Why Luxior, Giada’s Gift Is the Coolest Equipment Ever

Hello everyone! I have covered Elspeth Resplendent and Ob Nixilis, the Adversary so far, but we’re not done with sick cards yet! Now that Elspeth is back from the dead, she comes wielding not her famous Godsend, but instead, she comes with a new weapon in the form of Luxior, Giada's Gift.

So on it’s face, this card isn’t that impressive. It’s a 1 mana equipment and if you put it on a creature, it gets +1/+1 for each counter on it. This would be pretty hard to utilize outside of a dedicated +1/+1 counter themed deck, and even then, the juice would unlikely be worth the squeeze unless you were getting minimum +3/+3. However, that’s obviously not what we’re looking to do with it!

What makes Luxior, Giada's Gift so unique is that it can equip to Planeswalkers themselves! When you do, the Planeswalker loses it’s planeswalker status, but it can still activate loyalty abilities. While this does make Planeswalkers vulnerable to creature removal, they can’t be attacked down anymore which can be a huge advantage against certain strategies. Furthermore, if they have a lot of loyalty on them, they can turn into sizeable threats at the drop of a hat and you can start pressuring opponents out of nowhere!

So what planeswalkers work the best with this?

With two +1 abilities and the ability to constantly make creatures unable to go into combat, Grand Master of Flowers is a growing threat that can lock down blockers and kill quickly.

Not only is The Wandering Emperor insanely powerful, it can use the +1/+1 counter on itself to gain the counter AND a loyalty so it gains 2 power per turn with Luxior equipped making this a very quick clock!

The main concern with Wrenn and Seven is making the Treefolk, having the Treefolk removed, and Wrenn attacked down, but with Luxior, you can avoid that play pattern to some extent. If you don’t want to make the Treefolk, ticking up for a big beater is a reasonable play pattern as well.

With Teferi’s +1, you can keep scaling it up while also untapping it so it has pseudo vigilance which can be relevant against creature strategies, especially when you add the 2 life into the equation.

Kaito’s +1 asks you to attack with a creature to get the full utility from it and the inus makes a measly 1/1, what to do? Just attack with Kaito itself! It’s a 3 mana walker that can’t be attacked down on 3 so it can easily be swinging for 4 on turn 4 and then you draw a card and get an additional power and toughness out of the deal!

Probably my favorite planeswalker to potentially equip Luxior with, you can +1 targeting Kaya itself giving yourself a functionally unkillable Kaya. If they destroy or exile it, you just get it back to do it again so they’ll need multiple removal spells to break this loop!

There’s so many cool potential synergies with Luxior to explore and despite how cool this card is, it actually seems quite good as well! Sweet cards generally get relegated to the bulk piles, but I feel like this may be a strong enough ability to pull through for competitive play. So what deck could make the best use of this? Well, Esper Planeswalkers of course!

While I think Luxior is likely a better sideboard option, it still seems very reasonable for main deck play. It works so well with both of the 4 of planeswalkers that I can see it be a way to quickly close out games once you establish control which is an issue slow decks generally have. Why wait around for the opponent to claw their way from the brink of death when you can just bonk them a few times right? I’m unbelievably excited to give this a try in Standard once Streets of New Capenna is released so I’m hoping it’s as good as it looks!

VERDICT

Luxior offers an effect we have literally never seen before in Magic. While on the surface it may seem gimmicky, I think that considering it’s so cheap and can kill so quickly in conjunction with very popular planeswalkers, there’s a lot more to this card than meets the eye.

I doubt it could ever be broken (unless you count it in conjunction with Devoted Druid, but that’s a whole different story) as you’re a removal spell away from losing your planeswalker, but I like the velocity it could give slower decks.