Felisa, Fang of Silverquill: Similar Keyword Duels

In TCG ·

Felisa, Fang of Silverquill card art depicting a regal vampire wizard ready to mentor with silver-quill magic

Image courtesy of Scryfall.com

Flying and Mentor: A Closer Look at a Silverquill Vampire Wizard

In the evergreen dance of combat in Magic: The Gathering, some creatures win through raw power, others through the choreography of ability text. Felisa, Fang of Silverquill sits squarely in the latter category, a legendary Vampire Wizard whose two keywords—Flying and Mentor—form a compact, elegant strategy that rewards aggressive attack sequencing and careful token generation. Set in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, Felisa’s white-and-black identity loves a tight, tempo-forward plan that plays like a duel between Inevitable Advantage and Polished Precision 🧙‍♂️🔥.

Let’s start with the easy truth: Flying is one of MTG’s most iconic evasion tools. Felisa’s 3/2 body, costed at 2 generic, White, and Black mana ({2}{W}{B}), arrives with a built-in directive to pressure the skies and the ground alike. In practical terms, that means Felisa can connect past many blockers, delivering efficient hits and prodding your opponent’s life total. But the real spice comes from Mentor—the moment Felisa attacks, you get to boost a neighboring attacking creature with a +1/+1 counter, provided that creature has lesser power. This creates a dynamic where smaller attackers get heroic growth just as bigger threats threaten the airspace. The combination of evasion and mentorship turns ordinary strikes into a measured, incremental ramp toward a broader board plan 🧩🎯.

The deck-building logic behind Felisa’s two-keyword blend is as delicious as a well-timed topdeck. Mentor urges you to present a squad that includes a smattering of smaller creatures that you’re comfortable sending to the fray. Each attack with Felisa can be rewarded with a counter placed on the smallest target you control, effectively coaching your team to peak when you need it most. But Felisa’s text has a further pay-off: whenever a non-token creature you control dies, if it had counters on it, you create X tapped Inkling creature tokens (2/1, white and black) with flying, where X equals the number of counters that creature had. That means the same attack you leveraged to buff a 1/1 or 2/2 can, later, explode into a swarm of flying Inkling tokens if that boosted creature meets its end. The synergy of Flying and Mentor thus fuels a cyclical engine: attack, pump, trade, and replace with a chorus of Inkling fliers to pressure further. The Inkling tokens themselves love to fly over ground-based blockers, turning Felisa’s air superiority into a scalable advantage 🧙‍♀️💎⚔️.

From a gameplay perspective, Felisa rewards a few concrete tactics. First, attack sequencing matters. You’ll want to time Felisa’s assaults to maximize Mentor’s trigger on the smallest reliable targets, ensuring you accumulate counters that will later blossom into Inkling swarms. Second, the tokens are gold in EDH/Commander settings, where multiple opponents and a sea of detours can complicate direct combat. The 2/1 Inkling bodies are small but plentiful and, crucially, they carry Flying—allowing Felisa’s allies to bypass ground walls and apply pressure to life totals or unsuspecting planeswalkers. Third, because Inkling tokens are produced upon death of a counter-bearing creature, Felisa incentivizes you to craft death-friendly board states—creatures that die with meaningful counter counts become your token generators, bridging the value gap when mid-to-late game plays are looming 🧙‍♂️🎲.

Resistance and resilience are also part of the calculus. Felisa’s color identity (White-Black) means you can lean into removal and silencing packages that keep her offensive line intact while still developing tokens. Creative players pair Felisa with sacrifice themes or value engines that reuse creatures on the way down, maximizing the number of counters that survive even as you trade bodies. The cycle then hinges on giving your attacking force staying power via Mentor’s buff while leveraging Inkling tokens to threaten multiple angles—air, ground, and the all-important board presence. It’s a design that feels almost courtroom-drama precise: every attack, every counter, every death is a calculated argument for more advantage 🧭🔥.

Beyond the table talk, there’s a flavor-rich narrative to lean into. Silverquill’s aesthetic—the magical sharpness of quills and the chiaroscuro of white and black—echoes in Felisa’s text. The idea of a mentor who elevates lesser talents to flight and then turns the fallen into a token army resonates with Strixhaven’s lore of wizardry, intellect, and cunning. Sara Winters’ art for Felisa captures the character’s elegance and menace in one breath, a perfect mirror to the card’s tactical juxtaposition of flying grace and graveyard-generating grit. It’s a design that invites both nostalgia and new strategies, a reason to draft Felisa into a silver-and-black dreamscape of counters, tokens, and winged echoes 🖼️🎨.

For collectors and players, Felisa’s mythic rarity in a reprint-friendly, 2015-era frame might feel like a paradox—yet it remains a standout in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate. The set’s draft-inspiration orientation and its EDH-friendly power taps into a long-running hobby tradition: shaping a deck around a strong commander or compelling cards that reward multi-player interactions. Felisa’s balance of offensive pressure, counter-based growth, and token generation makes her a centerpiece for themes ranging from aristocratic control to aggressive, creature-based token stacks. If you’re building around Mentor and the Inkling payoff, you’re crafting a play pattern that rewards foresight, tempo, and bold, skyward strikes 🧠💡.

As you prep for your next session or weekend tournament, consider how this combination of evasion and counter-driven growth could fit into your favorite blue-white-black shell. And if you’re stepping out to game night on the go, you’ll want a trusty carry—perhaps a rugged, dependable case for your phone to match your disciplined, on-the-cut strategies. Speaking of carrying, here’s a little something to keep your gear protected between matches: the Rugged Phone Case — Polycarbonate/TPU for iPhone & Samsung. It’s a practical nod to the mix of durability and style every MTG player appreciates 🛡️📱.

Rugged Phone Case – Polycarbonate/TPU for iPhone & Samsung

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