seems funny that can be both good and bad depending on the creature. Otherwise its a nice control spell.
I could be wrong, but I don't think this effect can be bad for you? Since it doesn't say "[...]all instances of one creature type that appears on that card", if you steal, for example, a Plague Sliver, can't you just change all instances of creature type "Antelope" to "Vampire" and not inherit the drawback?
For this to look attractive you really want your opponent to be missing land drops and/or not playing anything, and even then it's probably not worth the cost unless you're applying pressure and/or getting value from the thing you bounced.
For example, say it's your turn 4 on the play, you've got a 2-drop and a 3-drop in play and your opponent still hasn't played a creature (better still if they're stuck on 2 lands). At that point it's worth thinking about bouncing one of your own lands along with one of theirs to prolong the portion of the game where they're doing nothing while you hit them in the face. I'm not saying you necessarily should do that (if you've got more creatures to play you're likely better off just playing them, and using Tradewinds to bounce whatever blocker they eventually play), but it's an option.
In the scenario from the OP, though, you're not really doing anything with the tempo you've cost your opponent, and it's not clear that you're hurting them more than yourself, let alone netting a 3-mana card's worth of value from the exchange.
Maulfist Doorbuster - 1.5. Don’t let the fancy energy symbols fool you, this probably plays much closer to Fiend Hunter than you would expect, and that card was very mediocre.
*record scratch*
Bro did you even Innistrad?
j/k of course, from context I take it the comparison was to Fiend Binder, and it's a good one. I do think it's interesting that Fiend Binder was such a stinker while Goblin Heelcutter was a total all-star. Obviously the surprise factor you get from Haste is a huge deal on an effect like this, even if the haste option comes with a drawback, but I do wonder if Fiend Binder might have been significantly better in some formats than it was in EMN.
I'm surprised that Thriving Rats are getting so much hate, not because I think they're especially good, but because they're obviously not unplayable. Aggro decks would play a 2-mana 1/2 Unleash creature all day, and the rats are significantly better than that. (Unleash, for any commenters who weren't around for RtR) You'd rather have Thriving Grubs, but if your plan is to turn two-drops sideways you're rarely turning up your nose at the rats.
On energy generally, I suspect UG Energy is a draftable archetype, but there are a lot of interlocking pieces to the energy economy and it's hard to know ahead of time how easy it will be to make it add up to a lot more than the sum of its parts.
I don't think they'll ever print another set where Murder wouldn't be a top ten uncommon, at least outside of some supplemental product.
There's been some good stuff, but nothing so far that would make me suspect they're dialing up the power level in Limited in a major way. Of the cards you mentioned, about 3/5 of the Thriving cycle seems very good, maybe more if drafting around Energy is a thing, which is about in line with other Common mechanic showcase cycles. Lawless Broker seems like a card that won't get cut, better than Elder Cathar on average and that card was okay. But as these things go, it's just fine, not even close to things like Nessian Asp/Wingsteed Rider/Goblin Heelcutter/Mist Raven/Pick your favorite nutty common creature. I agree that Prakhata Club Security is interesting in that black sometimes has problems with its common creatures being a little shrimpy on raw stats and the security guards are actually on curve, but it's not like Vestige of Emrakul set the world on fire. (Or maybe it did, I still don't know exactly how Eldrazi work )
So that kind of sounds like I'm tearing into the new set, and I don't mean it that way at all. It all looks great to me so far, and I'm especially excited to play with Energy and see what that's like. But it's not looking abnormally powerful (or abnormally weak for that matter) to me.
It really wouldn't. As an instant, this card would be a very good combat trick, which would make it a decent Limited card but still not as good as a good fight spell like Rabid Bite or Savage Punch. (i.e., this as an instant, esp. with an additional cost, is not outside the range of printable green commons)
As-is, without whatever the extra text is, this is pretty bad. Phytoburst is a totally unplayable card; trample helps this a lot, even with a smaller pump, but that's only enough to get it to "Playable if you're really aggressive," not "good."
I think it's pretty obvious that Maro's blogatog answers involved him getting confused about what people were asking (Shadows Over Innistrad-Innistrad vs. Innistrad-Innistrad) and incorrectly implying that they knew Emrakul was going to visit Innistrad back when they were making the original set Innistrad.
That idea wouldn't just be surprising, it's also been contradicted every time he's clearly laid out the timeline for creating Shadows Over Innistrad, most thoroughly in his most recent article. He reads and answers questions very quickly in between other things he's doing and there are mistakes and misunderstandings all the time (especially on creative/story questions). Not that I blame him, I think it's incredible that the head designer of a game is making himself so accessible to fans, but you have to take any information with Blogatog as its sole source with an enormous, monolithic grain of salt.
