There are many creature types inMagic: The Gathering. From Giants toGoblins, Elk toEldrazi, they span a hugely diverse range. They also provide players with a lot of options when it comes to constructing a deck centered around a particular type and its support cards.
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Appropriately enough, given their mythical status in the real world, the Yeti is one of the rarest of these creature types in Magic, appearing on a very small set of cards. Always affiliated with the Temur colours of red, green, and blue, and often tying in with the long-running snow mechanic, these cards represent Magic’s classiest cryptids. Let’s take a look at the apex predators; the ten best Yetis that Magic has to offer.
10Wiitigo
An interesting take on the Yeti concept, Wiitigo is a 6/6 for six that grows or shrinks depending on whether or not it gets into combat with other creatures. This cleverly represents the perpetual need to hunt and feed often associated with the beasts.
It’s a card that forces your opponent to make difficult decisions around attacking and blocking, since they don’t want the Wiitigo to grow out of control, but they also don’t want to let it through for damage if they can help it.
9Mountain Yeti
A nice top-down interpretation of a Yeti, this card’s abilities initially seem random, until you consider that ‘Protection from White’ is likely standing in for ‘capable of surviving in the snow’. Combined with mountainwalk, this makes Mountain Yeti difficult to deal with for decks using either white or red mana.
These abilities elevate what would otherwise be an unimpressive 3/3 for four mana into a flavourful sideboard option against certain decks of the time. It also gets bonus points for having one of the best pieces of Yeti art in the game, evoking the blurry Bigfoot photos that make up the creature’s public image.
8Sylvan Yeti
Sylvan Yeti showcases the brute force that Yetis can display, gaining power for each card in your hand. Combined with a respectable four toughness, this makes it a potentially dangerous threat, particularly when combined with card draw spells and auras that grant evasion.
The card works well in a tempo deck, where you sit back on a handful of counterspells and disruption, protecting your Yeti and clearing the way so it can smash in for big damage each turn. In Commander you can take things even further, making use of hand-size extenders like Reliquary Tower to shatter the ceiling on his power level. This leads to building up a huge hand just for the satisfaction of wiping someone out in one Yeti-fuelled attack.
7Karplusan Yeti
This card has fairly low stats for its cost, and very low stats for such menacing artwork, but it makes up for it with an incredibly useful activated ability. By simply tapping the Karplusan Yeti, you may have it fight any other creature in play, dealing three damage to it, and taking damage equal to the other creature’s power in return.
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This is a very flexible and powerful ability, letting you deal with small problem creatures on the board every turn, and even letting you effectively ‘sacrifice’ your own smaller creatures if you need to. Combined with stat-boosting auras and a means of untapping more than once a turn, this card becomes a true monster.
6Frostpeak Yeti
Channelling thepower of the snow mechanic, Frostpeak Yeti can’t be blocked by your opponent’s creatures, provided you pay two mana, one of which is snow, to provide cover for it. It’s also a snow creature itself, which means it interacts nicely with snow support cards such as Scrying Sheets and Narfi, Betrayer King.
The ability to go unblocked in Magic is a deceptively powerful one, and can result in a lot of damage over time. It can also cause instant kills when combined with auras that grant the poisonous ability, or those that just add a lot of extra power. Frostpeak Yeti can take advantage of all of this, making it a surprisingly useful card.
5Ohran Yeti
First strike is a great wayto break parity in a clogged-up board state, letting your creatures triumph against equally powerful creatures on your opponent’s side. Ohran Yeti lets you grant this incredibly useful ability to any of your creatures, just as long as they happen to be snow creatures.
This means that Ohran Yeti is a great choice in a deck with other Yeti creatures, since many of them will be able to benefit from this ability. It’s also worth bearing in mind that it can target itself with the ability, in order to keep it alive to do so again next turn.
4Drelnoch
A wild-looking creature, even on a list full of Yetis, Drelnoch’s interesting ability matches up with his bizarre appearance. When it becomes blocked, you get to draw two cards. This gives your opponent a choice every time Drelnoch attacks: do they take three damage, or let you draw two cards?
While not exactly the same, in practice this functions very similarly to the various ‘punisher’ effects seen throughout Magic’s history, such as Vexing Devil and Painful Quandary, giving your opponent the choice between two bad options. Either way, it’s a win for you.
3Karplusan Strider
A simple yet effective addition to the Yeti clan, Karplusan Strider not only has above-average stats for the creature type, but also comes with a duo of protection abilities against both black and blue.
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As black is the primary colour of hard removal, and blue is the primary colour of disruption and bounce effects, Karplusan Strider is safe from a large portion of the cards that could get it off the battlefield. It can also safely attack past creatures of those colours as well, making it difficult to deal with for specific decks.
2Stalking Yeti
Part of the great tradition of creatures that serve as ‘removal on a stick’, Stalking Yeti gets to fight another creature when it enters play. This lets you get your opponent’s annoying passive effects off of the battlefield, and with 3/3 base stats, gives the Yeti a good chance to survive, too.
If it does, Stalking Yeti can use its second ability to return to your hand, allowing you to play him again and fight another of your opponent’s creatures. This makes the card a repeatable removal engine, and a snow creature to boot — a fantastic package overall.
1Isu The Abominable
The undisputed king of Yeti mountain, Isu the Abominable has several features that blow his elusive peers out of the water. Firstly, he has solid vanilla stats for his mana cost, weighing in at a 5/5 for five. Secondly, he lets you look at the top card of your deck at any time, providing crucial information.
And finally, he lets you playother snow cardsfrom the top of your deck — effectively ‘drawing’ cards in a lot of cases, provided your deck is built right. He synergises well with his fellow snow-based Yetis, as well as other snow cards in general, and can even grow in power whenever you play a snow card, provided you have the mana. He’s an excellent card, and the one true legend among these mythical beasts.
