Playing cards off the top of your library is an extremely powerful ability. It’s just like drawing a card in some ways. If you can play multiple cards off the top in a row, you can quickly bury your opponent in card advantage. It’s part of the reason Experimental Frenzy is such a powerful card in the right decks. Now, artifact decks are getting their own version of the card in the form of Mystic Forge in Magic: The Gathering Core Set 2020 spoilers.
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Breakdown
For 4 mana of any color, Mystic Forge is an artifact that lets you look at and play the top card of your library at any time. However, that card must be an artifact or colorless nonland card. As a bonus effect, you can tap it and pay 1 life to exile the top card of your library. This helps to prevent whiffing on artifacts if you hit a land.
There’s no doubt this effect is powerful but requires building around. You have to be playing an almost entirely artifact or colorless deck to benefit from it. If you are though, Mystic Forge is a straight upgrade from Experimental Frenzy. Being able to chain together cheap artifacts after you get empty-handed can quickly overwhelm opponents with the sheer amount of spells. The exiling effect helps to keep you from fizzling, and you can still play cards from your hand as an added bonus.
Decks
What specific decks should play Mystic Forge? Modern Affinity, Sram-O’s, and Eggs all immediately come to mind. Affinity tends to run out of cards in hand extremely quickly and has a low land count. Mystic Forge keeps them churning through their deck, letting them keep playing through control-heavy matchups. Eggs and Sram-O’s could use it as a combo piece to keep their engines churning and to reduce their failure rate. It’s a lot harder to whiff when you can play free or cheap artifacts from the top of your deck and your hand. A possible, but less likely, home is Eldrazi Tron. Mystic Forge could be a sideboard option for the deck to grind through long games where they tend to get empty-handed.
What do you think of Mystic Forge? Is it good enough for Modern, or is their a sweet a combo we missed? Let us know down in the comments below!
Stay tuned for more Magic: The Gathering Core Set 2020 spoilers!
