For better or worse, the majority of MTG cards aren’t destined for competitive greatness. Only the best cards from a set with immediate impact are enough to break through a format’s hyper-refined metagame. A card can have some truly busted abilities, but if it doesn’t get to work right away, it’s often dead in the water.
Mirromind Crown, from Lorwyn Eclipsed, feels like the perfect example of this. When left unchecked, this card can generate obscene amounts of value, even giving you infinite turns. Competitionally, however, this card is nowhere to be found, since it doesn’t immediately impact the board, but this isn’t all bad news.
Thanks to its lack of competitive appeal, Mirrormind Crown is a surprisingly inexpensive MTG card. This is good news for Commander players, as the card is an absolute riot in the format.
MTG Mirrormind Crown
For four mana, Mirrormind Crown offers an equipment with incredible potential, but you need a few things to make it work. Not only do you need an impressive creature to copy with the Crown, but you also need a way to create tokens. While this means that the artifact won’t go in every Commander deck, a fair few popular cards can maximize the Crown easily.
Powerful creatures that naturally create tokens are one of the best ways to utilize Mirrormind Crown. Final Fantasy’s Ancient Adamantoise is a great example of this, so long as you have another token generator in play to make two of them. When your opponents finally manage to fell this tortoise, it will create 10 Treasure Tokens, which can easily be repurposed into 10 Ancient Adamantoise copies. Since the Turtles redirect direct damage to themselves, you’ll be able to tank 200 damage after just one successful activation.
In other cases, you can use Mirrormind Crown with less impressive token generators to scale their effectiveness. Academy Manufactor is likely the most blatant example of this, since each copy created by Mirrormind Crown will snowball to create more on the next trigger. Resolving Mirrormind Crown’s replacement effect twice attached to Academy Manufactor, so long as the tokens are something that it cares about, makes 81 copies of the creature, easily ending the game on the spot.
While a lot less exciting, Mirrormind Crown doesn’t need to create an immediate explosive effect to be worth adding to your deck. Even creating multiple copies of token generators over time, like Tireless Provisioner, or Bloodroot Apothecary, can gradually scale your position. Alternatively, you could just use Mirrormind Crown to create four copies of Biovisionary and win the game on the spot.
Creating Commander Copies
Mirrormind Crown can become even more consistent when used with Commanders, but you do need an extra card to make this work. Thanks to the Legend Rule ruining your fun, you’ll need a card like Mirror Box, or a copy effect like Spark Double, to allow your copied Commanders to coexist.
With your Mirror Box in play, all kinds of Commanders get extremely out of control. Krenko, Mob Boss is perhaps the most ridiculous, since each copy of Krenko will create more Commanders than the last. If you can get Krenko in play with a Haste enabler like Anger, and you can ignore Mirrormind Crown’s once per turn clause, easily creating a lethal army to swing at your opponents on the next turn. Lathril, Blade of the Elves and Mr. House, President and CEO can similarly snowball out of control, allowing each subsequent trigger of your Commanders to create even more copies of them in the future.
You can also use Mirror Box and Mirrormind Crown with Commanders that have payoffs in decks with token themes. Maralyn, Fae Ascendant, for example, can amplify its milling and steal multiple spells per turn using this combination.
Creating Infinite Turns
While Mirrormind Crown is capable of enabling plenty of shenanigans, getting infinite turns out of it is surprisingly difficult. Currently, no MTG card can give you an extra turn upon entry, but out of the extra turn-granting creatures, Timestream Navigator is the best bet.
So long as you have City’s Blessing and a card that creates tokens each turn, like Retrofitter Foundry, attaching Mirrormind Crown to Timestream Navigator will create infinite turns. Just use the Crown’s replacement effect to create a Timestream Navigator instead of a Servo, and use the original to take another turn. After that, move your crown to your new Timestream Navigator and make a new copy of it before using it. Similar combos can be pulled off with other infinite-turn cards like Wanderwine Prophets, but they’re far less efficient.
Whether you’re using Mirrormind Crown to take all the turns or just create a few extra token producers, this artifact excels at creating the explosive, wacky game states that Commander is known for. This has caused the card to appear in about 3870 Commander decks on EDHREC, despite being released just a week ago. Thankfully, if you want to take advantage of Mirrormind Crown’s antics, the card is rather cheap, available for just a dollar. This is unlikely to spike much in the near future, but we’ve seen general Commander cards like this spike once they become out of print. Mirrormind Crown may be no different.
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