Five Ways To Use The Darkhold

The Darkhold | Art by Yohann Schepacz

Whoa, did we just get a new The One Ring?

The Darkhold has nearly the same mechanic, tapping to draw an increasing number of cards, then dealing a ton of damage to us. It's not indestructible, and it doesn't have the Fog, but instead we can pay eight to bring everyone else's life total down with us. That's a strong set of abilities, and it's all on a three-mana card!

I can easily see this book being the boogeyman of 2027, and its evil theming fits really well. Let's see exactly how good it is!

The Jankiest Way to Use The Darkhold

Most of the time we're going to use The Darkhold as a card draw machine with downside. Draw as many cards as we can, then start being careful with it later in the game.

Maybe we'll take advantage of the life loss with cards like Betor, Ancestor's Voice, but that's some pretty minimal usage if you ask me.

As K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth players like to say, if we win at more than one life, we didn't use everything we had. Well what if we take that a step further and win at zero life? The Darkhold can bring everyone's life total down to the lowest at the table, which can be literally nothing. So if we're at zero with a Platinum Angel on the field, activating that ability will just win us the game.

Honestly, I'm surprised Platinum Angel and friends aren't some of The Darkhold's most played cards yet. Angel's Grace is an amazing clutch too, giving us the opportunity to draw several answers.

But as I'm sure Selenia, Dark Angel players know, going down to a very low life is quite the risky strategy. Any piece of removal for our Platinum Angel will immediately kill us, well before we can activate The Darkhold at sorcery speed. That hasn't stopped Selenia players from having fun, though, has it?

The Most Evil Way to Use The Darkhold

There are a lot of ways to turn card draw into a win. Psychosis Crawler makes it very simple, for each card drawn, our opponents take a damage. Psychic Corrosion does the same thing, but with mill.

Some cards, however, are not so easy to resolve. Sphinx's Tutelage, for instance, has us play a whole mini game every single time we draw ONE card.

When we draw for turn, one of our opponents is gonna have to mill two cards at a time until they don't share a color. When we activate The Darkhold, they're gonna have to repeat that whole process for every sin counter.

It will genuinely take forever to resolve, and we're doing it every single turn. How much more annoying can we get?

The Best Combo With The Darkhold

I can't lie, I really thought there would be a one card combo with The Darkhold. I mean, it's an artifact that taps to draw cards, surely that goes infinite with something, right?

Well, neither I nor the community have found it yet, so we're gonna have to get creative.

Now, how does one go about creating a combo? I like to start with the loop. Essentially, we're gonna try and make a circle of effects that can repeat infinitely. With The Darkhold, we're tapping an artifact to draw a bunch of cards. So is there a way to untap something when we draw?

Well there's Tolarian Kraken, who will untap a permanent for one mana. That's almost what we need, but we'd have to figure out a way to generate mana, so let's put that aside for now.

What if instead we discard a card to untap The Darkhold? A quick Scryfall search finds us Mind Over Matter, which lets us discard a card to untap an artifact, creature, or land.

It's perfect! The only problem now is that we're losing a stupid amount of life every time we tap The Darkhold. Well, one more Scryfall search reveals Queza, Augur of Agonies, who not only negates The Darkhold's life loss, but is also a win condition and the perfect commander to house the combo. Awesome!

To summarize, we start with The Darkhold, Mind Over Matter, and Queza, Augur of Agonies on the field.

First, we discard down to zero with Mind Over Matter, then tap The Darkhold to draw a card and lose a life. Queza triggers, and an opponent loses 1 life while we get ours back.

Then we repeat, discarding our hand with Mind Over Matter to untap The Darkhold, then drawing cards and damaging ourselves with the book, then healing and draining our opponents with Queza. The end result is damage dealt to our opponents equal to the number of cards in our deck.

If we want to make it even more infinite, we can add in Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre to shuffle our graveyard back into our library. We just have to remember that if The Darkhold gets more sin counters than our life total or the number of cards in our library, we'll die before Queza heals us!

Hmm, you know, those are some rough qualifications. This is a sketchy combo, but it's the best one I can come up with. Let me know if you can do better!

The Most Competitive Deck for The Darkhold

Let's be clear, The Darkhold is a really good card, and that means there are a ton of great decks for it.

At first I thought the best one would just be Queza, Augur of Agonies, but Sheoldred, the Apocalypse is even better, netting us positive life when we draw!

Then there's Greven, Predator Captain, who can use The Darkhold to grow huge, and already has ways to use a full hand with cards like Sickening Dreams.

I think the clear winner, though, is Rowan, Scion of War. She needs to be constantly losing life, and The Darkhold provides a way to do that every turn, while drawing a ton of cards to cast at a reduced cost. The book overcomes both of Rowan's hurdles at the same time, and can even be used to even the battlefield with all the mana we save. It's a perfect match!

The Worst Deck for The Darkhold

The prize for worst possible pairing of cards has to go to The Darkhold and Solemnity.

Not only does Solemnity prevent The Darkhold from getting counters and therefore drawing any cards, but it doesn't even stop The Darkhold from damaging us when we tap it! Solemnity doesn't just make it useless, it makes it actively harmful!

I know this nonbo is gonna happen at some point though, because both cards have Mister Negative and Y'shtola, Night's Blessed in their top commanders. Solemnity is a very common combo piece, and The Darkhold is just plain good, so eventually someone is gonna make this mistake and facepalm hard.

Time to answer the question, is The Darkhold the new One Ring?

I'd say definitely not, simply because it's not colorless. However, it's still a dire threat on the table, and definitely a card to pay attention to.

I think there's a lot to be done with it, and a lot of games to be lost because players weren't watching their life total. Let me know if you've got a better combo, or something even more evil than Sphinx's Tutelage. I love hearing from y'all!