At least in modern I think it is, as it allows non-heavy red decks to run it. Most decks were you'd want to side this card in against aren't running counters anyways, so replicate isn't that relevant.
EDIT: NVM, Shattering Spree is better, kills an artifact for R, while this requires 1R
But this kills 2 artifacts for 2R, while Shattering Spree requires RR. And 3 for 3R vs RRR. And so on. Depends on the deck I suppose
It's situationally more efficient than Vandalblast when X=2 or X=3, since Vandalblast is cheaper for a single target (as long as you don't control it) and turns into a onesided boardwipe for the same mana it'd cost to By Force for 4.
Still it's efficiently designed and splash friendly, I think it's a solid Shatter variant all things considered.
There's a lot of cheap undercosted stuff in Standard capable of supporting a tempo pile, last I recall. Whether it does anything in the face of the CopyCat meta is a different question entirely, but it's nice to see more cost reduction experiments.
The whole package makes sense, you're ensuring something is never coming back, but as is it's a net investment of 7 mana across two sorceries that pays off with a zombie token.
Then again you would retain priority after Never resolves, so you could just go full ham and do the whole chant in one go without getting interrupted I guess?
Whole card's weird, really. The main course is undoubtedly going to see play, even at sorcery speed chunky 3cmc removal spells that hit more than just a single class of permanent are serviceable, as Ruinous Path has proven. And Return isn't taking away from anything, so it's just free bonus value there for when you gotta grind it out real hard.
But when seen as a whole, it feels like some bits could've been pushed a bit harder.
Yet another kind of new allied color duals? Why won't you just finish what you started and print the enemy half of one of the last new dual land types, Wizards!? Also, there will now be three types of allied duals in standard, but only one type of enemy duals. Booh!
It takes years for cycles to be completed in the absence of a certain critical mass of color-combination inclusiveness, barring ABUR which has the excuse of being the first set and operating under the logic that "if it has more than one basic land type then surely the type-hosers will make them balanced!"
Like, Ravnica's ten guilds, that's incentive for the full shockland cycle.
The ten minor gods of Theros, each one being a color pair? There's your ten temples.
Shadowmoor-Eventide being heavy on hybrid mana and Chroma shenanigans? Enjoy ten varieties of filterland, you're going to need all the fixing you can get.
But everything else? The allied cycle practically always comes first, and then it's just a matter of how long it takes for a set to fit the tone required of an enemy color revisit of a prior cycle.
Zendikar's lands-matter theme got us enemy fetches finishing off what Onslaught began, and the revisit got us enemy manlands because much like the first time around two-colored manlands help to reinforce the lands-matter theme that defines Zendikar as a plane.
Khans of Tarkir starting off as a set doing 3-color wedge factions completed the cycle that Alara started with its shards.
We only got enemy taplands how many years since the debut of Invasion taplands? I mean you could argue the guildgates covered that, but if I'm not totally mistaken we got a full cycle of refuge-styled lands before the most simplest of tapland cycles got their straight adaptation to enemy colors, and even then they had to invent a new set of allied color taplands just to make them plane-agnostic and thus easier to justify reprints.
Apocalypse's painlands came years after Ice Age, and tied into it being the enemy color set of Invasion block.
Kaladesh's fastlands were like the most arbitrarily chosen lands I can think of but the Scars of Mirrodin fastlands have been unpaired for years and the enemy colors could use the boost considering they'd be stuck with taplands otherwise.
Admittedly there was some comment by, I want to say Forsythe shot his mouth off on this one, but there's a comment out there to the effect of wanting to finish cycles instead of leaving them open, but the history of Magic has shown that the allied cycle comes first, and then later down the line there's an inclination to do the enemy cycle before just straight up reprinting the allied cycle... with the exception of the M10-Origins core sets excluding M14, where across those sets the allied checklands still saw more reprints than the enemy painlands on like, what, a 2:1 ratio? And for those it was 4 prints of checklands, the M14 gap, then 2 runs of painlands.
Really though, one of the fundamental rules of Magic is that allied colors work together, enemy colors get hated on. It sorta leaks into the manabase development as well, if enemy colors get a cycle of lands before the allied colors then that's a very rare and special moment meant to be conveyed via gameplay as far as I'm aware.
