Image courtesy of Scryfall.com
Liliana's Scrounger Shakes Up Casual Formats 🧙🔥💎⚔️
When a two-mana black creature becomes a catalyst for planeswalker loyalty in the end step, you know casual tables are in for a little reshuffling. Liliana's Scrounger, a 3/2 Human Wizard for 2 colorless and 1 black mana, makes a quiet but potent impact in kitchen-table formats where every trigger can turn the game. This uncommon from Core Set 2021 (M21) brings a strategic wrinkle to decks built around Liliana planeswalkers, giving you a reliable, tempo-friendly way to push loyalty counters onto your walkers as the dust settles after combat. And yes, that flavor text about an arm with “plenty of use left” lands with a wry grin on any player who’s ever faced down attrition in casual play. 🎲🎨
The card’s core idea is simple on the surface: for three mana you gain a resilient 3/2 body that quietly fuels your Liliana planeswalkers over time. The real power emerges at the end step, when the battlefield has already traded a few blows and the board state is volatile. If a creature died that turn, you may put a loyalty counter on a Liliana planeswalker you control. That is not a flashy, snap-win engine, but in casual formats it can be the difference between whittling through a stalled board and finally flipping the script with a big Liliana activation. In formats where retirement from the battlefield is common—EDH/Commander, kitchen-table games, and some Pioneer or Modern non-interactive shells—the Scrounger acts as a persistent loyalty battery, quietly fueling a long game plan. 🧙🔥
Why this matters in casual Commander and friends
Commander audiences tend to gravitate toward engines that slot into existing color footprints and scale with the number of turns you have to plan. Liliana's Scrounger fits neatly into black or Grixis-based Liliana decks, where planeswalkers become the centerpiece of late-game inevitability. In casual games, you’re less likely to face hyper-aggressive fast-starts that punish slow ramp, so a 3/2 that brushes aside creature death as a loyalty-factory becomes a reasonable tempo play. You don’t need to tutor for it or assemble an intricate combo; you simply leverage what the table already tends to produce—a steady stream of creatures dying to pressure or trade—then deploy the loyalty you’ve earned to push your Lilianas into province-changing plays. And let’s be honest: the moment you drop a Liliana that’s been quietly padded by Scrounger triggers, your friends recognize that the game just slipped into a new, darker orbit. 🧙♀️⚔️
- EDH/Commander-centric strategy: Build around a Liliana planeswalker suite and use Scrounger to accelerate loyalty, enabling repeat activations like -X planeswalker ultimates or anti-board control swings. The card’s trigger condition lines up well with casual attrition games where creatures die due to board clears or combat damage from multiple players.
- Creature-die synergy: Casual games often feature groups of creatures dying across the table in a single round. Scrounger rewards that chaos with incremental loyalty growth, turning incidental deaths into strategic momentum. It’s a subtle but real top-down engine added to the mix.
- Budget and accessibility: As an uncommon from a core set, Liliana's Scrounger is approachable for budget builds and new players alike. It demonstrates how a single, well-timed trigger can change how you manage planeswalkers without requiring a high-powered rare slot. 💎
Other casual-friendly angles and deck ideas
Flavor and function walk hand in hand: a card that looks ordinary at first glance becomes a quiet engine when you realize how often this end-step trigger will fire in a typical casual game. The artful mundanity mirrors the way casual players build around reliable, incremental value rather than flashy combos.
In terms of deck construction, consider these angles:
- Planeswalker ramps: Pair Liliana's Scrounger with a Liliana planeswalker yourself, and lean into a wary, control-forward strategy. Each end step becomes a small, deliberate step toward a bigger ultimate, keeping pressure steady while you untap and rebuild.
- Attrition with a twist: Combine Scrounger with other death-trigger or fading-into-battlefield effects to maximize the number of creatures that die across a game. The end-step trigger gives you a reliable way to grow loyalty counters even when you’re not actively drawing into removal every turn.
- Casual-as-possible room for experimentation: Since casual formats tolerate slower planeswalker-driven games, Scrounger invites you to pilot lead-ins like removal-heavy boards and hand disruption, then lean on your Lilianas as late-game powerhouses while the table gets comfortable with the new tempo. 🧙♂️
Art, lore, and why collectors notice
Martina Fačková’s art for Liliana's Scrounger captures a quiet, eerie resilience—the undead-arm motif that speaks to a horror-informed fantasy vibe so common to Liliana’s lore. The flavor text—“This arm's got plenty of use left in it. Who'd throw such a nice thing away?”—feels perfectly pitched for casual games where table-talk can swing between witty banter and grim predictions. The card’s black frame and classic M21 aesthetic reinforce the sense that this is a sturdy, dependable piece in any black-based deckbuilding strategy. For collectors who track set composition and rarity, the Uncommon status of Liliana's Scrounger in Core Set 2021 places it as an accessible but flavorful addition to a Liliana-centric collection. 🎨
“A small engine that keeps growing with every death on the table.”
From a gameplay-design perspective, Scrounger exemplifies a common-sense design philosophy: reward players for board events that are already happening, without requiring new materials or complex interactions. In casual formats, that kind of design can have outsized impact, because the pacing of a multiplayer game often revolves around shared casualties, repositioning factions, and the slow burn toward a planeswalker ultimate. This is exactly the kind of card that nudges casual meta toward longer, more interactive games where loyalty counters accumulate as a form of currency for late-game domination. 🧙🔥
If you’re curious to explore Liliana’s Scrounger within your own playgroup, you can find a host of practical options in modern and historic casual scenes. And if you’re scouting gear that keeps you connected to the game between sessions, a certain you-know-what product might be the perfect companion to long evenings of deckbuilding and casual play—because after all, a little grip and kickstand never hurt when you’re cracking packs and plotting your next move. Speaking of staying powered up between rounds, the product below is a handy accessory for any MTG fan on the go. 🧙♀️🎲