As much as I like the fight mechanic, I feel there is an inherent problem in the word choice when fighting something does not result in combat damage.
I agree. I always felt like there must be an elegant solution out there that allows things like flying and first strike to be relevant to creature-on-creature combat. My ground-pounder should not be able to pick a fight with your Squadron Hawk, no matter how much I want it to.
Concerns about Double-faced cards aside, I'm troubled that there isn't a single mechanic in the article that actually does anything new. They're all super flavorful, and perhaps the combination will feel new, but each individual idea feels quite stale.
Double-Faced is pretty much exactly the same technology as flip cards, just with a splashier implementation and a removal of the no-unflipping restriction.
Curse is a subtype used only for reference by other cards, a little bit like Arcane.
Flashback is reprinted, so far with no new tricks up its sleeve.
Morbid is an ability word for a fairly straightforward trigger.
Fight is also just a new word for an idea that already existed.
It looks to me like my inner fantasy nerd is going to be super happy, but my inner strategy game nerd won't have much new to chew on. Again, it's tough to make judgments without playing the environment as a whole, but I'm not seeing the meaty goodness here. Is anyone else?
I'm aware that destroy does the same thing and that "dies" has only appeared on triggers -- I say as much above. My fascination is more with the flavor of the new template. I think it allows a card to tell a different kind of story. One that might be appropriate to a horror setting.
Yes, it wouldn't quite work as is under the rules, since "target creature is put into a graveyard" doesn't specify which graveyard it should go into. But I didn't want this to be a "Wizards should publish these cards verbatim!" thread. I wanted it to be a "hey, if we had this tool, what cool things could we make with it?" thread.
The new Rule 700.6 says "The term dies means "is put into a graveyard from the battlefield." It was introduced to a small amount of fanfare as a way of making the game a little more resonant. Currently, it's only used on delayed triggers: "When this creature dies, do BLAH."
But grammar allows that phrase "is put into a graveyard from the battlefield" to be used in some other interesting ways. For example:
Master Poisoner
2BB
2/2
T: Put a -1/-1 counter on target creature.
T, BB: Target creature with a -1/-1 counter on it dies.
Literally, the target creature "is put into a graveyard from the battlefield." It's as good as destroyed (only slightly better, since this gets indestructible creatures as well). Really, there isn't much reason rules-wise to use this when you already have "destroy," unless you really think the different flavor could be put to use.
To me, there's something horrific and subversive about the idea of a creature just dying. No obvious cause. Nothing destroyed it. It just died. Maybe it was poison, maybe it was felled by cold or disease. Maybe something evil grabbed it. Maybe it died of fright.
That, to me, is the kind of feeling a horror set like Innistrad could have. For example:
Panicked Flight
1BB
Enchantment -- Aura
Enchant creature
The next time enchanted creature is tapped, it dies. She never saw what bit her.
Or, even if we tweak things a little bit further:
Jason Voorhees
3BBB
4/3
Legendary Creature -- Zombie Horror
Jason can't be sacrificed.
Jason's toughness can't be lowered below 1.
Jason can't die.
The first two lines set up the third, preventing some of the more obvious rules shenanigans. There might still be some other issues, but I can't imagine a line that better captures the unstoppable-killer vibe, both flavor- and rules-wise. Jason literally cannot be put into a graveyard. Ever. By anything.
Blood Moon was in Standard with Ravnica the last time around (9th edition), along with copies 5-8 thanks to Magus of the Moon. So the return to Ravnica alone wouldn't be enough reason to keep it off the table.
The reason Blood Moon never got/gets out of hand is that Red Control isn't usually viable, and splashing Blood Moon into a multi-color control deck is obviously dangerous.
All that said, I'd love to see it again. Anything that lets Red be more interesting than just damage, damage, damage.
For a card really to be untouchable as a core-set staple, I think it has to fully represent its part of the color pie -- both mechanically and flavorfully. Moreover, it has to be the best/only possible execution of that idea.
Giant Growth, for example, isn't going anywhere: Green is all about instant-speed creature pump mechanically, and it's all about growth flavorfully. Moreover, the cost to effect ratio has been proven completely solid.
