Sword of Body and Mind

[Kino]

No this is not in the wrong spot.

Click Me!

I don't speak or read Spanish, but this site seems to indicate the existence of a card by this name within the upcoming Scars of Mirrodin set. From the page:

El set From the Vault: Relics contiene quince artefactos probados en batalla, seleccionados de toda la historia de Magic: The Gathering.

Esta set de edición limitada también contiene Sword of Body and Mind, una potente arma de la edición Scars of Mirrodin.

I can't confirm that this is real, but if it is, I for one would be extremely excited at the opportunity to get some really unique, powerful equipment into the draft pools. If not, I propose this is the name for the sword when we do make it in the custom cube.

[fadedoasis]

Makes sense, the first two were in Darksteel.

[Kino]

Officially Spoiled by Wizards at Comic-con.

Sword of Body and Mind (3)
Artifact – Equipment (Mythic)
Equipped creature gets +2/+2 and has protection from green and from blue.
Whenever equipped creature deals combat damage to a player, target player puts the top 10 cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard and put a 2/2 green wolf token onto the battlefield.
Equip: (2)

[massimiliano]

yippie for also being in from the vault to arbitrarily throw new cards at us

[fadedoasis]

Mythic makes me sad.

[Mike]

what the hell...? Why is it mythic, and why is it randomly half irrelevant?

[lummia2]

Also, it apparently has a watermark on it: forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=259029

Sooo hopefully there is some enemy colored or enemy tri things going on. Or it could just be some factions between mirrodin peeps vs. phyxrexian doods.

[Kiki]

The Mythic is pretty lame.

[akshay4876]

This is not as good as the other 2 swords since the mill ability is kinda useless. When you are giving some damage and making tokens for more damage. I find it kinda weird that you would want to mill someone. It doesnt feel as techy as the other ones.

edit: Mythic is a great marketing strategy since the cards are more rare and worth more. Wizards win andwe pay $50 for a single card.

[fadedoasis]

Akshay, WotC doesn't see any of that $50. WotC sees a portion of the $4 for the booster pack. Probably about $2. WotC doesn't sell singles.

[massimiliano]

But Wotc does see the $2 for the 100000 boosters you open trying to open the card

[vultanphase]

Consider at wholesale price, (and using m11 for a template, which had 15 mythics), you have about three of any given mythic in every ten boxes. Now, through a middleman, you're looking at $90 per box. To get a playset of a given mythic, 13 boxes and 12 loose packs have to be opened. For every four of any given mythic in circulation, $1200 has been spent by the consumer on Magic.

That is why fuck powerful mythics.

To be fair, there's other cards in those packs, but I feel like my point may still stand.

[zrealm]

That is indeed correct for all big sets, colin - good example of the math

[Mike]

While that $1200 figure is staggering, it's still true that on the flip side, when there are stupid-value cards like that, the people who do a lot of drafting get a better return on the 'cost' of drafting (aka opening product). Often people who are competitive enough to need the $50 mythics do a ton of drafting as well, or can share cards with other people, so really the market price only affects people who only buy singles.

This argument is obviously not absolute, I just want to point out that it is a good thing when the secondary market aggregate values are consistent with the retail price of sealed product.

Of course, that being said I did still prefer when you had many $5-12 cards instead of 3 $50 cards...

[akshay4876]

I just feel wrong spending more than $5 for a piece of cardboard. Mythics make a card 8 times more rarer therefore increasing the price. It makes standard a very expensive environment. Though the pros could draft and get a profit like Mike does; however, there is a hidden cost to that. The people who lost took the burden. And I am not saying that that is a bad thing. The people knew what would happen if they lost. It's a gamble and that's what makes it the more fun. They will try to get better, but most likely they won't. I liked drafting at RPI because it was cheap and had a low gamble. You will get 3 rares; maybe crap ones but still something that you could use. And if you do good you will get something really good.

So I guess what I am trying to say in a really long winded way is that I don't like mythics. I am trying to play standard and like the format. It is impossible to be any good at it without cash. I know that I could put a few baneslayers and jace v2.0 and make the deck better. Instead i put in jace v1.0 or vess and blue titan (my favorite one). I am not a spike but i dont want to put money in a deck and have it loose.

[fadedoasis]

"Mythics make a card 8 times more rarer"

False. Any specific Mythic is only two times rarer than any specific Rare. There are more Rares in a set than Mythics.

