Wrapping up this week’s tips, we have a fun equipment for creature-heavy decks: Shield of the Avatar. This little toy helps keep your best guy alive by putting a damage-prevention effect around that creature. How much does it prevent? Well, how many buddies does your best creature have? There’s usually strength in numbers, but the Shield makes that especially true!

The most common way you’d probably see a Shield being used is slapped onto a big blocker, to discourage retaliation while your little dudes attack. But, it can also be used very effectively on offense! See, the Shield doesn’t care if you’re attacking or blocking, it’ll protect all the same (it even protects from non combat damage, like burn spells!). You might be wary attacking with your creature, though- what if your opponent gang-blocks it to kill it? Well, that’ll probably end really, really badly for him.

See, when you have a gang-block, each of those blockers is a separate source of damage. And Shield of the Avatar happens to prevent some damage from any given source- which means if you have 4 creatures, and your opponent blocked your Shield-bearer with one thousand 4/4 Sphinxes… it would take no damage, at all. Because 4 damage from EACH of those Sphinxes is prevented! Now, granted, you’re probably going to die to the remaining 999 Sphinxes he’s mysteriously not attacking you with, but let’s ignore that for now.

This also works if you flip it around and put Shield onto a creature that can block multiple attackers- something like Guardian of the Gateless (or Avatar of Hope for maximum flavor!). Each creature that it blocks gets some damage prevented, which means you are in a really good position defensively! Just look out for non-damaging removal.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Trevor Nunez