By that rationale, Giant Growth is the only card that seems completely untouchable to me, although Samite Healer is close. There is another set of cards that I think are as mechanically and flavorfully solid, but that could be rebalanced if Wizards really wanted to. I'll try to put them in order of least likely to need rebalancing to most likely:
Samite Healer: Perfectly white in terms of who he is and what he does, and keeping him this size encourages players to use the ability, and provides a nice contrast to Prodigal Pyromancer (Newbie: "how come doing damage costs more mana than preventing it?"). Air Elemental: yes, blue gets flyers and Skies, but blue can only get a few big beaters -- wizards may decide to use a different one this time. That said, this is such a perfect limited card. Giant Spider: a completely iconic green card that Wizards riffs off of all the time, but Wizards could (and has) experimented with putting different spiders in the main set. Bog Wraith: black loves swamps, and it loves undead things, and it loves swampwalk, but given how weak it has gotten as a creature color, will it always have a card that obsoletes Hill Giant? Grizzly Bears and Scathe Zombies: completely vanilla, completely replacable, and designed for a creature curve that doesn't really exist any more -- green is supposed to get the most efficient creatures, and we've been spoiled to the point where a vanilla 2/2 for 2 feels really lame. Since the zombies exist partially to show that black CAN'T get the same level of effiency, they might also be a casualty of the new curve.
Getting toward cards that I feel like might not be included, there are some in the list of 16 that just aren't mechanically aligned with what Wizards is pushing:
Goblin King: as noted before, wrong kind of lord. Fear: Rosewater has noted his ambivalence about the fear keyword many times, although my understanding is that the ability is still sound. This could go either way. Rod of Ruin: new players might be confused by this leeching into black's slice of the color pie. It's also not a fun card for either player, in my opinion. Wrath of God: the debate on this one has been beaten to death. So who knows. Nightmare: it would make me super, super sad if this got cut. But black really hardly ever gets big flyers. They might create a replacement with fear or regeneration.
That leaves what I consider to be four special cases. I have no idea where Wizards is trying to position regeneration, so I would believe anything you told me about Drudge Skeletons and Regeneration.
I think Orcish Artillery is amazing -- it's fun to play with, it's risky in a way that I enjoy, and I love the idea of dumb orcs making ballistae that don't work right. But they should probably be goblins instead, and there are certainly people out there who aren't as wild about these guys as I am.
I also love Howling Mine. I think it's a really interesting effect that should always be in standard and casual, it's reasonably priced, and it's a good deckbuilding skill-tester. But I can't think of any reason it should HAVE to be included in an introduction to the game.
I'm actually really excited about the new set -- it's the biggest change in a Core Set since Alpha!
Well, and there are at least two more disappointments to be found outside of the 15 you mention. Let us not forget:
1. Exotic Orchard: the Felwar land!
2. Fusion Elemental: a vanilla creature!
I know it's early, but this is easily the least excited I've been about a new set since I started back up again in Ravnica. I actually thought every set up until SoA was more or less knocked out of the park. Shards seemed to be doing stuff just for the sake of doing it, but at least it was splashy, exciting stuff.
This set, though, feels like a casualty of all the WotC business decisions that have been made recently. Reprints and reprinted themes are easier to design, and a LOT easier to develop -- which is a very good thing when you're, oh, I don't know, firing your lead developer and several others at the end of August and dealing with the introduction of a new rarity.
Like I said, I'm hoping our disappointment is all just a function of small sample size. But I think there's fair reason to worry that it isn't.
I wasn't wild about this at first, and I'm still not sure about it as a four-drop. While the abilities themselves are nice, and it provides a hugely versatile utility for land destruction/denial decks, there's something about this that, like most modern LD, seems just a step slow. By playing this, you're wasting your fourth turn on some combination of Pacifism, Prison Term, and Stone Rain, or you're casting Lightning Helix. At 3 mana, those abilities make a big splash. At 4, I'm pretty sure I wish I had Wrath of God, Mirrorweave, Sulfurous Blast, or some other big play.
Also, Garruk is the best planeswalker right now because he's the best topdeck. His Overrun makes him a nearly-immediate threat that has to be addressed, or he at least gives you some blockers and card advantage. This Ajani looks even worse as a topdeck on turn 7 or 8 than he does on turn 4. If you haven't stabilized the board by then, one piece of weak spot removal isn't going to do it for you.
I think there is something to be said for the fact that Gleemax wasn't yet any good at doing what it was supposed to be doing. But Mercadian Masques and Kamigawa weren't too good at their jobs, either. Did Wizards proceed to cancel Magic?
I think there's much more to be said for the fact that Hasbro is taking resources away from a project that didn't have a built-in revenue stream, and moving them to two projects that do -- Magic Online obviously gets a lot of people spending money, and D&D Insider will be subscription-only. To me, it's pretty hard to view this move as anything other than a monetary decision.
