Thrumming Stone – Double Masters
Date Reviewed: August 11, 2022
Ratings:
Constructed: 1.13
Casual: 5.00
Limited: 2.50
Multiplayer: 3.50
Commander [EDH]: 4.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Nobody ever formally taught me how to draft. Even now, after reading a lot of articles about Limited principles, I sometimes just default to picking whichever art I like best. One effect of this was that it took me quite a long time to realize that the rule of a playset being four copies doesn’t apply in draft. If you somehow see five copies of Wandering Ones and want to play them all, you can. That was the idea that Thrumming Stone was originally intended to work with – as you can see from James’ link below, the other cards with ripple were based on the assumption that you picked up enough of them to make a 40-card deck in which a significant percentage of the cards has the same name. But when you’re drafting three boosters of a set as small as Coldsnap, this can happen with other cards too, and Thrumming Stone offers you a major bomb for the times it does happen. Throwing seven of almost any card into play at once can win games, even when it’s something with Grizzly Bear stats.
Of course, Thrumming Stone has another side to its existence, where it adds a level of danger to casual decks built around the cards whose rules text says that you can have any number of them. Note that ripple triggers when you cast a spell, not when it resolves or comes into play or whatever – most decks based on a single named card are weak to counterspells, but then again, most everything you know about conventional Magic goes out the window when things like Persistent Petitioners are involved.
Constructed: 1/5
Casual: 5/5
Limited: 3/5
Multiplayer: 4/5
Commander [EDH]: 4/5
If you’ve never seen ripple before, that’s not a surprise; it was a Coldsnap mechanic that gave you the chance to get multiple spells for the cost of one, revealing cards from the top of your library and giving you any additional copies of them for free (which chained off of itself, so you could potentially get a lot of value for one spell cast). The mechanic itself appeared, as “ripple 4”, on exactly 5 cards in Coldsnap, none of which saw any Constructed play whatsoever that I know of.
And then we have Thrumming Stone, which is far more sought-after and desirable than the others. It itself does not have ripple 4, but it gives it to all of your other spells. Of course, this does work with things like Relentless Rats, Rat Colony, Shadowborn Apostle, Dragon’s Approach, and Persistent Petitioners; yes, this means you can, after casting one, cast every copy of them out of your deck unless you get massively unlucky. So the combo decks that rely on drowning your opponents in vermin, demons, or dragons (or just milling them all out on the spot) make excellent use of this card, and while it’s a clunky card with dismal Constructed prospects, the thrill of winning the game on the spot with a timely Thrumming Stone into something else is a pleasure beyond measure.
Constructed: 1.25 (when your gameplan is to rely on a five mana artifact that requires a bit more set-up, there’s something wrong with the system)
Casual: 5
Limited: 2 (might shine if you build around it, but it’s still a hard sell)
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 4 (it only has a couple toys it plays with, but it plays beautifully with them)
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