MTG Salvation

Goal: In a previous thread (http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/creativity/custom-card-creation/671255-hics-rebels-and-mercenaries-a-solution-or-a?page=3), Doombringer and others drew my attention to an important argument for the inclusion of "bad cards" - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-6Nac4NVexcJ:archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/164 &cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au - Roughly, sometimes "bad cards" are useful draft tools to help balance the environment. "Bad cards" are cards that a player can dismiss offhand early in the pack, but may be late draft picks.

This is a cool concept, and I wanted to explore whether or not these 'bad cards" - what I'll call "Signal Cards" can be designed in such a way as to signal you not to draft them in draft, but such that they would be constructed playable elsewhere.

To immediately signal that card is a "bad card", I thought the easiest thing to do would be to come up with a "bad card" keyword. What would such a keyword look like? Answer: It's a drawback, like defender. Here's what I came up with:

Is the Tome a good card or a bad card? In constructed the tome is capable of swiss-army-knifing Unspeakable creatures from your 15 card sideboard onto the battlefield. Yes, you lose life equal to their Unspeakable number to play them, and then will lose life when they die and unspeakably exile themselves... but the Tome also has a way to gain some of that life back for you via it's 2nd ability. Ability 1? Pure flavor HERE, but it's possible that future unspeakable creatures will have activated abilities that require colored mana, and this lets you any-color-deck activate those abilities.

The "drawback" of cutting in to your sideboard for powerful "tutor" effects has been explored a bit with wishes, but rarely have you been inclined to so gut your sideboard for a toolbox.

Because the unspeakable creatures exile themselves, they "recycle" themselves for tome targets when they die. However, if you did run unspeakable creatures main deck, they also become tome targets after they die... although clearly the cost of losing life when you discard them or otherwise let them die is a problem.

Will the Tome of the Unspeakable deck be constructed worthy? It's hard to say. Because it'll be tutoring from the sideboard, it cuts down shuffle time. 3 mana and some life for ANY unspeakable creature from your sideboard is some pretty sick tech, and you'll note that their Unspeakable number is comparable to what you'd expect the CMC of these cards to be for them to be "high priority constructed targets" (IE the spider and elephant have unspeakable 2, and you'd certainly run both in constructed if they cost 2, right?), so the idea of dropping any one of these on turn 3 is pretty appealing - at least in theory. Some, like the Bishop, even encourage a specific kind of deck be built around it. Yeah, you'll never play him maindeck, but the ability to tutor him up on turn 3 and then go sacrifice-crazy is kind of appealing.

Will Tome of the Unspeakable be playable in limited? Yeah. In fact, it's probably first pickable, as it becomes 3 mana and some life for "the biggest Unspeakable creature in the cards you're not running." - and there'll be a lot of unspeakable cards you're not running.

Will Unspeakable creatures be playable in limited? Some will, others won't. Cheater and Spider are fairly limited costed, despite drawbacks, yet you won't really be happy to draft them early. As such, they fulfill the goal of "signal cards" despite being playable in some constructed decks.