Consider the article version (someone pitched cosmic horror with Emrakul on Innistrad some time after the original block, but before BFZ was decided) to be what actually happened.
I don't think it's ever been explicitly stated, but I've always had the impression that the main threat to humans on Innistrad, from a species survival/continuity of civilization standpoint, are the vampires. They're numerous, immortal, not controlled by humans, can convert humans to increase their numbers, have to eat humans to survive, and seem to lack the self-control and/or inclination to moderate that consumption. You can say some of those things about some other monsters, but vampires just seem like they'd be the main threat to the species.
I also have the impression that things have been really, really bad for the vampires lately. The humans and angels were ascendant at the end of Avacyn Restored, and Sigarda's musings in A Gaze Blank and Pitiless seem to say that that ascendancy hadn't really abated yet. Then Nahiri and assorted madness seem to have devastated the major bloodlines, except the Stromkirk (though if their sea god cult led a lot of them to fall under Emrakul's thrall and the Eldrazi-corrupted weaken or die when Emrakul is sealed, they might be getting wrecked too).
Sorin didn't hide on Innistrad though. He went looking for Ugin. I'm not going to say he made great decisions, but he wasn't completely ignoring the Eldrazi.
True, though he only stopped ignoring the Eldrazi after they were freed and even then expended the absolute minimum effort to do anything about it before retreating to what he assumed was the relative safety of Innistrad. Its actually really weird that he ignored Zendikar for 1000 years after being told that the containment was not as effective as they thought. Its not like he was super busy all that time. Either he though Nahiri had fixed the hedron network better than Ugin's original design (very unlikely given his opinion of her) or he didn't care if it failed (which seems contradicted by him trying to find Ugin when it does fail) or ... I can't think of a third option.
I think the best way to make sense of this is that Sorin cares about the survival of the multiverse in general, but it's not an absolute deal-breaker as long as Innistrad is protected. Like he enjoys being able to grab lunch on Kamigawa and take in a concert on Ravnica and he'd rather the Eldrazi didn't eat those planes, but he'd trade them all for Innistrad's safety, and he's only willing to go so far out of his way for the broader multiverse.
On the one hand, I kind of want the Magic story to move on from Sorin and Nahiri so it will stop tearing the community apart in bitter civil war. On the other hand, I kind of want the story to be about Sorin and Nahiri locked in a cycle of revenge forever, just to see how far the parallel grudge between Sorin partisans and Nahiri adherents can go.
That makes sense. For me, a "Werewolves + Eldrazi Werewolves" casual deck would work flavorfully in a way that "Werewolves + Wolfir" don't. I think that's because werewolves are already monsters that, when they're actually portrayed with a horror vibe, play on transformation, loss of autonomy, and maybe a touch of body horror, so John Carpenter-esque wolf monsters don't feel like such a huge thematic break to me. But I can appreciate that there are other perfectly valid ways to think about them, and others might think werewolves+wolfir work better, or that neither combination is satisfying.
So. Will we get any "good aligned" Werewolves this set..?
Mechanically, the only real werewolf we are getting is Ulrich.
Which is absolutely ridiculous and I'm not even a fan of the tribe.
It honestly confounds me that they essentially did the exact same thing to werewolves in both Innistrad blocks.
In both blocks set on the plane they've used the last set to completely screw over the tribe. AVR made them all into Wolfir, EMN made them all into Eldrazi.
It's extra infuriating because unlike every single other tribe on the plane, werewolves ONLY get support in Innistrad blocks, so screwing them in even a single set has a much harsher impact.
I don't think this is entirely fair. There's certainly some creative distance between Eldrazified werewolves and regular werewolves, but they're still werewolves, still transform, and actually play together really well mechanically. There's a ton of synergy between the traditional werewolf transformation mechanic and what's essentially the Monstrosity mechanic, so getting to play a mix of those mechanics with the same relevant creature type seems like it should work out well for fans of the tribe.
Your evaluations all seem like you're assuming the worst-case scenario, that enabling Emerge just won't be a thing* and any Emerge creature you cast is going to cost full price or involve sacrificing a relevant non-enabler creature. Given that Emerge is clearly meant to be the blue-green draft archetype and blue in particular is dedicating a lot of its card pool to supporting the mechanic, this amounts to assuming that R&D will prove to have just completely failed to execute on a central mechanical theme of the set. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that's happened, but I don't buy it as an assumption.
