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Lopen posted...

Akroma Angel of Wrath (include Angel of Fury/lore stuff here too don't mean just the one card)

82/100

No rest. No mercy. No matter what.

One would be forgiven for wondering why I love Akroma so much when it has a keyword soup long before Questing Beast was even a concept. First off... she's eight mana with three white pips. If you cast her, you earned those keywords.

The story of Onslaught block is one of the low points in Magic lore, best described as "yo what the fuck." Akroma's writing isn't very good (but is still among the best of the era, somehow). However, the concept is amazing. An illusionist wizard, Ixidor, who loses his wife in a gladiatorial battle to an abomination is left marooned in a desert afterward, and the bad juju artifact of the land, the Mirari, decides its next monkey-paw wish will give the dude the ability to create reality and not just illusons. The very first thing Ixidor does? Give up his arm to reimagine his beloved wife as an alabaster angel and tell her to do anything he can to avenge the real one. Somewhere, Edward Elric is coping and seething.

Months and months of holy war later... well, then I'd have to talk about the Scourge novel. I won't because even thinking about it would drop my IQ. Still, the concept and artistic execution behind Akroma kick ass. Magic has the best angelic art of any fantasy medium, and even compared to that, Akroma is built different.

With so many legendary creatures getting spewed out every year to feed the Commander meat grinder, it saddens me that I doubt any of them will become icons on the level of Akroma. I don't think we'll be seeing "Alquist Proft's Memorial" granting your creatures the ability to crack clues to Sphinx's Rev. Akroma broke ground in design and backed it up with her aesthetic and conceptual execution, even if her actual author sucked, and she deserves the acclaim all these years later.