Cycling duals. Painless, fetchable, cycling duals. Don't even care that they come into play tapped.
Dual land types and cycling are tempting, but when you unconditionally ETB tapped that just kills it for me in a lot of applications. I like them in Standard with how they line up alongside the SOI show-lands in that they enable those lands while also being able to convert themselves into an unknown, but in Modern I don't expect much from them beyond enabling very fringe strategies.
Which, on one hand, is nice, because it's always cool seeing new things in this format.
Yet, on the other hand, that means having to account for an even larger spread of ridiculous nonsense in a format that's already more diverse than the average fighting game.
But, on the third tentacle, I've always wanted to play a format where Life from the Loam could be a grindy card advantage engine in more than just recurring lands. I've seen old Extended Loam-Knight piles before, and while these duals aren't going to be as efficient as the Onslaught cyclers, it's still something. Besides, a lot of duals are fetched in tapped in this format anyway, maybe it's the case that cycling makes these a better card in hand than shocks or BFZ-duals, since you can do something with them besides play them for whatever tempo advantage or disadvantage you'd get. A question worth asking might be how many shocks or BFZs does it take before the first bicycle is better than the N+1'th of the other options?
I'm more peeved that they messed with Standard, but WotC is super losing it over how much people aren't liking Standard for arbitrary reasons so I guess I have to live with the fact that Dorfs did absolutely nothing wrong but got its toy taken away from it anyway.
So with GitProbe gone, consequently nerfing a few fast decks, I guess I'm finally getting around to messing with Smuggler's Copter in Modern way after everyone else tried and gave up on it.
Other than Fatal Push, I only see about 2-3 other cards that MIGHT be role-players in a few tier 3 or lower builds. IMO a very weak Eternal/Non-Rotating set, even though the Revolt mechanic has so much eternal potential.
If Push lives up to just half its hype, the entire set will be worth the single card. That said, I agree it's very disappointing we didn't get revolt Prohibit.
Outside of Johnny cards, Narnam Renegade is a promising inclusion in the Zoo decks running Kird Ape who would prefer the 2/3 deathtoucher. Another one is likely Renegade Rallier in Company decks (at least, if those decks return to the upper tiers).
With the way Aether Revolt flirts with cheating on costs in various ways, I'd be impressed if something isn't broken in some format somewhere.
Either the set's going to be a small army of mistake cards, or the set's going to be a showcase of how to push the envelope without destroying it.
At the very least I'm going to enjoy relearning the draft format while picking up Fatal Pushes.
It's hard having to follow up on Veteran Motorist, but Renegade Wheelsmith are you even trying?
I mean at least you act as a combat trick when crewing stuff, but you're no Veteran Motorist that's for sure.
Ok I'm actually being real harsh on this one, I've played my fair share of Kaladesh draft and nothing sucks the wind out of your sails quite like the opponent going wide with the chump blocks. It'll pull its weight in limited, I'm sure.
Im glad to see some people are excited by this. I wish I could count myself among you. I guess I am from that spoiled age of burst lightning and lightning bolt in standard.
I don't even think the last two saw play at the time but they were strong cards in their own right.
Of course, that was also a block where we got one of the worst Chandra cards ever conceived, compare that to Torch of Defiance. Not everything was great for Red in Zendikar standard.
This is going to be one of those really amusing cards in Limited, I wouldn't trust the Revolt criteria as making it safe to play this card on an empty table.
It's either an eye for an eye because of Revolt, or YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT because of Revolt.
What's there to say, other than wishing it wasn't just Shock but instead a variant that pushed it closer to the sweet spot between Shock's floor and Lightning Bolt's ceiling?
That said, an unconditional 1cmc means of doming people is nice to have again in a Standard context, and dealing 2 damage isn't all that bad, there's stuff out there that the first Galvanic Bombardment of the game could take care of.
It's not quite a shock to the system, but it'll do.
Or, to properly invoke the fringe scenario that I had in mind when making that comment: Imagine the world where Twin is still legal and for some bizarre situation you're staring down Pestermite.
If Twin is ever legalized, the card becomes a lot worse. That is the only metagame scenario where I can see "Oh man, I wish FP was Disfigure" happening with some regularity. In this current metagame, however, there are WAY more times we'd say "Phew, I'm glad this FP isn't Disfigure."
