This card is NOT very good. Utter End is about twice as good. Its use is doubly narrowed; play black-white aggressive, and maybe even ALSO have life gain. Otherwise, unusable. Who cares if you can go 1-for-1 on something that really HAD to leave the board? There is this thing called win or lose the game, and it really MAY NOT help you win the game, and that's the ULTIMATE litmus test of 'include this'. You had four slots covered? You may have been better off with eight and not eating crow. It plays against deck consistency usability; could play one. Use two of them, just double bolting yourself? One is the use of this card, supplementing other things. @Land destruction... this would have been all right, I think. It's ONE such card. I would have gone for it. Weak card, otherwise. Would have been like... HMM! Reason TO think of, not totally game breaking. Not teamed up. Agreed on, well, counter this, counter that, but not that? Blubbery, complaining a bit TOO much. Sinkhole was unfair. Wasteland was unfair. Stone Rain x4 is not unfair. It would be an environmental concern when you look at, oh, here's the new one. But that's why... ahh, here's just, Stone Rain. or Pillage. Or Rain of Tears or Winter's Grasp.
He seems pretty good. Narrow, but interesting, no doubt. You could definitely consider U/R fliers, where, because you are clever, you are playing this card instead of a dumb-o Stormbreath Dragon or Thundermaw Hellkite. Chandra's Phoenix, Flamewake Phoenix, Firewing Phoenix, Electrolyze, Geistflame, Remand, Mana Leak, Faithless Looting, and he simply hits harder; not as fast to 10 damage, but has recursion. Recurs along WITH those other things. It actually could be QUITE strong.
Remember reprint Mana Drain only if all of R & D got hit by a bus? That @ Civil Discourse. AS good as Mana Drain. Better than Remand, better than Time Walk unless attacking and combo off for take extra turns shenanigans. Which is always easy to do. For two more mana, proactively, could blue say, nah, Dismiss at sorcery speed. And that's off by one, remember.
Let's call this the hybridization of power and fun. When there is an ecosystem and there are more than one such card, I choose as the main post-it-note of this category, the broken cards of Urza's Saga block. And some originals that inspired the future. Let's make that a top 30 of cards that are non-Alpha/at all space-sharing.
Time Spiral
Necropotence
Dark Confidant
Snapcaster Mage
Eternal Witness
Sword of Fire and Ice
Pulse of the Fields
Chrome Mox
Grim Monolith
Smokestack
Crucible of Worlds
Mindslaver
Tangle Wire
Replenish
Survival of the Fittest
Recurring Nightmare
Sneak Attack
Enlightened Tutor
Vampiric Tutor
Mystical Tutor
Genesis
Past in Flames
Ancestral Vision
Life from the Loam
Oath of Druids
Hymn to Tourach
Force of Will
Capsize
Academy Ruins
Volrath's Stronghold
Worst card:
Aladdin's Lamp
Least effect for most cost by modern standards. Though some corner cases exist in Karn and so on. Great Wall, you can cast that with an enchantress out and draw a card. Let's say you were playing 400 card highlander.
Scepters are IN w10k. Right on the card, split the symbol. 2C, not 2/c. All are repeatable abilities worth nearly a half of a card. And a rock is a rock. Is lame? The Scepters sack like the Ramos cards for both.
He's totally nuts, no doubt about it. This can be a commander. The MOST significantly reductive understanding of him ALONE is ludicrously good, and is INDEED better than original Kozilek. He draws three more cards. That's a deckbuilding constraint that is eminently workable as a card that just goes, oh, whoops I guess two more next time, eh? Every mana rock and ramper in the world says yes, have some. He ACTUALLY closes out on 21 damage, is why. He is less likely to bite the dust than an eminently targetable original Kozilek who was more "value" oriented thereby. This guy... just kills you. Absolutely correct. Not WAY too good. That's a BIT exuberant, only.
One thing going for it is... one. The integer one. Not like any other integer. But not thus NAMED and accounted? Even though, next turn. And a unique word. Maybe not that one... but you ask the 8 ball? That is pretty good. It's pointing to yes. When you mess around, mess around with other things, is the best reason. The problem with it is... doesn't put a counter. Counter says deal with this. Are you LIKELY to forget it, no, but it's something that could kill the mechanic from real world, unlike the straightjacketed non-caringly complex suspend. Next turn only is a good idea, but it's... a bit problematic. The cards would end up being awfully good. It's awfully good with Storm, even though Storm is crazily upper tier. Suspend has the same issue, but very few cards that QUITE go bonkers like that. You'd have to put them at the range you have thus put them and not any cheaper and not great in number. Oh, that's just... BLEH. That one makes us angry. Wrong, A+.
