(Opened for August 03, 2015)
I’m really happy to see that prowess is now evergreen, and that it’s going to be featured primarily in red and blue, the spell-happy colors. For the longest time, red-blue is the color pair that hasn’t dominated any of the evergreen keywords for creatures, and it’s good that it still aligns with the two color’s strongest suit: instants and sorceries.
And it’s actually a good call that they decided to give the mechanic a non-culture specific name. Debuting in the Tarkir block – a plane with strong Asian, “Avatar: The Last Air-bender” elements – it would have been really tempting to just call it “kung-fu” or “martial arts”. Indeed, as Mark Rosewater once said, Wizards has learned its lesson to avoid such naming conventions, which effectively confined “bushido” and “ninjutsu” into the world of Kamigawa with little hopes of being reused for future cards outside supplementary products (unless we revisit that plane, which is yet another unlikely event). Then again, if they deem it flavorful and elegant enough, they can still rename it as a new mechanic with non-plane-specific nomenclature, as what happened with "devotion" in the Theros block, which was previously branded as "chroma" in Eventide.
We now see prowess cards even in other planes such as Bant (Jhessian Thief), Vryn (Mage-Ring Bully), and the mysterious plane of Regatha (Abbot of Keral Keep). Even creatures like owls get to have some of the prowess fun without having to be anthromorphic. I can’t wait for Wizards to think of an evergreen keyword to focus primarily on blue and black.