Today we are going to discuss Stoneforge Mystic and why it should not have been printed in its banned form. Let's analyze the card: A 1 / 2 creature for 1W certainly is a playable creature but by itself, nothing special. Looking at the table from last time, White cards had the fewest banned cards and creatures rarely get banned. So far, nothing special here. At this point, let's analyze a fictional card. Take a minute and ponder this card:
As printed, what are your initial impressions of Chalice Seeker? Probably nothing special. If you received this in a limited event, you definitely would play this card if you also received a game-breaking artifact. It is unlikely that this card will ever see serious consideration in the constructed environment. Only if there was an artifact that cost 7+, and then as a way to get the artifact into play instead of just collecting mana dust.
Now let's look at an alternate version; Chalice Drinker:
Way more powerful, wouldn't you agree? This card begs for someone to find a way to abuse it and even marginal artifacts will see more play with a reliable method of bringing them into play earlier and more consistently. This would be true for limited as well as constructed. Some of you are probably groaning at the would-be prospects of seeing yet another meta game dominated by artifacts and artifact-hate.
While Chalice Drinker is not functionally equivalent to Stoneforge Mystic; it is close enough to draw comparisons.
When looking at the table of banned cards, we see a battery of cards which were deemed too strong for Magic if there was a tutor or fetch effect enclosed. While this does NOT mean that there should NEVER be able fetch or tutor spells, it does indicate one must be extra-careful in testing the card.
Elvish Piper is a fetch card that rarely sees any play. Why is that? Elvish Piper is a 1/1 for 3G which is a rip-off whereas a 1 / 2 for 1W does not. You could even play Stoneforge Mystic as a bluff card to get an opponent to waste a kill spell on it.
Elvish Piper's fetch effect brings out a creature on turn five (5), which in a green deck, is mundane. By turn five (5), green should be able to hard-cast any creature costing seven (7) mana.
But mana savings is not the only consideration: it is reliability and what one is tutoring for: As creatures are not generally game-breaking, there is little reason to fetch for them. Fetch cards are strong only if the card that is fetched is a game-breaker, and fetch cards makes the deck more consistent and less random.
I discovered this out when playing against a Piper deck and after realizing I should hold my kill spells for what is fetched and not the Piper itself. So I let my opponent keep his Piper which he cast on turn 8 or so and I waited for him to scroll through his library and telling me that he didn't have anything in his deck that could help him win that game. Now this was a person who designed the Piper deck to have answers for various decks. This told me that until there were strong creatures, cards like Elvish Piper will be relegated to the dime bin.
Compare this to Stoneforge Mystic which retrieves strong artifacts in a very reliable and consistent manner. Wizards countered that because this was a fragile 1 / 2, decks would have little trouble removing this.
Really? How does white remove this? How does green deal with this? Even the vaulted blue would have trouble with a turn two (2) Stoneforge Mystic.
The problem was not the card itself, but how inexpensive it is. If it had cost 3W, would it have been banned?
Next time we will discuss the other banned card: Jace, the Mind Sculptor.
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