Pointed Discussion

howling mine is always interesting in multiplayer. Not really all that good but it certainly makes it more fun.

This was the first "no duh" permanent I thought of when I saw Zedruu the Greathearted spoiled.

Howling Mine ought to come back in M12, or M13. whenever they decide to rotate Beleren.

I love this in EDH with Font of Mythos and Archmage Ascension.

Anybody know a good way to keep this tapped for everybody's turn except your own?
I'm thinking it could be nigh impossible especially since I'm running an Unwinding Clock

@Fenizrael and ICEFANG13: Clock of Omens works perfectly with this, even if you have Unwinding Clock as well.

Recall that the untap step happens before anything else. All you need to do is activate Clock of Omens during your opponents' upkeep steps, targeting Clock of Omens (it doesn't say you have to target a tapped artifact) and tapping Howling Mine and Clock of Omens to pay the cost. The clock untaps, the mine stays tapped, and you're good to go. If you're not playing Commander, note that you can do this with one Clock of Omens for any number of Howling Mines.

@ Fenizrael

Clock of Omens would be my choice, but probably isn't as good for you because of Unwinding Clock.

Relic Barrier does exactly what you want it to do, as long as you don't mind a lack of other uses.

Icy Manipulator is probably the best choice, but only if you have mana ramping, not a lot of other players, or use artifact lands.

EDIT @Artscrafter I know that, but the reason why its not as good for this deck is because untapping things with the effect is much less useful with Unwinding Clock then it would be in a deck without it.

I used to hate this card.
Then I started running Spiteful Visions and Storm Seekers (yeah, I know!).
I like it much more now.
In fact, I have been put on the ropes by someone who had a howling mine out, and they died the turn they were going to crush me because without a howling mine, they would have been at 1 life.

I generally like using Lodestone Myr to keep this tapped. That is all.

We all shout, "Yes!" when this comes into play. Whoever played it always gets either first or second because nobody wants to kill the howling mine guy.
Also, beautiful with Consecrated Sphinx.

I was playing the Izzet deck on Duels of the Planeswalkers, online against Tezzeret's deck. They got three of these out. Izzet is counterburn. I had Niv Mizzet, the Firemind on the field, and proceeded to stomp them ruthlessly into the dirt.... Good times!

This is great in discard decks, when you need your opponent to have a steady supply of cards in hand. The extra draw you get is icing on the cake =)

Politically, this is one of the best cards in the game. The neat thing in multiplayer is, if you play this card, you've likely built a deck which is helped quite a bit by it, or needs the draw power from artifacts (W/R control comes to mind), so much so that the cards your opponent('s) draw are irrelevant to some degree. In multiplayer, most people see this played and stop attacking the guy with Howling Mine. While that's cool, it can be a pretty bad decision if that deck is a combo deck searching for it's last combo piece to win, ect.

Still, a fun card and if nothing else will make a game interesting.

Goes really well with Ral Zarek.

I was playing a casual gauntlet with some friends, and one of them asked if she could borrow my collection of Mox cards. I said sure; we stuck little pieces of Post-It on the front of mine so we'd know which ones belonged to me, and off we went. Turns out she had an "overdraw" deck with three copies of this card plus plenty of land-and-creature wipes (so she just used Mox for mana while the rest of us were screwed), plus cards like Black Vise, Font of Mythos, and Kederekt Parasite to continuously screw us. And as impossible as it was for us to beat her...we couldn't stop LAUGHING! We all looked ridiculous juggling hands of 20 cards. It's just so much fun to play with this.