Thursday, February 27, 2014

CCDD 022714—Evade

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/27/2014 - Green creatures are good at getting into fights; they should be good at getting out of them too.


15 comments:

  1. I'm not convinced that this ability needs to be in green. Fog's pretty good precedence. That said, if something's coming out of white and into green I'd rather leave this in white and give green the Heart of Light/Ghostly Possession wording which is closer to Fog and nearly functionally identical.

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    1. I'm not so much proposing changing "remove from combat" from white to green as bleeding it for this card, which is meant to be a particular flavor of "don't kill this." Hexproof and regenerate would match green better mechanically, but thematically, this is green's flicker effect.
      I guess?
      Hmm.

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    2. If you're going for a Flicker surprise blocking is relevant as well. What about going with the Beast Within/Terastodon approach?

      Inedible Form 1G
      Instant
      As an additional cost to cast ~, sacrifice a creature.
      Put a green Ooze creature token onto the battlefield with power and toughness equal to the sacrificed creature's power.

      Also plays nice with Giant Growth.

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  2. The optimal use here is to remove one of my opponent's two blockers that are blocking my creature. But it's kind of weird that I'm giving that creature hexproof.

    I'm trying to think of circumstances when you want both effects at the same time on the same creature, and I can't. Making this modal would probably be an improvement.

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    1. You would never need both effects at once. That doesn't make their pairing invalid because both effects serve the same goal. It is a thematic redundancy.

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    2. If you never need both effects at once, and sometimes you really don't want both effects at the same time (e.g. "in response to your attack, I Lightning Bolt your attacker), making the spell modal is a great way to make players feel smarter for using it correctly.

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  3. This seems like it wants to be blue.

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    1. I agree. The way that I am looking at this card are the following two scenarios:

      Scenario A
      My creature goes into attack / block. something happens (a combat trick or something else) and now combat will be un-favorable for my creature so i cast this on it to save it

      I think that in this scenario, the flavor of the card best fits blue. something like a rogue that attacks and finds himself in trouble so he drops a smokebomb and "poofs" from combat, and no-body can target/find them.

      I think that in this scenario, if a green creature found himself in unfavorable combat, they would more likely get +X/+0 until end of turn or something to show the flavor of an animal that feels backed into a corner / is fighting for its life.

      Scenario B:
      I play this on my opponents attacking or surprise blocking (flash) creature

      In this case, I feel that this is a very blue ability, basically bubbling the creature for a turn and messing with combat. This scenario does not feel very green to me, being a targeted way to mess with creature combat.

      That said, I really like this card idea, and think it could be an interesting blue card.

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    2. I'm swayed. Blue does make more sense here.

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    3. It also gives blue another combat mechanic that isn't just another form of evasion (e.g. "protection from not-color" that WotC seems to be trying to shoehorn into blue these days).

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    4. So maybe a card like:

      Smokescreen Rogue 1U
      Creature - Rogue
      U: Remove CARDNAME from combat. CARDNAME gains hexproof UEOT.
      1/1

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    5. Ugh. Invisible Stalker 2.0 looks miserable: Not as hard to block (but still must be blocked), and it can block ALL day long.
      One time effect!

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    6. Smokescreen Rogue 1U
      Creature - Rogue (c)
      1U: Remove CARDNAME from combat.
      2/1

      Doesn't seem very fun to me. Better to just have:

      Smokescreen Rogue 1U
      Creature - Coward Rogue
      U: Return ~ to its owner's hand.
      1/1

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    7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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