Card of the Week Poll #303: Know Thine Enemy

{Explanation} Here is a way to balance miracle a little bit.

{Explanation} The problem we have these days is planeswalker removal. Right now, good, permanent removal is only given to black (destroy) and red (burn spells), and green and white should have a cheap, somewhat inefficient, version too.
Here's a take on a Rabid Bite for planewalkers.

{Explanation} Here's a take on the whole white card advantage thing.

Took some of the wording from Ixalan's explore mechanic. I'd imagine weenie decks would love something like this to avoid running out of gas so quickly. Might have made the card a tad powerful, not completely sure.

{Explanation} With prowess getting phased out, needs a combat-relevant mechanic. I thought of something like Kaladesh's fabricate (as that appeared in colorless and Abzan colors only), and came up with this. Still true to 's desire to draw cards, but gives you the option to pump a creature's P/T should you happen to already be drowning in cards. Understandably, would likely only go up to 3, and even then, cards with acumen 2 or 3 would likely have pseudo-drawbacks/additional costs.

{Explanation} I feel Oko is the crowning example of WoTC increasingly pushing Planeswakers beyond an acceptable power level, with Narset and 3Feri being the leadups to such problems. New Ashiok and Elspeth seem like a careful attempt to dial this back but time will tell if they've learned their lesson.

That said, Planeswalkers are played fairly often in every format up to Vintage, so I feel this would be considered as a sideboard card of sorts against them. If enough cheap Planeswalkers existed in Standard, I could see this working as a way to convert duplicate copies of walkers into some value as well.

{Explanation} As for my entry, if Wizards thinks they can print big green creatures into Standard to provide legitimate answers to planeswalkers, then those cards should interact with planeswalkers instead of being equally pushed and driving up the power level of the format without providing safe, reactive checks to anything.

{Explanation} Currently there's a lot of talk about white being the weakest color - and a lack of card advantage or at least card selection is often quoted as a massive factor. My suggestion would be expanding green's take on card filtering into white - and as secondary ability as well (just like how they actually tried once with Militia Bugler in a restricted way). I pondered about showcasing a "new and clever" design for my entry, but then very much intentionally decided to just go with a colorshifted Lead the Stampede instead:

{Explanation} I built my first decks back in 4th edition and didn't open a pack until prophecy was discounted at Powell's for reasons that are now obvious to me. Consequently, I feel nostalgia for Banding despite sdfkjgh's valid critique.
This mechanic is basically strictly worse than banding since you can't assign all of the combat damage your blockers take to a single chump, however it preserves the oppressive nature of banding on the offense if you have, say, a 4/1 with first strike waiting to get into a fight. Serves as pseudo-evasion since trading a 2/2 for a 1/1 with escort paired with a 1/2 with haste is generally a faux pas. Also deathtouch is a thing now. This would be good if you wanted to get in with a bunch of little creatures.

{Explanation} Issue: Removing interrupts from the game breaks/changes how those cards were intended to work. For example, the submitted card can't work as an instant, because the opponent can just activate the target permanent's abilities in response to it being cast.

Solution: You might notice that my submitted card is an officially printed card. The only changes I've made are to add new reminder text, and update the rarity to better match modern standards. That's because my solution isn't to come up with something new. I assert that WotC made a mistake, and the correct way to fix it is to roll back the change, and reimplement the old rules in a way that works in the new system. Hence, the interrupt stack. Without accompanying rules amendments, it can't work perfectly, but it makes them function much closer to how they were originally designed and balanced.

{Explanation} The name is, or course, a joke on the fact that Arcane is a parasitic mechanic. How do you fix a parasitic mechanic? Well, you don't, because Arcane sucks, but something that basically turns Splice onto Arcane into an inherent property of the creature that still incentivizes running the actual cards that use the mechanic (by letting you cast Instants with Arcane, or paying the actual Splice costs of cards instead of discarding a card) seems like a good place to start.

{Explanation} anyway, some of y'all might have noticed that sexy "abolish mythic" in my signature. this is partially because it's my (possibly incorrect) understanding that wotc initially wanted the mythic rarity to be about cards with a mythic, heavy, impressive feeling to them (story flagship legends, walkers, big spells, big effects, weird effects) rather than just pushed value cards (I will strangle lotus cobra to death with my bare hands). even though I think having a "rare, but rarer" draft rarity is stupid in general for various reasons, I think the way to fix mythic is to make it more about having a sense of grandeur to it and less about just being super gud, so here's a mythic that fits my vision