I know it's usually more fun to talk about the best equipment in the format, I'll say that up top. Why would you talk about something everyone at the table has to read when you can take it out of the deck, then the sleeve, then the perfect fit, then throw it at the basketball backboard you have on your trash can, then put Shadowspear in the deck instead? Lots of reasons. Maybe you don't want to pay Shadowspear money. Maybe all of your spears are in other decks. Maybe the deck already has a Shadowspear in it and you need something that's not that. Or, maybe you're like me and Shadowspear bores you a bit. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely play it, and it doesn't bore me when I cast, equip and benefit from it. In the building process, though, I sometimes wish I could play cards people don't immediately know how to react to. Not only are there equipment cards already out there that do something powerful, interesting, or utilitarian, they also give you a little bit of incentive to play that old deck. Drawing a new card in an old deck for the first time is always a lot of fun and that's a thing you can do as often as you want - it's completely legal. If you are in the market for some new, spicy but overlooked armaments, I am here with a Top 7.5. Get it? Because I write the 75% article series so instead of doing a Top 10, I'm doing a Top 7.5. You can't have half of a card, so let's round up to 8. And a list like this is never complete without a few honorable mentions... fine, it's a Top 10 list. You happy?

Starting with the two honorable mentions. That's right, I'm saving the best for last, so you'll have to read the entire article if you want to HEY! HEY! Stop scrolling! Great, now that you RUINED THE SURPRISE for yourself, can we start here?

10. Hot Soup

This makes a creature unblockable. Other equipment like Whispersilk Cloak makes creatures unblockable and gives them shroud, why would we play a card that makes our creatures easier to kill? The answer is, DOES it? Are your creatures routinely taking damage in Commander in amounts that would not kill them? In my experience, your creatures die to a wipe or they take 13 damage with a Blasphemous Act, and no coroner is going to look at the charred husk of what used to be your commander and say "I think the cause of death was Minestrone." Making a creature unblockable is good, giving it Shroud is NOT always good because sometimes you like the idea of having an unblockable creature that can have more equipment and auras go on it. I know, right? Wild. And people have gotten the memo on not always wanting to pay 3 to play and 2 to equip a Whispersilk Cloak. Cards like Trailblazer's Boots (Unblockable unless your opponent is playing an all-basics mana base and if they are, good luck?) and Prowler's Helm (who plays Walls these days? Probably not all 3 opponents) are played quite a bit in the format according to EDHREC. Hot Soup deserves to be in that conversation.

9. Nemesis Mask

This is the opposite of Hot Soup in some ways, but it's no less useful. Typically a Green ability, Lure mechanics do well in all colors. If all of their blockers commit to one of your creatures, by my estimation, your other creatures aren't getting blocked. Throw this on some of the new, nasty creatures that punish them for blocking like Phyrexian Vindicator or, its scarier and much more blockable friend, "Phyrexian Vindicator with a Colossus Hammer". Is that too cute? Absolutely. But don't you kind of want to do it in a deck with lots of ways to tutor both of those equipment? You don't need to tilt fully into "block me.dec" territory for this to be a worthwhile effect - if you're only sneaking a more important creature through unblocked, it has to be worth a slot in the deck. If you want enough value to justify including this, you don't have to throw this on an Ixalan Dinosaur and get all of the triggers, but don't you kind of want to?

8. Grappling Hook

I advocate for this card a lot and I'll do it here, too. I think the additional utility granted by the ability to ensnare a utility creature and forced it to become a meat shield justifies the additional mana it costs when compared to Fireshrieker. Giving a creature Double Strike is good, and of the cards that do that, this is the one I'm most likely to play outside of Boros decks. Some Boros creatures get better when they're blocked, but colors like Black tend to give us creatures that put the creatures they kill into play on your side. Green tends to give creatures trample to take care of a pesky Seedborn Muse or Drannith Magistrate and still punch through for damage. Double on-hit triggers is good, optional removal is worth the mana cost.

7. Manriki-Gusari

Sometimes the best equipment is for them not to have any. Manriki-Gusari was Block Constructed anti-Jitte tech for good reason - the winner of the Jitte war was the winner of a lot of those creature mirrors. Swords that give their creatures protection from your whole deck, equipment that turns Planeswalkers into creatures, Umezawa's still-playable Jitte - there is a lot of annoying equipment out there. One option is to run Tower of the Magistrate. Another is to run an equipment to end all equipment. There's no law against running both.