Furthermore, the lack of grace with which this change has been executed is telling. Mogote mentioned above that Eventide had advertisements for Gleemax, which makes this a very rapid and absolute about-face. It's the third such quick reversal we've had to deal with in recent months -- the first being the decision to drop JSS and other tournaments, and the second being the move to drop a card from each pack and add mythic rares. That suddenness is out of character for a gaming division that has a Future Future League to develop its cards years in advance. While MaRo and others have done their best to rationalize those decisions, they all have obvious financial implications. I suspect that is why they happened, and why they had to happen so quickly.
It looks like the downturn in the American economy affects Hasbro, too, and as a result it is starting to affect Magic.
The trick is to have an entity and druid out with +1/+1 counters, and a persist guy without any. Then, you activate the Entity for 0 an arbitrarily large number of times. The Ranger and entity will stay alive through the activations. The persist dude will not -- and each time it comes back, the counter from the druid cancels out the persist counter, setting you up for the next entity activation and netting you a counter on the Ranger.
Result? Arbitrarily large Juniper Order Ranger and, if Kitchen Finks is involved, infinite life. If you want to go outside G/W, you can also rope in Murderous Redcap for infinite damage.
This may have been said elsewhere, but when I saw Faerie Macabre in the spoiler, I was buggin' out: it provides a free, instant speed, colorless AND uncounterable way to deal with reanimation targets (ie Body Double in a 'Lark deck) in either graveyard.
While I will grant you that it doesn't have the versatility of Extirpate or the power of Tormod's Crypt, you can't play Extirpate in a white deck and you can't Crypt through a counterspell, or in response to Makeshift Mannequin. Does this Faerie have a chance of seeing Standard sideboard play after Extirpate and Tormod's Crypt rotate? Maybe even before they rotate?
Knollspine Invocation+boom/bust?
Can I just pay 2 mana for the ability,but deal 8 damage?
This won't work, and here's why: any split card has TWO values for converted mana cost. Boom/Bust, for example, has a CMC of both 2 -and- 6. Now, you're right in that when Dark Confidant sees this card, you will lose 8 life -- that's because it sees both costs and causes life loss for each of them.
With Knollspine Invocation, on the other hand, you are asked to pick a card with converted mana cost X. If Boom/Bust was your only card in hand, you could pick X = 2 OR you could pick X = 6. You would pay the corresponding amount of mana, and Knollspine would do that much damage. So you can't cheat the system; instead, Knollspine can turn your split cards into instant uncounterable burn spells with kicker (either do 2 damage for 2 mana, or 6 damage for 6.) Still pretty nifty, if you ask me.
You need another creature that can survive the -1/-1 counter.
It's a 4-card infinite life combo in 3 colors. I think we'll be ok.
You don't need another creature -- the Bonder's ability technically wouldn't ever have to resolve. You'd just put the Utopia Vow ability on top of the stack, allow only it to resolve, and start over again.
So we're down to a 3-card infinite life combo in 3 colors, which is technically no worse than Project X using Crypt Champion and Saffi Eriksdotter. Except that these cards are potentially even more janky on their own.
Can Leech Bonder's activated ability be played if (somehow) there were no creatures with counters on the board? That is, can its ability target two creatures that have no counters on them?
The activation wouldn't do much, of course, but I don't see anything preventing it (it doesn't target any counters, just the creatures).
I may be reading too much into this, but the title of MaRo's article is "Shadowmoor than meets the eye" (I know this is a transformers reference before anyone says it) and at the end of the article, he says, "Until next time, may you enjoy hiding things in plain sight."
Is there something we're missing in his article?
He does run a picture of Shadow of Doubt in the article next to his history of hybrid mana. Could that be reprinted, by any chance?
I agree. I always felt like there must be an elegant solution out there that allows things like flying and first strike to be relevant to creature-on-creature combat. My ground-pounder should not be able to pick a fight with your Squadron Hawk, no matter how much I want it to.
Double-Faced is pretty much exactly the same technology as flip cards, just with a splashier implementation and a removal of the no-unflipping restriction.
Curse is a subtype used only for reference by other cards, a little bit like Arcane.
Flashback is reprinted, so far with no new tricks up its sleeve.
Morbid is an ability word for a fairly straightforward trigger.
Fight is also just a new word for an idea that already existed.
It looks to me like my inner fantasy nerd is going to be super happy, but my inner strategy game nerd won't have much new to chew on. Again, it's tough to make judgments without playing the environment as a whole, but I'm not seeing the meaty goodness here. Is anyone else?