It depends on how consistently you can revolt, what the choice Twin build ends up being, and how the disruption war could play out, because if I can revolt FP then I am totally comfortable with it over Disfigure since the last thing I normally expect from a Twin deck is a spell of cmc greater than 4.
Hell, I'm more comfortable with FP over Smother in that matchup because FP doesn't get hit by Spell Snare! Back when I played Boros, the two cards that always peeved me off from Twin builds were Spell Snares (almost killed the entire idea of resolving 2cmc spells that weren't instant speed) and Deceiver Exarch (4 toughness is the worst thing to be staring at when you're playing a ton of Bolt effects).
But again, among other things it depends on how consistently you can revolt. I'm playing Faeries at the moment and while the idea of chumping with Bitterblossom tokens has been brought up in an earlier post, the solution I had in mind was to up the fetchland count, incidental life loss from cracking fetches doesn't mean much as long as you win the game at above 0 life (plus it makes Murderous Cut marginally better).
I think the notion of "maybe I want Disfigure over FP against Twin-like decks" is more a thing when Kiki-Jiki is a quantity, but even then if you're against an opponent intending to make arbitrarily large numbers of creature copy tokens, enabling revolt and aiming FP at the creature being copied should get the job done more often than not (as long as it isn't Zealous Conscripts).
@Izzet: Obviously you Fatal Push the small stuff while the big stuff gets the Murderous Cut treatment. Or you Remand them, because Delve and Remand are the best nonbo.
I'm kinda just jumping to the end of the thread here to say this, so sorry if I'm repeating an earlier point, but Fatal Push still shares some flaws with Smother, a card I love but have benched not too long ago because of the liability that is targeting creatures of cmc 3 and below (IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEONE WHIPS KALITAS OUT ON YOU, JUST SAYING).
Now, with Revolt active, you get, ignoring the fringe cases where regeneration matters, a card that outperforms Smother where it counts: a single Black mana clowns anything on curve for the first four turns of the game. Without Revolt, you're limited to 2cmc and below, worse than Smother but acceptable for the reduced cost, and still totally a card worth playing when you need to kill stuff on the cheap and aren't in colors that have a better baseline. Try naming a card you'd cast Disfigure on that would survive an unrevolted Fatal Push, it's not exactly a large list.
To draw from a somewhat unrelated concept, Fatal Push is the low half of a high-low mix for Black-inclusive removal. It's cheap, and it hits a relevant range of targets. It doesn't cover everything on its own, but if you pair it with something that excels a few turns into the game like Murderous Cut then you get a really good removal suite going on.
Positive attitude aside for a minute, the fact is that being in the Smother school of cmc-matters spell design has relevant liabilities, and sometimes bad draws combined with poor sequencing leave you staring down the wrong half of a deck like Eldrazi with cards that aren't going to touch them.
But really, Fatal Push helps to bring Black's removal options up to par with the hand disruption combo of Inquisition of Kozilek plus Thoughtseize, which improves the color's ability to address threats in a resource-equitable fashion without necessarily requiring the addition of other colors (or playing Dismember and shooting yourself in the face for a lot of life just to stop the big fatty from out of nowhere).
TL/DR: GOOD CARD, WOULD SABOTAGE DRAFT TO PICK UP.
Agree that Smother is unplayable. But the difference between 1 and 2 mana in Modern is so massive that FP would probably have been fringe playable WITHOUT revolt. With revolt, it's clearly an all-star. The only legitimate wrench in FP's dominance is Bant Eldrazi, a Tier 1 midrange deck with tons of creatures at CMC >= 3. I'm a tiny bit nervous about that because Bant Eldrazi was already such a good deck, but also think it will turn out okay given how effective FP is elsewhere.
Also, the Disfigure comparison doesn't hold up at all.
Try naming a card you'd cast Disfigure on that would survive an unrevolted Fatal Push, it's not exactly a large list.
