Card of the Week Contest #385: Volo's Guide to Monsters

tophatpickle: You might wanna change your entry a little, to "Whenever a creature enters the battlefield under an opponent's control, Bushwhacking Brushwagg fights that creature."  Otherwise, your own creatures are gonna fight it, and most likely either kill it or get killed by it.  Also, there's nothing particularly about the design, so you could make it mono-; remember, R&D's philosophy is always to go monocolored if they can get away with it.  See here for a can of worms on the topic.

Long time no see. I have not played MTG in a long time, but im might getting a bit back into it, by playing some cube with friends, and buying some new cards for it.

Fun little challenge. It have ben so long sins i have designed a card. my wording might be a little off.





EDIT:

Green gets both "fight" and "deathtouch".

Not on the same card in a way that defeats its main weakness

I think it is fair to inform people participating in CoTW that a certain type of design tends to perform unusually compared to what one might expect.

While I could try and make a few guesses about why people vote that way, that isn't really my point; I'm more bringing this up because this isn't the first time the "Simic destroy creature card" design has been discussed in CoTW, and it certainly won't be the last. I figure it is as good a time as any to comment on this design's historical performance because it has happened enough times to be worth bringing up.

I do agree that if your goal is longterm improvement as a card designer, you should be taking the high road and be choosing correctness over certain types of appeal. I would even go as far as to say that that kind of struggle is something inherent to CoTW, and that making a design that is both correct and appealing is what the contest is really all about. You certainly could prioritize raw appeal, and get some wins that way, but I'd like to think that on average the CoTW polls support cards that are both correctly designed and appealing to look at even in spite of a few outliers.

I'm sorry, I didn't intend to badmouth. My intent was merely to point out that banding has been so long discontinued that it seems near madness to try and bring it back.

I think it's more just a matter of not going into the extremes of either idea.

To look at it another way:

- Without "innovation on the pie" Red would not have looting and impulse draw for example (things that are generally considered to be a very important part of what it offers now). If we were too rigid with colors Red would probably just be Burn and Goblins but discard-based and graveyard-based strategies are a meaningful part of what it can do to due to years of careful innovation.

- However we don't exactly run around giving Red enchantment removal just because it's currently not able to do it either. We have to consider that if a break is strong enough in terms of raw power it will permanently impact how the color plays/is perceived - my go-to example tends to be Feed the Swarm because it lets Black have reliable 2-mana enchantment removal in Modern without having to bend over backwards for it. To a lesser degree I recall Wicked Wolf was fairly notorious for effectively being Ravenous Chupacabra/Flametongue Kavu in Food decks that didn't even run Black, but fortunately Wicked Wolf is not strong enough to impact the longterm health of older formats so it's a 'forgivable' mistake so to speak.

This is part of why I think it's worth discussing the "Simic destroy creature" design whenever it comes up. There's a very thin line between "destroy target creature (whenever)" and "destroy target creature (with limitations)", but it exists for a reason and it's good to think about why it exists. Consider Ambush Viper - it might seem like easy conditionless Green removal at first, but the need to force things into combat actually heavily limits what it can kill (you're very unlikely to hit dorks and prison creatures that won't attack for example) and thus it's far more limited in what it can do than Wicked Wolf can do. It's a difference that's well demonstrated in Pixi-Rex's old version of the card vs his new version of the card.

(Of course, some people will go ahead, make a hard break without justification, and get a following anyway, but like I said before, CoTW does seem to be fundamentally be about having both correctness and appeal on average.)

ZephyrPhantom: I mean, I personally think Deathtouch should be excised from Green's slice of the pie specifically because it seems to me it undermines one of Green's core weaknesses (needing bigger, better creatures), confuses people about what Green should be able to do (Green gets Fight and Deathtouch, but can't ever combine them?), and all of the justifications for it seem completely flaccid to me (toxins are natural and therefor Green, but birds... aren't?) but I see your point. There is, however, a pretty wide gulf between Experimentation and Pushing Boundaries, and "Well I have a deck that wants to do this, so I'll just make a card that does this, because I want. Me. Me want."

I've edited it like so. Changed the +1/-1 to a static Relentless Rats-eqsue ability and Added the miracle cost it was supposed to have.


Attachment Deleted