Looking Up at the Yosemite Valley by Albert Bierstadt (1865-1867). Omniscience by Josh Hass.
In last week's blog post I touched upon the divide between competitive and midrange decks in my discussion of how I built Neheb, The Eternal. In today's post I'm going to dive a little deeper into those murky waters. Today I'm going to be writing about a card that players seem to either LOVE or view with slight regard and maybe a hint of disdain.
That card is the enigmatic...
Mirage Mirror
Lots of cards get a varied reception when they are initially released, with some players declaring it an absolute auto-include in every deck and others saying it's underwhelming and only worth looking at if you have a clear plan for how you're going to use it. That is certainly the case with Mirage Mirror.
This card looks amazing. For the low cost of 2 mana (of any color) it can become ANY artifact, creature, enchantment or land???
Sign me up!
So why are some people saying it's just not that great? How on earth can we have such varied responses to this little piece of cardboard?
I think the answer has an awful lot to do with how we look at EDH.
It's a Matter of Metas
We all play EDH, but that doesn't mean we're all playing the same game.
Some of us are playing games that rarely hit turn 6, and where our decks cost many hundreds or even thousands of dollars. They are finely tuned machines designed to go off and end games with incredible consistency and alarming speed.
Others, myself included, are more apt to find ourselves at tables where players play lots of "bad" cards, our decks rarely cost more than $200 - often much less, and part of the appeal is that games can last over an hour and have lots of interesting and even dramatic twists and turns on the way to someone eventually winning.
The reality is that both groups aren't playing one game but we also aren't playing two games - we're playing an expansive and varied format of Magic that includes everything from the worst 100-card piles of garbage to the finest and fastest tier 1 combo decks ever built. It's not a binary of EDH and cEDH, it's a scale from the saddest pile of jank to the most amazing deck you could ever imagine. It's also not a straight line from bad to good - there are all manner of nuances along the line from combo to stax to voltron to group slug, group hug, tribal and more.
Most players don't see that kind of variety in the games they get to play. As an example, I've only played against true tier 1 deck once (I lost), and I've played hundreds of games against well over a hundred different people in my relatively short time with the format.
People have their playgroup or playgroups and they tune their decks to win but also to have fun in the context of the decks they play against.
They have a view of EDH that might include what they read about online and see in EDH gameplay videos, but that is largely formed by the games they actually play. They view Commander through that lens, and will make judgements about new cards with the information they have available to them. Some have a wider worldview but many will praise or trash a card based upon what they personally know to be true about EDH. That knowledge is based upon their personal experiences - which is heavily biased by the games they have played.
Mirage Mirror is not a bad card. It's also not an auto-include in every deck. It's a tool, like any other Magic card, and it can be used to great advantage if you play it strategically and play in a meta in which you can take full advantage of the flexibility it provides.
Today I'm going to do my best to discuss its limitations and explore its possibilities.
What Mirage Mirror Can't Do
I have a bad habit. I sometimes read a card and my eyes go to the good parts and I gloss over the other stuff that's less convenient. You know, little things like "only once per turn" or "at sorcery speed". Little things added in to balance a card out sometimes get lost at first and only later do I realize the card isn't as amazing as I first thought it was. I've gotten better at RTFC but still every now and then I find myself not looking at the details because they happen to turn what I thought was a great card into a good or even mediocre card.
In Mirage Mirror's case, reading and understanding the card is particularly important. Let's look at the card's text again.
2: Mirage Mirror becomes a copy of target artifact, creature, enchantment, or land until end of turn.
Pretty simple stuff, eh? So what can't this bad boy do?
You can't do multiple activations on the same turn *
So the first thing you can't do is turn magic mirror into one cool thing and later on in the turn use its activation to turn it into something else.
That was my first thought - can I chain cards like Karametra's Acolyte and Gilder Bairn into an infinite combo?
It's great to think creatively, but this won't work. The mirror loses its ability when it transforms so you can't just gain infinite mana through any combination of transformations that would require the stack to resolve in order to continue your combo.
Did you notice the asterisk (*) above?
* You can't do multiple activations in the same turn EXCEPT that you can if you work with the stack. More on that later!
You can't break the basic rules of Magic
OK, maybe this didn't need to be included, but here goes.
If your opponent has an Eldrazi Conscription on their commander, you can't just pay 2 and have Mirage Mirror become an Eldrazi Conscription aura.
Actually - that's not even true.
You CAN do that, but you wouldn't want to do it.
