It’s been a while, so let’s dive back into realms of Magic the Gathering and see if there’s a card that we can’t turn into a new magical item for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.
Today we’re going to take a look at the Aether Vial card – first released in Dark Steel back in 2004, this card generates charges at the beginning of each of your turns and lets you tap it to play a card with a converted mana cost equal to the number of charges it currently has into play from your hand. Now, Dungeons and Dragons did a lot of things right with 5th Edition, but something that was missing (until recently) was solid rules for summoning creatures. Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything saw much better rules for these kinds of spells introduced, however, that make a summoning focused caster more viable in play.
All that said, my mind doesn’t go to an item to help with summoning creatures when I think of bringing this card into the game. Instead, I go directly to sorcerers and their various metamagic options. Let’s give them an option to play around with – adding some extra effects to their spells by letting them add an additional effect to a spell at a higher cost in terms of Sorcery Points.
Aether Vials are incredibly potent reserves of magical energy that a trained sorcerer can use to further augment their magical spells. By drawing on the raw power that such a device contains, they can further twist the magical powers at their command to change the effects of a spell in ways that their opponents are unable to predict, and thus, unable to effectively defend against. However, the creation of these devices requires capturing the essence of a very powerful wild magic storm so they are quite rare and jealously guarded by their creators, often times going so far as to be buried with them to prevent them from falling into other casters’ hands. For this reason, sorcerers are often always on the lookout for rumors of the resting places of powerful casters.
So there you have it for this week! Short and simple on the surface, but there’s a lot that creative enough casters could do with it to surprise even the most prepared DM with a metamagic combination that they never foresaw. And there’s even a built-in adventure hook to make your players jump through some hoops to get their hands on one as they brave a dangerous arcane tomb.
Ben Erickson
