by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 09, 2009

The reason that most of the cards in the time spiral block of magic the gathering had suspend was to allow you to play the card less expensively but as with most mechanics there are many uses for it and wizards of the coast likes to examine them all. That leads to cards which cost the same or more to suspend but have some advantage for being suspended.

Aeon Chronicler is a rare Avatar from the planar Chaos expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs two blue and three colorless to put into play and has power and toughness equal to the number of cards in your hand.

What make this card interesting is that it has a suspend cost of one blue, three colorless and x. X is the number of turns that it is suspended and depending on the situation you will want x as high as possible even though that means it will take longer for this card to come into play.

The reason for this is the second ability of Aeon Chronicler. Every time that a time counter is removed from this card while it is removed from the game you are allowed to draw a card.

This is only one extra card a turn if you pay the suspend cost though there are a couple ways to do this, but it also makes it more likely that the power and toughness of the Aeon Chronicler will be higher. It also gives it more value later in the game.

One way to make this card even better is to remove the time counters from it faster. There are a couple ways to do this. One of the easier is with the Rift elemental, a red creature that can remove time counters for one red and one colorless mana and gets +2/+0 for doing so. These two abilities combined make for a good attack with the rift elemental, several extra cards and the Aeon Chronicler being larger when he comes into play.

Although this is a good card in constructed limited is where it really shines. With the extra time to build up your mana and the turns to collect cards this card can put you considerably ahead in the game and when it does hit the battle field while rarely the largest creature it is almost always big enough to make an impact something you can't say of many blue creatures.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.