If your Mirage Mirror were to become an aura that wasn't attached to a creature, there's no extra text on the card saying you get to do anything except turn it into an artifact, creature, enchantment or land. That means your aura would be floating out there in the middle of the battlefield for about a nanosecond. Maybe less. Then as a state-based action the aura would be put into the graveyard. I don't believe you could respond in any way by using an instant to attach the aura to a creature.
Likewise you can't make Mirage Mirror a copy of your commander without also having Mirror Gallery in play because the legend rule would force you to sacrifice one of them.
Again - this stuff should go without saying but sometimes it's safer to cover all the bases. When in doubt - make sure your plan for Mirage Mirror isn't just clever - make sure it also works within the rules.
It can't provide effects past the end of your turn
There will be times where you'd love to make your Mirror a copy of something and have it stay that thing until your next turn. Unfortunately, the only way to pull that off is to save up 2 mana for every player's turn where you want to use it that way. In a four player game you'd be committing 6 mana just to maintain your Mirror as some other permanent. You'd be better off saving 2 mana and hoping you'll only need to copy a thing once, if at all.
It can't provide upkeep triggers
From my experience permanents that have upkeep triggers usually read "At the beginning of your upkeep". When you have multiple permanents like this, you can put them in whatever order you like, but they will always occur before you get a chance to turn Mirage Mirror into one of them. That means that I don't think Mirage Mirror is going to wind up being a clever way to get a permanent that will give you amazing upkeep triggers.
You might think that you should be able to untap and before you move to your upkeep phase, pay 2 to turn the mirror into something else. As I understand it, AS SOON as you do anything after untapping, you're in your upkeep phase. All beginning of upkeep triggers occur immediately after untapping, so there's no window for Mirage Mirror shenanigans.
It can't provide an ETB trigger
This one falls under the category of "well, duh!" but I'll include it anyways. Mirage Mirror enters the battlefield as Mirage Mirror. It then turns into stuff... without entering the battlefield again. You can make it a copy of Avenger of Zendikar if you really want to, but it's not going to have quite the impact of casting a real one.
Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal but there are a lot of ETB effects in our format and at some point you'll probably gaze longing across the table at a Chancellor of the Forge, Terastodon or Saskia the Unyielding and wish there were a way to use your Mirror to get their ETB.
Sadly, there just isn't - at least not that I'm aware of.
It can't transform
This might not seem like a big deal, but if you're looking across the board at Thing in the Ice, you're out of luck. Only permanents represented by double-faced cards can transform.
It can't help you keep up with cEDH decks
Another thing Mirage Mirror probably won't do is help you keep up with a competitive deck. It isn't a counterspell and it's highly unlikely there will be anything on the battlefield it can copy that will let you counter a spell on turn 1, 2 or 3 if someone playing a tier one cEDH deck is "going off". It's equally unlikely that there will be a permanent on the field that can act as removal in those key early turns when highly tuned competitive decks tend to go off.I should note that I'm far from an authority on how to stop top tier decks from beating you. I have to assume you just need to run stuff like Krosan Grip, which has split second so it can't be responded to. Mirage Mirror can't become a copy of Krosan Grip for you.
I suspect that the players who most quickly and vehemently declared that Mirage Mirror is terrible might tend to be those players who have to deal with top tier decks on a regular basis. They know Mirror isn't going to do enough to help them win and their reviews of the card reflect their view of the format. For them it's just not good enough.
What Mirage Mirror CAN do, but isn't particularly good at
So clearly the list of things Mirage Mirror can do is going to be way longer than what it can't do - but that doesn't mean every option you have available to you is a good one. There are a bunch of cool bordering on amazing things you can do, but they might not be worth the effort.
Crazy Stack Shenanigans
Remember our Karametra's Acolyte / Gilder Bairn example above?
What if you tried to use the stack to pull off some crazy combo ramp shenanigans?
Let's say you have 6 devotion to green and 10 mana available from lands & other mana dorks with Mirage Mirror, Karametra's Acolyte, Gilder Bairn and enough other stuff on the field to give you that 6 green devotion.
With your 10 mana, you could put on the stack that Mirror Transforms into Karametra's Acolyte, transforms into Gilder Bairn, transforms into Karametra's Acolyte, transforms into Gilder Bairn and transforms into Karametra's Acolyte. The stack is always last in, last out, so we resolve these transformations in reverse order. In this case that doesn't seem to matter, as we've set up our stack like a palindrome (the same forwards as it is backwards), but it is worth noting how the stack works.
