Polymorph for artifacts. Well, Polymorph has
always been an odd duck. It claims to be a kill
spell that just might accidentally give your
opponent something worse in exchange, but in
practice it tends to be used on one's own
creature tokens to cheat out the single copy of
whatever enormous win condition you prefer.
That only works because it's possible to create
creature tokens independently of creatures. The
enormous win condition is the ONLY creature in
the deck-- the rest of the deck is noncreature
cards that make tokens. What nonartifact cards
make tokens that are artifacts? Myrsmith can't
make a Myr token unless you cast an artifact
spell. Any other card that makes artifact
creature tokens is itself an artifact. So how
can you cheat out that Inkwell Leviathan if your
deck has to have some Origin Spellbombs in it
somewhere? Top of the library shenanigans could
do it, I suppose.
On the other hand, you could always use it as an
artifact kill spell... that might accidentally
give your opponent an even worse artifact.
Continuing our theme of "ridiculously powerful
spells" this week, we have Shape Anew, hovering
somewhere between Polymorph and Tinker. The
latter is restricted for a reason, and while I
wouldn't suggest that this is as crazy as one of
the first cards from Urza's Saga to be banned,
it has the potential to do crazy things, with a
little more planning than we needed for
Polymorph. I can't remember offhand if there are
any non-artifact cards that create artifact
tokens, but if you can think of one, you may
have just broken the universe . . .
Today's card of the day is Shape Anew which
works like Polymorph for artifacts and can turn
something like a token or Memnite into a
Wurmcoil Engine or Myr Battlesphere. A
deck using this should be built in a way to make
getting the desired artifact more likely such as
few other artifacts or tools to manipulate the
rest of the deck, similar to the regular
Polymorph builds. The potential is there
and it can make for a viable tournament
combination in the right build.
In Limited the nature of the format weakens this
as a tool to be used on your own artifacts in
many situations aside from removing a creature
weakened by -1/-1 counters. Unless you are
targeting one of the weakest cards and know your
deck will absolutely provide an upgrade this is
more likely to be used offensively to remove one
of your opponent's bombs and hope for a weaker
card to replace it. It is unlikely the
same card will be played again, but the move is
still a gamble. A fairly versatile card
and worth running in a Sealed deck using Blue
for the options it offers it can be harder to
choose in a Booster draft, but I still recommend
it for both the fun and potential. If used
as correctly it will generally make a situation
better and as it can work offensively,
defensively, whether you have no creatures, or
if the opponent has none, and on non-creature
artifacts it can do more than most cards and
should not be overlooked.
