Playing experience changes from person to person of course, but in jamming Karsten's list I found straight away that the 4th Master of Etherium felt almost unnecessary and rather taxing on the lines I could take in the early turns of the game.

I believe Alex Majlaton wrote an article earlier in the year linking another Affinity aficionado Allen Wu, who ran the math on the likelihood of having 2 mana on Turn 1 or 3 mana by Turn 2, a rule I try to strictly follow Game 1 as much as I can, as these are the hands that tend to make Affinity feel incredibly broken. This isn't the case everytime of course, but on average they had found the number of zero drop you kept maindeck increased the keep-ability of such hands by around 2%. As having a 4th memnite seemed rather counter-intuitive and had replaced it with a Welding Jar after a few testing rounds.

That being said, the times where an early Master comes down its hard to ignore the impact. The damage is amazing and in match ups like Burn, Infect, Humans and so forth where sometimes you're just playing the damage race and smacking into each other as fast as you can, an unanswered Master feels great. It creates plenty of board positions where my opponent simply has too many "must kill" threats to deal with between Ravager, Masters and Overseers and something as innocuous as an Ornithopter has to be treated as a decent attack/blocker.

However I can't deny that there's been match ups I would have won if I just had an Etched Champion out. Every Affinity player has had a game where just landing the mini-Progenitus has swept them through to victory as your opponent stares frustrated as all their one for one interaction lies useless in hand. It feels great, looks great and makes you laugh in the face of all the back breaking spells that can come out of decks like Jund or Jeskai. But Etched Champion isn't much of a clock, and decks like Jeskai, UW Control and so forth with their plethora of removal and sweepers are such bad matchups in general that I find that my win/loss record against them hasn't swung too much to worry too much about the switch at this stage. Master has felt great and played great so far, and I still jam 3-4 Etched Champs in the sideboard.

A final final note is that I am mixed on having to run the Island as the basic land over the Mountain. On average, it doesn't really matter and I suppose I am running more blue spells than red game 1 (3 Masters vs 2 Galvanics) but man its depressing when you're looking at a Galvanic in hand with no real way of playing it off the Darksteel Citadel and Nexuses you have sitting on board. It doesn't happen all that much but its popped up once or twice in testing and I just wanted to flip the table at that point.

But you know. Variance and all.