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By: one million words, Pete Jahn
Sep 17 2010 12:40pm
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Kuldotha Forgemaster is NOT Broken

I've been listening to podcasts recently, and reading a fair amount of articles and blog posts about Scars of Mirrodin cards.  The prerelease - paper, at least - is just weeks away.  Excitement is building.  Hype is building.  The prognosticators are everywhere.  Unfortunately, so are the idiots.  I know how often the former can turn into the later.  One of the more humbling experiences for a Magic writer is rereading what you wrote about the set two years later.   Embarrassing. 

I'm not talking about official preview articles.  I have written a few of those - and the author is supposed to put the very best possible spin on the card being previewed.  Caveat Emptor.  I knew that some of the cards I got to preview were going to be casual only / $0.10 rares, but I did my best.  That doesn't count.  Official previews are advertising for the new set, not serious reviews.  It's advertising.  I can live with that.

My problem, though, is with the commentators talking about, and giving opinions on, spoiled cards - and getting it really, really wrong.  The comments that inspired me to write this article were about Kuldotha Forgemaster.  Here's the card, and some of the comments.  

Mono-brown is also being pushed a bit. That tinker on a stick...nice!

I can't believe they reprinted Tinker!  That card is just stupid! 

Tutor artifact thing is good. He can sac himself. Though he does cost 5 and will be sick. He may be part of some combo is constructed but is costy.

wow   that forgemaster is sick too. fetch mindslaver? contagion engine? steel hellkite? wurmcoil engine? platinum emperion? Here's hoping they reprint lightning greaves; the way they're printing off-the-chain cards (in some cases reprinting) is rather disturbing.

Forgemaster is insane!   

Koth is nice and all, but we're all ignoring the Forgemaster here... With all the cheap dudes in the set, I can see this powering out a Platinum something or a Darksteel Colossus. Heck, maybe they'll print a bigger dude in SoM that will be even better. But either way, getting something like that into play EVERY TURN starting turn 3-5 is nothing to scoff at.

Kuldotha...best colorless EDH EVER. 

The Forgemaster is nice too. Sac three Origin Spellbombs for a Platinum Empirion (sp). yes please! :P

Forgemaster abuse is assured.

To be honest, though, a few people's comments were a bit more on track. 

The Forgemaster is strictly better than Siege Mastodon. OMG power creep!
 
Forgemaster...meh. Fixed and expensive Tinker is no fun.
 

Actually, opinions, in the abstract, are useless.  They only have value to the extent that they are based on reasoned evaluation - or, one step higher, that you expect that the person offering the opinion is basing it on solid analysis and some knowledge of what he or she is talking about.  After all, both Brian Kibler and my 18 month old niece have opinions on how good the Forgemaster is.  Kibler's opinion, especially if he expresses it publicly, is probably based on his knowledge of Magic and metagames.  My niece's opinion is probably based on the pretty colors, or maybe on how the card tastes.  Those two opinions are not the same.  

So, you ask, why should we trust your opinion of the Forgemaster / Frogmaster?  Good question.  You don't have to just trust my opinion -  I'll show you how to form your own, and how to rationally evaluate cards.  Then you can make your own judgment.  

When evaluating new cards, you have to answer three basic questions:

  1. What does it actually do?
  2. How fast / efficiently does it do that?
  3. How does that fit into the metagame?

Let's start by examining the card in detail.  

Krudy Frogmaster - oops, that's Kuldotha Forgemaster, sorry - is a 3/5 creature for 5 mana.   That completely fails what Limited Resources calls the vanilla test - it's power is nowhere close to its casting cost.  That makes it a very bad creature.  No one is winning any constructed formats playing this card as a beatdown creature.  After all, for five mana, you can have a Baneslayer Angel, and for one more mana you can have a Titan, or a 6/6 deathtouch & lifelink Wurm.  Forgemaster's P/T says it is not playable based on its stats.

OBV.

