Vintage Restricted Card Returns In March Of The Machine! – Analyzing Monastery Mentor

We had a big March of the Machines debut stream a few days ago, and with that, plenty of cards to look at! In the deluge of new cards to look at, we’re getting some really powerful reprints as well! Let’s take a look at a card too good for Vintage, Monastery Mentor!

Monastery Mentor is a three mana 2/2 with Prowess, nothing too impressive there. That said, whenever you cast a spell, you get a 1/1 token with Prowess as well! Since in Vintage you can cast an obscene amount of spells in one turn, this turned out to be a bit too strong for the format! That said, how strong is this in modern day Standard?

VERDICT

While this is too powerful for Vintage, it’s definitely an acceptable power level for Standard. The biggest issue I have with the card is the turn you cast it. If you cast it on curve. you have to untap with it to get the value from it and it’s unfortunately very easy to kill with even cheap removal spells like Play with Fire or Cut Down. That said, it’s rarely right to cast Mentor on curve for that exact reason. While it may not be easy to get value from it, if you are able to cast a spell or two with it, it’s absolutely insane. Cards like Young Pyromancer and Third Path Iconoclast are powerful and they just generate generic 1/1s, a token generator that produces 1/1s with Prowess is substantially more powerful. Once you get a few tokens on board, if you have a few spells in hand, it’s very reasonable to kill the opponent from a pretty high life total. Furthermore, while this doesn’t have to do with Mentor inherently, Convoke coming back into Standard is perfect for this style of deck while it’s easy to get a large amount of bodies on board to help generate mana.

While I lauded the power level of the card, again, the biggest issue with it is how easy it is to kill and how it needs additional spells to really show its value. Compared this to cards like Fable of the Mirror-Breaker and Wedding Announcement which do plenty on their own and you can see where the problems arise. On top of that, you need a very specific deck to make Mentor work as if you don’t have an extremely high density of cheap noncreature spells, this will do very little.

Overall, while this may not be as strong as some of the other options, it’s likely that this can spawn an archetype all its own on the power level alone.

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