Two cards, forty cents, one dead opponent. That's all it takes.
How it works (and why it costs so little)
Demonic Pact is a ticking time bomb that nobody wants to have in hand at their own upkeep: every turn you pick an option you haven't used yet, and once you've run through them all, you lose the game. The card's classic problem is simple — sooner or later, it's your turn to eat the downside.
Coveted Falcon solves that problem by letting you choose who takes the hit. You activate disguise for 
, turn it face up, and its trigger forces you to give an opponent control of any number of permanents you choose — with a card draw for each permanent handed over. Give away Demonic Pact, draw a card, and the bomb changes hands. From that point on, it's your opponent who picks the options, including the final game-over trigger.
The price drop says everything about how the market perceives this line: Demonic Pact has fallen 49% in two weeks, bringing the combo's total cost to €0.44. This isn't forgotten tech — it's a combo the market is making more and more accessible.
The minimum setup: what you need beyond the two cards
The bare combo costs two cards and runs on mana that's easily reachable in any blue-black deck:
to put Demonic Pact into play — ideally early, so you can start choosing the favorable options (damage, milling your opponent, card draw) before you're forced to hand it off.- for the disguise cost of Coveted Falcon, followed by whatever activation cost is required to flip it face up.
- A breathing turn between the two activations, since Coveted Falcon face down is just a vanilla 2/2 creature, vulnerable to any generic removal.
That window is exactly the weak point: Coveted Falcon face down has no built-in protection. If it dies before the flip, you've spent mana for nothing and Demonic Pact is still sitting there, forcing you to pick increasingly uncomfortable options.
Protection: Essence Flux and Ghostly Flicker as defensive plumage
This is where the shield comes in. Essence Flux for exiles and returns Coveted Falcon in response to removal, saving it without losing the disguise — the card comes back face down, and the flip stays in your hands for whichever turn you prefer. A one-mana instant that turns the combo from fragile into resilient.
Ghostly Flicker does the same job but doubles the value: it exiles and returns two permanents, so you can save Coveted Falcon and a second target at the same instant — another creature, a relevant artifact, or simply a second Falcon if you have a duplicate in play via clone effects. After the flip, both instants still have a use: if your opponent tries to get rid of Demonic Pact with removal targeting the enchantment or with a second control-swap effect, you can't save the enchantment — but you can bring the Falcon back into play for a second round of value if the game goes long.
Technical note: neither flicker effect interacts with Demonic Pact once it has changed hands. It cannot be recovered, and that's correct — the goal isn't to get it back, it's to get rid of it for good.
Why Donate isn't an alternative in U/B
The database lists variants of the same combo — Demonic Pact plus a "give control of a permanent to an opponent" effect: Donate, Coveted Falcon, among others. They're interchangeable in outcome, not in color identity or in price.
Donate is mono-blue, so it's technically legal in a U/B deck, but it costs more than ten times the price of Coveted Falcon for the exact same control-transfer effect. There's no functional upside that justifies the gap: Donate is a bare sorcery, while Coveted Falcon is a creature that stays useful on the board both before and after activation, flies, and has a second way to generate value by attacking opposing permanents.
The correct choice in blue-black is therefore mandatory, not stylistic: Coveted Falcon is the only piece of the "transfer control" effect that fits the color identity and costs a fraction of the alternative.
Forty-four cents for a two-card kill combo, protected by two instants that together cost less than two euros. In bracket 1-2, there's no reason for this line not to make the list.
Written from Mana Forge's card data and Cardmarket prices, and reviewed by hand before publication.
Forge Insights content is automatically generated and manually reviewed, for informational purposes only: we don't guarantee its accuracy or completeness, and it isn't professional advice. Prices are indicative and change over time.