How Hard Is it To Cast Anti-Venom?

Marvel’s Spider-Man is the next Standard-release set. You can preorder the set now, and it releases on September 26th. We’ve already seen a huge chunk of the set, and there’s one card in particular that caught my eye because of it’s eye-popping casting cost.

Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer is the first-ever card to cost “WWWWW,” and only the 7th card in Magic history to have 5 or more pips of the same color in its casting cost. I think color-intensive designs like these are really interesting, but anytime we see a powerful card with a challenging mana cost, we have to take into account the various challenges a card like this presents you.

In this article I’m going to evaluate Anti-Venom as a card, and discuss what exactly your deck should look like if you want to cast it, while also discussing the best ways to abuse this Symbiote Hero.

IS ANTI-VENOM EVEN WORTH THE EFFORT?

Before we get into the weeds and discuss how to pay this challenging mana cost, we need to consider whether or not Anti-Venom is worth jumping through those hoops in the first place. 

He’s a 5-mana 5/5 that generates a 2-for-1 upfront thanks to the “enters” trigger. Unlike a lot of more recent White reanimation effects, it doesn’t have a mana value restriction. He can bring back any creature at all, meaning that if you can stock your graveyard playing Anti-Venom can be a great way to cheat a huge monster into play.

For example, in Standard, getting back an Overlord of the Mistmoors or Summon: Knights of Round will almost assuredly win you the game.

Anti-Venom is also very resilient and a threat in his own right. While he can die to “destroy” or “exile” removal, he can’t be taken down in combat nor can he be removed by damage. In fact, he welcomes those kinds of effects since he can get even bigger.

MONO-WHITE IS IDEAL, BUT EVEN THEN YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL

While only playing a single color often limits what your deck can do in 40-card, 60-card, and 100-card formats, doing so is the best way to make casting Anti-Venom pretty trivial. If every land in your deck produces white mana, you gain very easy access to this mono-white Symbiote.

However, even if you’re playing a mono-white deck, you still need to be careful with your mana base. Running any non-basics that don’t produce White is potentially asking for trouble, as even having one land in play that can’t help you cast Anti-Venom will slow you down significantly. 

Anti-Venom has the most potential in a deck like Pioneer Mono-White Devotion, which can easily cast him, while also reaping the benefits of the fact that he contributes a ton to your devotion.

PLAYING ANTI-VENOM IN MULTICOLORED DECKS

Things get a lot trickier if you’re trying to play Anti-Venom in a deck that is two or more colors. That’s not to say it isn’t doable, but the more lands you have in your deck that don’t produce White, the worse a card like Anti-Venom becomes. And if you’re going multicolored, there’s a good chance you have to run a few of those.

That said, if your secondary color is only necessary for a few cards, you might be able to get away with it. There are enough lands that produce 2+ colors of mana these days that you can reliably cast cards of two different colors while still making sure every land in your deck produces White mana.

We have something of a precedent for this too. Phyrexian Obliterator and Phyrexian Vindicator have both seen play in multicolored decks in the recent past, but the decks that use them do have very carefully constructed manabases. 

The larger your cardpool is, the easier it is to make a deck with the necessary sources of White, since you have access to even more good dual lands. But mana is often very good even in Standard these days. In fact, the Obliterator and Vindicator were both seeing play in Standard two-color decks before they rotated out of Standard.

Going beyond two colors definitely isn’t recommended for Anti-Venom though, even in formats where you have access to every dual land ever printed – like Commander. This is because it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that every land in your deck can produce the correct color of mana the more colors you add. There simply aren’t enough tri-lands for you to build a good mana base.

IS ANTI-VENOM GOOD AS A COMMANDER?

Unfortunately, they did make sure Anti-Venom’s reanimation effect isn’t too easy to abuse with blink effects, since he has to be cast or you don’t get the trigger. However, that’s easier to trigger repeatedly in Commander thanks to the fact that any time he dies, Anti-Venom will return to the command zone and be castable again. This gives him the potential to reanimate multiple things in every game.

While Mono-White Reanimator isn’t exactly a popular strategy in Commander, I could see a legendary creature like Anti-Venom helping make that kind of strategy far more viable. After all, there are plenty of good White reanimation effects and reanimation targets. We just haven’t ever received a white Commander who is good enough at reanimation, and I think Anti-Venom definitely fills that void.

There are also some pretty sweet ways to abuse Anti-Venom’s damage prevention effect  – like anything that lets you redirect damage to it. Putting Pariah on Anti-Venom or using en-Kor creatures alongside him seems like a great way to really torment your opponents.

If you’d rather run Anti-Venom in your 99, there is also one powerful mono-white Commander he plays quite well with – Heliod, Sun-Crowned. Not only does Anti-Venom singlehandedly give you enough devotion for Heliod to be a creature, he can also be used to help you reassemble the Triskelion-Heliod combo by bringing back that important Artifact creature. If you give Triskelion Lifelink with Heliod, every time you remove a counter to ping something with Triskelion, it gains life and gets a +1/+1 counter back.

With Anti-Venom around, you can even find ways to take advantage of this against opponents who have given themselves hexproof, since you can instead choose to ping Anti-Venom a million times and make him absolutely massive.

END STEP

In short, Anti-Venom is a powerful card, one worth the somewhat challenging mana cost in multiple formats.

What do you think? Is Anti-Venom too hard to cast to be a reliable card? Does he make a good Commander? Let me know over on X or Bluesky.