In Magic: The Gathering, equipment is a kind of artifact defined by its ‘equip’ ability. Pay its equip cost, and you can attach these snazzy artifacts to a creature – and give it some powerful buffs in the process. MTG equipment cards offer the flexibility auras can’t: they stay on the battlefield if the creature they’re equipped to dies, and you can easily equip them to a different creature by paying their cost again.
Below you’ll find some of the best MTG equipment cards in the game right now. Some are so powerful they’ve been banished to the MTG banlist, while others are still common staples in a solid MTG Commander deck.
Here are the best MTG equipment cards:
Swiftfoot Boots
Like its name, the Swiftfoot Boots card has some speedy benefits. It only costs two mana to cast, and it can be equipped by spending one. Doing so gives the attached creature hexproof and haste. This means, as soon as your desired creature hits the battlefield, you can protect it from spells or abilities and start swinging.
According to the MTG data website EDHREC, Swiftfoot Boots is the number one equipment card played in Commander right now. At the time of writing, it can be found in 27% of the site’s recorded decks. However, there is another equipment card that comes very close – in both popularity and ability.
Lightning Greaves
Enter Lightning Greaves. This equipment costs two mana to cast, and it grants haste and shroud to any creature it’s equipped to. Sounding familiar yet? Swiftfoot Boots and Lightning Greaves are so similar that it’s hard to argue which is truly superior. Lightning Greaves can be equipped for free, but Swiftfoot lets you interact with your equipped creature by offering hexproof instead of shroud.
Even the internet can’t agree which is best. EDHREC says Lightning Greaves is the second-most played equipment card in Commander as of writing, but Swiftfoot Boots only beats it by 1%.
Skullclamp
Skullclamp is so potent, it’s been banned multiple times throughout Magic history. It was first banned from Standard and Mirrodin Block Constructed back in 2004, and it’s still banned in Modern and Legacy formats. How can one little equipment card cause so much chaos?
The answer is low costs and easy card draws. Skullclamp costs one mana to cast and one to equip. And while the +1/-1 it gives the attached creature is nice, the real magic happens when that creature dies – once the equipped creature is sent to the graveyard, you can draw two cards. Skullclamp stays in play, and it can be attached to a new creature the next time you can cast a sorcery. As you can imagine, things start to get broken pretty quickly.
Whispersilk Cloak
Costing three mana to cast and two to equip, Whispersilk Cloak is one of the more expensive cards in this guide. However, its benefits are more than worth it in the right deck. This equipment gives creatures shroud and unblockable. All in all, the equipped creature will be pretty hard to mess with.
Its slightly higher cost is definitely a drag; Lightning Greaves offers shroud for a slightly lower mana count. However, unblockable is not a keyword to be sniffed at – and Whispersilk Cloak can make a creature pretty tough to mess with.
Sword of the Animist
Sword of the Animist costs two to cast and two to equip. Once equipped to a creature, you can search your deck and add a tapped land to your battlefield every time said creature attacks. Shuffle your deck, and get ready to do it all over again next turn.
Basically, this is your go-to equipment for land ramp. Ramp isn’t easily accessible for many Magic colours, but Sword of the Animist is colourless, so everyone gets to play. Given the prevalence of ramp in Commander, it should be no surprise that Sword of the Animist is a popular choice for this format.