*Edit - Maybe I should clarify what I mean by this. For example:
Wretched Griff: C- One of my friends suggested a way of thinking of this card that I like: it's a split card between angelic gift and an overcosted cantrip flyer.
This analysis assumes that you literally never have an enabler or a creature locked under aura-based removal. Maybe you're pessimistic about how often enablers will matter or how playable an archetype based on enablers+Emerge will be, but to start from an assumption of complete irrelevance means you're being much too cautious.
For example, say it's your turn 4 on the play, you've got a 2-drop and a 3-drop in play and your opponent still hasn't played a creature (better still if they're stuck on 2 lands). At that point it's worth thinking about bouncing one of your own lands along with one of theirs to prolong the portion of the game where they're doing nothing while you hit them in the face. I'm not saying you necessarily should do that (if you've got more creatures to play you're likely better off just playing them, and using Tradewinds to bounce whatever blocker they eventually play), but it's an option.
In the scenario from the OP, though, you're not really doing anything with the tempo you've cost your opponent, and it's not clear that you're hurting them more than yourself, let alone netting a 3-mana card's worth of value from the exchange.
*record scratch*
Bro did you even Innistrad?
j/k of course, from context I take it the comparison was to Fiend Binder, and it's a good one. I do think it's interesting that Fiend Binder was such a stinker while Goblin Heelcutter was a total all-star. Obviously the surprise factor you get from Haste is a huge deal on an effect like this, even if the haste option comes with a drawback, but I do wonder if Fiend Binder might have been significantly better in some formats than it was in EMN.
On energy generally, I suspect UG Energy is a draftable archetype, but there are a lot of interlocking pieces to the energy economy and it's hard to know ahead of time how easy it will be to make it add up to a lot more than the sum of its parts.
There's been some good stuff, but nothing so far that would make me suspect they're dialing up the power level in Limited in a major way. Of the cards you mentioned, about 3/5 of the Thriving cycle seems very good, maybe more if drafting around Energy is a thing, which is about in line with other Common mechanic showcase cycles. Lawless Broker seems like a card that won't get cut, better than Elder Cathar on average and that card was okay. But as these things go, it's just fine, not even close to things like Nessian Asp/Wingsteed Rider/Goblin Heelcutter/Mist Raven/Pick your favorite nutty common creature. I agree that Prakhata Club Security is interesting in that black sometimes has problems with its common creatures being a little shrimpy on raw stats and the security guards are actually on curve, but it's not like Vestige of Emrakul set the world on fire. (Or maybe it did, I still don't know exactly how Eldrazi work
So that kind of sounds like I'm tearing into the new set, and I don't mean it that way at all. It all looks great to me so far, and I'm especially excited to play with Energy and see what that's like. But it's not looking abnormally powerful (or abnormally weak for that matter) to me.
As-is, without whatever the extra text is, this is pretty bad. Phytoburst is a totally unplayable card; trample helps this a lot, even with a smaller pump, but that's only enough to get it to "Playable if you're really aggressive," not "good."
That idea wouldn't just be surprising, it's also been contradicted every time he's clearly laid out the timeline for creating Shadows Over Innistrad, most thoroughly in his most recent article. He reads and answers questions very quickly in between other things he's doing and there are mistakes and misunderstandings all the time (especially on creative/story questions). Not that I blame him, I think it's incredible that the head designer of a game is making himself so accessible to fans, but you have to take any information with Blogatog as its sole source with an enormous, monolithic grain of salt.
Consider the article version (someone pitched cosmic horror with Emrakul on Innistrad some time after the original block, but before BFZ was decided) to be what actually happened.
I also have the impression that things have been really, really bad for the vampires lately. The humans and angels were ascendant at the end of Avacyn Restored, and Sigarda's musings in A Gaze Blank and Pitiless seem to say that that ascendancy hadn't really abated yet. Then Nahiri and assorted madness seem to have devastated the major bloodlines, except the Stromkirk (though if their sea god cult led a lot of them to fall under Emrakul's thrall and the Eldrazi-corrupted weaken or die when Emrakul is sealed, they might be getting wrecked too).
*Edit - Maybe I should clarify what I mean by this. For example:This analysis assumes that you literally never have an enabler or a creature locked under aura-based removal. Maybe you're pessimistic about how often enablers will matter or how playable an archetype based on enablers+Emerge will be, but to start from an assumption of complete irrelevance means you're being much too cautious.