Of course, Forgemaster has an ability:  tap, sacrifice three artifacts:  search your library for an artifact and put it onto the battlefield.  Shuffle your library.  It's that ability that has people talking.  The ability does put artifacts into play, which makes it way better than a tutor.  Tinker has that ability, and Tinker is banned or restricted in every format.   Kuldotha can "Tinker" stuff into play.   The question is - what can it put into play?  Let's look at the suspects.

Darksteel Colossus

Wait - he's leaving.  He rotates out when Scars arrives.  Let's move on -and remember that we are limiting ourselves to artifacts that cost at least six or seven mana.  After all, playing a five mana card that can be sacrificed the next turn to get something is not going to Tinker out a 5 mana artifact - or anything else you could just cast.    Based the existing sets and the cards spoiled so far, the Forgemaster has three reasonable targets:

Platinum Angel Mindslaver

Yes, Mindslaver is coming back.  Other tempting targets, like (Inktreader Leviathan) and Sphinx of the Steel Wind are not, and - as I write this - the spoilers have nothing else.  Given what we now know, the only viable targets are the three cards shown above.  Of course, since the Forgemaster is a tutor, you could run all three cards in the deck and put whatever worked best in any given situation into play. 

So, on to question two: how fast / efficiently does the Forgemaster do what it does?

The Forgemaster is a creature with a tap ability.  That means that you either have to give him haste, or have him in play during your upkeep to activate him.  Practically, unless Wizards reprintsLightning Greaves, haste won't be an option. 

You also need two other artifacts.  Wizards is not going to reprint artifact lands.  That means the best case scenario is probably turn one Forest, Birds of Paradise, plus Mox Opal or some other 0cc artifact.  Turn two: lands, mana Myr, something.   Turn three: Forgemaster.  Turn four, cast something, sacrifice Forgemaster, the mana myr and another artifact to Tinker something into play.  This is quite an all-in strategy:  you are basically using almost all of the resources you have built up over the first three turns to get one artifact - probably one of the above three - into play.  That's not necessarily bad - some decks do go all in.  All In Red was probably the most famous such deck - it could spend its entire hand just to put a single creature (or a whole bunch of Goblins) into play.  It can be worth it.

Of course, All In Red was looking to put a 6/6 trampling, land destroying creature - or a dozen or more goblins - into play on turn one.  In the Extended format that the deck was played in,  many decks could not handle that level of pressure.  Others could, which is why All In Red just good, never format defining.  In any case, that leads to question number three:  how good is the card's effect in the current metagame.

You can argue that the current metagame is not defined, since a lot of the current decks are losing key cards to the rotation.  That's not exactly true.  Even if we cannot define the exact metagame, we can cobble together a simple test gauntlet just based on the decks in Zendikar block.  Sure, we will probably find new decks, especially new combo decks (which, after all, is what the Forgemaster deck wants to be), once we get Scars in its entirety.  However, we can at least build a basic burn deck, a simple creature beats deck, and a generic control deck by taking Zendikar block decks, yanking the worst card and adding the most obvious cards from M11.  For example, here's a typical burn deck from the final Zendikar block daily event.  Well, after a closer look, it really revolves around  a mix of land destruction, mana acceleration and fast threats.  It's a Ponza deck, but it is still a start for our gauntlet.

 

In making the introductory gauntlet, I would add four Lightning Bolts, probably replacing the Staggershocks.  I would also consider adding some Manic Vandals somewhere, and maybe even a couple copies of Demolish in the SB, since we are adding an artifact block to the mix.  Whatever - at this point I am not trying to tune the deck, just get an idea of what we might face.

If we were to put our Forgemaster deck up against this deck, we can foresee a couple potential problems.  First of all, it seems unlikely that our mana creatures are going to survive.  Birds and Myr die to the large collection of burn spells, and to the Cunning Sparkmages.  The Forgemaster itself could also die - Bolt plus Burst Lighting, kicked Burst Lightning plus Sparkmage, Manic Vandal and more just kill it outright.  However, let's look at the best case scenario - that we resolve the Forgemaster's ability, and get one of our three cards.  What happens then?

