168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering’s Brothers’ War was fought between two of the most powerful artificers in its history: Urza, and his brother Mishra. Both p💞ractically strip-mined Dominaria in their decades-long conflict to gain the resources needed to build endless armies of robots, golems, and other automatons.

RELATED: Magic: The Gathering – The Best Artifacts In The Brothers' War

As the conflict grew, the soldiers got bigger, which is represented by Magic’s prototype mechanic. A tool to throw artifact creatures onto the battlefield quicker than normal, understanding how it works can be quite tricky. Here is everything you need to know about prototype in Magic: The Gatheri🗹ng.

What Is Prototype?

Woodcaller Automaton by Ryan Pancoast
Woodcaller Automaton by Ryan Pancoast

Prototype is an alternative casting cost found on specific artifact creatures.

As of The Brothers’ War, every creature with Prototype has two things in common: they can either be past for a high generic mana cost, or a smaller cost that includes coloured mana – its prototype cost. The prototype cost also always results in a smaller, cheaper creature.

Other than the colour and “size” (a phrase only found in reminder text that means “power and toughness”), a creature cast for its prototype cost retains every other part of the card, including its name, types, and abilities. For example, Blitz Automaton costs seven generic mana to cast as a 6/4 creature. Alternatively, you can choose to pay the two generic, one red prototype cost to cast it as a 3/2 instead. Both the &ldqu🌱o;hard-cast” seven generic version, and the prototype version have haste.

Blitz Automaton

As prototype is an alternative casting cost, it is bound to the same rules as mechanics like overload and mutate. If you’ve got any effect in play that reduces costs – such as Foundry Inspector or Saheeli, Filigree Master’s artifact reductions – they will also apply to the prototype cost. However, if something allows you to cast a card without paying its mana cost (such as with an Omniscience), you cannot cast the prototype version, and must play the larger, regular version.

Regardless of which version of the creature spell you cast, its mana value will always be the one found in the top right of the card, not its prototype cost.

In Commander, prototype costs contribute to the card’s colour identity, regardless of how you cast it. Blitz Automaton may be a colourless card for any other format, but in Commander it is considered red and can only be used if your commander has red in its identity.RELATED: Magic: The Gathering's Showcase Alternate Card Frames, Ranked

How To Use Prototype

Autonomous Assembler by Slawomir Maniak
Autonomous Assembler by Slawomir Maniak

As you’d expect from the lower costs, the big benefit of prototype is that you can play creatures much sooner. Paying eight mana for something is a big investment at any point in the game, only paying three for a Fallaji ൩Dragon Engine means you can get a 1/3 fl꧟yer out much sooner.

A lot of creatures with prototype have effects that scale off their🥀 power and toughness, meaning you’ll make a bigger impact if you can cast for the full cost. For example, Cradle Clearcutter taps to produce green mana equal to its power. You can cast its prototype for a 1/3, or hold out to pay six mana for a 3/6 instead – producing more mana at the same time.

Ephemerate

Prototype creatures are also excellent targets for flickering, as doing so will return them to the battlefield as the original, full-fat version. Considering flicker effects can often be inc𝕴redibly cheap, such as Ephemerate’s one white mana, this is a way to get massive creatures into play way before you’d normally be able to. The same also applies for graveyard recursion, so finding ways to dump prototype creatures into your graveyard to bring them back could be a great play.

How Many Prototype Cards Are There?

Rootwire Amalgam by Leon Tukker
Rootwire Amalgam by Leon Tukker

As of The Brothers’ War, the set prototype debuted in, there are 18 creatures with prototype. Technically, all 18 of them are colourless, however if we count the prototype casts themselves, you’ll quickly see green is the most popular colour for the mechanic.

There are two black, three white, three red, four blue, and six green prototype🧔 cards. There are no multicoloured or colourle𒐪ss prototype casting costs.

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