So Mirror turns into Acolyte. You have 6 devotion to green, so we can tap it to put 6 green mana in our mana pool. Then it turns into Gilder Bairn and we can spend 3 of our 6 mana to untap it. It will turn into Acolyte again and we can tap it to add 6 more mana, giving us 9 mana in our mana pool. Then it turns into GIlder Bairn and we can spend 3 of our 9 mana to untap it. It turns into Acolyte one last time and we can tap it to add 6 mana to our mana pool, leaving us 12 green mana for all of our trouble. Since we started this process with 10 mana, that basically was a whole lot of screwing around for very, very little gain.
That doesn't mean Mirror is a bad card It just means that this example isn't an effective way to get a benefit out of it.
That also doesn't mean a cleverer player than I won't find a way to do crazy stack shenanigans and make it work, but my first idea clearly is a big old nonbo. There are lots and lots of cleverer players than I, but we'll get to that later.
Counter Sharing
There are a lot of different kinds of counters that have been created over the years. There are net counters. There are scream counters. There are even winch counters. I've seriously considered buying a copy of Atraxa just so I can build a crazy counter types deck.
One interesting thing about counters is that they stay on a permanent for as long as that permanent stays on the battlefield unless some other effect were to legally move or remove them. That means that if you were to find a counter type that one permanent ("Thing 1") could create in huge quantities (but to little benefit) and another permanent ("Thing 2") could get a huge benefit from - you could reasonably turn Thing 1, Thing 2, and Mirage Mirror into a very clever plan.
The problem of course is figuring out what those permanents and that counter type would be, and then finding a way to get your Mirage Mirror and both permanents onto the battlefield at once or at least in the right order.
The basic idea is Mirror becomes Thing 1, gets tons of counters, then becomes Thing 2 and you somehow win the game or at least get to do cool stuff.
My mind went to charge counters first, as there are lots of cards printed over the years that have used them. In the time between starting to write this article and researching what other folks have thought up for Mirage Mirror I didn't think of anything amazing on my own. Other folks have though and we'll get to that later.
What Mirage Mirror CAN do and is pretty good at!
Now it's time to look at ways that Mirage Mirror really shines as a card. It's clearly got lots of people excited about it, so there has to be a reason, right?
The one caveat about this is going to be that you obviously have to leave 2 mana open to be able to use it. That sol ring is going to be spoken for if you've got Mirage Mirror on the battlefield - you might as well just slide one partially under the other so you don't forget. Some decks don't mind being down 2 mana for the rest of the game (or until your Mirror gets broken) but some do. Ramping is going to be pretty helpful in any deck that wants to take full advantage of what this crafty little artifact brings to the table.
Protecting Itself
Split-second spells like Krosan Grip will always be a problem but anything that doesn't have split-second is something you're going to be able to respond to. Did you save that 2 mana like I told you to? Good, because you're going to need it.
Someone goes to destroy your Mirage Mirror with a spell that destroys or exiles artifacts and enchantments? Pay 2 mana to turn it into a creature.
Someone then goes to cast Swords to Plowshares on your creature? Well now you're out of luck because you just turned it into a creature - and that creature no longer has the ability to pay 2 mana and turn it into something else.
Still - the ability to dodge the first bit of removal in a turn isn't nothing.
With a little luck you'll dodge enough removal that opponents will stop trying to break your Mirror and might even miss opportunities after you've transformed it. If they're experienced players and you've burned them with it before, you can bet they'll have their eyes peeled for a chance to destroy or exile it.
Protecting You
How often do you play at a table where someone gets even a single pillowfort enchantment out and suddenly everyone else is swinging at each other and the dude with the Propaganda, Glacial Chasm, Ghostly Prison or Sphere of Safety is just sitting back without a single care in the world?
When you're in this situation, the other players may know they can't attack the player behind the pillowfort but they're OK with that. They'll hopefully deal with them later. They often wind up tapping lots of mana to do fun stuff and will swing at someone without any protection.
What that means is that if you play your cards right you can hold up 2 mana and when the most aggressive or dangerous player decides to attack you, you can get that Propaganda effect just when you need it. They'll have forgotten they needed to save some mana to pay to attack you and you'll be safe for a turn. Of course, if you'll need it on multiple turns that's going to get expensive but it's still a pretty great way to piggyback on someone else's pillowfort.
You can also turn your Mirror into a the best blocker on the field at the drop of a hat. If there's an indestructible creature on the field you should be able to block with your Mirror all day long, or at least as long as you're able to pay for it.
