An artifact creature like this one looked
slightly out of place in the Theros block, at
first glance. In reality, though, Greek
mythology has a surprising number of constructs
that looked and even acted like people or
animals. The most famous was Talos, a bronze man
constructed by the famous Daedalus to watch over
the island of Crete. There's a theory that
mythology is an attempt by a culture to explain
its ancestors' experiences, so you can't help
but wonder what a story like Talos' was
originally intended to explain.
Burnished Hart's gameplay value is much clearer,
I feel. Even in this day of however many dual
land variants we're up to, not every deck wants
to or needs to include green for Sakura-Tribe
Elder and the like; the Hart's cost and stats
are probably about what we'd expect for a card
that gives such an effect to any color, and it's
worth noting that as a 2/2, it's actually
slightly more effective than the Elder in
situations where you have to go on the offense
right away with whatever you have lying around.
And further, the way it gives you two lands
rather than just one is actually a decent form
of card advantage which can be leveraged in any
deck with recursion effects. It's not quite as
purely powerful as Krosan Tusker, but it's good
at what it does.
Today's card of the day is Burnished Hart which
is a three mana 2/2 that can be sacrificed to
search for two basic lands and put them into
play tapped. This is a slower or more mana
intensive search when compared to Green options,
but does offer land acceleration to other
colors. As a creature it has value with
blocking before being sacrificed and when more
mana or deck thinning aren't needed at the cost
of some added vulnerability to removal.
Overall a decent choice for acceleration in
Commander or non-Green multicolor decks.
In a Limited format with this it adds
acceleration to any deck and has all of the same
benefits as in Constructed formats. An
easy inclusion in Sealed and a strong third or
fourth pick in most packs of Booster.
It's slow mana acceleration. What's that mean?
For a total of 6 mana, you get two basics
fetched and a free chump block. It's not great,
but it's okay in late-game when you're either
having trouble mana-fixing or you're
mana-flooded.
