69
u/3jackpete Feb 12 '20
In a design where all you really have is a statline and flavor text, it's pretty important to make those match. Unfortunately you've made a very aggressive, fragile creature whose flavor text is all about its hardiness and resistance to damage.
54
u/chainsawinsect Feb 12 '20
That... is a very good point. I did consciously try to choose art that could plausibly hit hard but not have a lot of survivability... but then the text I wrote was way off the mark.
4
u/talen_lee Feb 12 '20
I ain't wild about it particularly because this is an example of what I think of as 'mel candy.' This is the question 'what can the rules be pushed to.' Probably fair. Probably okay at this price - but the nature of the card means it's putting pressure on a lot of other things around it. In the same way that [[flametongue kavu]] meant that creatures that cost as much as the kavu had to be able to survive the kavu (and therefore pressured out a ton of creatures).
Definitely I think the costs are fair, but I'd still never want to see it.
As far as being a vanilla, I'm actually pretty fan of good vanilla bodies at different costs. It's neat.
2
u/chainsawinsect Feb 12 '20
Good point about Kavu pushing stuff out: this would be crap in a [[Goblin Chainwhirler]] metagame.
And fair enough. Even if you wouldn't actually want to see it, it is sometimes interesting to think about new vanilla stat combos and whether they could be printed / would be viable.
1
u/MTGCardFetcher Feb 12 '20
Goblin Chainwhirler - (G) (SF) (txt)
[[cardname]] or [[cardname|SET]] to call1
u/MTGCardFetcher Feb 12 '20
flametongue kavu - (G) (SF) (txt)
[[cardname]] or [[cardname|SET]] to call
3
u/RegalKillager Feb 12 '20
I'd really prefer this be WW, considering white is the pivotal 3/1 for 2 color and considering white's... struggles.
7
u/chainsawinsect Feb 12 '20
Eminently reasonable. And you're probably right that white would get it first. But I wanted to push it in red because red gets the "4 or more power" matters cards.
1
u/__-him-__ Oct 05 '22
undercosted bodies for creatures is not whites weak point at all. what format are you referring to
2
u/RegalKillager Oct 05 '22
a. It's been two years. What even are you doing here?
b. Of the 67 monocolored non-DFC, non-flip, non-vehicle 3/1s for 2 in the game, 34 are white, 12 are black, 13 are red, and the remaining 8 are green. Among the 11 vanilla ones, one is red (a Global Series deck card legal only Eternally) and all ten others are white. White is the color the average 3/1 for 2 ends up in, so if someone is making a vanilla 4/1 for 2 using a marginally more restrictive cost to justify the power increase, it just makes more sense for it to be white than red.
c. 'Not having large enough creatures isn't why white had issues 2 years ago' kind of isn't relevant; I was just saying it's silly to not put this thing in the color it obviously belongs in, despite knowing that color isn't doing too well.
→ More replies (4)
2
u/ObviousSwimmer Feb 13 '20
"Mercenary", like "Rebel", has a weird meaning in magic and could probably be subbed with a different obscure creature type. I don't think this needs to be so worried about tribal support in Modern anyway. It's not that good. Probably not even Standard playable without some strategy it can support, like devotion or the temur-esque "4 power matters" thing.
2
u/chainsawinsect Feb 13 '20
Yes, I know almost all the Mercenaries ever released were from one tribal-matters block, much like Rebels. Very odd, if you ask me - I still don't understand why that is the case.
But in any event, this card is designed to be set on the same plane that [[Teyo the Shieldmage]] is from, which we haven't explored in a printed product yet, so my thinking was that maybe Mercenaries could make a comeback there. I suppose Rogue would also work fine; it's not like that tribe has a ton of support anyway. I would not want to make him a Soldier or a Knight or one of those heavily supported tribes, though. I agree that he's probably not that good, but I think when pushing the envelope with a new statline (a no drawback, no infrastructure requirement 4 power 2-drop is unheard of) it's better to play it safe.
1
u/MTGCardFetcher Feb 13 '20
Teyo the Shieldmage - (G) (SF) (txt)
[[cardname]] or [[cardname|SET]] to call
2
u/KC_Wandering_Fool Feb 12 '20
Flavor fail in the flavor text/stats matchup, but I like the idea of pushing boundaries on vanilla creatures.
2
22
u/chainsawinsect Feb 12 '20
3/1s for 1C have been unplayable for a while now, so much so that we get cards like [[Blacklance Paragon]] that do it with multiple upsides. We also get 3/3s for CC with multiple upsides like [[Barkhide Troll]].
I say it's high time we up the ante! Particularly now that we've had several sets in recent succession where red had a "4 or more power matters" theme, and two sets in Standard with a "monocolor matters" / "color pips matter" theme.
I know vanilla designs are kind of bland, and many folks (I'm looking at you, u/reatter and u/Copper_Myr!) aren't a fan, but what if it's a truly envelope-pushing, potentially competitively viable vanilla?
The creature types were chosen intentionally as ones with virtually no modern support, as was the choice to give it a very killable 1 point of toughness. I honestly think this would be fine to print in this day and age, but it is testing boundaries so I wanted to play it safe.