

There are lots of uses for Perpetual that aren't using the graveyard in some way: targeting somebody's creature with an Ethereal Grasp can effectively lock it down for the rest of the game, or you can use a Fearsome Whelp to gradually make the dragons in your hand a lot cheaper to cast.Ī good thing about Perpetual is that the stat changes can be gradually built up in a way the usual temporary buffs can't. On the other hand, you also can't just sacrifice a creature and bring it back to get rid of a Perpetual negative effect, meaning your opponents can also scupper your plans even more.Įven if you're not running a graveyard deck that benefits from the persistence across zones, Perpetual can be a significant blow to your opponents. Graveyard decks can make great use of Perpetual, as you can buff up your creatures and retain those boosts as it moves in and out of your graveyard. Perpetual is both a powerful tool and a massive hindrance for certain kinds of decks, especially ones that regularly move cards from zone to zone.

All of them could be shuffled back into your library, and you'd still have that one lifelinking Pangolin hanging out in your deck. Say you had four Gloom Pangolins and one of them was perpetually given lifelink by an Ethereal Escort the other three Gloom Pangolin cards don't have lifelink, but that one you targeted does. Perpetual only tracks any cards it directly affected. Even if that creature is killed, blinked, exiled, or bounced, it will always have that -1/-2 modifier added to its base toughness.

For example, Davriel's Withering perpetually gives an opponent's creature -1/-2. Perpetual changes that, and effectively rewrites that card for the rest of the game. As far as it's concerned, it's a brand new, freshly-cast permanent, entirely unconnected for what it might have been doing in other zones. Usually, a permanent loses all knowledge of its past when it moves to a different zone, from the battlefield to the graveyard or into exile. Perpetual traits are modifiers that affect a card and follow it from zone to zone. It isn't a keyword ability like Seek or Proliferate, and it isn't an alternative casting cost like Mutate or Foretell. To call Perpetual a 'mechanic' is kind of stretching the definition of a mechanic in Magic. The count has been updated to include these cards. Updated April 27, 2022: Perpetuity continues to be one of the biggest aspects of digital-exclusive Magic, and has played a big part in more recent sets like Alchemy: Kamigawa. Here is everything you need to know about the Perpetual mechanic in Magic the Gathering Arena. Fundamentally changing how the game treats cards, Perpetual is something that would have been a pain to do elsewhere, but works well digitally. RELATED: Magic The Gathering: What Are Planeswalker Cards?One of those new mechanics is Perpetual.
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Full of new digital mechanics that make use of Arena's AI, it's one of the biggest things to hit Arena since launch.

Through the new Alchemy format and September's Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, Magic the Gathering Arena is hoping to position itself as a new, digital-exclusive offshoot of Magic to compete with the likes of Legends of Runeterra and Gwent.
