It’s not exactly a Tinker on a body but there are still loads of great constructs to tutor up. Scrapyard RecombinerĪnother great recursion piece, Scrapyard Recombiner was the first new modular card since Fifth Dawn. Crucible of Worlds seems too obvious and I can’t see myself splashing green to Crop Rotation over and over either. There has to be a way to abuse the modular ability on a land. It’s a great color fixer in any artifact deck and I love its reliability as a sacrifice target.īut I don’t think its potential has been unlocked yet. Power Depot is the first noncreature card with modular. It grows every time any artifact enters the battlefield, including your opponents’! In an artifact-heavy meta, this card can potentially become a threat in as quickly as one turn. Arcbound Crusher’s real value lies in its triggered ability. Arcbound CrusherĪ resounding four mana for a 1/1 with trample feels like a rip-off, because it is. It can end games but needs the right setup to be perfectly executed. At six mana, it’s a little too expensive to be “great” and its ability shrinks your other creatures slowly. Arcbound FiendĪrcbound Fiend starts out as a 3/3 with some middle-of-the-road evasion and a built-in way to grow its +1/+1 counters. As a 1/1 for one mana that moves its counter to another artifact creature on death, it’s an appropriately priced common you’ll want four of in any modular-themed deck. Arcbound Worker is the simplest Arcbound creature on Mirrodin. Arcbound WorkerĪh, the classic worker peon. I love the interaction of riot and modular on the same creature and I hope to see more crossover between +1/+1 counter abilities in the future. It’s more fairly priced than many of the other modular creatures, entering the battlefield as either a 5/5 or a 4/4 with haste. Arcbound SlasherĪrcbound Slasher is a great common hailing from MH2. Best of all, it won’t die if you remove all of its counters for its ability, meaning you won’t lose out on any counters you could otherwise redistribute among your other artifact creatures. The Javelineer’s utility is useful in a Limited environment and can become an effective rattlesnake to shake at your enemies with the right set up. It enters the battlefield as a 1/2 that can remove +1/+1 counters to deal damage to attacking or blocking creatures. Arcbound JavelineerĪrcbound Javelineer is the only modular creature with a toughness score. The best modular cards help you enable that strategy. I like to think of modular decks as akin to aristocrats decks since both want to constantly sacrifice and resurrect creatures for advantage. The conglomeration of these ideas led to the modular mechanic as we know it today. He wanted to avoid making another cycle of chimeras and make use of the spikes’ +1/+1 counter synergies by moving counters onto other creatures. In modern parlance we’d probably see this represented as the ability counters from Ikoria.ĭuring the design for the Mirrodin block, Rosewater wanted to make use of +1/+1 counters in a similar way to the spikes while also making artifact creatures matter. They can sacrifice themselves to put a mythical +2/+2 counter on any other chimera creature and permanently give that creature their respective ability. The chimeras on the other hand are all 4-mana 2/2 artifact creatures with one of four evergreen abilities: first strike, trample, flying, and un-keyworded vigilance. Spike Weaver’s repeatable Fog effect and Spike Feeder’s mana-free lifegain ability are both useful tools in any counters-themed deck. Two of the most popular spikes still see some play in EDH decks to this day. The spikes were 0/0 creatures that entered the battlefield with a number of +1/+1 counters that they could remove to activate abilities. Mark Rosewater designed modular to be reminiscent of the spike creatures from Exodus and the chimeras of Visions. Reduce, reuse, recycle! The History of Modular in MTG They donate their power and parts to new creatures each time they die. This allows their parts to be easily exchanged with other artifact creatures. Most of the Arcbound creatures appear as constructs and golems bound together by energies flaring around their joints. They originally appeared only on colorless artifact creatures but have expanded into red and white with MH2. The first 12 modular cards were introduced in Darksteel and Fifth Dawn back in 2004, with another 10 to follow in Modern Horizons and Modern Horizons 2. When it dies you can place a number of +1/+1 counters on a target artifact creature equal to the number of +1/+1 counters on the dying modular creature. A permanent with modular N basically enters the battlefield with N +1/+1 counters on it. Modular appears on cards as “modular N,” where N is usually a number (but not always! See: Arcbound Wanderer). Arcbound Overseer | Illustration by Carl Critchlow
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |