by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 09, 2009   Last Updated: January 12, 2012

  I never really used walls back in the day when they were a part of magic the gathering but something about them still evokes a feeling of history in me so when I first saw a real wall in the time spiral block I was happy and that there was at least one useful wall in magic the gathering again made that stay. I still haven't really used walls very much but if I were going to Aether Membrane would be one of the first choices. Aether membrane is an uncommon wall from the planar Chaos expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs two red to put into play and is a 0/5 defender that is able to block creatures with flying. More importantly though, when a creature is blocked by the Aether Membrane at the end of combat it is return to its owners hand meaning that Aether membrane actually has some effect on the opponents plans beyond slowing down his creatures and at 0/5 it has a reasonable chance to survive against many of the creatures. There is no way to really control what creatures your opponent will play and so the value of this wall is going to vary considerably from game to game, but there are a few things that you should be careful of. These are come into play and leave play effects. Blocking a creature and returning it to its owners hand will trigger effects that say when it leaves play and give the player the opportunity to trigger the other again. Either of these can leave you in a worse position. The advantage is that even a cheap card to play will still slow down your opponent considerably. First because the creature when played will once again have summoning sickness and secondly because it will make it more difficult to cast creatures. If you were to combine this with a bit of land destruction, one of the things that red is generally good at then you could really make it difficult for an opponent since they might not be able to play creatures returned to their hand at all. In limited where creature battles are more likely to be important this card can serve as the back up to your attacks letting creatures who would otherwise have to remain untapped so they could block attack and even one extra attacker is often enough to turn the tide in close games.

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