Welcome back to week sixty-five of Monday Magic: COVID Edition. It’s been 3 days since my last summoning.

Yes, you read that right – three! Staring down the barrel of what came very close to a full 500 days of inactivity, the crux of the original version of this particular piece was me steeling myself for the very real probability of hitting, or even surpassing, that number. But it did not come to pass. We may have come up against that particularly maddening milestone, staring into its maddening abyss and flirting with its presence like a Lovecraftian eldritch horror, yet we did cross that threshold. To which I will consider it a personal victory, even if the larger ramifications for it aren’t all that important outside of the confines of this series.

What it did mean, however, is that the waxing diatribe planned for this week was completely scrapped at the last minute.

Have you ever noticed on news and entertainment sites that sometimes an article will inexplicably appear covering a breaking event within minutes after it occurs? A celebrity death. A Supreme Court ruling. A major piece of Congressional legislation. An important company announcement. While many writers and journalists are quite skilled and trained to work under deadlines that are both fluid and come on short notice, few are that fast at throwing comprehensive landmark coverage pieces together as soon as it occurs. The magic behind this is simple: these articles, either in their entirety or the bulk of the framework, are often already written ahead of time. In the cases of binary outcomes, in fact, two articles are typically written, each worded through the guise of the outcome. When that happens, they simply use the version matching the situation to give them a head start on covering known events.

I did not have such a piece at the ready. While I assumed that our Magic-playing drought would indeed eventually end, I never wrote a formal draft piece highlighting that news. One key difference between the standard Monday Magic articles and those during the pandemic period is that none of them were written more than a few days in advance of publication, whereas previously some could have been crafted weeks in advance. Because reporting on COVID became part of the weekly posting, it proved neither authentic enough or was predictable enough to warrant advanced drafts. Instead, as you’ve probably seen over the last many weeks, at times the pieces were a bit more off-the-cuff than has been traditional.

Still, the long pause on playing Magic (or the lack thereof) only had two possible outcomes: either it would end, or my time with the game would. Given that the former was far more likely, I should have had more erudite words or a grandiose plan set up for when that moment occurred. But I didn’t. Frankly, it’s probably all the more fitting this way, as no one’s plans have gone quite right during the pandemic era. Why pretend otherwise at the very end?

I did, however, have the card picked out – both for its flavor and to serve as a valuable transition back to the ‘normal’ style of Monday Magic. It seemed a fitting way to bring the COVID Edition era of the series to a finale. The pandemic itself has not ended – some parts of the country are even seeing cases rise again due to stubborn variants and high unvaccinated populations. But the resumption of in-person EDH here seemed an appropriate signal that some sense of normalcy has returned and had long been planned as the trigger for the shift.

Throughout the COVID Edition incarnation, as you’ll undoubtedly recall, the principal focus was on cards I’d personally wanted to put into an EDH deck but never got around to one reason or another, whereas traditionally they were cards that served a particular illustrative purpose while also being valuable budget-focused EDH card picks. Whether or not I’d personally used them was immaterial. With this week’s important paragon pick, however, I am well acquainted.

Today we have: Glory

Name: Glory

Edition: Judgment

Rarity:  Rare

Focus: Creature Protection

Highlights: Over the course of Magic’s lifespan, many facets of strategic gameplay evolved as the game grew. This included the entire concept of the graveyard itself. The idea of being able to move cards from the discard pile back to your hand or directly back to the battlefield had been a staple concept since Alpha. Yet for much of its formative years the graveyard itself was mostly seen as a card repository more than another zone by which you could interact with and manipulate. It wasn’t until Ice Age’s Ashen Ghoul when a card appeared with an activated ability that could be used from the graveyard, and even then not much attention was paid to it.

The idea would reappear during Mirage with Necrosavant and again during the Tempest block with more interesting card designs such as Carrionette and Shard Phoenix. But it wasn’t until all the way until the Odyssey block in 2001 when card design involving the graveyard took a major leap forward with the introduction of mechanics such as Threshold and, more importantly, Flashback. Suddenly manipulating the graveyard for reasons other than creature reanimation became a strategic consideration, another space in the game by which both designers and players could explore. And the game never looked back.

Part of this new paradigm came with the introduction of 7 creatures in the Judgment set. These were normal creatures on the battlefield but were far more advantageous by providing you with beneficial effects only if they were in your graveyard – essentially enchantments operating from your graveyard. Five of these granted static creature abilities, such as the much beloved Anger and Brawn. A sixth, Genesis, was arguably the most used competitively for quite some time. Genesis offered an upkeep trigger to return creatures from your battlefield to your hand, and as a result remained marginally expensive from an EDH perspective until its reprint in Modern Horizons.

Then, finally, there is Glory. Wonderful, glorious Glory.

While on the battlefield it is a vanilla 3/3 Flier for five mana, which isn’t all that impressive even by standards of the time. This, of course, was by design, as its power resided beyond the grave. However you opt to get it into your graveyard is immaterial – the point is that you want it there. Glory has an activated ability while in the graveyard which states that for just 3 mana, creatures you control gain Protection of the color of your choice for the turn. (This same effect and cost would appear in the next set individually as Akroma’s Blessing.)

The ramifications for this cannot be understated, as this three mana bestows on your entire army all of the intrinsic benefits Protection offers: preventing any mass direct damage effects to your creatures, preventing blockers in combat damage from taking damage from an opponent’s attackers, and making your attackers unblockable by your opponent’s creatures of the stated color. Moreover, because Glory doesn’t require any additional costs or restrictions besides mana, should your opponent have creatures of a separate color, you can simply pay another three mana to activate it again. And again. So long as you have mana available, Glory sets up a marvelous bubble that works as both a shield and a spear, depending on your timing.

All you have to do is, you know, get it into your graveyard.

As downsides go, this is pretty minor. Creatures can be short lived on the battlefield in Commander to begin with, so that shouldn’t really be much of an issue.

At the time Glory was an absolute nightmare for opponents to deal with, and much of the efforts in dealing with it revolved around keeping it in your hand or on the battlefield itself. Nowadays, with the degree of graveyard removal and card exiling, Glory can be dealt with easier. But that doesn’t deter from its inherent usefulness. If anything, it just evens the playing field a little bit.

Since its release I have been enamored with Glory and have gone on to use it to wild success in numerous decks over the years, including – coincidentally – one of the EDH decks that just happened to be used the other night. I have never been disappointed when it appears…which is more than apropos given its namesake. It’s powerful, versatile, and not something super easily disrupted by most decks even in a multiplayer setting like Commander. And yet for all its potency it has steadily remained a remarkably economical card even after all these years. Which is pretty glorious in its own right.

Finally, as we close out the COVID Edition of Monday Magic and hopefully get back to focusing on stuff like game design choices and recent sets like Forgotten Realms (of which boy do I have Thoughts), I’d like to end this week on a personal note by saying thank you to you, dear reader, for indulging me in this chronicle over the last 60+ weeks. Like most people, enduring the pandemic has not been easy on many fronts, including something as benign as playing Magic. This interlude served not only as a journal of sorts to the historic nature of the time but also as a helpful outlet to endure that time apart from the game – and the friends absent from the other side of the table. It’s been appreciated. And, hopefully, you learned about a few interesting Commander card options in the process.

Keep an eye out for us to be regularly featuring other more accessible-but-worth-it Commander cards going forward. In the meantime, we’ll keep the light on for you.

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