This little trinket might take tons of mana to
take out big creatures by itself, but it's not
bad for a colorless kill spell, especially when
you compare it to cards like Moonglove Extract,
Rod of Ruin, or Heavy Arbalest. For two mana it
can take out 1-toughness creatures now, and
proliferate for you later if you need it to.
Obviously best in a proliferate deck, where
you'll likely have cheaper ways of proliferating
that the Clasp, and more ways of benefitting
from paying 4 and tapping this. And just using
it to shrink a troublesome creature isn't a bad
move either.
There have always been Magic decks that take a
long time to win, by gaining advantage over
their opponent incrementally. With the advent of
Scars of Mirrodin, we see that there are ways to
gain this advantage other than in card count.
Contagion Clasp is an example - it seems to be
one of the stronger proliferate cards, starting
and propagating a tide of -1/-1 counters that
many creature-based decks will struggle to keep
up with. In infect-based decks, it becomes an
uncounterable, repeatable, colorless source of
"damage." Eat your heart out, Price of Progress.
Today's card of the day is Contagion Clasp
which for two mana starts as a simple -1/-1
counter on a target creature and leaves an
artifact in play. This is a fairly
mediocre removal or support with the option of
Metalcraft support for the cost, but the second
effect adds a decent middle to late game
Proliferate option that is reliable. A
solid card for decks that want to use the
Proliferate mechanic for Planeswalkers, Infect,
or any of the various benefits it offers as it
is harder to remove than a creature and comes
with an early game playability.
For Limited this is a really useful source of
the Proliferate effect that can support nearly
any deck and should be played whenever possible.
Depending on the pack this can be drafted
relatively early on and is an easy choice to run
in a Sealed pool.