It's actually a very large and very relevant list. Disfigure doesn't kill Nacatl, Ravager with food, any Affinity creature with Ravager on the board, any Infect creature if they have a non-Vines pump spell, Death's Shadow, Scavenging Ooze with food, Grim Flayer with delirium, Monastery Swiftspear with even one prowess trigger, or Tarmogoyf. That's a really damning list for poor Disfigure. FP hits all that AND all the Disfigure targets (Guide, Birds, Hierarch, etc.). That's more than enough to make it playable.
I agree with your TLDR, but many of the points before that are off-base.
Let me rephrase:
Stuff that Disfigure kills, but that Fatal Push whiffs on unless you have Revolt active. In other words, cards of cmc above 2 with toughness <= 2.
Or, to properly invoke the fringe scenario that I had in mind when making that comment: Imagine the world where Twin is still legal and for some bizarre situation you're staring down Pestermite.
But yeah there was probably about 3 or so extra lines I could've inserted in there to properly transition from talking about FP to relating it to Disfigure. Disfigure was up until now the go to low end of removal, cheap in cost and able to snipe a few things without also costing you some other resource (like Dismember, or Ulcerate, or Vendetta...). At the same time, it has flaws, like the numerous targets you list where it only amounts to being a debuff rather than straight up removal. What I meant to convey was that Fatal Push does a better job of being low end removal, because it looks at cmc, and <=2cmc already gets you a good number of targets. The amount of times you'll ever go "man I wish my unrevolted Fatal Push was a Disfigure" amount to, again, the hypothetical world where Twin is unbanned and you had to answer a Pestermite, and that's one of those fringe cases that tend to be ignored when talking about a card's performance.
EDIT:
ALSO VENDILION CLIQUE.
A CARD THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS.
@Izzet: Obviously you Fatal Push the small stuff while the big stuff gets the Murderous Cut treatment. Or you Remand them, because Delve and Remand are the best nonbo.
I'm kinda just jumping to the end of the thread here to say this, so sorry if I'm repeating an earlier point, but Fatal Push still shares some flaws with Smother, a card I love but have benched not too long ago because of the liability that is targeting creatures of cmc 3 and below (IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEONE WHIPS KALITAS OUT ON YOU, JUST SAYING).
Now, with Revolt active, you get, ignoring the fringe cases where regeneration matters, a card that outperforms Smother where it counts: a single Black mana clowns anything on curve for the first four turns of the game. Without Revolt, you're limited to 2cmc and below, worse than Smother but acceptable for the reduced cost, and still totally a card worth playing when you need to kill stuff on the cheap and aren't in colors that have a better baseline. Try naming a card you'd cast Disfigure on that would survive an unrevolted Fatal Push, it's not exactly a large list.
To draw from a somewhat unrelated concept, Fatal Push is the low half of a high-low mix for Black-inclusive removal. It's cheap, and it hits a relevant range of targets. It doesn't cover everything on its own, but if you pair it with something that excels a few turns into the game like Murderous Cut then you get a really good removal suite going on.
Positive attitude aside for a minute, the fact is that being in the Smother school of cmc-matters spell design has relevant liabilities, and sometimes bad draws combined with poor sequencing leave you staring down the wrong half of a deck like Eldrazi with cards that aren't going to touch them.
But really, Fatal Push helps to bring Black's removal options up to par with the hand disruption combo of Inquisition of Kozilek plus Thoughtseize, which improves the color's ability to address threats in a resource-equitable fashion without necessarily requiring the addition of other colors (or playing Dismember and shooting yourself in the face for a lot of life just to stop the big fatty from out of nowhere).
TL/DR: GOOD CARD, WOULD SABOTAGE DRAFT TO PICK UP.
Making them Lotus Petal knockoffs as opposed to Gold tokens makes sense considering there's a Convoke for Artifacts ability and the last thing anyone needs is more of that Convoke + Wall of Roots synergy existing in other forms (ok in this specific instance it probably doesn't work due to the sac part, but still it sounds like a good idea to stay as far away from a situation as possible where your mana producing artifact doesn't have to tap to make mana).
While Tezz's previous incarnations have been a combo/tutor engine (Seeker) and a CA plus beatstick enabler with a way to close the game out (Agent of Bolas), this one's cute as a grindy attrition card: he piles up spare mana, which helps to improve a -2 that can act as pump as much as it can removal, and as the game goes on super long he's just crapping out disposable 5/5s like it's nothing. Granted, just looking at Standard there's the problem inherent in the line "the game goes on super long" known as Emrakul, but still incremental advantage is advantage!
