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 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.
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