Card of the Week Contest #381: Ancient Scriptures

emteedy

That's still a pretty modern way to word it. You really just swapped the order on the abilities, more or less. In old wording, rather than giving an ability with a cost, they would have spelled out how it works.

Camouflage and Ixidron had a child and this is what it looks like:



Mist Maze
Sorcery
Each player turns all cards they have in play face down and shuffles them. They are 2/2 creatures. Players may look at their cards and may pay 1 life during their turn to turn a card face up if it is a creature, artifact, enchantment or land or to exchange one of their face-down cards with the top card of their library. Players may pay llife this way only once per turn. Effects that prevent or redirect damage cannot be used to counter this loss of life.

Does anyone know wehre I can find the old Magic title font? Never mind; I remembered that Google was a thing.

I tried to turn this into modern wording and failed. I don't even know how to do the paying 1 life thing. Maybe with an emblem it would work; but WotC uses them exclusively on 'walkers.

spazlaz this should be an interrupt
... I think. I wasn't playing Magic back then.

i take great pride in my syntax skills so this was kinda 
complete with non-coloured rarity symbol

Old cards are my speciality, so I feel it's only fair I offer advice for this one.

Orion Rings - Even with old wording, I think that you would need to specify that a card is in Purgatory before you could play them from there, and unless there were going to be a lot of cards that dealt with Purgatory, they'd probably not go that far with the thematic mechanics, and just say that you could summon creatures under the card as though they were in your hand.





This would work fine as is, as a creature that flies and bands, and deals damage first, before creatures without first strike. Let's say I wanted to reinforce the "harbinger" theme, though. I want to make the theme a crow that will fly ahead of the band, but is still a part of the group. So I decide that if anything blocks and can't catch the bird, it just flies on without the group. In classic Magic tradition, though, I might want to specify that (a) the creature doesn't stop being a part of the band, and (b) that it's doing its normal combat damage, and not effect damage, in case the timing matters. So I might write it something like this;



In this case, I do specify (though I might not strictly need to even then), because its abilities are an exception to the way banding normally works. This is Magic written as though the game were brand new, and there's few hard rules for how things work. So I assume that I'll need to tell players that dealing damage separately doesn't mean not being banded, and that assigning damage to a different target is still combat damage, and still assigned when it would normally be.

Not sure this actually works.  Don't you choose bands first, and then block?  kefke, you mentioned "Schrödinger's Banding", "Bands with blockers" seems similarly paradoxical, in that the order of the timing of banding and blocking are erroneously reversed.