The only thing he really lacks is the ability to dig up a fresh artifact out of your deck on his own, something Seeker and AoB have going for them. Even the intro deck variant, Master of Metal, can flip you into artifacts, and is able to cash in on that for fast damage immediately. But on the other hand, this is, what, Blue's first take on the token engine Planeswalker archetype, right?
I'm not forgetting some other token spammer in Blue, am I? Other than Kiora, but that doesn't kick in until she ults.
At any rate, I like the design. I have my reservations regarding how playable he is, which feels like a running theme for much of the multicolor walkers in this block (still on the fence as to if Ajani's 6cmc price tag is worth it to have Swords to Plowshares on a stick), but I like it.
It's situationally more efficient than Vandalblast when X=2 or X=3, since Vandalblast is cheaper for a single target (as long as you don't control it) and turns into a onesided boardwipe for the same mana it'd cost to By Force for 4.
Still it's efficiently designed and splash friendly, I think it's a solid Shatter variant all things considered.
There's a lot of cheap undercosted stuff in Standard capable of supporting a tempo pile, last I recall. Whether it does anything in the face of the CopyCat meta is a different question entirely, but it's nice to see more cost reduction experiments.
The whole package makes sense, you're ensuring something is never coming back, but as is it's a net investment of 7 mana across two sorceries that pays off with a zombie token.
Then again you would retain priority after Never resolves, so you could just go full ham and do the whole chant in one go without getting interrupted I guess?
Whole card's weird, really. The main course is undoubtedly going to see play, even at sorcery speed chunky 3cmc removal spells that hit more than just a single class of permanent are serviceable, as Ruinous Path has proven. And Return isn't taking away from anything, so it's just free bonus value there for when you gotta grind it out real hard.
But when seen as a whole, it feels like some bits could've been pushed a bit harder.
It takes years for cycles to be completed in the absence of a certain critical mass of color-combination inclusiveness, barring ABUR which has the excuse of being the first set and operating under the logic that "if it has more than one basic land type then surely the type-hosers will make them balanced!"
Like, Ravnica's ten guilds, that's incentive for the full shockland cycle.
The ten minor gods of Theros, each one being a color pair? There's your ten temples.
Shadowmoor-Eventide being heavy on hybrid mana and Chroma shenanigans? Enjoy ten varieties of filterland, you're going to need all the fixing you can get.
But everything else? The allied cycle practically always comes first, and then it's just a matter of how long it takes for a set to fit the tone required of an enemy color revisit of a prior cycle.
Zendikar's lands-matter theme got us enemy fetches finishing off what Onslaught began, and the revisit got us enemy manlands because much like the first time around two-colored manlands help to reinforce the lands-matter theme that defines Zendikar as a plane.
Khans of Tarkir starting off as a set doing 3-color wedge factions completed the cycle that Alara started with its shards.
We only got enemy taplands how many years since the debut of Invasion taplands? I mean you could argue the guildgates covered that, but if I'm not totally mistaken we got a full cycle of refuge-styled lands before the most simplest of tapland cycles got their straight adaptation to enemy colors, and even then they had to invent a new set of allied color taplands just to make them plane-agnostic and thus easier to justify reprints.
Apocalypse's painlands came years after Ice Age, and tied into it being the enemy color set of Invasion block.
Kaladesh's fastlands were like the most arbitrarily chosen lands I can think of but the Scars of Mirrodin fastlands have been unpaired for years and the enemy colors could use the boost considering they'd be stuck with taplands otherwise.
Admittedly there was some comment by, I want to say Forsythe shot his mouth off on this one, but there's a comment out there to the effect of wanting to finish cycles instead of leaving them open, but the history of Magic has shown that the allied cycle comes first, and then later down the line there's an inclination to do the enemy cycle before just straight up reprinting the allied cycle... with the exception of the M10-Origins core sets excluding M14, where across those sets the allied checklands still saw more reprints than the enemy painlands on like, what, a 2:1 ratio? And for those it was 4 prints of checklands, the M14 gap, then 2 runs of painlands.
