I think the pros and cons of each of these are fairly obvious, so the main question here is: do you want your artifact/enchantment destruction to lose to Mental Misstep? It depends on the kind of deck you're playing I suppose, but generally I'd prefer to dodge one of the more played cards of the format. Obviously costing more mana is worse vs Shops, but I think you'd rather play something like Serenity against that deck unless it really messes you up.

If it changes your opinion, what if you're playing white eldrazi (or something similar)? Do you play Disenchant to make MM stone cold against you, or do you run Fragmentize calling the bluff that they took out all their Missteps and then battle off game 3?

I see the dilemma and i like it a lot. It doesn't make the card choice obvious and keeps both as a viable possibility in the metagame.

I personally would argue that the deck(s), which are Thorn decks, Fragmentize is most effective against, and you are most likely to board it in against, do not play MM anyway. Most shops decks, or other Thorn decks, do not play a significant enough number of artifacts above 4 cmc to make the card less useful. Chalice on 1 of course is still a small factor, but i wouldn't consider it big enough to really influence this decision.

It comes down to the old "go wide or go deep" Argument. Fragmentize is less useful against i wider range of decks (blue decks with MM, Enchantement destruction, above 4cmc handling), but it is all the more effective against the decks the card really needs to be very effective against. Its about being very effective in a smaller range of situations or be less effective but more flexible.

@Aelien I think you nailed it perfectly. For me I like having a replacement for nature's claim in decks where I want to run a basic plains not a forest. Frag fills this role quite nice and has been replacing some number of ingot chewers and disenchants in my mentor lists and Oath lists.

I honestly don't see why you would run disenchant over Fragmentize. Everything important you want to hit in shops is within range. If you are afraid of mental misstep hitting fragmentize, chances are you aren't doing it correctly.

@Ten-Ten You cannot cast Fragmentize with Sanctum Prelate set on 1 which is the most likely number I would set.

@Ten-Ten I like to have options as an Oath deck vs Blue decks as well hence the split.

I suppose the answer is subject to the deck, as a whole, one pilots.
Although, against hate bears, if Prelate lands, chances are you weren't in a good position anyway. So, neither disenchant or Fragmentize would help. In oath, why not just run the plethora of options already on color instead?
Honestly, the best place for Fragmentize is in a tempo Gush deck at the moment.

If you are concerned about MM, why not play Wear/Tear instead?

@themonadnomad Because you can still MM tear and thats the one you would bring against decks with RiP or Leyline

Ah, drat. I thought the CMC would be 3 ... my mistake.

@themonadnomad if you cast it with Fuse I think the CMC would be 3 but its 2 "separate" cards without fuse

I'm pretty fully in the fragmentize camp. I've found the 1 less in the CC is far more important in the shops matchup than then instant speed of disenchant. People are talking about hatebears style decks (prelate on 1 being a problem for example). But since it came out and I've been tinkering around with fragmentize I've been paired against 1 hatebear or eldrazi style thorn deck and since I went tinker/DSC with counter back up in both games 1 and 2 it never came up.

In a deck like that where you aren't faced with 4 thorn, 4 sphere and a lodestone and may have more pressure to make use of mana I can see how disenchant may be better to have instant speed at the end of opponents turn. But for shops the mana cost is all important.

What are we truly trying to Fragmentize that we're worried about Misstep? Oath? Moat? Is that it? Vault-Key is at an all time low probably, and while Disenchanting a Mox against Gush decks could be good, more often than not it's applying a band-aid to a gunshot wound as then cantrip themselves out of mana issues. Perhaps Pardoxical Outcome decks are really the only concern besides Oath?

Without 4x Chalice, seems to me that Fragmentize is an excellent choice right now for decks that can't play Claim/Natural State.

@enderfall My main problem is that I cannot cast Fragmentize with Sanctum Prelate out (my own).

@enderfall said in Fragmentize vs Disenchant:

What are we truly trying to Fragmentize that we're worried about Misstep? Oath? Moat? Is that it? Vault-Key is at an all time low probably, and while Disenchanting a Mox against Gush decks could be good, more often than not it's applying a band-aid to a gunshot wound as then cantrip themselves out of mana issues. Perhaps Pardoxical Outcome decks are really the only concern besides Oath?

