I've just returned form a friend's house where he was gloating over his recent purchase of 3DS Max (lucky b*stard!) and he showed me the "Edit Mesh" feature where you can deform and mangle the mesh with a Modifier without ever actually messing up your precious original mesh!

It seemed like an amazing feature and I was wondering if Carrara has anything like this at all. I've desparately been looking in the modifiers section and there's no equivalent!!

Is there a plugin available or something?

 Hi,

I´ll do not know how the feature in 3DS Max works, but I´ll think you can use the morph targets in Carrara to achieve a likewise effect.

 Yes, morph targets are essentially an equivalent.