Tinker - MTG Card of the Day #4

Welcome to MTG Card of the Day, where I show off one rad-as-heck Magic: the Gathering card, explain what I think makes it so cool, and share some interesting facts. You don’t need to know anything about Magic! Just have an appreciation for cool fantasy art, nerd history, and potentially broken game mechanics.

“‘I wonder how it feels to create balanced cards.’ -Unknown designer of the Urza's Block team.” - CovetousDragon

“ So, waitasec, you're telling me that when I play this card that I have to also sacrifice one of my artifacts? The ability better be pretty freaking amazing... um... waitanothersec... you're telling me that I get to get ANY artifact in my deck and I can put it straight into play?!??!?

Holy crap!!! Did they even playtest this card?!?!?” - Malachorn

So, look - I’m not a designer. It’s easy to sit back and backseat criticize MTG design decisions. Sometimes a simple card can completely break the game when used in combination with something else. Sometimes supposedly “overpowered” cards end up being a bust. Magic has more than 23,000 cards. There isn’t enough play testing on Earth to identify and address every possible potential balance issue. 

But it’s clear as day that Tinker is and always was a completely broken, insanely overpowered card from the moment it was printed. How did this happen??? And it wasn’t even printed as a rare! It was originally printed as an Uncommon in the Urza’s Legacy expansion back in 1999. 

The problem - Tinker allows you to easily put a card into play without paying its casting cost. For many of the most powerful cards in the game, their power level is balanced out by being extremely expensive to cast (meaning you can’t cast them until the late-game), or forcing players to make another big sacrifice to bring it into play. Tinker lets you bypass these drawbacks very simply and easily.

Not only do you get to play any artifact for free, you also get to fetch it from anywhere in your deck. The effect would already be pretty crazy if it let you play a card for free from your hand, let alone search it out from anywhere, basically letting you pull out your “I win” card at will.

Everyone makes memes about how Tinker lets you play a 11 attack 11 defense indestructible Darksteel Colossus on basically the third turn of the game, which is completely ridiculous and in most instances just instantly wins the game. But Darksteel Colossus didn’t come out until 2004, five years after Tinker was printed.

So you could make an argument that Magic’s designers didn’t anticipate that Tinker would be used to quickly and easily bring ultra-powerful Artifact Creatures into play way too early in the game. But the problem with this line of thinking is that there was already an 8/8 artifact creature printed just one expansion before Tinker, which was another obvious target to be Tinker’d into play early.

Even ignoring how Tinker can cheat powerful artifact creatures into play, there’s any number of other ultra-powerful artifacts that combo up effectively with it.

Tinker is (of course) banned from play in almost every official MTG play format, and is Restricted (meaning you can only have just one in your deck) in the almost-anything-goes Vintage format. Just like Black Lotus.

Have a hard you want to see appear in MTG Card of the Day? Leave a comment and lemme know!