Pointed Discussion

This is obviously an EDH-specific card, as the format tends to scale everything up in size an order of magnitude. For any other format, I'm a bit leery of any artifact acceleration that doesn't start helping you until after you've reached six mana.

Now, I know someone will come along and drop mention of Master Transmuter, or some other method of getting it in play quickly. To them, I say: why not cut out the middleman, and go directly for Blightsteel Colossus then?

Mono red with 4 mana flare, 4 caged suns, 4 fanning the flames, 4 shattering pulse and a few conjuror's bauble and chromatic sphere. let's see that's 24...maybe some lightning bolts (28), disintigrates (32) fireballs (36) and rolling thunders (40) oh oh, and 2 elixirs of immortality just because.

Burn.

I always disliked that Gauntlet of Power helped everyone. Well, I guess this is for me.

I can see some serious play with gran architect

Its Treasure Mageable as well.

One of my most favorite arts in all of magic

They're really pushing Commander with a lot of these cards, aren't they? What with the printing of new auto-includes? Eh, I'm not complaining, just need to get 1 for all of my decks.

SPECTACULAR ART. elves & dragons would be my choices

That is a very, very large cage.

Yeah, this card is pretty much win. In green its easy to get out, but with red's new geosurge and blue having the architecht and what not this has a lot of potential and enables Jin-Gitaxias for sure.

Gauntlet of Power upgarded?
Yes please!

geosurge will get it out for four mana and seething song can get it out if you have four mana

My deck is going to get sooo powerful- what with this and Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger entering the scene.

I was able to drop this 3 times in the pre release. Helped me, but will help me much more in casual play.

Retardedly convoluted combo of the day: three Caged Suns and a Filigree Sages can go infinite with Liquimetal Coating, and it's all Extended-legal!

>_>
>_>
>_>

Yeah, this entire set was basically designed solely for EDH. So much otherwise-unplayable crap like this.

On first sight this seems too expensive for what it does, but just as I was about to trash it I thought of some good uses.

Mono-red: get it out with geosurge, then power up firebreathing? moltensteel dragon I'm looking at you...

Mono-green: never mind buffing Elves... think of how big your genesis wave will be!

So they split Mirari's Wake into 5 pieces and cast a piece into each of the suns of Mirrodin? Nice.

Upping it's CMC by one and making it colorless? Very Nice.

How massive would that cage be, to be 2 or 3 times the diameter of a sun?

For all those commenting on the size of the cage, here's a bit of a history lessen on mirron. Its suns are actually glowing balls of mana. They actually orbit the planet as opposed to the planet orbiting them. So really, they're more like moons than suns. Yes, the cage is still very big, but no, it is not comparable to making a cage around our sun.

hmm a nice boost, too bad i use colorless artifacts mostly LOLZ

Well, this just helps every non-artifact, non-multi color deck. This isn't that bad, run this in a green elf deck you already bringing it out by turn 3 if you do it right, even at that, its searchable with treasure mage!?!? well now you just made everyone cry on the inside i give it 5/5 for being very flavorable, able to be used in any deck, and just a "win more" in most decks that doesn't really need to run it for anything but to help bring their creatures more power boost.

Oh the things I would do with you if I had you and a prototype portal... Just thinking of the mana acceleration there makes me giddy.

Gauntlet of Might Is arguably better for red, but very hard to find. (I happen to own 9 of them lol.)
Gauntlet of Power More all-around GoM for 1 more.
Mirari's Wake Much better if you're running those colors. Works only for you, and for every color/creature, instead of just one in particular.
Caged Sun Great for everything else, if you can ramp into it or trick it into play.

Grand Architect.

According to the Kardashev scale, which measures an advanced civilization's level of technological advancement, there are three degrees of energy mastery. Type I civilizations have mastered the energy resources of a single planet, while Type II have mastered the energy of a solar system (and Type III have mastered that of an entire galaxy).

It's comparatively simple to become a Type I civilization. The human civilization, at this point, are considered to be at 0.72 (with 1.0 being Type I, 2.0 being Type II, etc.
), which shows how we're actually rather close to achieving it, supposedly within one or two centuries. However, in order to become Type II, vast megastructures need to be completed in order to capture and utilize the energy of a solar system, where the major source of energy is the central star.

