MM7: The Balance of Power

Here are two of the most powerful and talked-about cards in MM:

Magistrate's Scepter 3 4T: Put a charge counter on Magistrate's Scepter T, Remove three charge counters from Magistrate's Scepter: Take an extra turn after this one.

Seismic Mage 3R 2R, discard a card: Destroy target land. 1/1

The problem is, those effects were a little too powerful. If these cards had been in Urza's Saga, they might have cost a lot less and been horribly broken. Instead, they're in a set that not only tries to have no broken cards, it gives itself a large margin for error. Instead, we got overpriced cards that are actually very bad. To see why Seismic Mage is bad, consider what it takes before the card is good. Assume you do have the Squee. That's two cards you drew. In exchange, you get to spend 3R, then keep a 1/1 alive, then pay 2R to destroy a land, then pay 2R to destroy another. You're still paying way too much at this point. You have to blow up at least four lands before this starts to make any sense. As for the argument that you can lock down an opponent, a four casting cost creature such as Balduvian Hordes can lock down the same opponent a lot faster. If you're willing to wait this long, you might as well play player removal. This is the land destruction deck I was toying with for the land article, but couldn't get to work right in my head:

If you think about it, you'll realize that putting in Seismic Mage would only make things worse. You'd never cast it in place of the deck's other spells, because of the delay involved in its use, unless your opponent was already almost out of the game. In addition, to get that much real advantage you'd have to use Squee as well, and that would be too much sacrifice for this deck. I clearly didn't like it, so I scrapped it for the infinite Fog deck. More fundamentally, I decided that this deck isn't as good as the artifact approach. If you want to play land destruction, the Wildfire route is basically the only way to keep it mono-red. You can also dip into green for mana creatures, and try to start the "real" land destruction on turn two, so that you've shut down two lands by the end of your third turn instead of one with the Port on turn two and a different one on turn three. Problem is, in this series, that deck isn't worth talking about, because there's no reason it would use more than a card or two from Masques. At best it would run Rishadan Port and Sandstone Needle, maybe a Ramosian artifact or two, and Tectonic Break as extra copies of Wildfire. In particular, you certainly wouldn't run Magistrate's Scepter.

What a bad card. With Magistrate's Scepter, you cast it for three mana, then you spend twelve mana over three turns, then you get to take an extra turn. Until you untap it, your opponent can destroy it or even bounce it and ruin all your hard work. Even if you get it working regularly, it's not even close to worth it. You can easily use one of the many Tome-like artifacts to turn roughly that much mana into three cards, and depending on the deck you can do a lot better. How often would you want to trade three cards for a turn, especially if the cards come an average of a turn and a half sooner? All a turn is are the untap, upkeep and draw phases, the main phase, the attack phase and the end step. The draw step is worth a card. The untap step and the attack phase aren't normally worth two this late, and getting to play a land is probably worthless. There are times when this is worth it, and times when your other artifacts will give you so much mana and so many cards the trade is worth it, but the game is probably all but over at this point, or would have been with another artifact in Scepter's place.

The reason the card is so bad is that you can use it to create an infinite loop using multiple copies or Voltaic Keys. If you get to untap one four times each turn and can spend twelve mana each turn on using them, you then take infinite turns. That's a horrible win condition. But WotC probably worried that if they made it any easier the card would be too good in a deck designed to take infinite turns. They may even have been right. But for now, there's no reason to use the card in constructed. And in limited I'm not even so unsure it's unfair. Something similar happened to Time Warp, which was costed at five mana to avoid abuses. But Time Warp was a lot better. Once you got to five mana, it paid for itself, and for it to be profitable all you needed was a creature on the attack or a Howling Mine on the table. Even then, it only saw use in some fun decks, never really breaking through into the first tier.

Seismic Mage had a similar predecessor, Flowstone Flood. It did basically the same thing: destroy land in exchange for a card in your hand. The Flood was better, because you didn't have to spend the first turn casting a 1/1 that couldn't die. The three life and randomness of the discard were important to keeping it balanced, but neither was important for the function of the card, which was to deal the final blow to your opponent's lands. The Flood proved a little better than Time Warp, and found its way into the sideboard of Sped Red.

Notice the pattern here. The new cards cost more mana and more time. They are more powerful in the theoretical sense. But they're nowhere near as good as cards that proved to be ideal. Both the Flood and the Warp were scary cards that people tried to break. They failed. They came darn close (does anyone remember TurboSeville?) but they failed. I failed. Believe me, I tried. The theme of this series seems to be the designers loosing their nerve and playing it safe. It wasn't my intention when I started it, or when I proposed it. And every now and then, I still catch that old Magic bug again and want to build a new deck with some quirky MM card. There are even a few no one's talked about that are one little problem away from broken. But what really gets me down is the set it could have been. The great concept cards that cost too much mana. I don't know how many more articles there will be on MM. One major problem is that I can't talk about anything I feel is important to extended, which rules out less cards than I'd hoped that it would. MM draft seems really good, though, so maybe I'll start talking about that.