Against the Odds: Mirrorform (Lorywn Eclipsed Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Today we're heading to our new Lorwyn Eclipsed Standard format to play my favorite card from the entire set: Mirrorform! For six mana the mythic turns all of our non-lands into a non-aura permanent of our choice, which has the potential to do some hilarious (and maybe even powerful) things! What are we trying to do with Mirrorform? Is the card any good? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Mirrorform
The Deck
Mirrorform is an incredibly cool card. It calls back to Mirrorweave, but is so much better since it works with non-creature permanents and the effect lasts forever, not just until end of turn! For six mana, at instant speed no less, Mirrorform lets us turn all of our non-lands into any permanent (except for auras, because that would get weird) we want, including our opponent's stuff!
So what do we need to do to break Mirrorform? First, we need to actually be able to cast it, which means we're playing a bunch of ramp to get up to six mana as quickly as possible. These cards do double duty in our deck because we can use them to ramp into Mirrorform and then since they are all permanents once we cast Mirrorform we can turn them all into something much more powerful!
The second thing Mirrorform wants is as many permanents on the battlefield as possible, which means cards that make multiple permanents (like Biomechan Engineer from our ramp package) go way up in value. Spyglass Siren makes two permanents for one mana, which is solid, but our best way to flood the board with permanents is Obsessive Pursuit. The two-mana enchantment makes a clue when it enters, and then another one on each of our upkeeps (for the cost of one life each), which means we'll at least get two permanents out of it and if we can play it early in the game it's possible it will end up adding 4 or 5 permanents to the board before we cast our Mirrorform!
The other way we up our permanent count is by playing removal that sticks around on the battlefield. Grim Bauble snips early game threats, Momentum Breaker makes our opponent sacrifice a creature and Nowhere to Run can even get around ward, giving us a bunch of ways to deal with our opponent's creatures and slow down their gameplay, and then later all of these cards will (hopefully) upgrade into something busted with the help of Mirrorform.
So let's say we do our thing by ramping into Mirrorform with a bunch of non-land permanents on the battlefield, what are we turning all of our stuff into? One thing I learned while playing the deck is that the answer really depends on the situation, and a decent amount of the time we use Mirrorform to turn all of our random permanents into our opponent's best thing. Remember, the permanents we convert with Mirrorform have pseudo-haste (since they were already on the battlefield, so even when Mirrorform changes them into something else, they still aren't summoning sick), so sometimes we just turn everything into a Quantum Riddler or Ouroboroid or whatever bomb our opponent has on the battlefield and just win the game!
This said, we also have some spicy targets specifically for Mirrorform. Ancient Adamantoise does some crazy things with Mirrorform in multiple ways. First, assuming we can get the eight-drop on the battlefield, turning all of our stuff into it makes it almost impossible for our opponent to kill us for a bunch of turns, since Ancient Adamantoise will eat the damage and leave behind 10 Treasures. These Treasures then give us even more permanents to make even more things with Mirrorform!
We also have Nexus of Becoming, with the idea being we can turn all of our permanents into it during our first main phase, go to combat and draw a ton of cards. Ideally we'll draw into an Ancient Adamantoise that we can put into play as a 3/3 Golem token to make sure we don't die, while also drawing into another copy of Mirrorform to cast an even bigger on the next turn!
Finally we have Demonic Pact. We can make a bunch of permanents and on our opponent's end step turn them all into copies of Demonic Pact and then simply go to our upkeep and burn our opponent out of the game by triggering each of them for 4 damage!
Wrap Up
Since we were playing on early access day the record of the deck doesn't really matter, although we did finish with a winning record overall. More importantly, we did some crazy things with the deck! The wildest was obviously the Mirrorform mirror, which ended up breaking Arena with like 70 Ancient Adamantoises on the battlefield, but we also got some wild wins by making everything Elvish Archdruid, Demonic Pact and even Spyglass Siren (I know it's just a 1/1, but enough 1/1 fliers actually gets the job done!)
My overall impression of Mirrorform is that it might actually be a real card, not just an Against the Odds card. While our deck was built to maximize the hilarity, the more I played with the card the more I realized that it seems pretty easy to use it to win the game with only a handful of permanents in play by copying something like Overlord of the Mistmoors. I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of Mirrorform Control deck develop with enchantment-based removal and the plan of using Mirrorform to close out the game with one big attack after you stabilize the board.
Basically, Mirrorform is awesome! It was already my favorite card in Lorwyn Eclipsed and now that I've gotten a chance to play with it (thanks to Wizards for the free account) I'm even more convinced that this is Lorwyn Eclipsed Doppelgang and a card I'm going to end up building a bunch of decks around in the coming months! If you like doing weird things and winning way more than you'd expect, keep Mirrorform in mind, the card is oddly strong and super fun!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
