Powerstone Shard is a card that has been on my mind for the longest time. It’s one of my favorite cards to brew around with in Standard and has led to some of my coolest decks. As rotation is getting nearer, I’ve been starting to think about it in other formats and have struggled to find a home for it. It’s not quite on the power level of Modern or Legacy, and Pauper doesn’t have the best supporting cast for it. (Although I will probably end up making a Pauper Powerstone Shard deck in the future). There is one format, however, that is the appropriate power level and has all the supporting cards a Powerstone Shard could need. That format is Commander.
There is one small problem with Powerstone Shard in commander. Only being able to play with 1 copy of the card makes assembling an army of Powerstone Shards significantly more difficult. Fortunately, Commander has such a wide card pool that we can get around this problem. My solution is to copy it as many times as possible. Using effects such as Phyrexian Metamorph and Clever Impersonator, we can continually create more copies of the card and generate a huge amount of mana.
A 100 card singleton poses another challenge in actually being able to find Powerstone Shard. It’s very unlikely you will be able to naturally draw yourself into it, so to fix that we use tutors. Trophy Mage, Fabricate, and Whir of Invention all help us to find Powerstone Shard, while at the same time, can find us other cards if Powerstone Shard is not what we need. Once you generate a ton of mana, Whir of Invention can get you anything in your deck at instant speed.
Another question we should ask is why? Why should we try to break a card that is specifically designed for non-singleton formats? The answer is to simply have fun, and do something silly. Assembling one Powerstone Shard after another is satisfying, and counting how much mana your 10 Shards can produce gives a great sense of accomplishment. But there is a practical reason too. Through the use of cards like Cogwork Assembler and Mechanized Production, Powerstone Shard turns into a wincon while also generating us a ton of mana. With Cogwork Assembler and a minimum of 15 mana (sounds like more than it actually is) you can make infinite mana with Cogwork Assembler, and then use that infinite mana to make infinite Cogwork Assemblers! And once we make 8 Powerstone Shards, we can win the game through Mechanized Production.
As fun as Powerstone Shard is, it’s not perfect and once opponents realize what you are up to they may start to destroy it. Fortunately, Powerstone Shard is largely replaceable in the deck. Using cards like Gilded Lotus instead of Powerstone Shard still lets you generate tons of mana. Sink all that mana into a huge Saheeli’s Artistry, or even an Earthquake and kill everyone who has a lower life total than you. Thank you all for reading, I hope you have a great week and an amazing Tuesday!
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