Noetic Scales MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: Noetic Scales provides a persistent battlefield effect that can lead to indirect card advantage. By continually returning creatures to their owners’ hands, you ensure that your opponents must repeatedly spend mana to redeploy their threats, which can effectively nullify their board presence and put you ahead.

Resource Acceleration: This card is ideal for decks focused on resource acceleration. Players who build around Noetic Scales can optimize their mana usage by laying down low-cost creatures or spells, keeping their hand sizes small while their opponents struggle with maintaining a board through the scales’ disruptive ability.

Instant Speed: Though Noetic Scales itself is not an instant, it synergizes well with instant speed interactions. It allows you to adjust your strategies in response to the board state at the end of your opponent’s turn, ensuring you have the smallest hand when the ability resolves. Moreover, this can be paired with spells that opponents cast at instant speed, compelling them to either hold back cards or play into your strategy.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Noetic Scales demands that you bounce creatures to their owner’s hand unless their controller discards cards from their hand. This can backfire by depleting your hand, leaving you in a tough spot especially when facing opponents who thrive on empty-handed strategies.

Specific Mana Cost: Noetic Scales has an activation requirement of a specific mana type, which might not always align with your deck’s color scheme. This can limit the card’s versatility and integration into various deck builds, ultimately affecting its utility on the battlefield.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: At four mana to cast, the scales might seem steep when weighed against other artifacts that activate for less and offer comparable, if not superior, effects. In a game where tempo is king, the opportunity cost of deploying Noetic Scales can be considerable, often prompting players to opt for lower-cost alternatives to maintain momentum.

Reasons to Include Noetic Scales in Your Collection

Versatility: Noetic Scales provides an unexpected form of board control that can be adapted to various play styles. It punishes decks with high-power creatures and fits well into control strategies that maintain card advantage and low creature power.

Combo Potential: This card offers immense synergy with strategies that temporarily reduce the power of your opponents’ creatures, ensuring their return to the hand. It can also work well with setups that encourage opponents to overextend their hand, leaving them vulnerable to your Scales.

Meta-Relevance: In metagames heavy with creature-based strategies, Noetic Scales serves as a unique equalizer. Its presence can tilt the battlefield in your favor against decks that rapidly deploy high-power creatures, making it a distinctive tool for the current competitive landscape.

How to beat

Noetic Scales is an intriguing artifact in Magic: The Gathering that can influence the board state by returning creatures with power higher than the number of cards in their controller’s hand to their owner’s hand during the upkeep. As such, it’s pivotal to adapt your strategy to maintain control over its effects. A straightforward tactic is to keep your hand size considerable to prevent your creatures from being targeted. Low-powered creatures or those with abilities that trigger when they enter or leave the battlefield could also effectively circumvent the scales’ influence.

Alternatively, decks that run instant-speed card draw or flash creatures can manipulate the timing to ensure their hand size is sufficient only when necessary, like right before the Noetic Scales trigger. Cards that allow for no maximum hand size, like Reliquary Tower or Thought Vessel, can also nullify the scales’ condition. Moreover, focusing on non-creature strategies or leaning on abilities such as hexproof to safeguard your important creatures can further secure your position against Noetic Scales. Keep these strategies in mind, and you’ll deftly navigate the scales to keep them tipped in your favor.