EDH tech: Glasses of Urza

Glasses of Urza is a card I probably have about 8 of from back when Revised was in print.  And I never thought much of it, especially after Telepathy was printed.

But then I started playing big multi-player EDH games.  I tried to run Telepathy and it was awful.  It slows the game to a crawl as everyone wants to look at everyone else's hand after every draw and before every action.  It's one of those cards that annoys people so much that they'll kill you just to make the game go faster.  It's good 1 on 1, decent in 3 player games, and terrible for any more than that.

But Glasses of Urza is great.  Check out what the Blue player has before you cast an important spell.  Or, if you're playing Blue, make sure that your counterspells aren't being used on lesser threats.  Seeing your opponent's hand is almost always good, it's just kind of hard to justify taking up one of your 99 slots for the effect.

Benefits include:

- It say's "look at opponent's hand" not "reveal opponent's hand" only you need to know what you see.
- It's a 1 mana artifact, and the only thing easier to tutor for than 1 mana artifacts are basic lands.
- It's too unassuming to waste targeted removal on.  Especially if your deck runs artifacts that are actually "good" any decent player is going to go after your Sol Ring or Sensei's Divining Top first.
- It's political, if opponent A needs to know something about opponent B, you can let them know, for a price or alliance, or... and this is where benefit #1 comes into play, you can lie.  They won't know until it's too late.
- Obviously it's great with any effect where you need to guess what's in an opponent's hand, or see if an "everyone puts an X into play for free" effect is going to screw you over.

It's really fantastic, I'm loving having it in my Esper ETB Control deck, and I've had to make some pretty tough cuts in that one.  I took out frikkin' Brainstorm.

Anyway, it goes in the long list of "card I'd never put in a 60 card deck in a million years but rock in EDH."  Try it!