Discarding is a downside. Discarding a card with Madness is less bad than discarding a card without Madness even if the Madness cost is higher.
That said, a counterspell is the card type least capable of taking advantage of a Madness cost. A counterspell is an instant-speed response to an action from a hidden zone (i.e. your opponent's hand), which makes it hard to set up the discard to happen at exactly the right time to enable the Madness-enabled counterspell. You can't play a creature or sorcery with a discard as an additional cost, for example, and symmetrical discard effects (like Liliana, Defiant Necromancer are only safe to print at sorcery speed.
Seriously? this gets attention? this is good enough now? Ash Zealot is a better aggressive card, and it was a bulk rare. If this is not only acceptable but exciting, I weep for the players just getting in who don't know any better. I sincerely hope that this doesn't see play
Ash Zealot is also a much nicer card from a Vorthos/Timmy direction. Scourge Wolf is a wolf with a skin condition; Ash Zealot is a witch hunter with great flavour text whose ability can be accurately described as "No!" *smack* "Bad necromancer!"
You could probably work backwards from a similar card to get the red angel. Thundermaw Hellkite is a good example because it's the same colour, same rarity, and almost the same cmc.
...
Done. I don't think there's any reason to add another drawback (such as you take double damage as well).
A fragile 4 power creature that also makes you lose the game faster isn't undercosted at 4 mana. Nor is it interesting of flavourful.
And on top of that: Thundermaw Hellkite taps most things that can block it on the turn it enters play, and wipes out any chump blockers among them. Meaning that the dragon is much more likely to actually connect with your opponent's face as well as helping your other creatures hit face. Thundermaw Hellkite might be a bit too good for its price, but there's a much bigger gap between it and the new angel than there should be.
There's no flavor here, it's just raw, pushed power. It's probably the most egregious example of a card being mythic solely to sell packs that I have seen.
No flavor????
It's like the most flavorous zombie/ghoul/undead in years. I mean: look, the guy is an undead that return from the grave every time you kill it. Arguably gravecrawler also was but the way this one works has its own flavor. Once (re)dead, your zombie corpse is (re)available from necromancy (you put it into your hand to recast it.). The fact that he raises others from the grave back to play is also flavorous of its 'relentless' aspect and of the common picture on popular culture of more zombies coming back once you kill one. It is also a cool mechanical way to translate the geometrical multiplication of zombies you get with endless ranks of the dead you get in the gorgeous artwork.
It's not a fluffy zombie because zombies aren't rare and they certainly aren't more rare than rare. Relentless zombies are relentless because they are common - it's not just one special zombie that makes the difference, it's a hundred zombies all doing the same thing until one gets lucky.
The only argument against its flavor could be 'menace' as arguably although scary, zombies in Magic do not have this ability and are not the most threatening creature type. One can argue 'menace' is new and it's going to be a zombie thing in the future, or that it represents the second meaning of 'relentless': unstoppable.
Making Menace a Zombie thing would be arse-backwards, because Zombies are all about many-attacker-few-defender scenarios, not few-attacker-many-defender scenarios. If you wanted a new Zombie keyword, bringing back a Banding-like keyword to allow multiple attacking Zombies to deal combat damage to a single blocker makes sense. Menace does not.
I'm not asking them to be pure altruists, I'm asking them for a mutually beneficial relationship: they make a good game that is fun to play, and we buy that game. A card game where you lose because your opponent beat you in the "Shovel Money Into The Scalpers' Maw" phase is not a good game and is not fun.
Sometimes, I feel like Magic players forget that MtG is a business.
Do you guys like the developers of this game? Do you want them to do well?
No, I don't. If they are willing to sacrifice the health of Magic-the-game (the part that benefits us) in favour of Magic-the-business (the part that benefits them), why should I show them any more consideration than they show us?
It is impossible to print only constructed worthy cards without making every previous expansion useless each set. POWER CREEP IS THE FASTEST WAY TO KILL THIS GAME. Yes some people are crazy and think power creep can save the game but experience has repeatedly proven otherwise.
I'm not suggesting power creep, you fool. How you can read "not overpowered but not underpowered" and think I'm arguing for more overpowered cards is beyond me.
