Alara Reborn Preview: Ethercaste Knight
A caste is a division with a rigid social heirarchy. The More You Know!
The Ethercaste Knight proves that not every card in Alara Reborn is a gold card. He still has multiple colors in his casting cost, but he’s an artifact creature. Also, knights riding lions? Nice.
I’m honestly not sure how the designers justified the Ethercaste Knight being an artifact creature. The flavor text seems to suggest that his etherium armor is the source of his artifactness, but the knight himself is a human. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a white/blue equipment artifact called Etherium Armor that granted the wearer a similar Exalted effect? [Edit: Ok, now I get it - his arm shows that he's fused etherium to himself. Cool.]
Ah well, whether or not it makes sense, this card is an excellent common for those who like to build Exalted decks. I’ve run into a few of them, and I don’t like playing against them at all. With a bunch of Exalted powers in play, you pick one creature to be your “champion” and attack by itself each turn. It gains a bunch of abilities (life gain the worst of all, in my opinion) and is really tough to block or kill.
The Ethercaste Knight helps in a simple way. He only costs two mana to play, is hard to kill with a toughness of 3, and boosts the Exalted champion with a +1/+1. Since the knight will be staying untapped while your champion attacks, he’s there to block when necessary, and a 3-toughness blocker is a nice thing to have around.
All in all, this is a good common, a very meat and potatoes card for Exalted decks. If your deck isn’t built around the Exalted mechanic, however, he is somewhat less useful. In limited formats, he provides a decent blocker, but the Exalted ability is likely to come into play only in the early game. I wouldn’t draft one early, but if a few were passed to me and I was playing blue/white, I’d certainly include him in the deck.
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April 14th, 2009 11:00 AM
I should probably learn how to play Magic one of these days.
April 14th, 2009 11:04 AM
Come by some evening when you’re free and we’ll play a few games. I have a ton of preconstructed decks – makes it easy to learn.
April 14th, 2009 11:38 AM
Check out his arm– he’s totally an etherium cyborg; he’s comparing wearing armor everyday to, well…melding with his armor to become a magical cyborg. So– wait, is this guy from two different shards, combined? The angels/knights shard & the wizards/sphinxes one?
April 14th, 2009 12:07 PM
@mordicai Maybe this guy is a result of the 5 shards combining into one and so he is part angels/knights and part wizards/sphinxes since he shares blue and white with both.
April 14th, 2009 12:18 PM
Good call, I totally didn’t catch the arm thing.
April 14th, 2009 12:59 PM
Yea, This guy’s a magical cyborg riding a lion. That’s pretty damn cool for a common.
Keep up the Previews. When is the prerelease for this?
April 15th, 2009 10:50 AM
Yeah– I missed the “five worlds will die, one will be born!” tagline: I thought this might be an intermediate stage in Alara re-fusing, but it looks like it’ll go all at once?
April 15th, 2009 2:29 PM
The intermediate stage was last set, I believe. Now it’s all together.