Welcome back to the Rules Tip Blog! With the Kaladesh Prerelease coming up this very weekend, we’ll be going over some general tips for the prerelease, as well as a little tutorial on the new mechanics of the set. We’ll start this crash course (I will not apologize for the pun) on the first: Vehicles!
Vehicles are an interesting new subtype of Artifact; they have a slightly different frame, and a brown Power/Toughness box. Despite having P/T printed on them, they’re not creatures- not inherently, anyway. All the Vehicles will have the ability “Crew”, followed by a number- for example, Sky Skiff has Crew 1. What this means is any time you have priority, you can tap any number of creatures you control with total power of 1 or more to ‘crew’ your Sky Skiff, making it a vehicle until end of turn. It’s almost like the opposite of Equip- you use your CREATURES to enhance your ARTIFACTS! As I said, this can be done any time you have priority, meaning you can Crew up a vehicle on your opponent’s turn if you need it to block; you can’t block with a creature and then tap it to Crew, so keep that in mind!
A few other tidbits: Your crew isn’t actually “on” the Vehicle; that is, if the Vehicle eats the business end of a removal spell, or dies in combat, the creatures you used to Crew it don’t go down with it. You can tap ANY number of creatures to Crew a vehicle, so long as they have enough power; a 3/3 or three 1/1s could crew up a Crew 3 vehicle. It also means you could tap down your opponent’s entire team while controlling their turn with the new Emrakul, for example. Crewing also notably does not use the TAP symbol; that means you could use a brand-new, summoning-sick creature to Crew a vehicle right after playing that creature! Keep that in mind- your opponent’s board of just a Vehicle could come online the moment they play a creature, Haste or not (your Vehicle does need to not be summoning sick, or have Haste, to attack though!). You can also hilariously use a Crewed vehicle to crew another; tap your 1/1 Servo (which we will cover on Wednesday!) to crew your Sky Skiff, and use that to crew your Renegade Freighter– planes driving trains! Lastly, look out for Pilot subtype creatures- they have fun abilities that power up Vehicles when you use them to Crew a vehicle.
Tune in tomorrow when we go over some Tournament Tips- including how to handle a certain Masterful variety of artifact…