It can't anything other than the narrow parasitic only reason to introduce an actual basic because of that point - no land may be better. Rishadan Ports, Wastelands, all random colorless producers that come into play untapped at a surpassing level of strictly better, despite the latter points to come. An Eldrazi is rare. What seems least sensical and backwards unhelpful to some is a multi-phase card. That is pretty strongly logically undeniable. What we see is, this says BASIC LAND. And the land is pretty darn good. Unrestricted in number, all Journeyer's Kites and Wayfarer's Baubles and Terramorphic Expanses are live. Awful if it were. Cards as printed. Therefore, nonsense if it is not a new proliferations voltron. Is that all that more restrictive than playing a tron set in your deck in the first place. Colorless tribal becomes 'the' splash, therefore, of any deck like that. It can choose 'self', not 'ISN'T good enough without color'.
Edit: As a new identity, as a COST, it probably CAN be paid by either: Any two purely colorless mana, any three purely colorless mana, or any two or three mana whatsoever. Nothing says different, that it would HAVE to be two if it at all was the same as the 2/x symbol.
It is not that complicated. It is an IN-pool tagged type of colorless mana, like any card that adds mana that can only be used for something specific, like Mishra's Workshop. Obviously no errata. Those are basics with a flawless symbol, it's a NEW type of mana that isn't all that new and both is and isn't a sixth color. Totally right. <> is 1 differentiated colorless mana in cost and "add this", colorless is not all backwards to <>.
There's nothing wrong with them. There is always "meant" to be played, reasonably assumed, and there is always, keep it AS simple as possible. The card in question... is no. Is definitely no. Not only is that too good for Standard, it would be a bit too good EVEN in Modern; Worn Powerstone would be a STAPLE effect if available, you can take that to the bank and back and put your feet up on the table. Urza-tron, while, really... it's a hair too good, that's EVEN better. Remember and think ahhhh...gross, won seven times and World Champion, level of better than Urzatron. And the same group of cards won the next year. Even with the existence of counters. Is Wayfarer's Bauble best friend to the utmost. That's the type of evaluation that might escape some players. That's SO ridiculously better than that that it can go strictly on a hypothetical multi-tree pathway without any lists.
Brutal Expulsion is not playable except as a fringe-case redundancy. It's just not fast enough. There is "soft" card economy plus a bad one for one. It's a card that goes in a cube only. Not in Standard OR Modern as any kind of a staple. The tempo play of a four mana remand is poor, to which it unfavorably compares as a gold card. Kill an X/2 is a bit better than draw a card, since they invested mana in it, but not double the cost better. You can maybe imagine, though, 4x Electrolyze, 4x Remand, 1x this. "Catching" a larger play in the net. Maybe. Bounce a creature is decent, any nonland permanent would have equalled fully playable card that opened up possibilities instead of just barely squeezing into something for the limited slots of zomg gold and a better design. Maybe the specter of a Cryptic Command loomed over that? Seems WAY worse, though.
Edit:
You could imagine that perhaps in a VERY deck-warping way, this could be pretty good in Standard. To play as a four. And playing very cagey with how it could survive on the draw. You would have to care about closing it out very fast with the least representative creature color, but it might be. You dodge that REALLY annoying one that seems rather good. Jhessian Thief-flames is a hot play.
Completely IS good and worth exploiting. Swing INTO Siege Rhino or any beefy wall, allies no whiff... CLOSE to draw, when opponent can draw card not yet castable or a land they don't need, through an opposite lens. Close to playing some kind of rather absurd GREEN deck.
4 Anointer of Champions
4 Infantry Veteran
4 Hada Freeblade
4 Munda, Ambush Leader
4 Lightning Helix
Allies
=> Melting Sky comment: They have. And is a bit over the line and wrong. Is more like pump knight would be more right, with a slight buff to those stats. Like pump knight is a 2/2. But what's done is done there, surely. Is now "fight it out" among those now-made cards. But there is SOME "exciting" to it on the pure p/t stats. The game closes out too slowly or the creatures trade off instead of bouncing off sufficiently, is a stalled board game closer to limited.
