CCDD 031511—Benalish Throwback

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/15/2011 - Benalish Throwback is inspired directly from the conversation around HavelockV's Reinventing Alpha series. A few of us were waxing optimistic about some magical fix to banding that could allow it to return in some clean, easily grokkable form. Jeff Peterson suggested breaking it up into different abilities. At first I was skeptical, but as long as those abilities can stand on their own as well, it's a decent option.

Before I go any further—while I expect and encourage vigorous disagreement on execution and merit—it will be a waste of time to respond with "this will never happen." We know. It's still interesting discussing how it might happen if it were to happen in some Magical Christmas Land of Design.

Command allows you to attack in a group of any size. The most unnecessarily complicated part of banding was the any-number-of-banders-plus-one bit. Any new banding needs to allow either any number of creatures into a band or only creatures with the ability. That other option might look like this:

Teamwork (Whenever ~ attacks, you may group any number of attacking creatures with teamwork. Creatures that block any of them, block all of them.)

Command is much more open-ended and likely the better choice. When you consider that teamwork is more analogous to bands with other, which is this ugly stepchild's ugly stepchild, it's pretty much right out. Command handles the group-attack portion of banding, but it doesn't replicate the trickier part (the damage assigmnent shenanigans); The defending player still chooses what order to assign damage to your blocked creatures, just as he would if he had blocked with a Palace Guard.

Tactics approximates the half of banding command doesn't. It allows you to choose the order combat damage will be assigned to your creatures rather than your opponent. Note that this is not the same as allowing you to choose how damage is assigned in the original sense because you can't split damage among your creatures without assigning lethal damage first. This is a significant step down, but considering the new rules for combat, I believe it is the most reasonable option. One alternative could be:

If a creature blocking or blocked by ~ would deal combat damage, you may redirect any amount of that damage to any number of creatures blocking or blocked by that creature.

The good news is that, together, command and tactics do a very good job of recreating banding and are not independently terrible to read or understand (though whether they're not terrible enough bears testing). But how often would we print command and tactics on the same card? Does breaking up one long reminder text into two medium reminder texts really help all that much? Does separating the concepts really make it easier to take in? And how often would we print them alone?

Command seems pretty weak by itself: How often do you want to give your opponent the Palace Guard ability for free? It does allow you to get more value out of a few weenies by forcing your opponent to block them all at once (or not at all) instead of picking them off one a time, but—let me know if I'm missing another sweet application here—that's about it. Combos with Umezawa's Jitte? So does Lure. And Creature.

Tactics would be helpful when your opponent blocks with a Palace Guard, but otherwise does nothing on offense. It's also pretty good for double-blocking on your side of the fence, but that scenario's not terribly common either. Altogether, tactics would affect the game less often than almost (I'm looking at you, rampage) any other keyworded combat ability.

I think for command and tactics to make it as package, they would have to make it on their own, and I'm just not feeling it. I know the fix-banding / banding-revival discussion has happened before and will continue to happen again, so feel free to post subtly or wildly different solutions in the comments. The Wright Bros didn't invent powered flight by trying one idea and then giving up.