An example of why this number-fuckery exists: Imagine a bag. Inside the bag are pieces of paper with words on them:

Hat Hat Chair Chair

Apple Apple Bone Bone

Shirt Shirt Wheel Wheel

Cup Cup Ghost (S) Magnet (S)

There is a 1/8 chance you will pull a tag marked (S). However, Ghost is only twice as rare as Hat.

(This does not invalidate the rest of your post. I'm just sick of when people think you will get eight Rite of Replications for each Felidar Sovereign.)

[Kiki]

Um, any individual mythic may be 2 times rarer than any individual rare. That said, in order to get 15 mythics, you must open 120 packs on average. That means the average price of an average mythic is 8 packs minus the average price of 7 average rares.


So when you have the really powerful cards at mythic and the not so powerful cards at rare, you effectively make mythics 4 to 7 times more expensive than rares.

Example: average cost of a rare: about 2.00 or so, sometimes less though, sometimes more. Primeval titan, baneslayer and grave titan cost 50, 30 and 35 on SCG so 115 on 3 mythics. If every other mythic was free, that would make the average cost of a mythic 115/15=$7.67.

On SCG, the total cost of all mythics in M11 is $186 in single form.

Now, the total cost of all nonmythics when bought together was 125 dollars, with a complete set costing 255. That suggests that the 15 mythics are worth more than the rest of the set combined.

Now, this issue wouldn't be so problematic if the average mythic wasn't simply a better card than the average rare. Ok, DoJ, lands are all solid, even a few good rares in there. But it makes me sick to think that a single card someone opens can be worth 2 polluted deltas or 3 goblin piledrivers. That suddenly 15 dollar cards aren't the expensive ones in standard.

And of course, don't forget that for each playset of mythic, you have about 2 playsets of rare.

And of course, the real issue here is that wizards seems to be using the mythic rarity to justify a power creep. Not a huge powercreep, but baneslayer is way better than every angel in the history of magic at its price. Its the best 5 drop white has ever had. Black has never had a better 6 drop than grave titan. Blue has never had a better utility enchantment than jace 2.0

Green has never had better 2 nonbasic fetch than primeval titan.

Whats hurting magic is that they use mythic rarity as a way of justifying doing 2 things on one card when they should just have one.

Baneslayer angel should have had flying and maybe one of those abilities. a 5/5 flyer with lifelink would be well above the white's curve. But then they threw on firestrike and the protections under the idea of "why not, its a mythic afterall"

They print the 3 best cards of the set at mythic rarity, and thats a problem. Also, wizard doesn't turn out cards that turn out to be way better than they were expecting so often anymore. The result is that we don't get really broken uncommons. We used to get top, aether vial, force of will, skullclamp, mana drain. Thank goodness for bolt and bloodbraid elf.

Thing is, there aren't a ton of absolutely crazy uncommons being printed these days. When they made a card that was supposed to be similar to force of will, they made it a mythic and called it mindbreak trap. It could have been an uncommon. Nothing mythic about a counterspell with the possible exception of spelljack.

So far:
1) power level is pushed at mythic
2) increased rarity of the best cards makes it very rough on the magic community. Especially when a set is only in standard for 15 months.
3) I guess this results in the people who don't quit buying more boxes. But I will say that it always irritate me when i look at my good cards and see that I'm playing a mythic and not a rare. It robs some of the fun of playing that card from me because i know its just a gimic, and that its overpriced for its effect because its twice as expensive as it should be.

[akshay4876]

Jul 26, 2010 19:49:20 GMT -5 Kiki said:

And of course, the real issue here is that wizards seems to be using the mythic rarity to justify a power creep. Not a huge powercreep, but Bankslayer is way better than every angel in the history of magic at its price. Its the best 5 drop white has ever had. Black has never had a better 6 drop than grave titan. Blue has never had a better utility enchantment than jace 2.0

Green has never had better 2 nonbasic fetch than primeval titan.

Green: Awesome beatstick+creature
Blue: Great Utility
White: great beatstick
Black: ridicules beastick.
Red: yeah... red gets boned

[Jaksiel]

It's not really full power creep. Creatures keep getting better but spells, in general, are worse. They did this intentionally.

[Godtoucher]

you can't say red gets boned when mono red is still a deck in the format.

[DazBoot]

Lol, red gets boned because it needs nothing else =P