Mana
This isn't always going to be a good option, but there are often EDH games where someone has an amazing mana source on the battlefield. If it's a Mana Vault, a Thran Turbine, Grim Monolith or a Basalt Monolith you can pay 2 mana to tap for 3 mana. That's not much but it's something. If you're missing a color but you have plenty of mana, there's a good chance there will be something out there you can turn your mirror into so you can get your missing color. It might seem like a waste, but there are times when color fixing can win or lose you the game. Mirage Mirror is here to help with that.
If you're looking for a bigger impact than just an extra mana or a missing color, you have to ask what kinds of decks you play against.
Is it worth 2 mana to turn Mirage Mirror into a Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx? How about a Gaea's Cradle?
Utility Lands
Dark Depths is an amazing land that turns into a fantastic monster - Marit Lage. Mirage Mirror will gladly do that for you, if only for one turn.
Maze of Ith is another amazing land that can protect you from any one creature you can target with its ability. For 2 mana, if there's one out there you can now have one too.
If that's not impressive enough, what if you had a way to return artifacts to the battlefield every turn and had a Strip Mine on the battlefield? Pay 2 to turn Mirror into Strip Mine, blow up a land and do it again and again and again. Sure, it's not fast but it's pretty nasty if you're into land destruction and don't want to actually have any friends in your EDH playgroup.
Winning More
Most EDH decks are going to have some cards that are great and that aren't legendary. Doubling Season is wonderful. Two of them... well, it's fair to say that it's at least twice as good - maybe even four times as good. Same goes for an awful lot of cards - especially ones like Doubling Season, but also Panharmonicon, Anointed Procession, Parallel Lives and Fire Servant.
While I've heard the argument that you should avoid "win more" cards because that's essentially putting the cart before the horse - in this case I think this is a key function of Mirage Mirror.
Different Things at Different Times
One of the biggest benefits that Mirage Mirror brings is flexibility.
Early game it can help with color fixing or maybe some minor incremental ramp to help you get key pieces out.
Mid-game you can use it to copy some pillow-fort cards or maybe a huge attacker so you can survive to get to your wincon.
Late game, you can copy something you or one of your opponents has put on the battlefield that in the right context is either a wincon by itself or is a wincon in the right situation.
This is really the biggest thing about Mirage Mirror. You never know what you'll need and when you'll need it, but if it's on the field and doesn't have hexproof, for 2 mana you can have a copy of it. The fact that you aren't locked into your choice for the rest of the game is actually pretty huge.
Cleverer Minds Than Mine
In my research for this post, I came across redditor MageKorith, who made some fantastic suggestions on how to abuse Mirage Mirror and absolutely nailed what I only just touched upon.
Using the "stack trick" you could have Mirage Mirror become something with firebreathing, and then something with infect. After the first transformation had resolved but before the second hits, you pump the creature up enough that it if had infect it would be lethal damage. Alternately you could have it become something like Pestilent Souleater or Vector Asp, which have the ability to gain infect until end of turn, and then turn into something huge (or pumpable) so you can swing lethal. It doesn't matter how you do it so long as when your Mirror swings it's both big and has infect.
MageKorith also hit upon my charge counter idea. He nailed it by suggesting that the Mirror could become something like Gemstone Array and then a Darksteel Reactor to win the game. I run Darksteel Reactor so I'm a little embarrassed I didn't think of it on my own, but I'm happy to give credit where credit is due, and in this case that credit goes to him.
You can go see MageKorith's comments and other ideas about Mirage Mirror at the link below. https://www.reddit.com/r/EDH/comments/6i8w6y/hou_mirage_mirror/
Final Thoughts
I still think the cEDH crowd is right about passing on Mirage Mirror. I'd guess that their games are too short and too brutal for Mirage Mirror to really become a major player in the format.
I also think it's a fantastic card. It wants to be in decks where it's going to have a good chance to be able to have an impact without depending upon your opponent's cards.
The bottom line is that it could go in practically any deck that isn't in a meta that's too competitive. I was going to try to choose two of my decks in which to put the two copies of Mirage Mirror, but I don't yet have that figured out.
Next week I may try to dive into some of the cards that will get spoiled over the coming week but that will have a lot to do with what gets spoiled. I've also got an article about a "day in the life" of me running my EDH league in mind, though it may wind up coming across as the ultimate "selfie". Still, I think it might be interesting.
Thanks for reading & see you next week!