With The Brother’s War set now in full swing use in the Standard format, we check on some of the popularly used new cards from the set on the MTG Top 8 website. That is on their Most Played Cards page with the data based on the recently submitted tournament results in various events locally and on MTG Arena or MTGO.

Surprisingly, some obvious auto-inclusion cards from the BRO set have not yet gathered enough statistics to consider them as one of the top-played Standard cards. In contrast, one particular artifact from the previous set, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, has garnered the top spot in the rankings.

Why should we consider this now as the auto-main deck in some midrange and even the sideboard of aggro decks in the metagame? Here are some key points.

-It is a cheap artifact to cast and activate. For two mana, you can just curve out usually on your second turn casting, and bypass counterspells (aside from Spell Pierce) if you are on the play. It is a good mana sink for midrange decks and control decks even with just a limited card draw engine.

-It can put pressure attacking for 4 damage in open situations. The Crew 3 activated ability is not that hard to achieve with a lot of utility creatures in the format are having 3 power, i.e. Bloodtithe Harvester, Tenacious Underdog, etc. This is another reason why curving a turn-two Bankbuster into a creature is still a good play.

-It is an ideal target for “blink” effects. It has only a limit of three charge counters before creating the bonus token and its “pilot” creature token. It would then be a good strategy to blink it out into play to reset it charge counters, hence drawing you more cards.

Those three main points I think are already valid to have this artifact in your maindeck lineup. As per MTG Top 8’s stats, 63.9% of the decks are already using this card with the average of 3 copies, either maindeck or sideboard. It is gas and also a creature threat all in one package so I would suggest you take on this advantage to improve your deck archetype.

That is a wrap for now, until the next post and thanks for reading.