Pointed Discussion

While pure lifegain is usually considered bad, artifacts which slowly give you life can be useful. This can help refund the life used to pay for cards like sign in blood. While not quite as effective as the Mirrodin cycle of lifegain card, this does have its uses. If it affected all players, it would probably be somewhat playable.

Ugggghhhh. I would have been plenty happy with another year of the ring cycle. I would actually argue that these are even worse than the original lucky charms, since they cost 1 extra and don't activate on spells your opponents cast. The pseudo Landfall is different, at least...

With Lilly this is the best of the cycle in limited maybe with sanguine bond as well. It still is awful though. At least it isn't another lucky charm I would rather have three worse cards than more of those horrid things..

I don't quite see the point. If an opponent keeps attacking me, and I play black, then I kill his stuff. I don't play lifegain to try to even out the damage he deals.

Card:
Staff of the Hotel Magus 3

Whenever a Hotel Magus or a Dementia Chef come into play under your control, your opponent has to act like an Innistrad bellhop and show you to your room

Cumulative Upkeep: Your bellhop curses you for complementing the 'decor'

Flavour Text: They thought they had never had that many guests in a fortnight. They were very wrong.

Man, the rings from M13 were WAY cooler than this garbage. These cards are a huge waste.

The only thing they are good for is being sands of delirium in mental magic. My friend and I have started playing 'pack wars' with mental magic rules. You get 2 of each land, and throw them into a deck that is only those 10 lands, and the contents of 1 booster pack. Mill, naturally, is really broken, so this card will be silly for that.

I can see this working quite well with Sanguine Bond.

If this and the rest of the cycle tapped for mana of the colour of the staff, they would be borderline playable. As is, this cycle will make no one happy and it makes you wonder if Wizards just threw in whatever trash they could think of rather than putting actual decent cards in M14.

Well, there actually is an In-World good explanation for having the -mechanic- of Charms exist in some form:

All Planeswalkers have "Loyalty" that kind of acts like Toughness.
And we have Life Totals that kind of act like...Life Totals.

Imagine if you were a Real Planeswalker. You would never actually use your Lifegain Artifacts in battle. They're just not ever going to be appropriate or efficient unless they are a one-shot drinkable potion, or a VERY MAGIC vial super-charged 5-hour Life Total.

But things like that are pretty expensive. Here at Wizard School, on Plane (X), sometime shortly before your spark is about to ignite, you practiced studying books of lore in ancient languages how to cure your afflictions and wounds after Adventuring. You do that by drawing on the Mana of your preferred Source, and or casting spells that match your Alignment.

If Planeswalkers were RPG characters, they'd gain 1 HP for each mana in their mana pool and the end of the turn or something. It would be practically the direct opposite of Mana Burn. Mana Burn would make sense for a situation like an X-spell that you juiced up to X = 6 to kill a 3 or 4 toughness creature. You'd totally take Mana Burn then for exploding an overlarge spellbomb, or if you were in a Rhystic Battle, and you had to juice pure mana into a block? You'd take Mana Burn for each point of Mana you had to use to Counter Target Spell. Then Rhystic Battles would actually be Fun and less pointless ^_^


So I've ALWAYS loved the Flavor of the Charms even though I think they pretty much always always suck to put in your deck even if you're White that Likes To Gain Life, or Red that Maybe Needs To.

Another reason to dislike these cards, aside from the poor effect: Daniel Ljunggren just copied and pasted the same hand into all five pictures, then tweaked the background and staff (the easy parts to draw). Bah, lazy art.

Costs too much.

I'm not a fan of this type of cards either, but just so you know, this was featured as a 4-of sideboard card of the winning Grand Prix deck (GP Beijing 2014).
I'm not going to pretend to "know it all", but that goes to show that some cards, even such as this, have their place, depending on the metagame you're playing in.

Four of these in sideboard of a winning decklist of a Standard Grand Prix (Beijing). Probably deserves more than 1.9 stars :)

Pure sideboard material, but it's a lot better than its current rating. 2.5/5, maybe even 3/5 if it keeps making strong showings like it did in Beijing.

Holy cow, this crummy little core uncommon is an important part of Standard in Black Devotion decks! After the Staff is dropped, those decks will consistently gain two or more life per turn, while playing exactly what they want to anyway: Swamps and black spells. Wasting three mana is a big deal against aggressive decks so it's only a sideboard card, but it stops burn decks better than a brick wall.

Sideboard card for red burn when nothing else is available.

The significant part of this card is that it triggers off a swamp, which means you gain as much as 2 life per turn early on, allowing you to afford your own Herald of Torment, Underworld Connections, and other bleedy things.