Bottled Cloister – Ravnica Remastered
Date Reviewed: January 23, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 1.37
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 3.13
Multiplayer: 2.50
Commander [EDH]: 3.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
There was a time, long ago, when it was harder to get artifacts that filled holes in your deck, such as drawing cards in colors that are less good at it. Before that, of course, there was a time when it was easier, but the designers dialed back on things like Howling Mine because some players didn’t like things like the symmetry or the sometime difficulty in getting it to work for you. Bottled Cloister is actually in the middle of that first long-ago time I mentioned, when the power levels were lower but the puzzle elements were still fairly difficult. If you want to have no cards in hand at a time you can plan for but not use things like One With Nothing, this is probably your most effective option; but it’s still a four-mana artifact that doesn’t have an immediate impact, which wasn’t necessarily a great proposition even in Dissension Standard. Later, once Umezawa’s Jitte had rotated and people forgot that they might need to bring artifact removal in their sideboard, some people used it to draw extra cards in decks like black-red Sligh, where people didn’t expect it.
Nowadays, most of those concerns are far from people’s minds and there are more purely powerful options for what Bottled Cloister does. It’s still an interesting option that is worth remembering now and then, because there are few cards that do exactly what it does – some decks might be able to take advantage of its quirks.
Constructed: 1.5
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3
Bottled Cloister is an interesting card with a strange bit of cross-set intention from its original set. The idea is that you get an extra card on your turns if you give up having them on an opponent’s turn. For decks that burn through their resources, that’s not an awful plan, and it does quickly turn on the hellbent abilities that Rakdos cultists in Dissension were sometimes fond of. Unfortunately, the wording on Bottled Cloister makes it a bit exploitable: if it gets blown up while cards are tucked away, those exiled cards are gone forever, doubly so since face-down exile has even fewer interaction avenues.
As far as “budget” card draw engines go, though, this can work in a pinch, and it can sometimes shine with hellbent or the fan-named “heckbent” (one or fewer cards in hand) mechanics. But this feels a bit too high risk for the middling reward on offer, and I can’t say I’m enamored with it.
Constructed: 1.25 (too slow, too fiddly, too fragile)
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 3.25
Multiplayer: 2
Commander [EDH]: 3
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