How Does Edge of Eternities' Stationing Function in MTG?

Understanding Stationing in Magic: The Gathering

In the vast sci-fi realm of Magic: The Gathering, navigating through the Edge requires a spacecraft. Whether it's a small shuttle or a large space station filled with traders and intrigue, you'll need to assemble a crew to keep things running smoothly. This is where the station mechanic comes into play.

Stationing allows players to use their creatures' power to charge up a permanent, granting it additional abilities that can be game-winning. Before setting off on your journey, it's essential to understand how to station your ships effectively.

What Is Stationing?

The station mechanic is an activated ability typically found on Spacecrafts and Planet lands. If you're familiar with Vehicles' crewing or Mounts' saddling, you'll find stationing quite similar, though with some key differences.

Each card that can be stationed will have additional text at the bottom of the card, along with a number. This number indicates the number of charge counters needed to activate the ability. These counters can be added by tapping creatures. Each creature you tap for a station will add a number of charge counters equal to the tapped creature's power. For example, tapping a 5/5 would add five charge counters.

This is a significant difference from earlier mechanics like crewing and mounting. Charge counters remain on the permanent as long as it stays in play, allowing players to spread stationing over multiple turns if necessary. Any card that interacts with counters will also interact with these charge counters, making proliferating or using counter doublers a viable way to fully charge up a station card faster.

Once a card with a station ability has the required number of counters, it remains active as long as those counters are present. You don't need to station creatures every turn to keep it active. However, if the counters are removed and the station card falls below the prerequisite, it will immediately revert to its base form.

Another major difference between stationing, crewing, and mounting is that stationing can only be done at sorcery speed. This means you can only perform it during your main phase when the stack is empty.

How To Use Stationing

When assessing station cards that require effort to reach their maximum impact, such as Battles and Planeswalkers, it's important to focus on the cheaper effects rather than the final ones. For instance, while The Eternity Elevator can eventually generate a massive amount of mana, it requires frequent stationing to get online. Instead, treat it like a five-mana mana rock, which is good but not overly powerful.

On the other hand, Wurmwall Sweeper offers a great tradeoff, allowing you to surveil two for just two colorless mana. Tapping creatures for stationing comes at the cost of the station ability itself, but you can tap creatures that have summoning sickness.

Consider how quickly you can station a card. Big effects like The Eternity Elevator's or Infinite Guideline Station's can be game-ending, but there's a chance they might be removed before you get the chance to use them. Cards like Extinguisher Battleship or The Seriema have more modest charge costs that could be achieved in just a couple of turns.

Tapping creatures also has other payoffs that may make station cards just a small part of your overall strategy. Having a quick way to tap Kona, Rescue Beastie or Kilo, Apogee Mind is always handy, especially if you can proliferate those charge counters for even more profit.

There is one big exception to this, however, and that's Planet lands. Land cards are much harder to remove than artifacts like Spacecraft, making a land with a big ability more likely worth playing, especially if you get it out early. Dropping an Uthros, Titanic Godcore on turn one gives you plenty of time to tap creatures that aren't doing much else, safe in the knowledge your land probably won't be blown up anytime soon.

The Best Cards With Station

It's tempting to be drawn into the explosive power of Spacecraft and Planets. If you're looking to take command, these are the cards you'll want to work with.

Inspirit, Flagship Vessel

As the face card of Edge of Eternities' Counter Intelligence Commander deck, Inspirit is an easy card to cast and even easier to charge up to its first ability. From there, you have a way to put counters on any creature or other station card each turn. Unfortunately, it can't charge itself this way, but it's still a handy ability for such a low cost.

The fully charged ability is even better, giving all your other artifacts hexproof and indestructible. Again, it doesn't protect Inspirit, but it only needs eight charge counters to work, making it surprisingly easy to achieve quickly—especially when you're already buffing creatures with +1/+1 counters.

Evendo, Waking Haven

Green's entire identity is having big, stompy creatures ready to bash your opponents' skulls in, which makes the otherwise high charge counter cost of 12 or more startlingly achievable. As mentioned, lands are harder to interact with than Spacecraft, making this an almost inevitable threat in just about any green deck.

Once it's online, you'll be able to make more green mana than you'll likely ever need, throwing out more and more creatures and spiraling out of control. Provided you have enough creatures, it also goes infinite with two cards: Wakeroot Elemental and Silvanus's Invoker, because the one thing your mono-green Commander deck needed was a way to get more mana.

The Seriema

One of the cheapest Spacecraft available, the Seriema only needs three mana and seven charge counters to be fully online. Even if you don't have the creatures to charge it, its enter trigger lets you search for a legendary creature and put it into your hand. In Commander, this could be just about anything, while in Standard, you're likely wanting to grab something like Arahbo, The First Fang, thanks to it making a 1/1 that's buffed up to a 2/2 when it enters to immediately charge it up to four counters.

White goes wide with lots of tokens, so use them to charge up The Seriema to make a 5/5 flier that makes your legendary creatures indestructible when they're tapped. The Seriema really speeds up aggression, making this little tugboat of a ship something to be feared.