Today we’ll be starting on our tips from Kaladesh! To start with, we’ll cover crewing, and crewing a specific card: Cultivator’s Caravan. Every Vehicle has the Crew ability, which is followed by a number (in this case, Crew 3). That means that anytime you have priority, you can tap any number of creatures you control with total power 3 or more to Crew that vehicle; it becomes a creature, and has Power and Toughness as printed in the lower-right of the card. Crewing does not use the tap symbol, so you can use creatures that have ‘summoning sickness’ to crew; you can also overtap, if you want to, so a 5 power creature could crew the Caravan by itself if that’s all you have. You can also Crew a vehicle as soon as you play it, if you want to (maybe to chain things- tap a 3 power creature to crew the Caravan you just played, then tap it to crew a Skysovereign, Consul Flagship from a previous turn!)
Now, here’s the tricky part with the Caravan. You can’t tap it for mana the turn you play it…. if you crew it! Once you Crew it, the Caravan becomes a creature, and is suddenly subject to the evils of Summoning Sickness, which means you can’t activate any abilities on it that have the Tap or Untap symbols in the cost. But if you don’t crew it, it’s just a regular old artifact, not a creature- and those don’t care about summoning sickness at all! So you could drop it and immediately tap it, so long as you don’t Crew it first!
Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez