"Greenbelt Rampager:Addressing the elephant in the room"

"Greenbelt Rampager: Addressing the elephant in the room"

by:

Virgilio F. De leon Jr. MD

Let me address the elephant in the room...Greenbelt Rampager.

The funny thing is that when I saw this card I had an absurd picture in my head of an elephant running wild in the Greenbelt area in Makati. It might have been my lack of sleep lately. 

With that out of the way let me just say that this creature is amazing and is designed to be relevant in a lot of decks.At first glance it is a 1 green mana creature with 3/4 stats with a sickness , it has a requirement of 2 energy counters so that it can stay on the battlefield but it is much more than that.

Greenbelt Rampager can be viewed as the following:

1) "1 energy counter for 1 green mana" - Yup. If you can't pay it's 2 energy counter requirement it bounces back to your hand and gives you 1 energy counter so that you could use the same energy counter later on to make it stick in play. Or you could keep on playing and bouncing it back for more energy counters. 

2) "Recurrent Revolt Trigger" - Don't have the energy counters or simply refusing to pay them bounces it to your hand making it leave play. Triggering Revolt!

3) "Awesome crew!" - I can see people collecting a full set of this card. It is probably the best card to crew the new 1 colorless mana costing 7/11 Consulate Dreadnought on turn two! Turn 1 play the Dreadnought , Turn 2 play 2 Greenbelt Rampager's from your hand. Before they go back to your hand you could tap them to crew the Dreadnought. Attack. 7 damage. 2 more unblocked turns later you have one very dead opponent and you didn't even need 3 mana to do it. 

4) "3/4 fattie on turn 2." - Assuming you have played an Aether hub on turn 1 play a Forest , play the Greenbelt Rampager and allow it to bounce back to your hand to net one energy counter. On turn 2 , play an Aether hub and play the Greenbelt Rampager again. This time it will stay because of the counter you already have and the counter you just received from the fresh Aether hub.

Now that we have addressed how great this card is I hope I can get 4 copies. I can see a lot of brewing in my foreseeable future. Thanks for reading.