Trade Cards Online

General description:
Probably one of the best equipments created since Skullclamp. A two-mana equipment which allows you pump your creature, kill opponent's, and even saves you from burns by giving you life? It's rare to see a Legendary card worth of using four copies of it in your deck.

Uses:
Umezawa's Jitte is a perfect card for any kind of Beatdown decks (Like the Red/White Wheenie). However, since it's a legendary card and is undercosted, it's used also as sideboard by Control-Aggros, or even Control decks.

Strategies and game play:
Usually a Jitte into play means "I'm two steps of winning", if you know how to deal with it. Umezawa's Jitte is an equipment, and therefore needs creatures in play so you can add more counters to it. Creatures with first strike and doublestrike are a good shot for it. Umezawa's Jitte is a Legendary card, so don't ever play two of them at a time.

Combos with other cards:
Cards with doublestrike (such as Boros Swiftblade) are a good call to be use with Jitte, since you'll get four counters instead of two. Also, cards with evasion ability (flying, fear) are a good call so you can hit your opponent's life points directly with your pumped creature.

Ways to counteract it:
A Umezawa's Jitte is only dangerous when it has counters on it; otherwise is useless. A good way of avoiding it is killing equipped creature before it deals damage, or avoiding it dealing damage (Like blocking with a Sakura-Tribe Elder and sacrificing it before damage). Playing another Umezawa's Jitte is also good shot. Acoording to the new Legend rules, two legendary cards with the same name are simultaneously destroyed. Cards like Naturalize and Manriki-Gusari are good ways of destroying it.

Strengths/Pros:
Equipment, undercosted (both mana and equipping cost), the abilities of giving -1/-1 and gaining two life do not require the Jitte to be equipped, it receives two counters when damage is dealt by equipped creature.

Weaknesses/Cons:
Vulnerable to artifact destroyers, legendary artifact, needs creatures to work.

Variations:
Printed only into Betrayers of Kamigawa, on normal and foil version.

Artwork and aesthetics:
Jitte was a "peasant" weapon (since it was adapted from farm implements) from Japan, usually used by magistrates to disarm bandits, rather than killing them.

Overall rating:
Cards like Ancestral Recall and Library of Alexandria are rated 10, so I'll give a 8.5.