Pointed Discussion

SORRY MATE? TEL-JILAD JUSTICE? aw yeh you got me good, in the ares hole

What's that? Oxidize? sure, you got me, got me good you dirty blind jungle cat.

Too expensive, of course. But definitely nor useless, like Sorrow's Path or Wood Elemental. There have been games when I have wished my Noble Hierarch, Eternal Witness, Harmonize or something else were this instead. That has never been the case with the truly sucky cards of Magic - this is just outclassed, not bad per se.

Awesome name and flavor (tarnish is a force of nature). Just too bad this name had to be used on a 3-mana green Shatter instead of on Naturalize, which is so much > than this.

It has just been confirmed that this will be in From the Vault: P00P

look to naturalize instead more options at a lower price win win

1/2 star
I can think of three better green artifact destroyers right off the top of my head
there's crumble, oxidize and if you need to 86 enchantments as well use naturalize

An odd bit of history from the days before Color Pie was altered to give us Naturalize. Back in the Weatherlight-era environment, this was one of a tiiiiny handful of green spells that could destroy artifacts directly. The high cost seemed justified back then.

These days this card is pretty bad. Oxidize blows it out of the water.

Also, it's an absolute shame such an awesome name got wasted on a card like this.

Hydrogoose's and DaaNz' comments are within 9 seconds of each other. Conspiracy?

Doesn't even have cycling like Scrap? Suckish.

Could be worse.
It could be a sorcery.

One of the more attractive portraits of Hanna.

Context is everything. At the time green's artifact destruction was rare, expensive or with drawbacks - this was before Naturalize was in green's pie, so this was a costly Shatter for green. Still, this was not a great card, even for its time.

Welp... It's strictly better to have than Naturalize if you were Mindslaver'ed....

Green already had Crumble way back from Antiquities (and it became a staple, finding its way into Revised edition), so there was no reason for the design team to make a card like Verdigris anyhow. Crumble is far superior; the difference between G and 2G is huge for instant-speed removal. Letting your opponent gain a couple life is a worthy tradeoff. Also, you could always Crumble your own artifacts to gain life in a pinch. Oh, and Crumble stopped artifact creatures from regenerating, too.

There's no reason to print strictly-worse versions of "off color" effects. Shatter and Disenchant might be better than Crumble overall, but at least Crumble wasn't completely inferior to either card. Things are much more interesting with each spell having its own advantages, instead of one thing being a cheap inferior knockoff of something else.