by Elton Gahr

Created on: October 31, 2009

One of the biggest disadvantages of using creatures is that every deck has a considerable number of removal spells and it is very difficult to keep those creatures alive. This becomes even more notable when the creatures are large because it is more difficult to lose.

Colfenor's Urn is a rare artifact from the Lorwyn expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs three colorless mana and if you are able to make it work it will have a major effect on any game.

The card reads "Whenever a creature with toughness 4 or greater is put into your graveyard from the battlefield, you may exile it. At the beginning of the end step, if three or more cards have been exiled with Colfenor's Urn, sacrifice it. If you do, return those cards to the battlefield under their owner's control."

The major disadvantage of this card is that if it is removed before you have exiled three creatures with it, or not during the end phase that the card does nothing. This is a major problem since unless someone is using mass removal they are going to have enough time to destroy this very easily. The good news though is that in general people do not have enough artifact removal in their deck to use a considerable amount of times and this is an excellent addition to a deck that has other artifacts which you also do not want to be removed.

Waiting for your opponent to kill the creatures is only one possible way to use this card, another valuable possibility is to use it in a deck with creatures that you generally know are going to die. This can work with cards that are sacrificed or are dangerous in such a way that your opponent has no choice but to kill it.

More likely though is a deck that has wrath of god effects as well as a number of mid to high level creatures this could allow for a considerable advantage since you would be able to replace all of your losses almost immediately while they would not.

The main difference between constructed and limited for this card is that limited generally has a far lower chance of the opponent having artifact removal and larger creatures are both more likely to exist and to be killed in combat all which means that this card is likely to be of considerable more value.

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