The Scorpion God
Oracle Text
Whenever a creature with a -1/-1 counter on it dies, draw a card.
: Put a -1/-1 counter on another target creature.
When The Scorpion God dies, return it to its owner's hand at the beginning of the next end step.
Card Rulings
7/14/2017 You’ll draw only one card when a creature with more than one -1/-1 counter on it dies.
7/14/2017 If a creature with a -1/-1 counter on it dies at the same time as The Scorpion God does, you’ll draw a card. The same is true if The Scorpion God dies with a -1/-1 counter on it.
7/14/2017 If this creature dies but leaves your graveyard before the next end step, it will remain in its new zone.
7/14/2017 The “next end step” refers to the next end step that occurs, not the end step of the next turn. If this creature dies before a turn’s end step (for example, during combat), it will be returned to its owner’s hand at the beginning of that turn’s end step.
Edit: Just Realized. WTF is their no Indestructible?? I guess it is the drawback for already being amazing. Very close to indestructible though.
-not an enchantment. no starry background.
-not an 'invoked' creature from a different state. always a creature.
-not indestructible.
what are we left it?
it's curvy. a 5 mana 6/5 with no drawbacks is....well, it's close to what Green gets for Common, frankly! (a LOT has changed to Craw Wurm's space on the limited curve over the years.) but not Red-Black I guess. OK, I'll admit that's not only solid grounds for an uncommon, it squeaks as a rare Just for the 6/5 for 5 mana.
it's Legendary. this hurts it's 6/5 for 5 status. but hey, fun Commander possibilities for themes and colors. Anytime you give Commander a new Creature type Color combination, there's going to be someone that wants to build it. Before, we only had Mogis for Rakdos colored Gods. This is a new face for that set of players. there's only one problem: he's not really much of a God, so the flavor falls flat.
-he's got an activated ability, but so what? lots of creatures have activated abilities.
A Creature Design like this is like a Demigod of Revenge given the Legendary Creature type (forget for a moment that Demigod happens to be one of the only ones from that 10-card megacycle that really didn't want to be legendary). It puts even more spotlight on proofing that Shadowmoor basically gave us more Nephilim-- "forgetting to put 'Legendary' on cards that felt Legendary"-- (another Cycle that is sort of like that is the Titans. But the Titans kind of created their own new Trope as ''if you're not going to do Legendary, this is how to do Non-Legendary Epic RIGHT.'' Most people I think would say the Titans are cooler and more fun as Non-Legends. But the Ghastlord of Fugue, Nobilis of War, Demigod of Revenge and friends really look like they share with Nephilim the flaw of not being Legendary as a flaw. They should have been.
The fact that this Scorpion God can exist, pass itself off as a kind of bland, slightly curvy legendary, with a Mythic Rarity slapped on it, and represents a minor role from the lore that will be easily forgotten given a year, and people are still at least somewhat excited to at least get a card for the character, really shows that those Shadowmoor cards could have been Legendaries and nobody would have doubted their Legendary status as legit and earned.
This card isn't exactly bad or boring, I'm having a hard time believing it's Mythic Rare and Legendary, but it does dodge the graveyard, it does use -1/-1 counters for a flavorful Scorpion's Sting, and it does remind me in a lot of ways of Olivia Voldaren just based on what a Mythic Rare Legendary card gets you in Red and Black with fairly modern R&D sensibilities about Power.
I'm not irritated about the power level of the card here, but it looks a lot more to me like a Mythic Scorpion Horror than a Mythic God. The flavor is very distorted and diluted for two major, major, reasons, and one minor reason.
1. Gods need names. Every God so far has had a name. While it can work to have flavor texts refer to ''the Scorpion God'' ''the God-Pharoah'' ''the Serpent God'' or ''the Jackal God'', on the cards themselves, you want the character to know it's own true real name for a figure as high-profile as a God. it's fine if the denizens of Amonkhet don't know this guy very well at all. Let his epithet title be ''(God's Name Here), the Scorpion God'', and let the other two Secret Gods all be ''the Something God'', but give them names too! Nicol Bolas ought to know their names! This is pretty lazy. The biggest excuse for allowing laziness here is I don't expect them to ever return to Amonkhet. It's a pretty fun world, but they deliberately drained it of having much to tell about it and destroyed it on their way out. We're probably done with Amonkhet and will never see this one again. But......if he ever gets a reprint anywhere for some reason, like a reprint set, well.....''The Scorpion God'' with no other name is in my opinion lame.
2. He's not Indestructible. Look at Progenitus, the Eldrazi, the Theros Gods, and even the Amonkhet Gods. Graveyard-dodging has taken on a life of its own with these Super-Mythic monstrosity creatures, and we expect them all to be able to do it by now, but there's also an issue of flavor at stake. Some shuffle into the library, some are indestructible. it matters which is doing what. It's become part of their identities as their creature types to have the same methods of graveyard dodging consistently. If Emrakul, the Promised End had returned to your hand, that would have felt wrong, for more reasons than just power balance. Eldrazi-undeathing is iconically shuffling your whole graveyard into your library. They decided to not give any graveyard dodging to the 2.0 Eldrazi from what I remember, but if they had given a power like that to any of them, they would have given the SAME one to ALL THREE OF THEM.
(2.b Likely, because Wizards isn't totally stupid, (only partly stupid), they'll give this grave-bouncing to the other two Secret Gods.)
3. (Minor) No flavor text. It would have taken fewer words to give him Indestructible than to give him Graveyard bouncing, and they could have used a quote to really increase the flavor lore of these Secret 3 Gods, who are still pretty giant mysteries. Now it looks like the only things we'll be learning about them is that they aren't indestructible and they have 3 animal heads. We have little idea what they really care about as Gods because this one doesn't have any flavor except -1/-1 counters and a possible connection to Scorpions. out of 26 Gods with Creature Type-God this one is easily the stupidest which is a little sad, because Theros pumped out so many God creatures that it should have been easy to be better than the 3-5 worst of them by just being Very Amonkhetlike and Very Godlike.
Sadly, Amonkhet has stripped the God Type of most of its Divinity piece by piece, taking away everything that made Theros Gods special. Each time having less and less reason to do so.
There were good and necessary reasons for Enchantment to be taken away, but considering that these cards are supposed to be the highest of high profiles short of Planeswalkers-- "Mythic Rare Legendary Creature- God"-- each of the Gods ever needs to stand on nearly even footing with a Titan for coolness. They don't have to match the Titans for Raw Power, especially as you add more colors to them, but they do at least have to feel Iconic and Mythic. And 25 cards have set up the expectation that this creature type is Defined more than anything else by its Indestructibility.
All this guy is is an activated ability dealing with -1/-1'ing stuff. I'm sure there are better ways to -1/-1 in not just other cards, but Standard, heck even this set. If he'd been the God of -1/-1, the God of Stingers or whatever, he could have had extra mana in his mana cost and a crazy powerful machine gun ability, but instead they played him down so safe that I'd much prefer him to lose the God type and Mythic Rarity, and be a Rare Scorpion Horror instead. He looks nasty for Limited I guess. Still doesn't feel at all like a God, in a game where everything is Magical and there's all kinds of other cards feeling more Magical than this one.
My biggest beef with this card is that its creature type could have been Scorpion God.