Pointed Discussion

A very powerful card, allowing red instant-speed 5 damage burn for 2 mana. Kind of a Goblin Grenade for artifacts, in a block that featured artifact lands. A great example for set designers about how to make a powerful card with a significant but not insurmountable drawback, as evidenced by its presence in many decks.

From a designer's standpoint, this is one of the worst cards ever printed. Five damage to the dome in a set that rendered its drawback null and void...for two mana. At instant speed. As if that isn't bad enough, it was released in the same set as isochron scepter.

You'd think Wizards would have learned their lesson after this extreme cheese was printed, but then they went and released arcbound ravager in the very next set.

This card broke the game and had cardfloppers everywhere looking for new hobbies. I didn't start playing magic again until Ravnica.

As somehow mentioned before, this card has some serious potential.
I love using it most with cards that offset this spell's inherent card disadvantage.
Using a Chromatic Star for the blast lets you draw another card.
Trinket Mage can get you this one - or a -mana artifact if you don't want to spend any mana.
Stoneforge Mythic can also fetch -mana equipment.

This card loves Epochrasite

Give this card a break. It's a lot worse than Fireblast. At least with this card you generally can guess how many are coming. With Fireblast you could start the game on 8 life and not even know it.

Today this might be fair if it was in Scars, for two major reasons:
1. Lightning Bolt sets the norm now
2. There's no artifact lands to ensure that you always have artifacts lying around to deliver to last 5 or 10. You need to work (and engineer you deck) for every blast.

Back then it wasn't, but in a sea of such grave errors like Skullclamp, Ravager, Aether Vial, and Cranial Plating (two of them only because of the extent that they were augmented by artifact lands), the Blast almost seemed like the negligible of the evils. It was still a bit on a broken side, though.

Twincast?

Equinox, this is not a good example for any designer to follow. This card is too strong. I can't tell for sure where the line is between 'too weak' and 'playable AND printable' but the 'too strong' line is pretty clear: Thou Shalt Not Be Better Than Lightning Bolt. Development didn't need to know anything else in the Mirrodin Design file to kill this: It deal more damage than Lightning Bolt, ALMOST more damage PER MANA, AND it's primary features are 'sacrifice' and 'artifact'. They should have learned their lessons about those two words by this point.

Printing a card that literally says 'sacrifice an artifact, deal 1.6 Lightning Bolts' was insane on their part.

I bet Mox Rubies saw a lot of play in Pro Red Decks because of this (Pro Level, not Protection From)

Ah, this makes me recall how nutty Mirrodin Limited was. Loxodon Warhammer was an uncommon, and those things were EVERYWHERE.

Wish the art wasn't stupid.

This is madness!!

Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!!!


Seriously, it being an instant is tremendously powerful. I wish goblin grenade was an instant, even if it costed one more (I play goblins)

This has nice synergy with Mycosynth Wellspring.

Hey Goblin Replica, here's your grenade.

Otherwise knoiwn as Artifact Grenade.