Thorn of Amethyst Artifact Card in Magic the Gathering

Series Summary

Magic: The Gathering is a role playing card game invented by mathematician Richard Garfield and introduced to the RPG market in 1994 by Wizards of the Coast. Since then, MTG has become so popular that its rosters boast over 6 million players worldwide. Perhaps some of this attraction is a by product of the mythos that Magic borrows both from classic role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and the body fantasy and science fiction literature. But part of the game’s major appeal is its logical complexity. Intermediate and advanced players often employ strategies on a level akin to chess, running multiple decision-consequence threads while adjusting for the historical and characteristic playing styles of an opponent to determine their best play. The rules of the game and the logical implications of any given card’s instructions can develop decision making abilities in players, who essentially are training to be able to solve game theory matrices on the fly—a challenge for even the most avid Magic gamer.

In this free Magic: The Gathering video series, learn how to use the cards from the artifact deck. This often mechanical/technological class of cards allow players to use abilities with little to no regard for the color of mana used. Learn how to play to the strengths of the artifact deck, as well as exploit the weaknesses of the other players’ artifact cards in these short, informative Magic card tutorials.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Lopez with Expert Village and, today, we'll be discussing artifacts from Magic the Gathering. Artifacts is one of the blocks that is actually colorless, do not count as a color and are not represented on the actual face of the colors for Magic the Gathering. But, all artifacts are meant to work with each individual colors and themselves. And, now, I'm going to discuss Thorn of Amethyst. Thorn of Amethyst is from the artifact color. Which is not actually a color, it's just an artifact, black. It's actually colorless. And all mana paid for artifacts is usually going to be colorless. We have an artifact. It's from the low end block. It is a rare, as you see here. Thorn of Amethyst costs you two to put out and what this does is, that this artifact stays in play until it is either destroyed or dealt with. And, non-creature spells cost one more to play. So, that's any spell that is not a creature spell, including, this artifact itself is not a creature spell. So, if you were going to play this again, it would cost you three to play instead of two. But, this is very, very important if you're playing heavy spell, IE domination decks, discards decks, direct damage decks, anything that's not creature oriented will have a hard time with this artifact because it costs one more, per spell, that they're going to play. Which means, they have to play everything later in the game than they normally would have."