Michiko’s Reign Of Truth Is MTG’s Newest Cranial Plating

There isn’t a lot of setup required to sell you on the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty preview I’m discussing today. Michiko’s Reign of Truth is just priced to move in non-rotating formats. Almost every card that scales power with your artifacts at a good rate is going to hit, and this rate is good.

Michiko’s Reign of Truth lands somewhere between Cranial Plating and Master of Etherium in effect, but somehow is more efficient than either of them. It drops the equip cost from Cranial Plating, granting the same boost a mana cheaper, and it lets you pay the “summoning sick no attack turn” cost of Master of Etherium or a Construct token multiple turns down the line.

The perfect comparison might be All That Glitters, except look at how much better Michiko’s Reign of Truth is against removal. If they kill the first thing you target with Michiko’s Reign of Truth, you choose a new target next turn and don’t fumble an Aura. If they kill all your stuff, you can still just cast the card and wait around for Portrait of Michiko instead of sitting on a dead Aura. All the reward, almost none of the risk. Considering All That Glitters has seen solid play across several formats, you should expect nothing less from Michiko’s Reign of Truth.

So, we have an obviously good card that’s going to make waves in Pioneer and possibly Modern. What are the other cards that go with it to fill out the 60?

Until they ban the card or stop printing new one- and two-drops, discussion of new sets in Pioneer and Modern is going to include Lurrus of the Dream-Den. The other good analogue for Michiko’s Reign of Truth is Nettlecyst, and I’ve spent plenty of time talking about how that card fights against Lurrus for space in Modern. You can’t do the best Nettlecyst thing with the new Saga because it isn’t an Equipment for Stoneforge Mystic and Steelshaper’s Gift, but you can now build all the multiple-Nettlecyst decks as Lurrus decks at a much lower cost.

Is that worth it? There are cards besides Nettlecyst you’re going to have to sideline to play Michiko’s Reign of Truth….. and I don’t even know why I’m asking this question, because have you cast a Lurrus?

I will fully admit some of this list is trying to recapture an era now lost, but there are some impressive truths between the Signal Pests.

Michiko’s Reign of Truth is very effective at magnifying your already-good lands. The Urza’s Saga interaction is just the obvious one where “enchantment land” is basically the same as “artifact land” when totaling up damage with the +X/+X triggers, but Inkmoth Nexus is by far the more interesting one.

The opening hand I presented above is a Turn 3 poison kill, something that was reserved for your best Mox Opal draws when that was still legal.

• Turn 1 Inkmoth Nexus, Springleaf Drum.
• Turn 2 Darksteel Citadel, Ornithopter. Cast the first Reign of Truth for no value.
• Turn 3 animate Inkmoth Nexus on your draw step. Pump it for five with the repeat second chapter. Then play your third land and cast the second Reign of Truth for lethal.

This perfect scenario is admittedly rare, but you can feel the fact Michiko’s Reign of Truth drops the equip cost from Cranial Plating every time the card teams up with Inkmoth Nexus.

This math discussion does bring up one good point about Michiko’s Reign of Truth: the card is at its best if your opponent dies after the second trigger. Making Portrait of Michiko is cool, but it’s slow. You really want to pair the card with an aggressively critical artifact and enchantment count, with the creature as a backup plan when that fails. This also makes the card better in multiples or with Cranial Plating, since the layered pump effects make it much more likely that second trigger turn adds up to lethal.

– me, in the part of this article you read a minute ago.

I guess Future Sight is a Lurrus-compatible effect now. Keep that in mind for all future fun and games with your Cat Nightmare decks.

As I alluded to, the part I’m least sure of with this deck is the spread of cheap artifact creatures. I didn’t see anything that obviously solved the Fury problem, which is best described as the immediate desire to concede the match and drop from the event any time your deck of cheap creatures runs into an opponent casting that card. Maybe you want Stonecoil Serpent to let you better pace threats and sizing if that card is going to be a threat, since trample is almost evasion with the boost numbers we’re talking about from the pump spells this deck has access to.

This lack of finding good options to solve the problems is why I have a lot more Urza’s Saga targets than normal. When you’re looking at Hex Parasite because you have eight Sagas to tick down instead of the usual four of the Urza’s variety, you might be getting too cute with your card choices.

Maybe it’s time to add four Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer to this deck and call it good.

Or maybe it’s time to step over to another format.

The application of Michiko’s Reign of Truth in Pioneer is much less interesting because there was already an obvious Lurrus artifact deck to slot it into. There are even two obviously worse pump effects you can cut for it in Ghostfire Blade and All That Glitters. But some good fiddling with the micro-decisions has to happen.

Bumping your creature curve down a bit is critical. The stock lists prior to Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty had been cutting Toolcraft Exemplar in the wake of Ingenious Smith giving you a bit more long-game grind, but Pioneer is paced such that Turn 2 Reign of Truth into Portait of Michiko landing Turn 4 is a real setup to close out the rest of the game. That play really wants you to have a Turn 1 play to hit with your pump triggers, and more than your baseline twelve copies of that effect would be great.

There’s a chance Michiko’s Reign of Truth makes you want Silver Raven or Hope of Ghirapur over Toolcraft Exemplar as more ways to hook that pump up with evasion. Depending on what cheap artifact creatures get revealed in the rest of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, I can even see cutting the curve down further for more one-drops.

Enchantress players drooling over Sagas that exile themselves on the third step and then return to the battlefield as enchantment creatures. pic.twitter.com/g5okk1NzeZ

— April King (@CubeApril) January 27, 2022

This is a lot of chat about artifacts, but is there a way to build around counting enchantments?

April is probably dreaming too big with the second draw trigger on the transform into Portrait of Michiko, but all my attempts at an enchantment-centric Michiko’s Reign of Truth deck are going to start with Setessan Champion. You want the overlap between the Enchantress thing and just killing your opponent, which has always been that card’s strength.

This does mean you can’t play Lurrus. Bear with me for a minute on that one; it’s called a deckbuilding exercise and we have to give them a fair try.

I won’t be trying this in Modern though. The Affinity-style decks can actually leverage Michiko’s Reign of Truth into a relevantly fast kill; I can’t imagine the Enchantress decks doing that reliably. It’s probably better to lean on pseudo-kills like Blood Moon for your fast wins there.

Historic feels like the sweet spot for setting this up. Pioneer lacks the efficient true Enchantress effect for redundancy with Setessan Champion, stuck with just Sram, Senior Edificer for Auras, while Historic has Sythis, Harvest’s Hand.

Where most of the current Historic Selesnya Enchantress decks are based around the Nine Lives + Solemnity lock, I’m opting to take things in a more aggressive direction to maximize Michiko’s Reign of Truth. It does feel like the current Historic format is a bit light on the generic good interactive enchantments I would want to support this strategy, though, and the Orzhov Auras (Lurrus) decks are already trimming on All That Glitters for raw efficiency and trying to leverage the attrition parts of the deck.

But as the old saying about the weather goes, if you don’t like the card pool in Historic, you can just check again tomorrow. As soon as Historic or any other format reaches a critical mass of efficient artifacts or enchantments with some other payoffs to match, Michiko’s Reign of Truth is likely to be the headline effect those decks are built around.