Shoes

Oh my god. Shoes.

For a great long while, Lightning Greaves has been a staple in all EDH decks. Your deck could essentially look like this:

General
Lightning Greaves
Sol Ring
97 other cards

and you wouldn't be too far off from a winning deck. However, something new is on the horizon that is going to make all EDH players take a second look at that Lightning Greaves. Ladies and Gentlemen, Swiftfoot Boots:

Sure, it isn't the best picture ever, but spoilers are spoilers are spoilers and this is a confirmed spoiler from the new M12 set. Swiftfoot Boots reads as such:

Swiftfoot Boots
Converted Mana Cost: 2
Artifact-Equipment
Equipped creature has hexproof and haste.
Equip: 1
Uncommon

For those of you who are not in the know, hexproof is the new keyword for Troll shroud....Ugh! You don't know what Troll shroud is either?! I have to do everything around here. Troll shroud is where you can target your creature with spells or abilities and your opponent cannot. So, lets do a side by side comparison of Swiftfoot Boots and Lightning Greaves:

Lets go from top to bottom. Between the battle of names, we are going to have to give it to Lightning Greaves. Swiftfoot Boots is a pretty lame name.

Lightning Greaves: 1
Swiftfoot Boots: 0

They both cost 2 so that is a push there. As far as picture go, I really like the FNM promo picture better than the regular Lightning Greaves picture, however the picture of Swiftfoot Boots is much better than the regular picture of the regular picture of Lightning Greaves. So....push?

Okay, now that that is over, we can get down to the nuts and bolts of the card which is the comparison of which is better:
Hexproof and a Equip cost of 1

OR

Shroud and Equip cost of 0

Honestly, both are amazing. I can see both scenarios working to your advantage. I really like throwing the Greaves from one creature to the other, however, I have had times where I have had a pump spell or some kind of spell that gives a protection from a color, but I can't play them. There was a scenario where I had a Hallowed Burial, Venser, The Sojunour  and Lighning Greaves on Angus Mackenzie. My whole plan was to use Venser to exile Angus and then send everyones creatures to the bottom of their decks. I had to do some tricky maneuvering to make Stirring Wildwood a creature, put the boots on him, exile Angus and then Hallowed Burial. Swiftfoot Boots would be so easy to work around that.

However, a argument can be made for moving the boots back and forth from one creature to the other to get that haste ability without spending any mana. Equipping a Kuldotha Forgemaster, using him to sac 3 artifacts, getting Blightsteel Colossus, putting the boots on him and infecting. You can't do that with only 5 mana with Swiftfoot Boots.

So, I guess it is up to you. Do you have a deck that doesn't want your opponent to target your general but you can exile/pump/protect your general, but you have a lot of expendable mana? Or do you have a deck that just wants your dudes to just get there?

Close call. You don't want to make the wrong choice for your deck do you?

.....