@vaughnbros

Welp, serves me right for not reading the card, huh? That really hurts it for Vintage. Ironically, it makes it much better in Legacy and Modern. 3 mana uncounterable board wipe for all 1-cc cards is pretty hype.

Explosion zone enters the battlefield with 1 counter
T: add colourless mana XX, tap: put X counter over explosion zone
3, T: sacrifice explosion zone: destroy all nonland permanents with converted cost equal to the number of counters on explosion zone

This card seems totally bonkers. Uses a land slot instead of spell slot, randomly hoses Moxen, and yet DOESNT have synergy with Workshop. Perhaps this leads to a resurgence in Eldrazi?

It's a reference to Massacre Wurm, ya'll.

Isn't this just doing what Flusterstorm already does, but for more mana?

In Vintage, this little 3 mana dork says:

1. Your spells can't be countered.
2. You can play big effects on your opponent's end step.
3. Also removal. If you need that.

This seems like a big money play during blue mirrors.

I like it; in fact, most of this set seems like it's asking for trouble. Tons of walkers like this with decent abilities.

However... I don't think this gal is going to see Vintage play. It's more expensive and harder to dig up than Key, and less powerful than Tezz. It reminds me most of those Merfolk decks around 2014 that would use Merrow Reejery to take Vault turns. Funny, fun even, but probably not powerful.

Yeah, but Electrodominance scores a few points over the Expertises:

1. It's cheaper. RR for a Suspend spell.
2. It's instant speed. (And it does overcoming timing restrictions; look at the Gatherer ruling on similar abilities, like from Etali, Primal Storm)
3. The default ability (Blaze) is more generally useful than the expertises.

I think this all makes it a pretty safe bet that Electrodominace is BETTER than the Expertises were. So, the fact that the Expertises were not playable is not really relevant when considering this card.

On its own merits, is it worthwhile? Is it worth playing RR to instant-speed out Suspend spells in any Vintage deck?

@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.