However... this is a crazily better game than the game of 1996 and pure numbers don't account for it. Much of that was wrong and didn't meet playability expectations enough. The absurd power level of black could be played, white/blue control could be played, you could play armageddon or winter orb, and red aggro could be played. Elvish Archer SUCKS, you're a noob, I swords him, I bolt him, I contagion him, only a best player ever could run him... was not as good as it could be. Oh and by the way, 4x strip mine. Or even wasteland. That was Standard. Even 4x Black Vise used to be a standard deck. Some things don't have "Type 2" written on them as archetypes to promote. They ought to be historically analogued to some non-stupidly forced degree, by minimally slow squeezing introduction of the cards otherwise.
Depends how 'sticky' that is, doesn't it? It's no 'shockland' or 'painland' or 'fetch' is it? Well, what do you mean? That was a whole sentence. So... I would spend the few extra words as none is MOST obvious, that everyone everywhere (who spoke English, at least, I suppose) would know what I meant. I would call those the double basic type check for tapstatus lands. Which refers SOMEWHAT ambiguously to both what's ON it and what it CHECKS, but that's what I would say. WORST. NICKNAME. EVER.
I assume you mean real-world animals. We don't know all of them. Not-yet-or sparsely proprietary science. That could be something. Run with that.
Blue-White: Bird
Blue-Black: Depthling
Blue-Green: Amphibian
Blue-Red: Interling
White-Black: Yeti
White-Red: Lizard
White-Green: Cat
Green-Red: Boar
Green-Black: Bear
Black-Red: Insect
Let's call this the hybridization of power and fun. When there is an ecosystem and there are more than one such card, I choose as the main post-it-note of this category, the broken cards of Urza's Saga block. And some originals that inspired the future. Let's make that a top 30 of cards that are non-Alpha/at all space-sharing.
Time Spiral
Necropotence
Dark Confidant
Snapcaster Mage
Eternal Witness
Sword of Fire and Ice
Pulse of the Fields
Chrome Mox
Grim Monolith
Smokestack
Crucible of Worlds
Mindslaver
Tangle Wire
Replenish
Survival of the Fittest
Recurring Nightmare
Sneak Attack
Enlightened Tutor
Vampiric Tutor
Mystical Tutor
Genesis
Past in Flames
Ancestral Vision
Life from the Loam
Oath of Druids
Hymn to Tourach
Force of Will
Capsize
Academy Ruins
Volrath's Stronghold
Worst card:
Aladdin's Lamp
Least effect for most cost by modern standards. Though some corner cases exist in Karn and so on. Great Wall, you can cast that with an enchantress out and draw a card. Let's say you were playing 400 card highlander.
Edit: As a new identity, as a COST, it probably CAN be paid by either: Any two purely colorless mana, any three purely colorless mana, or any two or three mana whatsoever. Nothing says different, that it would HAVE to be two if it at all was the same as the 2/x symbol.
Edit:
You could imagine that perhaps in a VERY deck-warping way, this could be pretty good in Standard. To play as a four. And playing very cagey with how it could survive on the draw. You would have to care about closing it out very fast with the least representative creature color, but it might be. You dodge that REALLY annoying one that seems rather good. Jhessian Thief-flames is a hot play.
4 Jhessian Thief
4 Stratus Dancer
4 Silumgar Sorcerer
4 Savage Knuckleblade
4 Brutal Expulsion
4 Radiant Flames
1 Crater's Claws
2 Lightning Strike
4 Nullify
4 Negate
3 Trap Essence
3 Temur Charm
lands
Completely IS good and worth exploiting. Swing INTO Siege Rhino or any beefy wall, allies no whiff... CLOSE to draw, when opponent can draw card not yet castable or a land they don't need, through an opposite lens. Close to playing some kind of rather absurd GREEN deck.
4 Anointer of Champions
4 Infantry Veteran
4 Hada Freeblade
4 Munda, Ambush Leader
4 Lightning Helix
Allies
However... this is a crazily better game than the game of 1996 and pure numbers don't account for it. Much of that was wrong and didn't meet playability expectations enough. The absurd power level of black could be played, white/blue control could be played, you could play armageddon or winter orb, and red aggro could be played. Elvish Archer SUCKS, you're a noob, I swords him, I bolt him, I contagion him, only a best player ever could run him... was not as good as it could be. Oh and by the way, 4x strip mine. Or even wasteland. That was Standard. Even 4x Black Vise used to be a standard deck. Some things don't have "Type 2" written on them as archetypes to promote. They ought to be historically analogued to some non-stupidly forced degree, by minimally slow squeezing introduction of the cards otherwise.