Clustering Worship’s Mana Cost with Machine Learning for MTG

Worship card art from Ninth Edition by Mark Zug

Image courtesy of Scryfall.com

Machine Learning Meets Worship: A Look at Mana Costs in MTG

When you pair Magic: The Gathering data with a curious mind and a steady pulse of curiosity, you start seeing the game's mana curves like constellations. Clustering by mana cost isn’t just a nerdy exercise in numbers; it’s a way to map archetypes, timing windows, and color commitments across sets. In particular, a card like Worship—a white Enchantment from Ninth Edition—offers a compact but potent hook for this kind of analysis. Its mana cost of {3}{W} sits at the crossroads of efficiency and protection, and its effect rewards conservative, creature-forward boards with a stubborn kind of life-preservation ⏳🧙‍♂️.

Worship’s converted mana cost (CMC) is 4, and its color identity is white. This places it in the classic White Midrange/Control-adjacent territory in many real-world decks, where you’re balancing board presence with life total as a resource. The card’s rarity—rare in Ninth Edition’s core printing—signals that it’s a design piece with a specific purpose: a replacement-like safeguard that can swing the outcome of a critical combat or a top-deck race. The flavor text—“Believe in the ideal, not the idol.” — Serra—invites players to trust a higher plan rather than flashy interruptions. In a modern ML sense, Worship is an excellent data point for clustering by mana cost because its cost cleanly encodes both a color (white) and a relatively high mana threshold (four mana, with a white component).

“Believe in the ideal, not the idol.” — Serra

From a gameplay perspective, Worship is deceptively simple: if you manage to control a creature, any damage that would drop your life total below 1 will instead leave you at 1. That replacement effect is not a full shield; it’s a life-tank buffer that becomes increasingly valuable in creature-dense metas. It’s the kind of card that shines when you’re trying to weather a flurry of attacks or stabilize after a tutor finds a board-swinging threat. And because it’s a 4-mana aura of white mana, it sits in that sweet spot where you’re not ramping into it in a vacuum, but you’re planning for the midgame with a stable mana base—something ML clustering models can pick up as a recurring signature across white cards from that era.

In terms of design elegance, Worship isn’t flashy, but it exemplifies a recurring MTG motif: the power of a single, well-timed effect to tilt a game state. The art by Mark Zug, the white border, and the Serra flavor tie into a long tradition of white-enchantment archetypes that weather the storm and grind out incremental advantages. For collectors, Ninth Edition marks a period when reprints helped bring classic concepts into players’ hands with approachable mana costs. The market data hints at modest but steady value—the card’s USD price hovers around a dollar range, and it’s certainly a favorite among long-term collectors who enjoy the Ninth Edition era’s crisp, iconic visuals.

From a data-analytic lens, the presence of Worship in a cluster of 4-mana, single-white, non-foil enchantments across core sets makes it a perfect anchor for exploring how white’s enchantments drift through different metas. If you’re running a clustering experiment on MTG cards, Worship tends to land near other 4-mana white spells with protective or life-smoothing hooks. This alignment often surfaces when you compare decks built around life gain, creature-based stances, or midrange stabilizers. The interplay of creature presence and a life-total anti-collapse mechanic is a narrative you can trace through a corpus of white cards from Ninth Edition and beyond. 🔥⚔️

For players who love practical application, Worship invites a strategic “what-if” exercise: what happens if you slot multiple protective enablers in a white deck, then leverage Worship to prevent a lethal swing while you stabilize with a bigger threat? The answer usually hinges on timing and the number of creatures you control—the precise moments when replacing lethal damage with a 1-point life total keeps you alive long enough to deploy a finisher or to push through with evasive attackers. From a designer’s vantage point, that is exactly the kind of mechanic ML models adore: a crisp rule-set that translates cleanly into a feature vector (presence of a creature, number of sources dealing damage, life total, etc.) and a binary outcome (life total hits 1 instead of 0). 🎲

The card’s position in Ninth Edition also nudges us toward a conversation about reprints and collector value. Ninth Edition reprints, while not as flashy as modern premium sets, carry a nostalgic weight. Worship’s white aura fits a pattern of evergreen white enchantments that players revisit when building casual or kitchen-table decks; the card’s rarity and the Serra-flavored motto add a storytelling layer that keeps it memorable. For ML practitioners, that combination—clear mana cost, color identity, and a defined gameplay effect—creates a reliable data point for experiments about clustering by mana cost, color, and effect type. 🧙‍♂️

On the practical side of life in the hobby, you may want to keep the real world close as you brew. While you map distances between mana costs and card effects, a phone case can slip into your pocket as elegantly as a well-timed on-board defense. If you’re upgrading your carry, check out the Neon Slim Phone Case for iPhone 16—glossy polycarbonate with a modern, punchy look that travels well from table to table during long drafting sessions. It’s a tiny reminder that even a nerdy data project can wear a stylish, sturdy wrapper. Yes, the crossover between MTG nerding and everyday gear is real—embrace it with joy. 🧠🎨

For those who want to explore this topic further and see how different sources discuss MTG concepts, here are five pieces from our network that touch on adjacent ideas—ranging from gaming experiences to thematic collection design—and they pair nicely with the ML mindset we’re applying to Worship.

Neon Slim Phone Case for iPhone 16 Glossy Polycarbonate

Machine Learning Meets Worship: A Look at Mana Costs in MTG

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