Yes, it wouldn't quite work as is under the rules, since "target creature is put into a graveyard" doesn't specify which graveyard it should go into. But I didn't want this to be a "Wizards should publish these cards verbatim!" thread. I wanted it to be a "hey, if we had this tool, what cool things could we make with it?" thread.
But grammar allows that phrase "is put into a graveyard from the battlefield" to be used in some other interesting ways. For example:
Master Poisoner
2BB
2/2
T: Put a -1/-1 counter on target creature.
T, BB: Target creature with a -1/-1 counter on it dies.
Literally, the target creature "is put into a graveyard from the battlefield." It's as good as destroyed (only slightly better, since this gets indestructible creatures as well). Really, there isn't much reason rules-wise to use this when you already have "destroy," unless you really think the different flavor could be put to use.
To me, there's something horrific and subversive about the idea of a creature just dying. No obvious cause. Nothing destroyed it. It just died. Maybe it was poison, maybe it was felled by cold or disease. Maybe something evil grabbed it. Maybe it died of fright.
That, to me, is the kind of feeling a horror set like Innistrad could have. For example:
Panicked Flight
1BB
Enchantment -- Aura
Enchant creature
The next time enchanted creature is tapped, it dies.
She never saw what bit her.
Or, even if we tweak things a little bit further:
Jason Voorhees
3BBB
4/3
Legendary Creature -- Zombie Horror
Jason can't be sacrificed.
Jason's toughness can't be lowered below 1.
Jason can't die.
The first two lines set up the third, preventing some of the more obvious rules shenanigans. There might still be some other issues, but I can't imagine a line that better captures the unstoppable-killer vibe, both flavor- and rules-wise. Jason literally cannot be put into a graveyard. Ever. By anything.
Any other ideas in this vein?
The reason Blood Moon never got/gets out of hand is that Red Control isn't usually viable, and splashing Blood Moon into a multi-color control deck is obviously dangerous.
All that said, I'd love to see it again. Anything that lets Red be more interesting than just damage, damage, damage.
Giant Growth, for example, isn't going anywhere: Green is all about instant-speed creature pump mechanically, and it's all about growth flavorfully. Moreover, the cost to effect ratio has been proven completely solid.
By that rationale, Giant Growth is the only card that seems completely untouchable to me, although Samite Healer is close. There is another set of cards that I think are as mechanically and flavorfully solid, but that could be rebalanced if Wizards really wanted to. I'll try to put them in order of least likely to need rebalancing to most likely:
Samite Healer: Perfectly white in terms of who he is and what he does, and keeping him this size encourages players to use the ability, and provides a nice contrast to Prodigal Pyromancer (Newbie: "how come doing damage costs more mana than preventing it?").
Air Elemental: yes, blue gets flyers and Skies, but blue can only get a few big beaters -- wizards may decide to use a different one this time. That said, this is such a perfect limited card.
Giant Spider: a completely iconic green card that Wizards riffs off of all the time, but Wizards could (and has) experimented with putting different spiders in the main set.
Bog Wraith: black loves swamps, and it loves undead things, and it loves swampwalk, but given how weak it has gotten as a creature color, will it always have a card that obsoletes Hill Giant?
Grizzly Bears and Scathe Zombies: completely vanilla, completely replacable, and designed for a creature curve that doesn't really exist any more -- green is supposed to get the most efficient creatures, and we've been spoiled to the point where a vanilla 2/2 for 2 feels really lame. Since the zombies exist partially to show that black CAN'T get the same level of effiency, they might also be a casualty of the new curve.
Getting toward cards that I feel like might not be included, there are some in the list of 16 that just aren't mechanically aligned with what Wizards is pushing:
Goblin King: as noted before, wrong kind of lord.
Fear: Rosewater has noted his ambivalence about the fear keyword many times, although my understanding is that the ability is still sound. This could go either way.
Rod of Ruin: new players might be confused by this leeching into black's slice of the color pie. It's also not a fun card for either player, in my opinion.
Wrath of God: the debate on this one has been beaten to death. So who knows.
Nightmare: it would make me super, super sad if this got cut. But black really hardly ever gets big flyers. They might create a replacement with fear or regeneration.
That leaves what I consider to be four special cases. I have no idea where Wizards is trying to position regeneration, so I would believe anything you told me about Drudge Skeletons and Regeneration.
I think Orcish Artillery is amazing -- it's fun to play with, it's risky in a way that I enjoy, and I love the idea of dumb orcs making ballistae that don't work right. But they should probably be goblins instead, and there are certainly people out there who aren't as wild about these guys as I am.
