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by Christopher Askwith Magma Mine      Exploring this useful Visions uncommon With a great deal of diversity in the cards available in making a deck, it is obvious that you will want to have a card that can give you a win. A card that acts as a clutch, but isn't banned from play; you still want to be able to use it at the tournament level. In light of this requirement, my advice is to get your hands on the Magma Mine - a gem of a card found in the Visions expansion set. The Magma Mine is an artifact with a casting cost of one colorless mana. For four colorless mana, you can put a pressure counter on the Magma Mine at any time. You may tap and sacrifice the Magma Mine at any time to do X damage to any creature or player, where X is equal to the number of pressure counters on Magma Mine when you set it off. The one apparent problem with this card is that it takes a good deal of mana to pump the thing up. Still, though, the card is useful in a variety of decks, such as : All-artifact decks A few Magma Mines wouldn't hurt in an all-artifact deck, since the only land you should be using in an all-artifact deck are the Urza's lands and Mishra's Factory. So, you should have no problem getting the mana to put a respectable number of pressure counters on the thing. Power-Surge decks Have a lot of untapped mana and don't want to get hit by the power surge? Well, just pump it into the Magma mine to avoid the damage and do more damage to your opponent later. Burn decks Burn decks generally means plenty of mana via the Mana Flare. Mana you don't spend on spells can be put into the Magma Mine, increasing the amount of damage you can do. Birds and Elves decks Magma mines go well in green decks which have plenty of mana producers such as elves or birds or wild growths. With all this mana, you should have no problem putting out enough mana to set off a Magma Mine and do an appreciable amount of damage to your opponent or one of his creatures. Of course, magna mine is not for all decks. Black decks with Dark Rituals can provide heavy mana for the Mine, but all the black mana provided by the Rituals are better put into Drain Life spells. White and blue are known to be slow as far as heavy-cost spells go, and so a Magma Mine is not so good, except to draw away Disenchants and other such spells from more important artifacts. A Magma Mine used for that purpose can be pumped up a lot only to be blown away, and still not have a real impact in a white weenie deck. So, go out and get those Mines! Hopefully, some day, they will help you out when the pinch comes or deliver the fatal blow to a seemingly formidable opponent! [ Back to April 1997 Table of Contents ] [ Back to Beyond Dominia ] Magic: the Gathering is a Registered Trademark of Wizards of the Coast