illakunsaa wrote: ↑3 years ago
I'm honestly surprised to see how little play this card sees. Only 2% at edhrec.
Its not a card that is just universally good, it requires a specific build of deck even more so than Open the Vaults or other mass reanimation cards, even more so than Living Death.
Living Death is good in a wider variety of decks for a number of reasons. First, its in the best color to take advantage of every facet of its effect. Second, its easier to set up plays where Living Death works as a one sided board wipe stapled to one sided mass reanimation. These two feed into each other, as being in black enables you to fill your yard and nuke your opponent's yards to set up the blowout. Even without building around it, Living Death is still often a bomb play, just because there will be many times where casting it will put you in a better board state and your opponent's in a worse one. Effecting creatures makes it easier to take advantage of, and makes its effect more impactful. There are more cards that care about creatures leaving play than artifacts, more cards that care about creatures entering the battlefield than artifacts, and more and better ETB and LTB abilities on creatures than on artifacts.
Scrap Mastery, being in red, has fewer ways to take advantage of the effect. You can add another color to make it easier, but you can also do that for Living Death. There are fewer occasions in regular play where you will want to nuke all your opponents artifacts AND be able to return a bunch of your own than there are with creatures. If your running an artifact deck that doesn't build around the gy, then you will usually have more artifacts you care about in play than in the yard, whereas if your running a creature deck that isn't built around the gy your going to see you gy fill with dudes over time just based on regular gameplay. While Living Death is good in any black deck with creatures, and only gets better when built around, Scrap Master doesn't just require a red artifact deck (which is more rare than a black creature deck), but the subset of Red artifact decks that are built around either sacrificing artifacts or the gy. Its basically an auto include in those decks, but those decks are fairly rare, so as a result Scrap Mastery ends up being ran only as often as the decks it works in.