Really though, one of the fundamental rules of Magic is that allied colors work together, enemy colors get hated on. It sorta leaks into the manabase development as well, if enemy colors get a cycle of lands before the allied colors then that's a very rare and special moment meant to be conveyed via gameplay as far as I'm aware.
Dual land types and cycling are tempting, but when you unconditionally ETB tapped that just kills it for me in a lot of applications. I like them in Standard with how they line up alongside the SOI show-lands in that they enable those lands while also being able to convert themselves into an unknown, but in Modern I don't expect much from them beyond enabling very fringe strategies.
Which, on one hand, is nice, because it's always cool seeing new things in this format.
Yet, on the other hand, that means having to account for an even larger spread of ridiculous nonsense in a format that's already more diverse than the average fighting game.
But, on the third tentacle, I've always wanted to play a format where Life from the Loam could be a grindy card advantage engine in more than just recurring lands. I've seen old Extended Loam-Knight piles before, and while these duals aren't going to be as efficient as the Onslaught cyclers, it's still something. Besides, a lot of duals are fetched in tapped in this format anyway, maybe it's the case that cycling makes these a better card in hand than shocks or BFZ-duals, since you can do something with them besides play them for whatever tempo advantage or disadvantage you'd get. A question worth asking might be how many shocks or BFZs does it take before the first bicycle is better than the N+1'th of the other options?
So with GitProbe gone, consequently nerfing a few fast decks, I guess I'm finally getting around to messing with Smuggler's Copter in Modern way after everyone else tried and gave up on it.
Saved me the trouble of finding a sixth copy.
With the way Aether Revolt flirts with cheating on costs in various ways, I'd be impressed if something isn't broken in some format somewhere.
Either the set's going to be a small army of mistake cards, or the set's going to be a showcase of how to push the envelope without destroying it.
At the very least I'm going to enjoy relearning the draft format while picking up Fatal Pushes.
I mean at least you act as a combat trick when crewing stuff, but you're no Veteran Motorist that's for sure.
Ok I'm actually being real harsh on this one, I've played my fair share of Kaladesh draft and nothing sucks the wind out of your sails quite like the opponent going wide with the chump blocks. It'll pull its weight in limited, I'm sure.
Don't forget Searing Blaze.
And Forked Bolt.
And Flame Slash.
I don't even think the last two saw play at the time but they were strong cards in their own right.
Of course, that was also a block where we got one of the worst Chandra cards ever conceived, compare that to Torch of Defiance. Not everything was great for Red in Zendikar standard.
Just a decent number of things.
It's either an eye for an eye because of Revolt, or YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT because of Revolt.
What's there to say, other than wishing it wasn't just Shock but instead a variant that pushed it closer to the sweet spot between Shock's floor and Lightning Bolt's ceiling?
That said, an unconditional 1cmc means of doming people is nice to have again in a Standard context, and dealing 2 damage isn't all that bad, there's stuff out there that the first Galvanic Bombardment of the game could take care of.
It's not quite a shock to the system, but it'll do.
It depends on how consistently you can revolt, what the choice Twin build ends up being, and how the disruption war could play out, because if I can revolt FP then I am totally comfortable with it over Disfigure since the last thing I normally expect from a Twin deck is a spell of cmc greater than 4.
Hell, I'm more comfortable with FP over Smother in that matchup because FP doesn't get hit by Spell Snare! Back when I played Boros, the two cards that always peeved me off from Twin builds were Spell Snares (almost killed the entire idea of resolving 2cmc spells that weren't instant speed) and Deceiver Exarch (4 toughness is the worst thing to be staring at when you're playing a ton of Bolt effects).
But again, among other things it depends on how consistently you can revolt. I'm playing Faeries at the moment and while the idea of chumping with Bitterblossom tokens has been brought up in an earlier post, the solution I had in mind was to up the fetchland count, incidental life loss from cracking fetches doesn't mean much as long as you win the game at above 0 life (plus it makes Murderous Cut marginally better).
I think the notion of "maybe I want Disfigure over FP against Twin-like decks" is more a thing when Kiki-Jiki is a quantity, but even then if you're against an opponent intending to make arbitrarily large numbers of creature copy tokens, enabling revolt and aiming FP at the creature being copied should get the job done more often than not (as long as it isn't Zealous Conscripts).
