@protoaddct This is where I always came down when I was running the card. Transmute Artifact is not as good as Tinker, so right away if we want to tutor an artifact we start with 1 Tinker. Next, we consider whether Transmute Artifact is better than Demonic Tutor. Almost certainly not, so we add DT to our artifact tutor package. Then we ask is Transmute Artifact better than Mystical Tutor? Well, given that we're running Tinker, probably not, so now we're up to 3 tutors.

Only at this point do I consider jamming a Transmute, and I'm skeptical even that is correct. How many more tutors can we realistically jam into the deck? I'm down with some build where we're just running counters and tutors and want to win with keyvault pronto - Turbo Vault? - but I've never seen that.

That's why I said that a deck who wants Transmute Artifact would need to be heavily leveraging what makes the card DIFFERENT from these other choices in a potentially positive way. Namely:

1. It costs UU. That's cheaper than Tinker and less Black than Demonic Tutor. So, maybe if you want a mono-blue artifact deck, this goes up in consideration. Traditionally the trade off of going mono color has not been seen as worth it by control players, though...

2. It's an Entomb for artifacts. In Vintage, the graveyard is halfway into play! This is the angle that seems to have the most promise to me, but it requires tons of (easily disrupted) things to go right in order to get an advantage. Plus, any deck who wants to use the graveyard has to ask whether they're better than Dredge, since they fall to the same hate.

I'd love to see some suggested builds using Transmute Artifact. Absent that, my suspicion is we're just not there yet. Here are the kind of cards that I think would push me to really want to use it:

1. Some kind of artifact fatty or with a powerful activation cost that comes out of the yard on its own power, like Metalwork Colossus, but with a more Vintage-friendly condition. Like, you can cast it from the yard by pitching other cards from the yard or based on storm count or I dunno.

2. Some other generally useful card that does something bah-roken if you have a significant artifact in the yard early in the game. Like, maybe a bolt where you can exile artifacts from the yard to do damage equal to their casting cost.

3. Something that rewards you heavily for being mono-blue and wants to be in an artifact deck. Like, Back to Basics that also makes your blue spells and artifacts cost 1 less.

I don't think any of these specific card ideas would be printed, but my point is that there are fissures between what Transmute does and what "better" tutors do that can be potentially leveraged by new printings.

@john-cox I think you need two moxen; one to Transmute away, and one to Weld away.

@rat3de said in Transmute Artifact:

@MaximumCDawg I agree wholeheartedly, I was just saying that it may be worth adding to help Transmute out big boys without having to make huge amounts of mana. I think if you wanted to play Transmute it would be boring to only be tutoring out small things like Vault/Key, Top or whatever other useful artifact you can find.

Sure, but at that point I think I like Trinket Mage better for most uses. It misses Vault but gets everything else.

@rat3de Well, let's play that out. What's the best line here?

T1 - Land, Welder
T2 - Mox, Mox, Transmute away one Mox to bin Inkwell/Sphinx, Weld out?

That's not too shabby but it's a pretty long line of things to have to occur.

I admittedly have not played much Vintage lately, but when I was playing I tried out Transmute Artifact several times and I was never really happy with it. Tinker has a big edge on Transmute Artifact because it lets you cheat out expensive artifacts. It's like stapling Demonic Tutor to a Show and Tell.

Transmute, by contrast, always functioned like a worse version of Trinket Mage, in my experience. Sure, you can tutor for a cheap artifact at sorcery speed, but... how often is this the best card for that job? Assuming you really want to get something that costs 2 or 3 instead of 1, now we're talking about paying 3UU or whatever to tutor... and we're crossing into what Tezzert costs. On top of all that, Demonic Tutor does the same thing for X+1B instead of X+UU+sac so...

I think it's just a function of a card that is really legitimately broken just not being competitive with other broken cards.

Now, if there was a deck that really needed to pump artifacts into the graveyard or really wanted another useful sacrifice outlet, maybe we'd be talking. Transmute does put two artifacts into the yard, and if that angle is something you can exploit, maybe it has a place.

Whoops!

I posted a thread with your preview card a few hours before this thread went up - I had no idea it was your preview! Sorry about that!

Yawgmoth's Will for your opponents graveyard! This effect is super powerful, as we know, but is there any case for it being playable in a world seeing a Storm mirror is like seeing a Unicorn in the wild?

So I've been screwing around with this thing casually, and it's really fun. Not sure it's vintage-level power, naturally. But, it can be tutored out and then it gives you a useful mana sink turn after turn. If you get Sai, Master Thopterist going with it or happen to be running other Thopters, it gets really powerful.

The deck I stuck it in has Ornithopters, Roterothopter, and Pilgrim's Eye. They're all pretty terrible, but Goblin Welder at least makes Eye sort of workable.

Whether LSV invented something or not, when a popular streamer does something, the larger community notices. You can see this with lots of reserve list spikes in prices that correllate to being mentioned on a podcast or a show. I think it's very fair to consider what tech is in the public's attention, at least if you're playing MTGO.

@hierarchnoble So we should call it Noah Fish instead, right?

Color me skeptical. This is a Punisher card. Your opponent will choose whatever is best for them. If you're locked down under a Sphere, they'll rely on Sol Lands instead.

If it cost 1 mana, then they probably would not have a choice; they kept a hand with a mox or crypt and need to use it, probably. So, if it cost 1, it would situationally be as good as Llanowar Elves. That's not high praise.

There's a second use case, along side Welder or something else to sac the artifacts, but that's an awful lot of work and mana to do what Mox Monkey already does.

@smmenen Well then, here's my list of cards I would like to hear your thoughts on from Battlebond and M19:

Spellseeker
Arena Rector
Archon of Valor's Reach
Stunning Reversal

Runic Armasaur
Sai, Master Thopterist
Alpine Moon
Isolate
Remorseful Cleric
Tezzeret, Artifice Master
Amulet of Safekeeping
Suncleanser