Few Magic: The Gathering cards have defined the game in recent years quite like The One Ring. Introduced in 2023’s The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, the four-mana legendary artifact protects its controller from everything for a turn before it begins accumulating burden counters. Tapping it adds another counter and draws a card for each one, while every upkeep brings progressively greater life loss.
Playing The One Ring in a game of Magic feels a lot like slipping Sauron’s evil piece of jewelry onto your finger. It promises tremendous power, but the more you rely on it, the more rapidly it destroys you. That combination of protection and escalating card advantage has also made it one of Magic’s strongest cards across multiple formats. That’s why it got banned in Modern and Historic and was even flagged as a Game Changer in Commander.
But now, The One Ring may have a legitimate challenger.
Wizards of the Coast officially announced a new Marvel Universes Beyond set scheduled for release in April. Called Darkhold Destiny, it features the evil Darkhold tome as the centerpiece of the whole set. Unlike every previous UB set, Darkhold Destiny will tell an original, dimension-hopping story in which Dormammu and Hela use the Book of the Damned to invade numerous realms across the Marvel Universe. Appropriately, the Darkhold is another legendary artifact remarkably similar to The One Ring that accumulates unique counters, draws progressively more cards, and drains its wielder’s life force.
But the Darkhold adds one profoundly dangerous wrinkle: Once the book has nearly killed its controller, it lets them drag the entire table down to their level. The result looks like an even better — and more dangerous — alternative to The One Ring that only gets scarier the longer you look at it.
The Darkhold makes its own ammunition
The Darkhold only costs three mana: one colorless and two black. That makes it cheaper than The One Ring, although the two black pips make it considerably harder to splash into multicolored decks than its entirely colorless predecessor. To reliably cast the Darkhold early, you’ll want to be playing mono-black or running a deck that leans heavily into black.
That limitation is probably for the best, considering what the Darkhold can do. Its first ability lets you tap the artifact to put a sin counter on it, then draws one card for every sin counter it has accumulated. This ability also makes you lose one life for each card in your hand.
Like The One Ring, every activation becomes more powerful than the one before it as you draw more and more cards. But the Darkhold’s life-loss clause is potentially much more punishing. The One Ring makes you lose life equal to its burden counters once during your upkeep. The Darkhold counts every card in your hand immediately after it fills your hand with even more cards. Unless you’re aggressively playing or discarding cards, the Darkhold can tear through your life total at an alarming rate.
Sin counters may be new, but they’re still counters, which opens the Darkhold up to decades of existing Magic interactions. Counter-doubling effects can accelerate the process, while proliferate can add another sin counter once the Darkhold has at least one. Something like Inexorable Tide in blue proliferates whenever you cast a spell.
A decent place to look for counter interactions is in the Final Fantasy 10 preconstructed Commander deck, Counter Blitz, which is all about manipulating all sorts of counters across your permanents. Inexorable Tide is in there as a reprint, along with Scholar of New Horizons, a white creature that combines removing a counter from any permanent with the ability to search your library for a Plains card as a simple tap ability.
While the vast majority of cards in Counter Blitz focus on +1/+1 counters or counters on creatures, there are still a few interesting options that can interact with the Darkhold’s sin counters. Ironically, there’s Sin, Unending Cataclysm, which can remove all the counters from any number of artifacts, creatures, and enchantments when it enters, converting them into twice as many +1/+1 counters. In theory, you can have Sin eat however many sin counters you want to convert that into raw power, but that would require you to be in Sultai (black-green-blue). The blue creature O’aka, Traveling Merchant, can tap to remove a single counter from a nonland permanent to draw another card, which can help with keeping up your draw if you don’t want to take the hit from Darkhold to your life points.
You can also just invest in cards with proliferate, even in mono-black, if you really want to let it spiral out of control. Atraxa players just found their favorite new artifact.
The Darkhold turns a deadly drawback into a win condition
The Darkhold’s second ability costs a whopping eight mana — six generic and two black — and can only be activated as a sorcery. It makes every player’s life total become the lowest life total among all players.
Because the Darkhold’s first ability can rapidly grind its controller down to only a few remaining life points, these abilities naturally work together. You repeatedly trade life for cards, use those cards to assemble the rest of your plan, and then force every opponent down to your dangerously low life total.
Eight mana is expensive, but artifact decks have plenty of ways to reduce that cost. Forensic Gadgeteer in blue makes activated abilities of artifacts cost one generic mana less. Zirda, the Dawnwaker in red-white is a companion reduces non-mana activated abilities by two (but only if all of your permanents have activated abilities), as does the blue Power Artifact enchantment when attached directly to the Darkhold.
The second ability also doesn’t require the Darkhold to tap. With enough mana (perhaps by using something like Dark Ritual), you can activate the first ability, draw a bunch of cards, lose a dangerous amount of life, and then activate the second ability during the same turn.
After reducing the entire table to one or two life, almost any symmetrical damage effect can end the game. Red offers a lot of possibilities: Flame Rift deals four damage to every player, while Slagstorm deals three. Acidic Soil damages each player according to how many lands they control, making it particularly deadly in a longer Commander game.
Exocrine offers an adjustable option, entering with X +1/+1 counters and dealing X damage to every player and every other creature. In green, sorceries like Hurricane and Borrowing the East Wind deal damage to all players that scales with whatever value you pay for X in the mana cost.
Even creatures can provide another avenue. If you want to go full-on apocalyptic, Coalhauler Swine deals damage to every player whenever it takes damage, so you can target it with a large burn spell or drop a Blasphemous Act to blast every creature and player at the table for 13 damage. Black recently received an especially clean option from Reality Fracture with Cast Away Doubt, a three-mana sorcery that draws two cards and deals two damage to each player.
There is one considerable problem with all these finishers: They hit you too. Fortunately, Magic already offers several ways to fix that.
Platinum Emperion prevents your life total from changing. The ideal sequence would be to use the Darkhold until your life is nearly depleted, put Platinum Emperion onto the battlefield, and then activate the Darkhold’s second ability. Everyone else falls to your life total, while the Emperion protects you from the symmetrical damage spell that follows.
Orzhov (black-white) feels naturally suited to the Darkhold, so Teferi’s Protection seems like an even more potent and obvious choice. If somebody else has the lowest life points, you can activate the Darkhold’s second ability, cast Teferi’s Protection at instant speed, and then allow the Darkhold’s ability to resolve. Although your permanents phase out and your life total cannot change, the Darkhold’s ability remains on the stack. Then, all you have to do is cast your damage-dealing spell afterwards.
Platinum Angel is probably the single scariest and best card for Darkhold decks, however. As long as Platinum Angel remains on the battlefield, you cannot lose the game and your opponents cannot win. That means all you need to do is use the Darkhold to bring your life total into the negative with its top ability and then activate the bottom ability. You can’t lose, so you aren’t eliminated, but everyone else will. No Flame Rift, Hurricane, or Cast Away Doubt is required. The Darkhold itself kills the entire table.
The One Ring offers a lot of power while threatening to destroy anyone greedy enough to keep using it. The Darkhold follows the same basic design philosophy, but it’s decidedly more dangerous, allowing you to destroy yourself in complicated ways that ensure you drag everyone else down into hell with you.
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