This one's a bit tricky. For one, it can drop
the mana costs of a good precentage of your
deck, by a considerable amount. On the other
hand, you have to exile a card out of your hand.
So if it eats a Naturalize, you've been
2-for-1'd. And even if you manage to cast every
card out of your hand on the cheap, well, you've
just emptied your hand all the faster. So now
your opponent knows you're not holding a
counterspell or a combat trick, and you're
basically at the mercy of the top of your deck.
The payoff is that you get a huge rush of tempo
by getting to cast an assualt of sorceries, an
armory of artifacts, or a crowd of creatures far
sooner than your opponent was prepared to defend
against it... if you even have that many cards
of the same type in your hand at the time.
Remember, you had to exile one to imprint onto
the Semblance Anvil. And also remember, if you
get a card for cheap, but had the extra 2 mana
to pay and didn't have anything else to spend
that 2 mana on, you would have been better off
not casting the Semblance Anvil at all and
keeping the imprinted card. The benefits this
card promises are great, but I'm concerned about
the hoops you have to jump through to get them.
Semblance Anvil reminds me a lot of Cloud Key,
which was a very powerful card that never made
too much of an impact in sanctioned
formats. Since the Anvil makes you lose a card,
which is gone forever if it gets Shattered, I
suspect that a lot of risk-averse players won't
really go for it. Like the Key, though, I'm
expecting it to appear in other places; anybody
who plays Dragonstorm or other spell-heavy
archetypes in more casual settings will go for
this just for the potential of the high reward.
Might I suggest pairing it with Duress to get
any Naturalizes and such out of the way first?
Magic The Gathering Card of The Day: Semblance
Anvil
Welcome back readers today's card of the day is
an interesting artifact from Scars of Mirrodin,
Semblance anvil allows you to imprint a
nonland card on it and allows you to cast spells
for up to two generic mana cheaper if they share
a permanent type. This reminds me of Cloud Key
but a more explosive, easily exploitable Cloud
Key. The potential to make all your artifacts
highly reduced or in some cases free, is a
temptation to great to pass over. In standard
this card could see play as a way to spam Myr
creatures, enable metalcraft, reduce
planeswalkers costs and this isn't even touching
the tip of the iceberg. In extended and eternal
this card could see play as a combo enabler,
trading two cards for the reduction of your
spells is good but I'm not sure if its good
enough to break into the broken range. In casual
and multiplayer this card basically allows decks
to get to their good stuff faster as well as
fueling degenerate combo decks, really it is up
to your imagination this card can be sick. In
limited I'm not sure how to value this card, if
you run a lot of cheap cards it can accelerate
you but imprinting may be a problem. Overall a
card with so much potential it makes my head
spin.
Today's card of the day is Semblance Anvil
which is a three mana artifact with Imprint that
reduces the cost of spells you cast by two that
share a type with the card exiled by Imprint.
Often the best choice will be an artifact
creature since it will share a type with both
artifacts and creatures giving a single
reduction to both. This is a fairly
powerful form of acceleration that requires good
draw power, more expensive cards, or some
combination of the two to get the most use out
of. With extra cards, even lower cost
ones, the reduction allows them to be swarmed
quickly while playing for acceleration lets big
threats get out much earlier. Either way
this is a solid addition to combo decks and is
quite playable especially for an artifact theme.
For Limited this works quite well to fuel
Metalcraft and help bring out some of the bigger
artifacts in the set. The only choice for
removal is going to be some kind of artifact and
an artifact creature if possible as the bulk of
the set is artifact based. Semblance Anvil
works best the earlier in the game it is played
and makes a horrible topdeck later on which
weakens it considerably and any card exiled is
likely to be the only copy available in your
deck, so choosing carefully is more critical
than in Constructed formats. A good first
choice in Booster and an easy inclusion for
Sealed, but the power is a bit more subtle than
some of the flashier cards in the set.
