They also nerfed black LD.Originally Posted by TsumiBand
Black also had efficient, hyper-aggressive creatures with drawbacks (--> Suicide Black). I think that was more than a sufficient distinction between red and black creatures. But then they stopped to print interesting black creatures and came up with some horseshit that it shares design space with red creatures. While that kind of reasoning made some sense, the next step did not: Black suddenly having higher toughness than power creatures - because that totally doesn't overlap with white.
E.g. the new Vampire legend in BFZ - flying, first strike, 2/3 are all white attributes. Pumping on combat damage is a bit unique to black creatures, but could just be as easily printed in white.
Yes its creatures are a weird mix of green and white mentality now. Vampire Nighthawk could never have been White with that exact mix of combat abilities, but its utility is clear as an early drop that can wear a lot of hats, so of course it's seen as an incursion into efficient weenie space that belongs to White.They also nerfed black LD.
Black also had efficient, hyper-aggressive creatures with drawbacks (--> Suicide Black). I think that was more than a sufficient distinction between red and black creatures. But then they stopped to print interesting black creatures and came up with some horseshit that it shares design space with red creatures. While that kind of reasoning made some sense, the next step did not: Black suddenly having higher toughness than power creatures - because that totally doesn't overlap with white.
E.g. the new Vampire legend in BFZ - flying, first strike, 2/3 are all white attributes. Pumping on combat damage is a bit unique to black creatures, but could just be as easily printed in white.
I don't know why it was so ghastly to stick to the suicide weenie approach -- Suicide Black hasn't been a playable archetype even in passing for a long, long time, but it was one of Black's more defining traits. Wreck they hand, drop an undercosted midrange guy with a drawback, punch like a beast and hope like hell there's no retribution. Instead we get these wacky :rb: guys that just fold to Shock and have a drawback that's too difficult to mitigate and maintain board presence (like return to your hand or some similar bilge). UGH.
I mean if they wanna be like that fine, but don't knock all the legs off the table. No card draw? Okay cool, but how about some discard. No tutors? Hey man no problem, as long as there's life-for-cards spells. Can't reprint Negator? Just give me a spell that controls the early game, I'll figure out what to do on turn 5. It's like they hollowed out the pumpkin without putting a fucking face on it.
It's actually kind of funny how a card that was "obviously white" in the color shifting set (Mirri the Cursed) got color shifted to black but is now looked at as a template for black cards. It'd be like a student writing a report quoting a news article that was written on April 1st. I dunno, maybe that card was supposed to be black all along. It is vampire-ish. The new card isn't even drawing from Vampires except for the +1/+1 counter, but it's getting them for completely different reasons.
Hold on a second. They only recently printed Tasigur and Gurmag Angler, which are precisely the kind of playable aggressive creature with a drawback that black used to get in the past. Like Phyrexian Negator or Tombstalker. The drawback, in this instance, is that you have to play fetchlands, cantrips and cheap instants and sorceries generally in order to be able to cast them early on. (And what a terrible drawback this is!)
What's more, every now and then black used to get some Black Knight-type creatures that might as well have been white. You could argue that this was mainly for flavour reasons, to have some mirrored good and evil knights, but the fact remains, this type of creature is not outside black's piece of the pie.
IMVHO their current card/set design strategy has its flaws, but this is not one of them...
Delve a broken mechanic which isn't a black-specific mechanic (Hooting Mandrills say Hi!), so that's a weak argument.
First strike is tertiary in black, so the Knight thing gets a pass (I'm still waiting for cool Demon Knights...). For same reason Mirri the Cursed makes sense in black since all those ability words are at least tertiary in black (Haste is within black's color pie, but not in white with exceptions like Akroma), as was higher power than toughness. Self-pump is selfish, thus black, while pump for the common good is more green/white's domain.
There's a fairly large difference between, like, playing Delve spells versus mitigating the drawback of like a Flesh Reaver or Phyrexian Negator, right? I don't think Delve it an inherent drawback, especially in a format where the stat quo of gameplay just fills your graveyard with things incidentally.
I mean like, given the power creep in creatures over the last several years -- pardon my shitty card creation, but I'm fairly sure that Black could get a 3/3 Jackal Pup for, instead of all these weird 2/2 for
The New Guy Scale is annoying. The game has to have some of those kinds of curveballs in it, ffs.
In "younger" formats, especially Standard, this is not such a trivial issue. Having multiple cards in your graveyard early on is by no means guaranteed, and it's harder to filter out unwanted copies of Delve guys you can't cast.
I think right now you and Barook are being unreasonable. WotC rarely tries to design and balance anything specifically for Legacy, and they probably don't care much if Delve is easily abusable in the format. You're just not going to get, say, a kosher Sui Black creature that "feels" like Phyrexian Negator, is playable in Legacy, and happens to have poor synergy with the blue shell. If you want to play like Dark Ritual, Duress, Hymn, pass, Sinkhole, pass, Phyrexian Negator, then you have my commiserations: your time has passed, now you're old and you will play Delver until your death in solitude.
They don't test for Modern either, which got Modern raped by TC and DTT. But at least they had the decency to ban both Delve spells in Modern instead of letting the format rot like they do with DTT legal in Legacy.
And I would rather quit the format before I start playing Delver.
Thing is that they completely shat on black's identity over time and their poor attempts to fix things are just as bad. Fear is also a victim of WotC, as is its shitty replacement intimidate.
