I wonder if the activated ability was the more traditional BG "target creature gets -2/-2, another target creature gets +2/+2" but was cut for space/power/whatever reasons. That ability is monoblack, and doesn't really have anything green to it.
Cute - further confirmation that Monstrous is going to be picking up the slack created by the reduction in the number of instants/sorceries due to the enchantment-matters theme.
Thanks to those of you upthread who answered my question regarding whether this is a creature upon entering the battlefield if you have insufficient devotion!
On a side note - at one point in design do you think this card changed from 1UU to 2U? If that change isn't mentioned/discussed in an article on mtgnews at some point, I will be shocked.
Sorry - I'm sure this has been asked and answered somewhere in these 20+ pages of comments, but would this card trigger abilities keyed off of creatures entering the battlefield, even if the caster has insufficient devotion to blue? It seems like the answer is yes, it's a creature when cast, but then becomes a non-creature after it enters the battlefield.
Darksteel Forge is a Timmy/Johnny card that doesn't need an artifact rich environment to be liked and appreciated by its target audience. The existence of such a card is a challenge to a certain type of player. As has been said many times and many ways, not every card in a set is printed for Standard/Modern/competitive play.
The art on Angelic Accord looks awful. It looks like a particularly bad instance of a pro-player type card, where the player's likeness is shoe-horned into the art.
I'm fine with an update to slivers based on modern design and understand the need to have a broader range of creatures, but...
Couldn't they have made more effort to tie these things to their original look? Making them eyeless and always with a scythe hand would've gone a long way in my book.
Edit: Are we sure we have slivers in all colors? They might try something weird and only put slivers in red, green and white. I don't know what the justification for excluding blue and black is (it's not as if red's theme of chaos and individuality meshes with a hive - blue seems like a better fit than red if only three colors get slivers).
I would bet all cards in this set will be guild aligned so even the single color cards will have guild effects/other colors on them
That's a good point - it may not be a full multi-colored set, but it might be a full guild set, meaning that all of the mono-colored cards will have the guild mechanic or off-color activiation costs creating a guild alignment.
So meaning all instants and sorcery cost 2 less, including your opponents.
It looks like part of making the other colors feel more like white is by creating symmetrical effects (which is funny given that the card type is disfavored, and white doesn't even get that many global effects).
I'm hoping you fine folks might weigh in on an argument I've been having about a different game (Dominion) with how Magic handles this question:
Is it cheating to put your deck in a certain order prior to shuffling?
My answer is no, provided that you have rules requiring a sufficient shuffle to randomize the deck. Dominion doesn't have any rules on point, but I'm curious how Magic handles this scenario.
I suspect that Curses and Traps are there largely for a new player intra-block pokemon (gotta collect em' all!) effect. It's a relatively small subset of cards that a new player can focus on collecting, none of which are so powerful as to be very expensive or sought after on the secondary market, and highlight a particular theme of the block.
It lets you wrath on your turn, and any turn that you do not have to tap it for mana it is automatically live during opponent's turn. It is a good example of a card that is hard for many to fully grasp without actually playing with or against it.
Good point.
Still, I could see why that functionality would matter for a better card (the kind that you'd want to play in constructed), but here it seems like an ugly way of building a card whose primary function is to be a cool top-down design.
That said, maybe it plays in an elegant fashion despite the inelegant looking text and serves it's primary function after all.
On a side note - at one point in design do you think this card changed from 1UU to 2U? If that change isn't mentioned/discussed in an article on mtgnews at some point, I will be shocked.
Couldn't they have made more effort to tie these things to their original look? Making them eyeless and always with a scythe hand would've gone a long way in my book.
Edit: Are we sure we have slivers in all colors? They might try something weird and only put slivers in red, green and white. I don't know what the justification for excluding blue and black is (it's not as if red's theme of chaos and individuality meshes with a hive - blue seems like a better fit than red if only three colors get slivers).
That's a good point - it may not be a full multi-colored set, but it might be a full guild set, meaning that all of the mono-colored cards will have the guild mechanic or off-color activiation costs creating a guild alignment.
It looks like part of making the other colors feel more like white is by creating symmetrical effects (which is funny given that the card type is disfavored, and white doesn't even get that many global effects).
Is it cheating to put your deck in a certain order prior to shuffling?
My answer is no, provided that you have rules requiring a sufficient shuffle to randomize the deck. Dominion doesn't have any rules on point, but I'm curious how Magic handles this scenario.
Edit: Thanks for the info eflin and Eurfuun.
Good point.
Still, I could see why that functionality would matter for a better card (the kind that you'd want to play in constructed), but here it seems like an ugly way of building a card whose primary function is to be a cool top-down design.
That said, maybe it plays in an elegant fashion despite the inelegant looking text and serves it's primary function after all.
Edit: Thanks Lectrys for the additional points.