Fetching Platinum Angel seems really useless.  Ponza is simply going to smash with the Hellkite Charger until your life total is negative, then kill the Angel.  Platinum Angel is only a 4/4 after all.  Sure, you could try to get a Whispersilk Cloak on it, and hope they cannot kill the Cloak, but that's hardly a given.  Worse yet, the Ponza deck might well be running Destructive Force, which could care less whether the Platinum Angel has a Cloak or not.

Fetching Platinum Emperion is a slightly better option.  You cannot lose life while the Emperion is in play, and it is an 8/8.  However, it still dies to burn - in large quantities - and to a pile of chump blockers.  Since the red player would have no reason to attack while the Emperion is in play, expect chump blockers.  If the Emperion had evasion, then it might work, but the Emperion has no evasion.  Once again, Whispersilk Cloak looks like the best option, but Forgemaster plus Cloak  plus other artifacts looks like a way-too-many-card combo.  It could work, if you were lucky, but the odds are strongly against it.

The third option is Mindslaver.   You probably could fetch the Mindslaver and activate it the same turn, since you would be spending the mana to cast Forgemaster on the previous turn.   It would probably work - but the question then becomes what does Mindslaver get you?   The set does not have anything like  Academy Ruins to allow for a perpetual Mindslaver lock.  Instead, you get one turn to do as much damage to the opponent, using the opponent's own cards, as you can.  That's unlikely to be all that much against Ponza, and you have a decent chance of whiffing.   Sure, you could fire off the slaver and see a hand with a Searing Blast and a couple Bolts, and end up frying your opponent's entire team.  OTOH, you could also see a hand with nothing but a Lodestone Golem and a pair of Hellkites, and do nothing but tap all your opponent's lands.   That is not enough to justify several turns worth of mana and three artifacts. 

After sideboarding, it is just going to get worse - and I did not even Include Koth of the Hammer in the red deck.  Koth is nuts.  Koth decks are nuts.  Let's assume that we get a god draw with the Forgemaster deck, and have a turn four Platinum Emperion .  The Koth deck is going to play a turn four Koth, turn five (Kolizek, Butcher of Truth) - and turn six Ulamog, which will kill the Empherion.  Not going to win that one.  

If Darksteel Colussus does reappear in Scars, that could be a bit better - Ponza would have a hard time killing it.  However, the Koth / Eldrazi version would have less trouble:  you can sacrifice indestructible creatures to Annihilate.  But I'm digressing - let's get back to the Forgemaster. 

Let's take a look at a creature deck.  From that same DE, we see one creature deck - Vampires.  Here's that list.

 

I could make a bunch of changes to this deck, but simply replacing the Feast of Bloods with Doom Blades should be enough.  It might be interesting to add a few Captivating Vampires as well, and consider replacing Inquisition with Duress, but that's more than we need to do.  Let's look at what our fetched cards can do against the simplest Vampire build.

Mindslaver is going to do nothing.  Vampire's targeted removal can't affect their own creatures, and their other cards do very little.  At best, a Mindslaver might let you kill their weenies with a kicked Marsh Casualties, but the cards that are going to kill you are not the 2/1s - at least not the 2/1s that stay dead.  Beyond that, you might be able to crack a fetchland and find nothing, but that is not going to win you the game.

Platinum Angel cannot really block anything in the deck, unless you want to risk having it die to Disfigure.  It does die to Doom Blade, and a kicked Gatekeeper, and stuff out of the sideboard.  Platinum Emperion is a bit better - but it still dies to a lot of the same stuff, and it cannot attack through a Vampire Nighthawk.  Even Darksteel Colossus would not be a huge problem, if it were legal. Normal removal for the other creatures, then kicker a Gatekeeper, does it in.

Finally, let's look at the control decks coming out of the final Zendikar DE.

