Draft Trainer

The Brothers' War Retro Artifacts Limited Quiz

Answered: 0/20
Accuracy: 0
Altar of Dementia
Average Picked At: 3.67
Total Times Picked: 6
Average Last Seen At: 3.08
Total Times Seen 27
Pro Rating: 0.0 // 2.0
Pro Comment: This format has enough big monsters in it that I think Altar of Dementia has a bit of potential – plus you can use it to mill yourself, and some decks in this format are interested in that. There is also a pretty legitimate sacrifice deck in the format that could use this an outlet. It won’t work in most decks, but it has some buildaround potential
Springleaf Drum
Average Picked At: 8.85
Total Times Picked: 53
Average Last Seen At: 6.48
Total Times Seen 383
Pro Rating: 1.0
Pro Comment: It is surprisingly hard to set up this kind of mana ramp in Limited. This can get your mana going incredibly fast provided you have some early creatures, but that’s far from guaranteed, and then by the mid-to-late game it has waning usefulness
Thorn of Amethyst
Average Picked At: 9.78
Total Times Picked: 9
Average Last Seen At: 6.84
Total Times Seen 91
Pro Rating: 0.5
Pro Comment: If you are a super heavy creature deck, the tax this puts on your opponent can be interesting, but ending up in such a deck is tough in Limited – and this is still something that doesn’t add to the board in a meaningful way
Burnished Hart
Average Picked At: 4.75
Total Times Picked: 51
Average Last Seen At: 3.65
Total Times Seen 210
Pro Rating: 4.0
Pro Comment: This is a great source of ramp and fixing, and it has a baseline as a gray ogre with a useful card type.
Foundry Inspector
Average Picked At: 4.20
Total Times Picked: 44
Average Last Seen At: 3.17
Total Times Seen 150
Pro Rating: 3.5
Pro Comment: This looks amazing in this format, because most decks are going to have 7+ artifacts, and some will have even more! This makes your artifacts easy to cast while adding a very real body to the board – that makes it a heck of a lot better than something like Cloud Key.
Mazemind Tome
Average Picked At: 1.73
Total Times Picked: 11
Average Last Seen At: 1.53
Total Times Seen 17
Pro Rating: 3.5
Pro Comment: This was pretty good last time we saw it, and that will continue here. Using the Scry effect when you’re low on mana is fine, and actually drawing cards with this is very powerful, and also easier to do because of power stones. Gaining the 4 life helps make up for the fact that you sunk some mana into something that didn’t actually add to the board, too.
Wurmcoil Engine
Average Picked At: 1.00
Total Times Picked: 11
Average Last Seen At: 1.08
Total Times Seen 12
Pro Rating: 5.0
Pro Comment: A 6-mana 6/6 with Deathtouch and Lifelink is easily a 4.0, and this comes with the absurd effect of leaving behind two 3/3 tokens – each with one of those keywords – when it dies. So, your opponent either gets killed by this massive 6/6 that puts the game out of reach thanks to lifelink, or they get 3-for-1’d. Yeah, that’s a bomb – and definitely an A. Keep in mind exile effects and Aura-based removal do make the Engine a little sad, but yeah – still a bomb
Perilous Vault
Average Picked At: 5.00
Total Times Picked: 3
Average Last Seen At: 3.94
Total Times Seen 17
Pro Rating: 4.0
Pro Comment: This is a lot of mana of course, but it is also quite the reset button, as it rids the board of all permanents apart from lands, and it even exiles them! The effect is almost unrivaled in its ability to change the state of the game, and power stones make it more doable. All that good stuff out of the way, it does still have the very real problem of being bad in situations where you’re ahead of your opponent or at parity – but it is just about the best thing you can do when you’re behind.
Semblance Anvil
Average Picked At: 10.33
Total Times Picked: 6
Average Last Seen At: 5.80
Total Times Seen 88
Pro Rating: 0.0
Pro Comment: 2-for-1ing yourself to get a discount on one type of spell isn’t what you want to be doing in Limited 99% of the time. You end up really putting yourself back, and only for a discount, which is basically never what you want to do
Chromatic Star
Average Picked At: 5.08
Total Times Picked: 39
Average Last Seen At: 3.97
Total Times Seen 195
Pro Rating: 2.0
Pro Comment: Because this is a noncreature spell and an artifact that replaces itself, it is going to be very playable, as multiple decks in this format care about that stuff. It also fixes your mana of course, though it is a bit clunky if you’re just using it for those purposes
Key to the City
Average Picked At: 3.53
Total Times Picked: 15
Average Last Seen At: 3.32
Total Times Seen 38
Pro Rating: 3.5
Pro Comment: This is a pretty nice card. Unblockability is the kind of thing that allows you to close out a game – or just allows you to pressure your opponent no matter what they are doing – and while you have to discard a card for the effect, you are ultimately just rummaging, since you can pay mana to draw a card when it untaps. Powerstones can pay for that ability too! This was nice last time we saw it, and I think it is pretty good here too.
Lodestone Golem
Average Picked At: 7.00
Total Times Picked: 4
Average Last Seen At: 3.59
Total Times Seen 46
Pro Rating: 2.0
Pro Comment: So, this is a 4-mana 5/3, which is close to a 2.0, and it does have an extra effect that adds a tax to non artifacts! Problem is, the effect is symmetrical, and is likely to hurt you and your opponent similar amounts. If you end up with a deck that I very heavy in artifacts and your opponent’s deck is surprisingly low on them, it will overperform.
