by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 06, 2009

Mana producing artifacts have a long history in magic the gathering being the very first and most powerful of the chase cards they have remained a part of the game going up in down in quality from the high of the Lotus and moxes to a general mid range card that you can't play until the second or third turn now and yet even as mid range cards they can be useful.

Coalition Relic is a rare artifact from the future sight expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs three colorless mana to put into play and can be tapped to add one mana of any color to your mana pool. This puts it on a generally level playing field with a great many midling artifacts most of which are not rare and many, while producing only one color are less mana, but Coalition relic has another ability up its sleeve. This ability also requires tapping and lets you put a charge counter on coalition relic. The rest of the card reads "At the beginning of your precombat main phase, remove all charge counters from Coalition Relic. Add one mana of any color to your mana pool for each counter removed this way."

What this means in short, especially with the elimination of mana burn from the rules in the magic the gathering 2010 expansion set rules changes is that if you don't use the card in any turn you can get two mana from it the next, but it is not a mana battery and you can't build up to any truly high amount of mana.

This is of great value though, especially for certain color mages, most notably blue who likes to keep its mana untapped as long as possible. After all with this you can leave it untapped through the entire turn and lose nothing forcing your opponent to deal with the threat of counter spell more directly.

It also allows you to get creatures or other spells out just a little bit faster. This is most effective when this card is played on the second or third turn, and tapped to put a counter on it. If you then play a land on the next turn you should have six mana, enough to play a large creature and since it will be at least a turn ahead of your opponent the changes of doing damage with it are higher.

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