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?

.....

Wizards of the Coasts and the Commander format and other dysfunctional relationships

In the past few days, we of the EDH/Commander format saw cards spoiled that will "help" us play EDH (I'm dropping Commander from now on in this article). I use the quotations around "help" very loosely. Wizards of the Coast saw a cash cow in the EDH format and jumped in with both feet. And then jumped on it again and again like a small child who just found a puddle.

Now, I am all for stupid, ridiculous cards that are just not fair. However, when I see that WotC is making these new decks that make me say "Well jeepers, I have to buy this to stay competitive!" it kind of makes me a little peeved. I get over that quickly and just come to terms that. Now, I start looking at the cards and about the 3rd card deep I start going into this:

I mean, holy shit snacks! Are you kidding me?! All of these cards look like they have never been play tested and are just dumb! With that being said, here are the cards I am really excited to play myself:

Easily the best land you can have in a EDH deck. Just think, you are playing some kind of Bant commander. You have Seaside Citadel in your hand and you also have this. You have to generate a mana on turn one. Is there even a argument here?!

Ways to make this card not broken: Make it Legendary. How fun would it be to battle over a Command Tower.

Ugh. Moving on. (Love Command Tower)

I like the Join Forces mechanic. I really REALLY like the Join Forces mechanic. I like, even more than the Join Forces mechanic, Collective Voyage. Sure, you can draw some cards with the blue one or make a dragon really beefy, but for one mana, you can excel your turn 4 into turn 6 (1 to play Collective Voyage, 2 mana to search out 2 lands, turn 4 you play your 6th land). This means, for those of you not getting it, if a turn 4 Primeval Titan, who turns your turn 5 into turn 9 (Same as above, but add two more lands from the Titan)! Holy land ramp Batman! Joining Forces is fun, but I really like the idea of watching people tap out then playing a card like this.

Finally:

I've always thought that red has gotten the shaft in EDH. You can't burn them out and trying to out control a blue deck is...well...Link to funny "Not fair" picture .

Stranglehold are what blue decks are going to be saying that isn't fair (you can just click on the link with the picture again). I would have loved to see this card cost 1 red, but at 4 mana, you can still get it in under the wire before they can go off with Time Warp. This one card makes me want to start playing decks with red in them...now if there was a good general with red.....Hmmmm....

Nope. Can't think of one.

Tolarian U.

Going through my academics, I found out that film really appealed to me. There was something really fun about going to class, watching a film, and then talking about it. That is pretty cool. Of course, I had a hidden reason why I liked film so much. Film has a lot of unique and rich history, but the history of film only dates back to around 1880's-1890's. That means that film has only been around for 130-120 years, and for a good number of those years, there wasn't a whole lot of narrative story lines. It was mostly people kissing or trains pulling into stations. In the grand scheme of things, that is not all that long. Therefor, it made it a lot easier, in my own opinion, to study film as oppose to, lets say, history of Europe. This got me thinking a bit:

Magic the Gathering has been around since 1993. This means that in 2013 it will have been a game for 20 years. To many people, they use it as an income. They call themselves "professionals" at the game. The time people put into tuning decks, studying the metagame and playing in tournaments is usually more than the time it takes to study for some tests.

My question to the peanut gallery: How long until Magic the Gathering becomes an academic course in college?

Now, my other question is this: How freaking cool would it be to major in Magic the Gathering?! Granted, you would forfeit any chances of ever having sex again in your entire life, but you could write your dissertation on Dredge!

Imagine going to class and learning about the philosophy of land base construction. Your instructor would say something like this:


Please pull out a piece of paper, write me 38 lands for a commander deck that is for a blue, black, white land base. I would like the general theme of the land base to be man lands and graveyard manipulation.

I am being totally serious. I bet there is a school that you can major in Magic...maybe one of those independent, feel good-ery type schools. There is also a great deal of history you can go into with Magic such as when it was released, general pro-tour winner knowledge, evolution of decks, etc.

I think it is a great idea. Maybe it's because I went to one of those feel good-ery type schools.