Mishra’s Foundry – The Brother’s War
Date Reviewed: January 6, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.63
Casual: 3.50
Limited: 4.00
Multiplayer: 3.00
Commander [EDH]: 3.13
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
This card is almost Mishra’s Factory in name, and almost Mishra’s Factory in function. It’s a testament to just how powerful the Factory is that you can add one to most of its mana costs, and limitations to one of its key functions, and it still comes out as a good card. The Foundry retains many of its famous ancestor’s advantages, like entering untapped and attacking very early, and will thus play many of the same roles. And that clause about attacking Assembly-Workers seems odd, but it signals that you want to be aggressive with it, whether in Standard or in cube formats you design yourself (stalemate is often the enemy of fun).
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 4 (on top of how good creature lands usually are, there’s at least one non-land creature in The Brothers’ War with the right type for its buff)
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3
The text on Mishra’s Foundry looks familiar, doesn’t it? More or less, it’s a nerfed version of the rather infamous Mishra’s Factory, one of the first creature lands and one of the most powerful for many years (and one that sees fringe play to this day). In particular, its animation cost and buff cost are both higher (and it can’t do the same trick Mishra’s Factory would use to block as a 3/3), and the efficiency of Mishra’s Factory was its biggest selling point.
That said, a nerfed version of a card is still playable enough, and for all its faults, Mishra’s Foundry is in a perfect set for it, with the ubiquitous Powerstone artifacts running around to make things interesting. It’s still a decently-efficient creature land that resists removal, and the ability to buff other copies can prove useful in a pinch when you’re trying to muscle across the finish line. It won’t crack formats where Mishra’s Factory is legal…but Pioneer and Standard are not such formats, and it’s certainly an effective card on its own merits in those formats.
Constructed: 3.75 (it’s in a good format for it)
Casual: 3.5 (usually better to run Factory, but Foundry can help out as a sort of plan B (or even helping plan A))
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3.25
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