This card has been the insidious power supply
for any number of creature decks themed around a
single creature type. These decks tend to do
pretty well against other creature decks as long
as the other guy’s deck doesn’t feature the same
sorts of creatures as your own. In these
primarily weenie based decks, Coat of Arms is
normally the most expensive card in the deck. I
do not support the use of Coat of Arms in a
limited deck, I just don’t see how you can get
enough creatures of one creature type in limited
formats to make Coat of Arms worth the trouble.
As is fitting a coat of arms, this card is
basically the emblem of tribal decks. Tournament
decks don't really care much about creature
types, unless it's Goblins in Extended, which
are too fast to care about turn five, when you
can play this. In limited, it can be really hard
to get enough creatures of a certain type for
this to be relevant, unless you pick up a bunch
of token engines, or first pick Coat of Arms and
then proceed to force an archetype. But then
you're probably giving up better options. In
Casual is where this card really shines.
Especially in Saproling or other token-based
decks, where you can usually put creatures into
play at instant speed and pump up the rest of
your army as well with attackers declared.
Constructed- 1
Casual- 4.9
Limited- 2.3
KC MetroGnome
Coat of Arms
This card was the casual player's dream
pre-Onslaught block. This was the card we used
for tribal games when we built decks around
crappy groups of cards like Elves, Goblins and
Zombies and got called scrubs for doing it. Then
Onslaught came out and actually made those
tribes viable, dominant and allowable
(respectively). Obviously that made Coat of Arms
much better in constructed, and casual players
everywhere lamented the loss of "their" card. It
doesn't see much constructed play now (although
it did in some Snake decks), but giving your
guys a big bonus is nothing to sneeze at. This
card is casual gold, unless your group bans it
for your tribal games. In limited, the
likelihood of actually getting enough of one
creature type to use this is low. But if you see
a lot of one type going around the table, it
might be worth picking this up just-in-case.
Constructed - 2 (in the current environment)
Casual - 4
Limited - 1
