Notable cards[]
- Gravecrawler and Geralf's Messenger formed the backbone for of Zombie decks in Standard, as both are hard to kill and can push a lot of damage through in early turns. Geralf's Messenger in particular is a conceptual mirrored version of Kitchen Finks which was a popular aggro card during Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block; providing life loss against life gain, getting stronger upon death as opposed to weaker and being extremely inflexible in casting as opposed to being fairly easy to cast.
- Grafdigger's Cage — A powerful hoser card against strategies that attempt to cheat cards into play. This card incited widespread skepticism and anger, but turned out to not be as threatening as expected.
- Lingering Souls saw widespread application in a nearly all formats and was banned in Block Constructed due to providing a large number of creatures with the cost spread over multiple turns.
- Huntmaster of the Fells — Providing two bodies in one card, as well as lifegain and potential damage output, this card saw much tournament attention.
- Elbrus, the Binding Blade is a very flavorful artifact, depicting an expensive but weak dagger, which transforms into the gigantic and nigh-unstoppable Demon Withengar who feasts on the souls of defeated opponents.
- Tragic Slip is considered by many to be one of the best spot creature removal cards in the game, due to it's ability to destroy almost any creature for one mana, provided that another creature already died that turn.
- Faithless Looting showed the shift toward "looting" (a la Merfolk Looter) abilities in Red, but with the distinction that would be demonstrated in later sets that discarding would occur as a cost to differentiate it to the Blue version of looting. Its position as a Red mechanic would later be solidified in Magic 2013.