Let me rephrase:
Stuff that Disfigure kills, but that Fatal Push whiffs on unless you have Revolt active. In other words, cards of cmc above 2 with toughness <= 2.
Or, to properly invoke the fringe scenario that I had in mind when making that comment: Imagine the world where Twin is still legal and for some bizarre situation you're staring down Pestermite.
But yeah there was probably about 3 or so extra lines I could've inserted in there to properly transition from talking about FP to relating it to Disfigure. Disfigure was up until now the go to low end of removal, cheap in cost and able to snipe a few things without also costing you some other resource (like Dismember, or Ulcerate, or Vendetta...). At the same time, it has flaws, like the numerous targets you list where it only amounts to being a debuff rather than straight up removal. What I meant to convey was that Fatal Push does a better job of being low end removal, because it looks at cmc, and <=2cmc already gets you a good number of targets. The amount of times you'll ever go "man I wish my unrevolted Fatal Push was a Disfigure" amount to, again, the hypothetical world where Twin is unbanned and you had to answer a Pestermite, and that's one of those fringe cases that tend to be ignored when talking about a card's performance.
EDIT:
ALSO VENDILION CLIQUE.
A CARD THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS.
I'm kinda just jumping to the end of the thread here to say this, so sorry if I'm repeating an earlier point, but Fatal Push still shares some flaws with Smother, a card I love but have benched not too long ago because of the liability that is targeting creatures of cmc 3 and below (IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEONE WHIPS KALITAS OUT ON YOU, JUST SAYING).
Now, with Revolt active, you get, ignoring the fringe cases where regeneration matters, a card that outperforms Smother where it counts: a single Black mana clowns anything on curve for the first four turns of the game. Without Revolt, you're limited to 2cmc and below, worse than Smother but acceptable for the reduced cost, and still totally a card worth playing when you need to kill stuff on the cheap and aren't in colors that have a better baseline. Try naming a card you'd cast Disfigure on that would survive an unrevolted Fatal Push, it's not exactly a large list.
To draw from a somewhat unrelated concept, Fatal Push is the low half of a high-low mix for Black-inclusive removal. It's cheap, and it hits a relevant range of targets. It doesn't cover everything on its own, but if you pair it with something that excels a few turns into the game like Murderous Cut then you get a really good removal suite going on.
Positive attitude aside for a minute, the fact is that being in the Smother school of cmc-matters spell design has relevant liabilities, and sometimes bad draws combined with poor sequencing leave you staring down the wrong half of a deck like Eldrazi with cards that aren't going to touch them.
But really, Fatal Push helps to bring Black's removal options up to par with the hand disruption combo of Inquisition of Kozilek plus Thoughtseize, which improves the color's ability to address threats in a resource-equitable fashion without necessarily requiring the addition of other colors (or playing Dismember and shooting yourself in the face for a lot of life just to stop the big fatty from out of nowhere).
TL/DR: GOOD CARD, WOULD SABOTAGE DRAFT TO PICK UP.
While Tezz's previous incarnations have been a combo/tutor engine (Seeker) and a CA plus beatstick enabler with a way to close the game out (Agent of Bolas), this one's cute as a grindy attrition card: he piles up spare mana, which helps to improve a -2 that can act as pump as much as it can removal, and as the game goes on super long he's just crapping out disposable 5/5s like it's nothing. Granted, just looking at Standard there's the problem inherent in the line "the game goes on super long" known as Emrakul, but still incremental advantage is advantage!
The only thing he really lacks is the ability to dig up a fresh artifact out of your deck on his own, something Seeker and AoB have going for them. Even the intro deck variant, Master of Metal, can flip you into artifacts, and is able to cash in on that for fast damage immediately. But on the other hand, this is, what, Blue's first take on the token engine Planeswalker archetype, right?
I'm not forgetting some other token spammer in Blue, am I? Other than Kiora, but that doesn't kick in until she ults.
At any rate, I like the design. I have my reservations regarding how playable he is, which feels like a running theme for much of the multicolor walkers in this block (still on the fence as to if Ajani's 6cmc price tag is worth it to have Swords to Plowshares on a stick), but I like it.