged Recovery, has a lot of modal benefit. At the cost of some minor restrictions, it gives twice as many bodies as Eternal Witness, and it does so at instant speed.

Our first one-off recursion spell is Fungal Rebirth, which has a lot going for it over our Staple. For those decks, Witness may not be worth the slot (or the price tag). However, not all decks are capable of taking advantage of this synergy in the first place, and others may not need to reuse it. Let's get to some of those now! Uncovering Hidden RelicsĪs stated previously, one of Eternal Witness 's main strengths is its ability to abuse the enters-the-battlefield effect for extra benefit. Īll of these classics are staples in and of themselves, and thus aren't the most new or exciting replacements for Eternal Witness, but their power, and the precedent they set, makes them worth mentioning before we tackle the less common replacements. Sometimes, the restriction on which cards we can recur will actually improve the rest of the spell's quality, potentially providing truly fantastic bonuses, as we can see from the land-grabbing, graveyard-filling powerhouse that is Life from the Loam. This comes with additional benefits, though: it can grab three cards from the graveyard instead of just one, and it can return itself to hand using its Dredge ability. It comes in at the same cost as Regrowth, but it only grabs lands. Life from the Loam is the odd one out here. If you're missing a land drop, or you're playing a Landfall deck and would get extra benefit from playing a land, you might instead opt to play Bala Ged Sanctuary. It also benefits from instant and sorcery synergies (although those are admittedly rarer in green).īala Ged Recovery is a bit costlier than Regrowth, but it benefits both from its sorcery status and, most importantly, some added modality. Regrowth lacks the synergies that creatures might benefit from, but it comes at a more easily-achievable two mana, rather than three. The most obvious versions of this effect have almost the same text as Eternal Witness, but with some key differences.

Mtg eternal witness art