Arcane Proxy

[Sinis]

Printed recently (at time of recording), Arcane Proxy is in 850 decks on EDHREC (less than 0.5% of decks). This card is the bastard stepchild of Snapcaster Mage without flash, and a higher mana cost (in either mode). The card's trigger irritatingly says "if you cast it", meaning there's no flicker shenanigans to be had.

There are upsides to this card, however. The thing you cast from your graveyard isn't exiled (unlike Snapcaster, Mission Briefing and similar), and you can have an artifact creature with a cost of for for the purposes of Birthing Pod, One with the Machine, etc.

So, is anyone running this? How's it working for you?

[Dunadain]

Pretty sure it still has a mana value of 3 if you cast it for the prototype cost. At least, that's what the reminder text makes it sound like.

[PrimevalCommander]

This mythic is throttled in so many ways. I'm not complaining, because the dual-cost gives it some flexibility, and probably good for standard control decks that want to keep casting cantrips while drop a little 2/1 creature. But for commander I think the restrictions add up too fast for what we want in the creature slot. Yes, you cast the spell for free, but your limited to sorcery speed, capped cmc, cast trigger on creature, the card is exiled, and its power based instead of cmc based, so for 7 we only get a 4 cmc spell. If I wanted a top end, Diluvian Primordial or Torrential Gearhulk does it better. It has some decent tempo on the low end hitting Ponders in the early game, but would Sea Gate Oracle or Augur of Bolas do something similar with blink synergies?

I could see a deck that would play this, but I don't see it getting into all the spell slinger decks due to the above mentioned issues.

[ISBPathfinder]

Let me start off by saying I freaking love Snapcaster Mage and those type of cards. That said, I think they lose a lot of their functionality when moving to commander because a small non evasive body creature isn't useful. In 60 card magic doing things like Lightning Bolt, Snapcaster Mage, Lightning Bolt is something that can clear space for snapcaster to put in work on lowering opponents life totals in a meaningful way or going to their face for six direct and attack for two. This just isn't a thing in commander.

This all said I do think Snapcaster Mage is still playable in commander but I think you also have to get additional value from it beyond just its ETB for it to really shine. When you use it as an equipment carrier, Birhting Pod, Skullclamp it, thats when a cheap value creature like these start to make sense. If you are just getting the ETB and not getting some level of additional value I think these cards are sort of weak these days.

I think Arcane Proxy is harder to make work than Snapcaster Mage and I think Snapcaster is only at the like..... fine but not amazing point for this format.

[JovialJovian]

Lacking flash kills it for me. Overwhelmingly the spells I want to cast with it are reactive instants.
I would much rather they had gone the Torrential Gearhulk route and given it flash, but restricted it to instants.

[onering]

So far I've only run it in Raff Capeshan, because he gives historic cards flash. The deck wants to be reactive, so spending 5 mana to recast a counterspell is something it wants to do, and the fact that you can cast it for 7 if you have it for it to be bigger and cast something bigger is nice. Being an artifact is an upside because at this point it's mostly a draw go artifact deck, with some legends.

[RedCheese]

I thought it wasn't that bad when i first drafted it. They i got to play it....Extremelly mediocre jesus. I honestly i thought it had flying

[DirkGently]

The thing you cast from your graveyard isn't exiled (unlike Snapcaster, Mission Briefing and similar)

The card is very much exiled. It's even more exiled than snapcaster since it's exiled before the spell is even cast, and exiled even if you choose not to cast the spell (or can't for some reason).

Yeah it's a very mediocre mythic.

[Sinis]

The thing you cast from your graveyard isn't exiled (unlike Snapcaster, Mission Briefing and similar)

The card is very much exiled. It's even more exiled than snapcaster since it's exiled before the spell is even cast, and exiled even if you choose not to cast the spell (or can't for some reason).

Yeah it's a very mediocre mythic.

Yeah, it looks like I misread that part *and* the MV cheat. It really has no angles on it, does it?