 

Simplest change - add some Mana Leaks in place of the Deprives and maybe the Spell Pierce.  The lands also get a bit better if you add Glacial Fortress, and Baneslayer Angel or a Titan might work better than Emeria Angel.   However, even if we don't do a lot of modification, it should be pretty clear that Forgemaster is not going to do much.  First off - what are the odds that you will ever resolve Forgemaster?   If that is the core of the deck, you can expect that they will reserve a Mana Leak or Cancel for it, if that matters.  More likely, you can expect them to have a Day of Judgment or Journey to Nowhere for it, or for whatever you fetch with the combo.  Another likely scenario is that you get the Forgemaster out, and fetch something - and then they drop Jace and bounce it. 

Once again - you have to be very lucky to be able to damage the UW deck with Mindslaver.  Maybe you could get them to kill their own planeswalker by casting a second copy, or killing their own creatures with Wrath, but that's about it.  Mindslaver is not going to win you the game.  Neither are the Platinum creatures.  They will just be bounced, killed or Exiled -and that only gets worse once UW Control brings in Sanctifiers from the sideboard. 

Basically, Kuldotha Forgemaster does too little, too slowly.   You are investing too much for the possible return.  Of course, that could change.  If Wizards printed a card  like this

Dumbstone   - Artifact  - 30

tap: you win the game.

then the effort could be worthwhile.  At present, it is not - but it might not be a bad idea to grab a set just in case something amazing appears in one of the next couple sets.  Wizards has pushed the envelope with cards like Progenitus and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn - if they do it again in the third Mirrodin expansion, and print a stupendous artifact or artifact creature, then you might want those Forgemasters after all.

Anyway - the point of this diatribe was not really to bash Forgemaster, but to provide a framework for evaluating cards and showing how to use that framework.  Hopefully that will provide some benefit, because we have a lot more cards to see and evaluate between now and the prerelease.

PRJ

"one million words" on MTGO

 

10 Comments

And by stupendous artifact or by Paul Leicht at Fri, 09/17/2010 - 14:52
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And by stupendous artifact or artifact creature you mean stupid right? I've cursed the R&D guys more than once for Emrakul and Annihilator.

I am not sure I completely concur with your assessment of Forgemaster. (Unintentional bashing aside, and you did really tear it a new one.) WotC does print cards that have no apparent purpose other than to confuse and mess with bad players BUT rarely do they do it so blatantly. I expect there WILL be a deck that the forgemaster wants to be the center of and that momentarily rocks the meta (eg: swans assault) and then is obsoleted.

I really like the rumor by ArchGenius at Fri, 09/17/2010 - 15:19
ArchGenius's picture

I really like the rumor season before a new set comes out BECAUSE of the wild speculation about how good the new cards are going to be. I don't find it annoying when people get it wrong because that just keeps some eyes off of the cards I'm really interested in getting. It wouldn't be any fun if everybody knew the 5-10 really good cards in each new set and practically ignored the rest.

Besides, a lot of the cards are good in different formats. People are usually examining cards based on the formats that they play. A great card in standard could be terrible in Classic/Vintage and vice versa. And I've heard that just about everything could be good in Commander/Elder Dragon Highlander due to the political nature of that format. But I'm no expert on it.

A key card for Commander/EDH by Lythand at Fri, 09/17/2010 - 16:31
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5

Good article.

I think the card will be good and an artifact heavy Coomander/EDH deck since a lot of the bigger Haymaker spells are played in thse decks. I would gladly sacrifice a few Myr dudes to get Darksteel Forge.

As far as the statement of just about everything could be good in Commander/EDH, I would have to disagree. There are a lot of 1 v. 1 cards that are useless in Commander or EDH simply because of thier limited ussage. Lightning Bolt is one card that comes to mind. yea it can off a bothersome small creature, but in EDH/Commander, using a lightning bolt is like trying to buttner knife in a sword fight. However cards like Syphon Mind and Syphon Soul increase in value.