If I was in charge of Magic (or any deckbuilding/listbuilding game), the goal would be that every card does one of three things:
1. Has a place in at least one top tier deck. At least half of the cards should be viable in constructed - not overpowered but not underpowered - with common cards being generally decent cards for their cost, while Mythic Rares can be "Play around me" cards that are more complex or complicated to use.
2. Is a tech card that is below average in a healthy meta, but becomes more powerful if another deck gets out of hand. These are intended as safety valves to do things like prey on Eldrazi decks if they suddenly become 40% of the meta.
3. Experimental and random cards. It's okay to print cards with the intention that they don't interfere with competitive constructed IF they do something sufficiently interesting in casual games that it's worth adding them to the game for their own sake. Shahrazad is an extreme example of this type of card.
There is no place for a card which is both generic and weak. Limited decks should be weaker because you don't have the luxury of constructing your ideal mana curve with ideal synergies, not because your deck is full of trash tier cards.
By working from the mindset that every card should have a purpose (and no, teaching newbies "This is what it looks like when WotC pisses on your head and tells you it's raining" is not a valid purpose), the game becomes more accessible since it lets newbies start building a deck they like sooner if they don't have to wade through building a deck that isn't full of trash first.
What are a few examples? I don't really play modern video games, and the SciFi/Fantasy stuff I read is old, old stuff I pick up used. Are the themes I mentioned becoming a trope, or are they rarely used anymore?
It's not strictly a religious thing, but it does come up in comic books way more than I'd like. Just look at a list of Marvel's crossover events and you'll see a lot of excuses for "Half the superheroes turn their potentially lethal powers on innocent people/their former allies." Civil War, AvX, AXIS, Time Runs Out, Civil War II...
If it was me, I'd make it an encore block like Time Spiral, about the Guildless getting up in arms and demanding representation.
First set is five Guilds and the Guildless masses. Second set is the other five Guilds and the lead representatives of the Guildless.
Each Guild would have at least one card with both their Guild keywords - a Golgari that you can either feed to the others with Scavenge or bring back for another go with Dredge, for example.
I'm really interested in this theory of Angels becoming overzealous or corrupted. One of the more interesting things in the history of Magic in my opinion was the backstory to The Dark, where this same thing was the case. There were themes of religious persecution, sanctimony, zealotry, etc. Too bad The Dark was mostly poop.
One of the least interesting things in fiction these days is the cynical refusal to let paladins exist. You can have magic, aliens, or monsters, but the moment you put a good man (or woman) in there, there's some jackass itching to take him down a peg or two.
WOTC had the most successful game property of all time-but when they attempted to license it, they realized it had almost NO transferable value to other companies. Why would a company pay a large amount of money to make a MTG lunchbox, or an MTG plush doll, a T-shirt for Wal-mart, when the only thing they are "buying" is a logo and a piece of generic fantasy dragon art? It gets even worse when you REALLY try to expand your property and make a movie. No studio is going to pay WOTC a million dollars for the right to slap their MTG logo on a movie with no flagship characters.
There was already a solution to that, as long as you didn't try to crush the entire lore of MtG down into a single movie. Magic: the Gathering as a whole might not have had iconic imagery to sell, but Ravnica does. Lorwyn does. Marvel hasn't just proved that "childish" worldbuilding sells big on the big screen, it also proved you could present a property on the big screen and use its breadth and not just it's length. Thor is not the sequel to Iron Man, but they're still part of the same franchise.
Introducing iconic Planeswalkers is still a good idea (except making Jace the face of Magic, that bit sucked), but it's not the only way to use the property.
But I find it unrealistic to expect two "black planes" in a row...
Personally, I think it would be cool to see Ancient Egypt as a white plane instead of a black plane. Making mummies White Zombies would probably be a closer match to actual Ancient Egyptian beliefs than the Hammer horror take.
That said, a counterspell is the card type least capable of taking advantage of a Madness cost. A counterspell is an instant-speed response to an action from a hidden zone (i.e. your opponent's hand), which makes it hard to set up the discard to happen at exactly the right time to enable the Madness-enabled counterspell. You can't play a creature or sorcery with a discard as an additional cost, for example, and symmetrical discard effects (like Liliana, Defiant Necromancer are only safe to print at sorcery speed.
