Explorer's Scope MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: With the repeated potential to look at the top card of your library and possibly put a land onto the battlefield, Explorer’s Scope can incrementally increase your available resources. This effect, over time, ensures you can utilize every draw to its fullest potential, maintaining or increasing your card quality advantage.

Resource Acceleration: By potentially placing a land card directly onto the battlefield, Explorer’s Scope can effectively ramp your mana without the need for an additional land drop. This acceleration allows you to play bigger threats earlier than usual, which can be crucial for outpacing opponents.

Instant Speed: Although Explorer’s Scope itself isn’t an instant, it triggers at instant speed upon the equipped creature attacking. This allows you to keep up the pace and pressure, possibly advancing your board state during the combat phase, usually a time reserved only for combat-related activities.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Although this doesn’t apply to Explorer’s Scope itself, equipping it does require a card to be in play. Therefore, if a player is required to discard cards and has limited creatures or artifacts to attach the scope to, the card’s usefulness diminishes significantly.

Specific Mana Cost: Explorer’s Scope has a generic mana cost for casting, but its equip cost demands one mana of any color. In a multi-colored deck, this can sometimes be challenging, especially if the mana base isn’t perfectly optimized for color fixing.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: Despite its low casting cost, the fact that Explorer’s Scope requires one mana to equip every time it’s moved to a new creature can add up in terms of resource expenditure. Although the initial cast is affordable, repeated equipping can act as a mana sink, detracting from the player’s ability to cast more impactful spells in the mid to late game.

Reasons to Include Explorer’s Scope in Your Collection

Versatility: Explorer’s Scope is a flexible card that can be attached to any creature. It’s particularly useful in decks that prioritize ramping up and gaining an edge in land drops.

Combo Potential: With this card, you’re able to manipulate the top of your deck and synergize with library manipulation strategies. The ability to potentially drop an extra land during combat adds surprise value to many plays.

Meta-Relevance: In metagames where quick development of your board is key, Explorer’s Scope ensures that you are maximizing your land plays and staying ahead of the curve. By fitting into both aggro and control decks, it remains a relevant card in numerous strategies.

How to beat

Explorer’s Scope is a unique accessory in the realm of Magic: The Gathering, offering an exploratory edge as you venture into the unknown territories of your library. As an artifact, it’s deceptively simple, allowing you to look at the top card of your library whenever the equipped creature attacks. If it’s a land, you may put it onto the battlefield tapped. This capability offers incremental advantage, potentially ramping up your resources round by round.

To counteract this momentum, focus on disabling the equipped creature. Targeted removal spells, such as Doom Blade or Path to Exile, can effectively neutralize the threat before accruing value, leaving the Scope without its essential companion. Another strategy is to address the artifact itself with cards like Naturalize or Shatter, disrupting the opponent’s setup directly.

It’s also important to note that Explorer’s Scope requires a creature to attack for its ability to trigger, which means that maintaining control of the battlefield or keeping creatures at bay can be crucial. Cards that create repeated impediments for attacking creatures, such as Propaganda or Ghostly Prison, can lead to diminishing returns for an opponent relying too heavily on the Explorer’s Scope for land acceleration.

BurnMana Recommendations

Embarking on your MTG journey, the Explorer’s Scope offers more than a peek at your upcoming draws; it symbolizes the endless potential to expand your play. From its subtle board advancement to the thrill of flipping a land card during combat, this artifact equips you with a tool that celebrates incremental growth and strategic foresight. Whether you’re honing an existing deck or looking to experiment with new strategies, incorporating this card can be a game-changer. Enhance your collection and elevate your gameplay with the Explorer’s Scope. Delve deeper into its versatile uses and join the ranks of players mastering the art of exploration. Deepen your MTG knowledge and tactics with us.