6. Rakdos Riteknife

Rakdos Riteknife was bad for a very long time and it was properly rated until very recently. What has changed for Riteknife is that Proliferate decks have gotten a ton of tools lately, and it seems like Ashnod the Uncaring was tailor-made to wield it. It's not just Blue that Proliferates well anymore, though - White is getting in on the fun. Being able to play Riteknife in some sort of Grixis nastiness deck or a Mardu aggro deck with the knife in the hands of anything from a Mirran Crusader to a Grateful Apparition means you only have to sac one creature to get the Riteknife party started because Proliferate will take care of the rest. Build up a lot of counters on this and you suddenly have quite the bargaining chip - who is going to aggress the player who can nuke 10 permanents with a terrible bulk rare from back when your parents were in High School? No one twice, that's who.

5. Scythe of the Wretched

Scythe does not specify combat damage. It does not specify that the damage need be the reason that the damaged creature goes to the yard. It merely specifies that those two things need to happen in that order. If you put in a bit of work, you could be killing every creature and gaining control of all of them. That's much more fun than a conventional board wipe, and makes almost every creature with a targeted damage ability into an optional Olivia Voldaren, which is even more surprising in non-Rakdos colors. Maybe it's just me, but playing with their creatures is more fun and this lets you scoop them right out of the bin.

4. Deathrender

Scythe of the Wretched gives you their creatures for free, but what if you want your own creatures for free? Strap Deathrender to a hapless creature and force it to block or just sac it somehow and you can upgrade to the best creature in your hand, which will start out with a nice power and toughness boost to boot. There isn't a ton to say here - this card speaks for itself and I think newer players will be delighted to learn this exists.

3. Dragon Throne of Tarkir

This card deserves a second look - the world it was launched in wasn't ready for a card this expensive. If you draw this, you're spending nine MANA before you can even use it. I'm suggesting if you have nine mana, you probably have enough creatures for this to end the game. Suddenly, go-wide decks are faster than they used to be, and creatures are bigger. Not just one new type of deck benefits from this game-ending effect - it is equally potent in Adeline, Resplendent Cathar or Ghalta and Mavren. Green decks don't need to jump through hoops to get a Craterhoof effect and it's the color that has the most ways to tutor for it, that's not new. What's new is that Green isn't the only color who can go both tall and wide at the same time and those colors are suddenly spoiling for a quick way to end the game. Here it is. I recommend putting it into play with Stonehewer Giant or Stoneforge Mystic for less mana and winning the game on the spot.

2. Neko-Te

This card is actually fairly absurd. When it was printed, it was fair if not underwhelming - Jitte and Swords of both Fire and Ice and also Light and Shadow ruled the roost. "THIS is the equipment they're giving us now?" we thought. "They're really overcompensating for Skullclamp!" Commander is a format where Umezawa's Jitte is the fairer card as far as I am concerned. This turns any creature that can deal damage to more than one creature into a table-locking menace. I have used this card to kill a player who had a Worship out. That is a bit of a corner case but I mostly just wanted people to know about it. The creature wearing Neko-Te can die - that won't unfreeze the creatures. This doubles ping damage on players. Of all Magic equipment, this has the easily the worst "effect to ubiquity" ratio; it's in fewer decks as of today than Poet's Quill. The raw power of this card demands more respect.

1. Spy Kit

I am not smart enough to break this card. I don't think I need to tell you exactly how to do absurd things with this card to tell you that this card is begging to be broken. You could do fair things with Evil Twin. You could do unfair things with Eradicate. Power creep has made this card tickle my Spidey Sense lately - Spy Kit isn't that good in a deck with Clone but it's superlative in a deck with Pirated Copy or Mocking Doppelganger. As Magic continues to explore design space, there will be more ways to benefit from having a card have a certain name. You have to do some work with some of the cards - if you want Mimeofacture to do anything, for example, you'll first need to donate the kitted-up spy. Is it worth it to jump through those hoops? I think so, but the main takeaway isn't that, the main takeaway is that there will never be fewer effects that break this card than there are now, but there are going to be more and more each year. I can't wait.