The Harrowing

The Harrowing is a rare-rarity spell card from Riftbound's Origins expansion. It costs 6 Energy to cast as a one-shot effect. Aligned with the Chaos domain. It appears in roughly 4.1% of tracked tournament decks.

6 Energy | Spell | Chaos | rare | Origins

Rules Text

Play a unit from your trash, ignoring its Energy cost. (You must still pay its Power cost.)

Domain: Chaos

Meta Statistics

Inclusion Rate: 4.1% | Win Rate: 57.6%

Related FAQ (2)

What happens when a card like The Harrowing instructs me to play another card during its resolution? Do I play it while the other spell or ability is still resolving? What if I can't play it?

To clarify the timing of these and other effects, we're introducing the idea of pending items on the chain. When you play a spell, or use an ability, they will be pending until you finish the steps of playing them before priority passes. When a spell or ability instructs you to play a card or play a token—or when a triggered ability has its trigger condition met—during the playing or resolution of another card or ability, you'll perform the very first step of playing that card or using that ability by putting it on the chain, then stop. This chain item is still pending for now. You'll then process the rest of whatever is currently happening, including putting any other pending items on the chain above it. Then, in the order the items were put on the chain, each pending item's controller goes through the other steps of putting it on the chain: Make choices, pay costs, and evaluate legality. Only then is the pending item considered to have entered the chain. If it's legal to play and it's a unit or gear, it resolves immediately as usual. Once all pending items are done being fully added to the chain, play continues, and any items that remain on the chain can be reacted to. The most recent items to be placed on the chain will resolve first as usual. If at any point during that process that player is unable to proceed with playing the pending chain item for any reason, the item is removed from the chain and, if it's a card, is put back where it came from. This won't happen very often—if you start the process of playing a card, you'll almost always be able to legally finish it—but it's a necessary failsafe to handle corner cases.

What about cards like Blind Fury and Promising Future, which let players look at or reveal cards from the top of a deck, play one, and recycle the rest? If I can't play that card, where does it go? It sounds like it's too late for it to be recycled as part of “the rest."

Hey, you're pretty sharp! For most cards that let you play something, it's easy to put the card back where it came from if you can't play it. The Harrowing would put it back in your trash, Ava Achiever would put it back in your hand, and so on. But when the card came out of a deck, which is both secret and randomized, it's not so simple. To provide a clear and easy answer to this question, four cards in set 1 that let you play other cards from decks are receiving errata. They'll each banish the card before instructing a player to play it. If the card can't be played for any reason, it just stays banished. This is a small functional change, but it's one we feel is well worth it to avoid the fuss of getting these cards back into a deck somehow. (1)(C), (E) Kill a friendly unit. Look at the top 5 cards of your Main Deck. You may banish a unit from among them that has Might up to 1 more than the killed unit and play it, ignoring its cost. Then recycle the rest.

All Riftbound rules FAQ

Tournament Decks