I also love Howling Mine. I think it's a really interesting effect that should always be in standard and casual, it's reasonably priced, and it's a good deckbuilding skill-tester. But I can't think of any reason it should HAVE to be included in an introduction to the game.
I'm actually really excited about the new set -- it's the biggest change in a Core Set since Alpha!
1. Exotic Orchard: the Felwar land!
2. Fusion Elemental: a vanilla creature!
I know it's early, but this is easily the least excited I've been about a new set since I started back up again in Ravnica. I actually thought every set up until SoA was more or less knocked out of the park. Shards seemed to be doing stuff just for the sake of doing it, but at least it was splashy, exciting stuff.
This set, though, feels like a casualty of all the WotC business decisions that have been made recently. Reprints and reprinted themes are easier to design, and a LOT easier to develop -- which is a very good thing when you're, oh, I don't know, firing your lead developer and several others at the end of August and dealing with the introduction of a new rarity.
Like I said, I'm hoping our disappointment is all just a function of small sample size. But I think there's fair reason to worry that it isn't.
Also, Garruk is the best planeswalker right now because he's the best topdeck. His Overrun makes him a nearly-immediate threat that has to be addressed, or he at least gives you some blockers and card advantage. This Ajani looks even worse as a topdeck on turn 7 or 8 than he does on turn 4. If you haven't stabilized the board by then, one piece of weak spot removal isn't going to do it for you.
I think there's much more to be said for the fact that Hasbro is taking resources away from a project that didn't have a built-in revenue stream, and moving them to two projects that do -- Magic Online obviously gets a lot of people spending money, and D&D Insider will be subscription-only. To me, it's pretty hard to view this move as anything other than a monetary decision.
Furthermore, the lack of grace with which this change has been executed is telling. Mogote mentioned above that Eventide had advertisements for Gleemax, which makes this a very rapid and absolute about-face. It's the third such quick reversal we've had to deal with in recent months -- the first being the decision to drop JSS and other tournaments, and the second being the move to drop a card from each pack and add mythic rares. That suddenness is out of character for a gaming division that has a Future Future League to develop its cards years in advance. While MaRo and others have done their best to rationalize those decisions, they all have obvious financial implications. I suspect that is why they happened, and why they had to happen so quickly.
It looks like the downturn in the American economy affects Hasbro, too, and as a result it is starting to affect Magic.
The trick is to have an entity and druid out with +1/+1 counters, and a persist guy without any. Then, you activate the Entity for 0 an arbitrarily large number of times. The Ranger and entity will stay alive through the activations. The persist dude will not -- and each time it comes back, the counter from the druid cancels out the persist counter, setting you up for the next entity activation and netting you a counter on the Ranger.
Result? Arbitrarily large Juniper Order Ranger and, if Kitchen Finks is involved, infinite life. If you want to go outside G/W, you can also rope in Murderous Redcap for infinite damage.
While I will grant you that it doesn't have the versatility of Extirpate or the power of Tormod's Crypt, you can't play Extirpate in a white deck and you can't Crypt through a counterspell, or in response to Makeshift Mannequin. Does this Faerie have a chance of seeing Standard sideboard play after Extirpate and Tormod's Crypt rotate? Maybe even before they rotate?
This won't work, and here's why: any split card has TWO values for converted mana cost. Boom/Bust, for example, has a CMC of both 2 -and- 6. Now, you're right in that when Dark Confidant sees this card, you will lose 8 life -- that's because it sees both costs and causes life loss for each of them.
With Knollspine Invocation, on the other hand, you are asked to pick a card with converted mana cost X. If Boom/Bust was your only card in hand, you could pick X = 2 OR you could pick X = 6. You would pay the corresponding amount of mana, and Knollspine would do that much damage. So you can't cheat the system; instead, Knollspine can turn your split cards into instant uncounterable burn spells with kicker (either do 2 damage for 2 mana, or 6 damage for 6.) Still pretty nifty, if you ask me.
You don't need another creature -- the Bonder's ability technically wouldn't ever have to resolve. You'd just put the Utopia Vow ability on top of the stack, allow only it to resolve, and start over again.
So we're down to a 3-card infinite life combo in 3 colors, which is technically no worse than Project X using Crypt Champion and Saffi Eriksdotter. Except that these cards are potentially even more janky on their own.
The activation wouldn't do much, of course, but I don't see anything preventing it (it doesn't target any counters, just the creatures).
He does run a picture of Shadow of Doubt in the article next to his history of hybrid mana. Could that be reprinted, by any chance?
EDIT: No hits for "shadow" in the orb. Nevermind.