Eh, I don't honestly know that that's completely fair. Things like Demonic Taskmaster, Master of the Feast, or Abyssal Persecutor come to mind right off the bat, although I guess you could argue that those drawbacks are dick-face-punch level. AdNaus is also a fairly recent printing that does a pretty good job of conveying that great power at great cost thing. You just can't have one of those effects in every set because they tend to be ridiculously powerful when you build around them (see: Necro, AdNaus, Grizzlebees, Doomsday, Yawg's Bargain). Maybe we're just looking at things through '96-tinted glasses and lamenting the fact that Dark Rit into Carnophage and Dauthi Slayer is just never going to be a thing again.There's a fairly large difference between, like, playing Delve spells versus mitigating the drawback of like a Flesh Reaver or Phyrexian Negator, right? I don't think Delve it an inherent drawback, especially in a format where the stat quo of gameplay just fills your graveyard with things incidentally.
I mean like, given the power creep in creatures over the last several years -- pardon my shitty card creation, but I'm fairly sure that Black could get a 3/3 Jackal Pup for
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
Carnophage is never going to be a thing again because other colors have caught up because of creature power creep. We need some sort of 3/2 for B with drawback that would be analogous to today's creatures what Carnophage or Sarcomancy were to creatures of the 90's.
Try out Death's Shadow. You can power him up right away with a Spellskite and any spell that was cast at all.
It's hard to understand your point when you are asking for 2 power guys for B with out a drawback, when in fact we have had a ton of them recently with bonus's that don't see play, like Gravecrawler and Bloodsoaked Champion.There's a fairly large difference between, like, playing Delve spells versus mitigating the drawback of like a Flesh Reaver or Phyrexian Negator, right? I don't think Delve it an inherent drawback, especially in a format where the stat quo of gameplay just fills your graveyard with things incidentally.
I mean like, given the power creep in creatures over the last several years -- pardon my shitty card creation, but I'm fairly sure that Black could get a 3/3 Jackal Pup for
Which has since been replaced with Menace. From Fear to Menace is a pretttyyyy big step down.
It's a series of steps that make sense, though. You have flying, which was baked into the game in Alpha, makes good flavor sense, and helps close out games. The problem is that you can't give it to all colors at common, for color pie reasons, but you still need to give those colors a way to deal damage through board stalls. Fear has been a thing in black forever, but green just has to go over the top with big guys and red has to try to burn things out of the way or swarm, and neither of those are optimal solutions. Solution: give fear to green and red. Problem: "can't be blocked except by black creatures or artifacts" reads weirdly on things that aren't black creatures or artifacts. Why does this giant wurm spook other huge green predators but not some random 2/1 human assassin? Why does a random 2/2 Goblin scoot past giant fucking dragons but a random zombie will mess his shit up?
Solution: divorce fear from black creatures and instead make it cue off of the color the creature is. The idea is that fear was always flavorfully, "This thing is super scary to people who aren't used to it, but it's just another run-of-the-mill horror to the bad guys who've seen it before (and artifact can't get scared)," and this just extends that principle to other colors. Problem: now neo-fear is completely binary; either your opponent is playing the wrong colors and your guy is completely unblockable, or he isn't and your guy doesn't have evasion anymore. This leads to bad game play because ideally evasion is something that lets your guy get through but isn't completely unanswerable except by killing the guy, giving players some strategic back-and-forth, and intimidate fails that test hard.
Solution: develop a new mechanic that grants evasion but is also color-agnostic and not just a reskin of flying, i.e. horsemanship. That mechanic is menace. Personally, I think menace is a little on the weak side, since it only works when you're ahead (unlike flying) and is not great on little guys that effectively get killed for free if your opponent can get sufficiently large creatures on them. I like it on medium and large guys, and I like it in colors with combat tricks, since then it gives you more room for two-for-ones.
Just wait for a few years until they tweak the mechanic to give us Megamenace.
Shush you! I approve of this change
they should just print more horsemanship
Shadow is probably a better analog to flying than Menace. Menace isn't evasion so much as pressing an advantage, not necessarily a bad mechanic in its own right.
Fear never should have been a keyword to begin with, but it's just another symptom of the problem with constantly trying to introduce more elements to the game. I think around Ice Age or something they announced they'd be doing two new abilities in every block. It was silly then, it's silly now.
What were we talking about again? I'll just repost this since it still makes me giggle:
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
I see what you mean, it's a hard point to correctly emphasize. I guess if I had to quantify it, I might start by saying that a proper "suicide creature" is a) over the usual p/t ratio for its casting cost; but b) has a drawback that affects the controller negatively. This is to say that it is different to Do Something Bad for its controller vs Do Something Good for its opponent.
As an example, Phyrexian Negator - its drawback impacts its controller directly if it should enter into the equation, you have to sac a bunch of permanents and probably get blown out pretty badly for being reckless. Compare to Master of the Feast, which gives your opponent a card during your upkeep. It isn't really because it's not asking life or permanents to be bigger than it "ought to be", it's just content giving your opponent a second draw step. Maybe that card in and of itself is fine, but that isn't the point - the point is, the concept of a card that demands tribute from its caster to maintain superiority is less and less frequent.
The new line of Black 2/1s don't necessarily even curve out over the other colors, so while many of them do have a drawback that offsets their cost, they don't measure up really in terms of a proper Suicide creature; why would you pay
That's why I tossed out the idea of a 3/3 for
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