Precursor Golem
Average Picked At: 1.76
Total Times Picked: 17
Average Last Seen At: 1.74
Total Times Seen 19
Pro Rating: 4.0
Pro Comment: 5 mana for three 3/3s is absolutely insane, though the Golem does give up one of the big advantages of producing multiple bodies. Usually, the fact that you make multiple bodies makes your opponents spot removal pretty bad, but that’s not true here – if your opponent casts removal on one golem, it hits every single one of them! The upside is that your combat tricks that target one golem also target all of them, and while that isn’t quite as big of a deal as the downside, it is nice that the effect isn’t just all negative. Be careful if you have some other golems too by the way, as the set does have them, and they will all get blown up by a single removal spell! That said, if your opponent doesn’t have removal, you add a significant presence to the board very efficiently
Sword of the Meek
Average Picked At: 9.20
Total Times Picked: 5
Average Last Seen At: 4.95
Total Times Seen 46
Pro Rating: 2.0
Pro Comment: Two to play and two to equip for this bonus is probably a 1.5, but this format actually has some stuff going on that makes this interesting. While you can’t go full on Thopter-Sword combo, the format does have a lot of 1/1 creature tokens. So, sacrificing this to something in the Black-Red deck, and then making a creature token one way or another means you get it back and at that point you’ve gotten some nice value – and you can even sacrifice it again if you have the means.
Staff of Domination
Average Picked At: 4.25
Total Times Picked: 4
Average Last Seen At: 2.60
Total Times Seen 16
Pro Rating: 1.5
Pro Comment: This isn’t close to efficient at utilizing any of these effects, but it does make for a kind of interesting win condition for powerstone ramp decks, which should be able to utilize these abilities multiple times. Still, the first few turns after you play it it feels pretty bad, since you aren’t really doing anything with it for awhile, and then once you do it takes some pretty amazing effort
Quicksilver Amulet
Average Picked At: 7.71
Total Times Picked: 7
Average Last Seen At: 4.65
Total Times Seen 48
Pro Rating: 0.0
Pro Comment: Yeah, no. This kind of effect is easy to overrate because you think of the ideal situation of slamming some monster into play, but that’s hard to consistently line up in Limited, and this asks for so much mana to do its job that it almost isn’t worth it anyway. This kind of thing also never gives you an actual card of value, because it basically just gives you a discount. It does let you play a creature at instant speed, which is something – but we’ve seen this card and cards like it before, and they’re always awful in Limited.
Jalum Tome
Average Picked At: 10.42
Total Times Picked: 26
Average Last Seen At: 7.93
Total Times Seen 446
Pro Rating: 0.5 // 2.0
Pro Comment: This is a pretty clunky way to loot, but the Blue-Black deck in the format is probably interested in this, as it gives you a way to consistently trigger all of your payoffs for drawing a second card in a turn.
Astral Cornucopia
Average Picked At: 9.20
Total Times Picked: 5
Average Last Seen At: 5.98
Total Times Seen 67
Pro Rating: 1.5
Pro Comment: This is mostly just a three mana rock that can tap for one mana of any color. And that’s passable in a format with a bunch of artifact and ramp stuff going on. You can use a bunch of powerstones to make it better than that of course, which is some decent format-specific upside, but this still isn’t that impressive.
Caged Sun
Average Picked At: 4.25
Total Times Picked: 4
Average Last Seen At: 3.55
Total Times Seen 11
Pro Rating: 2.5
Pro Comment: This is powerful of course, but seems pretty awkward in this format. First of all, yo’ure usually a two-color deck, so all of your creatures aren’t going to get buffed by this – and not all of your lands will be augmented. Additionally, there are lots of artifact creatures and artifact creature tokens that are colorless, which also don’t get any help from Caged Sun. One bit of good news: if you cast a creature for its prototype cost, it does have a color – but still, this seems a little too specific about what it benefits in a format where you’ll almost always be fairly evenly divided between two colors
Platinum Angel
Average Picked At: 1.00
Total Times Picked: 2
Average Last Seen At: 1.50
Total Times Seen 4
Pro Rating: 4.5
Pro Comment: Making it so you can’t lose and your opponent can’t win is pretty oppressive, and the Angel can even help you win the game with its 4/4 flying body. The downside of the card is always the massive mana investment coupled with the fact that it dies to a whole lot of stuff, and while the latter is still going to be true, the mana will be easier to come by in this format than normal. If she sticks around, your opponent just can’t win – obviously – and that’s enough for her to get into the lower bomb range. She doe still die to a lot, and gives you absolutely 0 value in situations where your opponent untaps and kills her, and that keeps her from being completely absurd. But she’s still great
Name Answer You

Enter The Battlefield Prepared

With the MTGA Assistant deck tracker MTGA Assistant