Yes, I don't really have much by ArchGenius at Fri, 09/17/2010 - 16:52
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Yes, I don't really have much experience with EDH/Commander. I just have noticed a lot of "that's good in EDH" posts on the discussion boards for a lot of spoiled cards.

Which makes me wonder if the criteria for judging an EDH/Commander card is more based on politics than the actual strength of the card. I.E. look innocent and play interesting cards and the other players will leave you alone and beat up on each other.

Another note by Lythand at Fri, 09/17/2010 - 16:41
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5

One other thing I want to note and this is what I based my assumption on, Peter did a good job of giving us a example guantlet to evaluate your cards in standard. You have to re evaluate those cards against other decks when going to a different format. For EDH and Commander, there really isn't a gauntlet.

heh yes and no. You know for by Paul Leicht at Sat, 09/18/2010 - 05:55
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heh yes and no. You know for instance online commander decks tend to be either combo or control. No aggro in general because those types of decks tend to not only fall short but get stomped by the fatties of the late game control decks and can't do anything to stop combos from going off. So you know whether a card being aggro, combo or control fits in your commander decks. In EDH (a game I haven't had the opportunity to play sadly) I am sure things vary enough between play groups that the meta choices are more difficult but still you have the ability to narrow down the choices a bit. (Eg: If you know a group tends to favor board controlling sweepers like pestilence and pyroclasm etc you will be hard pressed to include 1 and 2 toughness creatures (like Royal Assassin) which will most certainly die early and often.) So while there is no set deck list to fish against you can do a lot of weeding just by knowing the meta.

Wizards always overhypes the by Jyalt at Fri, 09/17/2010 - 21:39
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Wizards always overhypes the new cards for previews, it's part of their marketing strategy. I get that the over-exuberance bothers you, but this is nothing new.

People hear what they want to by lenney at Fri, 09/17/2010 - 22:35
lenney's picture

People hear what they want to hear. I haven't heard any speculation about Forgemaster being broken at all, but I don't discount what you have heard. Lately all I have been hearing, is Koth.

I agree - mostly. by Felorin at Sat, 09/18/2010 - 08:04
Felorin's picture

They made this guy costly enough, both in mana and in the artifacts you have to feed him, that I don't see him as broken or amazing, and in a lot of cases he won't even be playable as Johnnies try to fit him into decks where he just doesn't get the job done.

I would disagree with the one assumption though, that the only useful way to use him is to fetch out cards costing 6 or more. In some cases, yeah. But you know, many a Tezzeret has fetched out things as small as Chalice of the Void or Engineered Explosives. I see two cases where you might want to use a tinker effect (like this guy) to fetch out something small. A) Artifact toolbox decks, particularly in broader formats (legacy, vintage, highlander) where there's more high power effects (& more silver bullets & answers) at low casting costs. (Nevinyrral's Disk, anyone?) B) Combo decks that involve artifact pieces. When I'm playing Blasting Station + Summoning Station + Mycosynth Lattice, and I have the latter two pieces in play, I don't care what it takes to get my 3 mana blasting station out - I'm doing it. Infinite damage is some good, and if the Forgemaster gives me one more chance in my deck, ok. Granted, in anything but EDH I'm probably gonna stick with Fabricate, Drift of Phantasms to transmute, Arcum Daggson, Tinker, Diabolic Tutor, any of a myriad of cheaper, easier ways to find a Blasting Station. But if a combo with at least two artifact pieces becomes strong I could see someone trying to use this guy to fetch a cheap artifact ftw.

Blue card drawing spells are probably just better, though! Again, I agree he's not that amazing, just saying sometimes fetching a cheaper artifact with him might be The Play. Maybe when the block is all released some cards will produce amazing synergy with him and make him even playable. I'm not holding my breath waiting, but we'll see.

It's fun with voltaic key and by Theobill at Sun, 09/19/2010 - 06:11
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It's fun with voltaic key and myr battlesphere.