Scars of Mirrodin Set Review

Heya,

I got some really bad news over the weekend (I'll share in a minute), so this won't be my normal set review style.

SoM, I think, is a hard set to review right now. Many of the best cards like Wurmcoil Engine, Steel Hellkite, and Prototype Portal are very mana intensive. Actual play will be needed to see if they are any good or not. All of them are powerful. But are they useful? Testing is needed.

I do have a few cards that I see as standing out:

Ratchet Bomb- This card is good in Shops and against Shops. In fact, I think this will be the standout rare for the set in all formats. It is, IMHO, an upgrade to Powder Keg and a thumb in the eye to the Reserve List. The price should come down, especially if SoM turns out to be a popular set.

Liquimetal Coating- I'm excited about this card. I think it will be fun. I don't have much more to say right now, but I will.

Leonin Arbiter- Hate Bears are great. Green and White have been getting lots of great utility creatures for the last six or seven blocks. This just continues the trend.

Nihil Spellbomb- The obligatory Dredge hate card of the block. Throw it on the pile with the gazillion other GY haters that have been printed since Ravnica.

Mox Opal- I like this card at $15 but not at $40. I think a lot of decks like Time Vault, ANT, TPS, Oath, Elves, and 5c Stax will want one, while other decks like Gro, Fish, MUD, and Dredge won't even though it could conceivably fit. It'll make its way into the format as a one-of, but it won't revolutionize the mana bases of Vintage.

The two featured mechanics (Infect and Metalcraft) are interesting. I went to my local pre-release and felt I learned a lot about them. First, they're both all-in mechanics. They're not like Scry, or Buyback, or Flashback, or many other mechanics. Infect works only in a deck dedicated to it and it must have some kind of evasion or the big fatties just wreck the strategy.

I played a W/B Metalcraft deck and was fairly successful with it (4-2 match record, 10-5 game record). But my opponents weren't so lucky. Metalcraft was easy to disrupt. A well placed creature kill spell here, a nifty combat trick there, and their whole plan went down the toilet. It is such a fragile mechanic, that I think anyone playing with Pyroclasm in Standard can take down the strategy easily. Memnites and Myrs just aren't strong enough to rely on to get the effect consistently, IMO. We'll see.

Anyway, about the bad news. I'll reference my earlier article, The Stagnation Continues. My local game shop has been a haven for Vintage for years. It hosts a Vintage State Champs for Kentucky annually that usually has a pretty big draw. All that ended this month.

I showed up Saturday with a well tuned Shop deck to find that the weekly Saturday Vintage tournament has been replaced by a weekly Legacy tournament (not surprisingly, the top 2 decks from the week prior were Merfolk). I was shocked and dismayed. The guy who runs the place, a man I have immense respect for, told me that everyone just got tired of the three way battle between MUD, Time Vault, and Oath. Apparently, I was the only one who ever brought Dredge to the table. Anyway, the overall sentiment of the group was that the stagnant metagame- which I still maintain has been largely unchanged since fall 2008- has driven away a huge amount of the player base and made the format un-fun.

As I reviewed the tournament logs, I had to agree. During the Golden Age, the weekly tournament there pulled in 20+ people easy. It was an excellent melting pot of Storm, Control, Shop, Agro, and Rogue decks. The last Vintage tournament there had 6 people. The week before that had 7. It's a sad moment for me.

As I talked to the former Vintage players who came for the pre-release, a lot of them expressed a feeling of futility in facing Time Vault decks and a feeling of fear that SoM would unleash unbeatable MUD decks. I pointed out that Gush and Frantic Search were just unrestricted, but there wasn't much faith that those cards would change anything. One guy who sat across the table from me said, "Vintage is dead. There's only three good decks [meaning JaceVault, Elephant Oath, and MUD]. Fish can't keep up with MUD's fatties and no one plays Dredge cause it's not any fun. It's over until they fix Time Vault and Workshop."

I have no idea what he meant by "fixing" those cards. Presumably banning Time Vault and printing some decent artifact kill. Who knows? But the reality is, a once great bastion of Vintage in Kentucky is no more. Sad really.

Peace,

-Troy