Ash Zealot is also a much nicer card from a Vorthos/Timmy direction. Scourge Wolf is a wolf with a skin condition; Ash Zealot is a witch hunter with great flavour text whose ability can be accurately described as "No!" *smack* "Bad necromancer!"
Oh no! It was unplayably bad in all eternal formats! The horror!
And on top of that: Thundermaw Hellkite taps most things that can block it on the turn it enters play, and wipes out any chump blockers among them. Meaning that the dragon is much more likely to actually connect with your opponent's face as well as helping your other creatures hit face. Thundermaw Hellkite might be a bit too good for its price, but there's a much bigger gap between it and the new angel than there should be.
It's not a fluffy zombie because zombies aren't rare and they certainly aren't more rare than rare. Relentless zombies are relentless because they are common - it's not just one special zombie that makes the difference, it's a hundred zombies all doing the same thing until one gets lucky.
Making Menace a Zombie thing would be arse-backwards, because Zombies are all about many-attacker-few-defender scenarios, not few-attacker-many-defender scenarios. If you wanted a new Zombie keyword, bringing back a Banding-like keyword to allow multiple attacking Zombies to deal combat damage to a single blocker makes sense. Menace does not.
No, I don't. If they are willing to sacrifice the health of Magic-the-game (the part that benefits us) in favour of Magic-the-business (the part that benefits them), why should I show them any more consideration than they show us?
I'm not suggesting power creep, you fool. How you can read "not overpowered but not underpowered" and think I'm arguing for more overpowered cards is beyond me.
1. Has a place in at least one top tier deck. At least half of the cards should be viable in constructed - not overpowered but not underpowered - with common cards being generally decent cards for their cost, while Mythic Rares can be "Play around me" cards that are more complex or complicated to use.
2. Is a tech card that is below average in a healthy meta, but becomes more powerful if another deck gets out of hand. These are intended as safety valves to do things like prey on Eldrazi decks if they suddenly become 40% of the meta.
3. Experimental and random cards. It's okay to print cards with the intention that they don't interfere with competitive constructed IF they do something sufficiently interesting in casual games that it's worth adding them to the game for their own sake. Shahrazad is an extreme example of this type of card.
There is no place for a card which is both generic and weak. Limited decks should be weaker because you don't have the luxury of constructing your ideal mana curve with ideal synergies, not because your deck is full of trash tier cards.
By working from the mindset that every card should have a purpose (and no, teaching newbies "This is what it looks like when WotC pisses on your head and tells you it's raining" is not a valid purpose), the game becomes more accessible since it lets newbies start building a deck they like sooner if they don't have to wade through building a deck that isn't full of trash first.
It's not strictly a religious thing, but it does come up in comic books way more than I'd like. Just look at a list of Marvel's crossover events and you'll see a lot of excuses for "Half the superheroes turn their potentially lethal powers on innocent people/their former allies." Civil War, AvX, AXIS, Time Runs Out, Civil War II...
First set is five Guilds and the Guildless masses. Second set is the other five Guilds and the lead representatives of the Guildless.
Each Guild would have at least one card with both their Guild keywords - a Golgari that you can either feed to the others with Scavenge or bring back for another go with Dredge, for example.
He's a tough street cop.
She's an angel.
Together, they fight crime!
One of the least interesting things in fiction these days is the cynical refusal to let paladins exist. You can have magic, aliens, or monsters, but the moment you put a good man (or woman) in there, there's some jackass itching to take him down a peg or two.
There was already a solution to that, as long as you didn't try to crush the entire lore of MtG down into a single movie. Magic: the Gathering as a whole might not have had iconic imagery to sell, but Ravnica does. Lorwyn does. Marvel hasn't just proved that "childish" worldbuilding sells big on the big screen, it also proved you could present a property on the big screen and use its breadth and not just it's length. Thor is not the sequel to Iron Man, but they're still part of the same franchise.
Introducing iconic Planeswalkers is still a good idea (except making Jace the face of Magic, that bit sucked), but it's not the only way to use the property.
Personally, I think it would be cool to see Ancient Egypt as a white plane instead of a black plane. Making mummies White Zombies would probably be a closer match to actual Ancient Egyptian beliefs than the Hammer horror take.