Luck Bobblehead – Fallout
Date Reviewed: April 1, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 2.00
Casual: 4.25
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4.00
Commander [EDH]: 4.13
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
There is definitely some overlap between players of Magic and enthusiasts of other hobbies which involve rolling dice – roleplaying games, of course, and tabletop wargames. I often wonder whether having one or more of those hobbies alongside Magic affects a person’s response to dice-rolling mechanics. Magic does tend to encourage you to try and be in control of everything the entire time, to the point that we have a deck archetype named “control”. But the real world isn’t like that, and perhaps rolling a die every once in a while is a timely reminder. Or maybe it was always just to have some way of resolving combat where players will get caught if they try to cheese it or use loaded dice.
Regardless, Luck Bobblehead really plays into the concept implied by its name, though Magic’s obsession with control means that an alternate win condition involving dice is not too likely to take off in tournaments. The Bobbleheads are also a little over the mana cost that’s usually optimal for constructed-tier mana artifacts. Having said that, it’s still a decent way to generate Treasure and a great way to roll dice whenever you want to for other cards’ purposess. And I just have a feeling that someone out there is waiting to prove something with Open the Vaults and Krark’s Other Thumb (for the casual tables with the latter). The Bobbleheads are also a fun and thematic addition to most any Fallout-themed deck; and if you try hard enough, you can just about have a deck where every card has Vault Boy on it in some form!
Constructed: 2
Casual: 4
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
“You win the game” is always a fun bit of text to see on a card, and Luck Bobblehead certainly rewards you for getting lucky. The bobbleheads were all stat boosters from Fallout, and while luck is often a game’s “dump stat”. the luck payoff looks alluring. I will mention that there are exactly seven unique Bobblehead artifacts, and so this is possible on paper…but seeing as how you’re counting on getting a specific result seven times, each one a 1/6 probability, I would not bank on getting a win this way.
That said, the other functions of this card are fine. It’s a three-mana mana rock, which isn’t too awful a rate for Commander, and it even taps for any color. If you have no need for the mana that way, you might be able to generate more for later with treasure tokens; a 50% chance of treasure isn’t terrible, and a big mana cache can facilitate later explosive turns.
In sum, play this for being a mana rock, not for the win condition. It’s a decent enough mana rock.
Constructed: 2 (decent for Commander, not so much for Legacy)
Casual: 4.25
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
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