Without 4x Chalice, seems to me that Fragmentize is an excellent choice right now for decks that can't play Claim/Natural State.

Completely agree.

@Water0 Would you want Abolish anyway? I'm not familiar with the Hate Bears strategy, but I always thought that Abolish was criminally underplayed.

@bleedth3sky Yeah, but you CAN play 1WR and destroy say, a Mox too to avoid Misstep.

A thought I just had is that you should always be playing a full set of Fragmentize before the first Disenchant because Hurkyl's Recall is a better 2 drop, so a combination of Fragmentize and Hurkyl's is far superior to a combination of Disenchants and Hurkyl's.

I think, largely, people in this thread are talking in generalities, when ultimately we should pick sideboard cards based on specifics. Understandable though, as we don't have much context to go on.

The question "Fragmentize vs Disenchant" has no answer in a vacuum - neither card is better in the abstract, it only gets better in the context of a matchup or a group of matchups.

@enderfall hit the nail on the head with his question about Missteps. Fragmentize getting hit by Misstep only matters if you're bringing the card in against decks that typically use Misstep - these are not traditionally matchups where artifact/enchantment removal is used. There might be special circumstances about your deck, or your metagame, or the slots you have available, that made you decide that you wanted a Disenchant-style effect against, say Oath or Tezzeret. If that's the case, those circumstances might inform our answer.

I'm not sure how useful it is to say "Fragmentize is better" without laying out the assumptions we're making about decks/matchups/metagames that make that true - unless we're arguing that Fragmentize is universally better, but I'm not sure that's the case here.

In the spirit of my last post. I'd like to be the only person defending Disenchant in this thread.

I've been playing a lot of White Eldrazi lately, and made a lot of builds for different expected metagames. While I tend not to run either, I've ended up putting Disenchant in some builds, but Fragmentize in none.

The specific reason I've done this is because of Car Shops. Car Shops is a matchup I've spent a lot of time working on, and in my experience, the instant-speed nature of Disenchant has been more relevant than the cheaper cost of Fragmentize.

Disenchant as an instant can lead to tempo blowouts by targeting a vehicle after it's been crewed, or the target of an Arcbound Ravager's Modular tokens on the stack. Disenchant can answer a Fleetwheel Cruiser or an Umezawa's Jitte before it connects once, which Fragmentize can't.

Of less importance, but still notable, there are a few relevant artifacts in this matchup with CMC > 4 (Skyship Skysovereign, Karn, Silver Golem, Precursor Golem, Wurmcoil Engine)

Further, the extra mana isn't near as much as a pain point for White Eldrazi as it might be for other decks - WEldrazi has a huge mana count, often some number of lock pieces are removed from both decks post board, you often end up with unused mana at the end of the turn, and this is not an effect you're trying to get to land on turn 1 or 2.

This alone isn't even enough context to make this decision though, because if you've noticed, Path to Exile gives you all the upside of being an Instant (for the cards we care about in this matchup), at CMC 1. The only reason I would run Fragmentize/Disenchant over Path to Exile is if there were some noncreature artifacts/enchantments I was worried about in other matchups.

In this case, I like Disenchant over Path to Exile right now because of the up-and-coming Stax-style decks, which have key cards like Ensnaring Bridge, Crucible of Worlds, Smokestack which can't be Path'd. While I might rather have Fragmentize than Disenchant against a Stax deck, Car Shops is so much more important a matchup, that Disenchant gets the nod. Besides, Disenchant has some edges in the Stax matchup too ... it works through Tangle Wire, it kills a Smokestack after they've lost a card to it, it kills a key spell the turn they draw it rather than having to wait and use your next turn's mana, etc.

This is all assuming I'm not running red mana in my list, which is usually where I end up these days. With red in the list, I sidestep the entire discussion and run a mix of Paths and Ingot Chewers, which are too good with Ancient Tomb and Eldrazi Displacer to pass up. If unrelated metagame factors caused me to dump red (like Karakas getting stronger or Mentor getting less popular), I'd likely be on Disenchants.

Disenchant is notably better against Time Vault/Key decks as well - not because of the Missteppability, but because a Sorcery is going to be too slow most of the time. This didn't factor into my decision at all, despite the fact that I might end up boarding them in.

If we're talking about different lists and different matchups (and I'm sure most of us are), there's probably a ton of reasons why Fragmentize is better instead.