"Kaya, Ghost Assassin: Blinking for Fun and Profit"

"Kaya, Ghost Assassin: Blinking for Fun and Profit"

by:

Virgilio F. De leon Jr.

Kaya , Ghost Assassin steps into the light and takes her place as the newest planeswalker. So what do you do with a planeswalker who deals with the ethereal? Kills Ghosts for a living(In this case King Brago who is now not so Eternal?).Well you get her under contract and you pay her. You Pay her well.

She initially costs 4 mana (2 colorless , White and Black mana) making some players happy that she is in Orzhoz colors because like the Orzhov there is always a price to pay when dealing with her.

She comes in with 5 loyalty counters when you summon her and these will come in handy. Her build reminds me a lot of Sarkhan the Mad where you have no abilities that actually give her any + loyalty counters. So that after you have successfully utilized her abilities she just fades away. 

So let us check on her first ability. It costs nothing but you can exile Kaya herself or up to one target creature.Return the exiled card to the battlefield under its owners control at the beginning of your next upkeep. And the price for this? You lose 2 life.

Now there are several uses for this ability and I am focusing mainly on the EDH possibilities here because I have not played any other format for awhile.

1) If you are about to be clobbered by a really really big creature and you need to to have enough time to figure something out then you could just exile it temporarily. You could target your opponents creatures as well as yours and speaking of that. 

2) If one of your creatures have been kidnapped  , possessed or taken over by one of your opponents which happens a lot in the course of an EDH game then you could just exile that creature and on your next upkeep you get to have it back. And hopefully it has an Enters the battlefield effect like a Sepulchral Primordial so that your opponents will have second thoughts about stealing your creatures again. 

3) And as I mentioned if you have a creature that you would like to blink again and again then Kaya is your planeswalker. For example if you have a Noosegraf Mob in play and it is going to die when a player plays another spell then you could just blink it and on your next upkeep you could have it "Fresh" with 5 +1/+1 counters on it and you could wait for your opponents to play spells to get more 2/2 zombies. 

My favorite cycles of creatures are the Titans and Primordials so any EDH deck with them would love to have Kaya on board.

4) And of course Kaya would love to interact with the recently  released Oaths from Shadows Over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon. So the obvious colors would be for Oath of Liliana and Oath of Gideon but you could also splash with the other multicolored EDH decks that feature Orzhov colors(W/B). So what would be the interaction(Let's say that you already have the 2 oaths out before you play Kaya). You get a 2/2 Zombie from Liliana and an additional Planeswalker Loyalty counter from Gideon. And that is for a price of 0. The extra loyalty counters would come in real handy if you want to use Kaya's other abilities

Her second skill , (-1) allows you to siphon off 2 life points from each opponent and you gain 2 life. Sure, 2 life points seems like such a little thing and does not seem to have an impact at all but then again if one or more of your opponents are ganging up on one particular player sometimes those 2 points would be be the difference between a player losing or all of you suffering magnificent Overloaded Cyclonic Rift when that player has enough mana. 

And finally her last skill which is a (-2) which makes each opponent discard a card and you to draw one. So everyone's hand is poorer and Kaya makes you a little richer. Not bad to have right. You could maximize using this ability for 2 turns and then using her first ability to blink herself on the 3rd turn so that she comes back fresh from the aether to help you draw , gain life or blink a creature out of existence.

Kaya , Ghost Assassin is a fun card to play with and she will surely find her place among existing EDH decks. So who else excited for her? I know I am. Keep on playing. Keep on brewing.