Pointed Discussion

worst then Lightning Greaves

"worst then Lightning Greaves"

You can't equip Lightning Greaves as an instant like you can this card. Opponent Lightning Bolt's your creature, you respond by equipping this Artifact to it, the Bolt is countered due to no legal targets.

Indeed akirhol, you are correct. I'd prefer the ol' Leonin Shikari/Lightning Greaves trick, but this is a more than acceptable alternative in a deck not running the Shikari or going for all out aggro, like a blue deck, perhaps.

Zero Suit Samus comes to mind :)

So it's basically Counterspell: The Equipment. Sweet. If I'm in blue then I'd rather have this than the Greaves.

Nasty counterspell

best card in its cycle.

Sorry, Hibron, but that honor actually belongs to Cranial Plating. This is probably second.

I run 2 of these in my blue control deck just for insurance... they are very helpful.

Aaron's Random Card Comment of the Day #31, 11/8/10

Both Scars of Mirrodin and all the sets in the original Mirrodin block contain many artifact cards with colored mana symbols on them. (I’m pleased that the ones in Scars are actually, you know, colored as opposed to the grayed-out ones on the cards from the original Mirrodin block, which were that way because of a long-since-solved printing complication created when we switched to the newer card frames.) We include so many colored-activated artifacts to both broaden what artifacts are capable of and to narrow what decks they go it. As anyone that has played a fair bit of Scars sealed deck recently can attest to, a huge number of purely colorless cards can be daunting to evaluate. Hopefully the colored mana symbols help give direction.

Ideally, artifacts with colored mana symbols still function in a deck that can’t generate that color of mana, but are way better in decks that can. Just about all of them fit that model, with there being a few rare (literally) exceptions, such as Proteus Staff. Neurok Stealthsuit fits the typical mold.

Mark Rosewater initially proposed the cycle of equipment with colored “instant equip” abilities for Mirrodin proper, but it was right not to include them in the set that debuted equipment. They were correctly saved for a couple sets to let players get their heads around how equipment worked normally before throwing this twist at them. This cycle, by the way, is pretty embarrassing due to how disparately powered they are. I’m sure most of you are familiar with Cranial Plating.

I doubt we’d print this card today as a common, as we have been consciously trying to cut down on common on-board tricks, as they lead to some real feel-bad moments. Nothing feels as bad a casting a spell at a creature only to have your opponent pay to give it shroud with a card you should have realized was in play. Magic is hard enough without this kind of slap-you-in-the-face occurrence happening frequently.

To tie this discussion back to some of my previous card comments, when I say stuff like R&D is currently down on on-board tricks, or shuffling, or counterspells, or tutors, or whatever, that doesn’t mean we’re trying to expunge them from the game. We know people like them. We keep printing them. Heck, M11 had Infantry Veteran, Fauna Shaman, and Mana Leak, just to name a card from each category. It just means that we need to be conscious of how many of them are in an environment, which wasn’t always true of how we did things in the past. Lorwyn block, for instance, is loaded with on-board tricks because we weren’t thinking about them at all, and the limited environment suffered greatly because of it. Whatever the cool, dangerous thing is that you enjoy, we want to make sure we’re giving you just the right amount of it to keep Magic fun and you happy.

I like the flavour of this card. Its like the suit is made of a certain liquid metal.

Flanders: "Feels like I'm wearing nothin at all..."
Homer: "Damn sexy flanders."

I love on-board tricks. I loved the Lorwyn limited environment, and I hadn't quite realised that was part of why, but I'm sure it was. I do particularly like it when a card can grant shroud/protection at instant speed, but not too easily. Leonin Shikari + Lightning Greaves is too easy (once you get the cards out) - it just becomes impossible to target anything. But {U}{U} is a sensible cost for it: the player can't do it very much, especially if blue isn't their only colour, so the opponent still has a hope of managing to target things sometimes. I like Neurok Stealthsuit and still use it in my decks from time to time.

Counterspell as an equipment. Nice.

@Polkovnik_Skyfox: the correct quote is "Stupid sexy Flanders." Homer never says "Damn Flanders.", he says "Stupid Flanders."

"As anyone that has played a fair bit of Scars sealed deck recently can attest to, a huge number of purely colorless cards can be daunting to evaluate."

Huh? I don't get this, Aaron. When worrying about whether you'll have the colors to cast spells is taken out of the equation, I find it much easier to eval a sealed pool. Just compare CMC to power/tough and effectiveness and look at your curve. Where I find the challenge in evaluating Scars sealed pools is deciding whether I have what it takes to go Infect, and if not, whether I have sufficiently aggressive creatures to try to be the beatdown against non-Infect strategies or whether I need to go a controlling route (ugh).

As for Lorwyn Block, that was one of my favorite blocks for Limited games and it was *because* of the on-board tricks - it was a real skill-tester and often my opponents were found wanting. Later formats that lacked such a density of on-board tricks are more strictly about "did you maintain discipline during drafting / did you open a good sealed pool, and did you build your deck correctly?" Without much on-board interaction the decks then tend to play themselves too much for my taste. :(

Good card. Not the best in the cycle (that would obviously be Cranial Plating) but shroud is very nice, and instant speed shroud makes it comparable to Lightning Greaves.

Obviously the card is fantastic, and colored abilities on artifacts were a big deal at the time.
However I always lol when I imagine anyone (anything) other than an attractive Neurok woman wearing this

She's hot. 5/5

At least 2 people in comments compared this to Cranial Plating and mentioned that Cranial Plating is obviously superior to Neurok Stealthsuit.

Honestly I disagree. Both equipements are doing principially differend things and hardly can be compared. And even if plating is doing things that will be more appreciated in majority of players, I would still disagree. In my opinion, because of big principial difference between those two cards, evaluating them strongly depends on type of player.

At example plating is really useful only in artifact decks, but stealthsuit could fit well to deck where it is the only artifact. What would plating do in such deck? Not much. Also imagine stealthsuit in EDH deck where number of copies is limited to 1. With this card, player has virtually unlimited number of copies of counters. Only thing he has to care about is enough mana.

In my opinion superiority of plating over stealthsuit is definitely not obvious. It always depends on type of player and type of deck. Different preferations for Timmy and Johnny.

@ Spirit_of_blue

I definitely see what you're saying, and this could be really nice with certain decks (Something that runs Master Transmuter for example) so nothing short of a wrath effect can stop you from cheating things into play. However, Cranial Plating is a really powerful offensive bomb that can almost singlehandledly turn the tide in the player's favor due to the sheer firepower it brings, especially if equipped onto something like Vault Skirge, Etched Champion.

Not to say this card is bad or that it even has no use. It's a good card with some good applications in the right deck as I've said. Cranial Plating certainly has more board impact though: if the opponent can't do something about Plating, they're probably going to lose.

2 mana counter target spell that targets a creature you control pretty much. Pretty good.

"Does this suit make my ass look fat???"

cranial plating
horned helmet
healer's headdress
neurok stealthsuit
sparring collar
Sense everyone else is to lazy to do it themselves.

Dipping your creatures in chrome bodypaint makes them stealthy!