by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 06, 2009

One of the most overlooked demographic of cards in magic the gathering are the vanilla creatures. These are creatures that have lots of room for flavor text because they don't do anything besides being creatures. The classic card is the grizzly bear, a 2/2 creature for one green and one colorless mana, and though they are often overlooked they are often very good, though probably not as good as the creature that has the likelihood of being a 4/5 creature at the same cost.

If you want to play with them though there is one card that hasn't overlooked them that card is Muraganda Petroglyphs. A rare enchantment from the future sight expansion set of magic the gathering which costs one green and three colorless and reads "Creatures with no abilities get +2/+2"

This may seem like an ability that makes it necessity to play with creatures that are generally considered boring but all this really requires to help a creature is that it have no abilities. Which is where things like face down cards, and tokens come into play.

Likely the most valuable of these is the elf token creatures. This is because in the later sets there are a great many elves that not only produce tokens(which have no abilities) but count the number of elves in play to increase their own abilities making the tokens valuable. It is also worth noting that a +1/+1 counter is not an ability, and neither is another card which gives the creature a bonus, since the creature giving the bonus is the one with the ability. This means that you could easily play a creature that produces elf tokens, gives all elves +1/+1 and put out 4/4 elf creature tokens with this card.

What you must be careful of though is creatures such as some of the elves that give abilities to all creatures of their type. The problem with this is that once the creature has been gives something like trample it is no longer a creature with no abilities and it would lose the +2/+2.

In limited the weakness of this card is that there are a remarkably few number of creatures with no abilities printed in the advanced sets of magic the gathering which are most popular for draft and so you are not going to get a great deal of value out of this card, but it is still good to see that the vanilla creatures are getting some love.

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