Ravenous is a creature keyword that appears on cards from the Warhammer 40K Commander Decks. Creatures with Ravenous all have an X in their casting cost. Ravenous means two things: creatures with it ener the battlefield with a number of +1/+1 counters equal to whatever you paid for X, and if you paid 5 or more for X, you draw a card when the creature enters the battlefield.
Pretty simple! There’s a few notes here, but nothing too tricky:
- Creatures with Ravenous enter the battlefield with the +1/+1 counters already on it, so there’s no window for anyone to do anything before the counters are put on. This also means any abilities or effects that look for creatures at or above a certain power and/or toughness entering the battlefield will see the creature entering with the counters already on it.
- The card draw ability only checks for what the value of X was when you cast the spell, not the total amount of counters the creature enters the battlefield with – so no getting the card for a discount with Doubling Season or the like in play.
- A copy of a Ravenous creature will enter the battlefield as if X was zero. If you copy the creature spell while it’s on the stack, the copy will have whatever value for X the spell was cast with.
Ravenous is simple and works well enough, and is also a generic enough name for a mechanic that it isn’t totally locked into the Warhammer 40K universe. The biggest knock against it returning is that normal sets generally only want so many creatures that scale with your mana the way a creature with Ravenous does. So while Ravenous could see an appearance in a Standard set in the future, it would take a certain kind of environment to work.
If you’re feeling a Ravenous need to add to your collection, head on over to cardkingdom.com!