Spotlight: Skullclamp

Clampy McClamperson

With a name like Skullclamp, it has to be good.

Way back, 10 years ago (!) when Darksteel came out, we got the Clamp. It was a mysterious piece of equipment, which was something exciting and new at the time.

At the time, I remember thinking that something went horribly wrong with this card. I'm sure there's a story out there somewhere for what happened, but it's clearly not right. The problem is the "-1" toughness.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's take a close look at what this card is.

It's a 1 converted mana cost (CMC) artifact. Great. It potentially can go in any deck, can come down early, and has the magic word "draw" on it (and I'm not talking the Divine Intervention kind of "draw," either).

It's equipment, which was like enchantments of old, except you didn't automatically get 2-for-1'ed when the creature it was attached to got killed. That was the big problem with creature enchantments (auras). Equipment, on the other hand, "stayed in play" to equip another day. Problem solved. In other words, equipment was already much better than most auras up to that point.

The equip cost of Skullclamp is a very low 1CMC. Sure, it only gives the equipped creature one additional power, but with an equip cost of 1CMC, you can equip over and over as long as there is a target. More on that later.



Pretend, for a moment, that Skullclamp's first line read like this, "Equipped creature gets +1/+0." Compare this to another piece of equipment, like Bone Saw or Bonesplitter. If it stopped there, it would be relatively overcosted. It would be better to run Bone Saw. But, it doesn't stop there. Instead, it reduces the equipped creature's toughness by 1.The real reason to run Clamp is not the one additional power. The real reason is to draw cards. Not one card, mind you. But, two flippin' cards.



Unless you've been at this for a while, it may or may not be obvious to you how this works. Here's the problem. Let's say you have a way to generate small creatures. Cards like Endrek Sahr come to mind, but there are lots of token generators that will work here. Once you have creatures with one toughness + Skullclamp, you suddenly have a very efficient, colorless draw engine.

Because it draws two cards at a pop, not just one, ripping a dozen or more cards in one go is easy peasy. Or, how about drawing two additional cards per turn with Awakening Zone? Skullclamp is a kill on sight card.

Clamp is an elegant card. Conceptually, it makes one of your creatures slightly more deadly at the cost of being slightly more vulnerable. It also makes it a more interesting process to attack or block into the equipped creature, knowing that you are giving the owner two cards in the process. If that's what this card actually did, it would be a great design. But it's not used that way.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything like it. A colorless card with such a low cost to draw that many cards. And it has the potential to hang around to do it again, turn after turn. I don't mind that it exists in the world of Magic, but I'd have much rather it be designed to do what it actually does. Call it a sacrifice knife or something.

For power reasons, this card is banned in Modern. More telling, it is also banned in Legacy. In other words, you have to go all the way to Vintage to run this in a competitive format. For Commander, it's totally legal. Go nuts. Clamp away.