One of these kinds of megastructures is the Dyson Sphere, which starts out as a series of thousands of satellites positioned around a star in order to collect it's energy, and grows until it becomes a solid structure completely encompassing the star. Between these two stages is when the satellites are linked together, to form a massive web, or cage, around the star, similar to the one depicted in this art, except most likely far less ornate.

Of course, the mirrodin suns are nowhere near the same scale as our sun, as they were all ejected from within Mirrodin's core, and the outer shell of the plane is only 1400 Km circumference (the earth's circumference is 40,000 Km, while our sun's is 4,379,000 Km). Even so, the idea of creating such a massive structure around one of Mirrodin's suns is rather impressive.

Number of New Phyrexia boosters purchased, total: 4
Number of Caged Suns found: 2

I never find the ones worth lots of money.

Played against a girl playing a monored deck with these, some red mana producing myr to help get it out faster, some Dragonspeaker Shaman and lots and lots of big nasty dragons.

Got very nasty about turn 5 or 6.

In green, ramp to this, then play Vorinclex, Voice of hunger. Proceed to play whatever the hell you feel like and stomp all over their face.

This could easily go into a 2 color deck. Simply run lots of duel lands.

I'm a tad surprised that the two colors mentioned the most here are Blue and Green. I'm going to get one of these and stick it in a Black Red mana ramp deck with olivia and possibly her big little sister Drana. For standard ways of getting a lot of one turn manna quickly see: infernal plunge and Seething Song. For Legacy culling the weak and dark ritual.

Pricey, but if you can get it off, no spell is beyond your reach.

Honestly, one of my favorite cards ever, I run it in so many diff decks

I think it's cute that the caged sun in the art is the green sun, the color for mana ramping and the color that probably needs it the least.

Combos with March of the Machines, Life and Limb, and Conspiracy.

Great art on a great card. i use it in a mono- EDH deck with Gauntlet of Power and Crypt Ghast. The deck usually has more than enough mana.

http://nicolascage.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Teletubbies-Sun.jpg
Phyrexia was definitely here.
The real caged sun

Someone took a Conjurer's Bauble to the next level.......

First I want to say this: Hell yes, this card is awesome, and will probably be the answer for my troubles of creating a functioning dragon deck. A bit expensive though; could have been 5 mana, but I guess the price-tag would have sky-rocketed then...

That said, let's think about this freaking megadothos-sized cage:

Some of you refer to it as being "only" 2 - 3 times the size of the sun. But that is not true. It is waaaaaaaay larger if it is to appear like that on the sky.

1) Light scatters and is spread, so the actual sun is much smaller than what we can see with our eyes. Think of a bright lamp; it looks very bright and big, but actually the tungsten that is the actual light source is very, very small. Same applies for the sun.

2) If the cage was close to the sun it was surrounding, like in the picture, it would be drowned in Contre-jour (look wiki) and the cage would be black, and most probably not be wisible due to the strong light from the sun. So for this cage to be visible and bright-lit like it is here it has to be far from the sun, and closer to the planet being lit up by something from our direction of view.

So my point is: That cage is not just much larger than the sun: It is way, way, WAY larger than the sun it is surrounding taking up a huge amount of the space between the planet and the sun. Question is: Who made it, and for what purpose? And why is it producing mana and boosting creatures?

Someone who knows light physics even better may continue explaining this in detail. :D

Sizes: The "suns" of Mirrodin are an almost complete misnomer. The Suns are balls of mana ejected from the Lacunae of the planet. The Lacunae sometimes eject mana at other times, creating a Beacon effect, as seen in the Beacon cycle. As you can see in the Beacon of Tomorrows, https://www.wizards.com/mtg/images/daily/ftl/ftl75_beaconSplash.jpg, the blue lacuna is small. Easily small enough for someone to say, fire an arrow across the Lacuna.

Repeat:
Mirran Suns = Balls of glowing mana
Mirran suns came out of Lacunae.
Lacunae are of varying size, but the Blue one isn't even on a geographic scale, let alone astronomic.

I'm not able to estimate the sizes of the other ones, but a Caged Blue Sun could be as small as a couple hundred feet across.

Also, this card has no interaction with Suncrusher. Something feels off about that.