Target Planeswalker

Remember that whole debacle last year where everyone hated planeswalkers (most Jace, the Mind Sculptor) because there weren't enough good answers to them? Wizards elected to skip printing Oblivion Ring for a year and the effect was vastly more pronounced than they expected. Other valid answers included Vampire Hexmage for the heavy-black mage and, uh, I think there was another one. Hex Parasite? Yikes.

That was the least fun Standard environment in quite a long while, but Wizards and anyone else paying attention learned a valuable lesson: The capacity to kill planeswalkers via combat—while vital—is not enough. There have to be spells that can kill them directly. So far, everything that can handle the newest card type does so circuitously, without ever mentioning them by name. Some target a group of types from which planeswalker is not explicitly excluded, while others remove counters from permanents (a fairly unique weakness of 'walkers). Despise is the only exception, specifically naming the card type you can make your opponent discard.

The obvious question—one many players and designers have asked—is whether we can use the phrase "target planeswalker" to create explicit answers. Some folks strongly believe yes, some no. Let's examine the situation from both sides and see what conclusions we can make.

Here are a few sample card skeletons for later reference: Murder is a black card with "Destroy target creature or planeswalker"; Liquefy Soul, a blue card with "Counter target creature or planeswalker spell"; and Bar, a white card with "Exile target planeswalker." The rarity, mana costs and other potential restrictions that might be on actual cards that evolve from these skeletons are irrelevant to the conversation. We want to know if the effect should exist at any level.

There is an obvious advantage to making cards like this. Every card needs answers and specific answers (aka limited / restricted answers) make the game better overall because it makes more of a difference which answers you finally include in your deck. Planeswalkers are necessarily powerful cards, so we really can't afford to make an exception for them—they need reasonable answers at least as much as every other card type.

By making a card like Bar, we're giving the player a (presumably efficient) answer to planeswalkers. The implicit cost being that if a player with this card in their deck plays against someone lacking planeswalkers entirely that the card becomes a blank. There is an inherent risk to putting Bar in your deck, which would likely justify a low mana cost.

A card like Murder is another story because it's very rarely dead. Not everyone plays many 'walkers, but most decks do play a fair number of creatures. Murder gives you an option that Terminate and Bone Splinters don't. You can always choose which of your opponent's bomb creature or bomb 'walker is the bigger threat and deal with that one. Liquefy Soul has the same versatility but with the standard countermagic disadvantage that you have to have your answer in hand as well as the mana to cast it available at the exact moment the spell is cast.

There are cards like Bar, Murder and Liquefy Soul that handle every other type of permanent and every other combination of types, so why not throw 'planeswalker' into the mix? The biggest argument is that planeswalkers are too special to be treated like any other card type. Players are planeswalkers, so planeswalkers cards represent beings on par with players. There are no cards that say "destroy target player" (though it seems inevitable that they'll print one) and transitively, there shouldn't be anything that says "destroy target planeswalker."

My problem with that argument is that planeswalkers aren't players and nothing in the game should compete with the player. Planeswalkers are cards, even if they are special cards, and as such are answerable to the same set of design rules that make every other card work in the game.

One could argue that an unwritten rule of planeswalkers is that they can't be targeted by any old spell. That makes them more worth playing and reinforces their uniqueness. I don't have a strong counter to that, but I will say that 'walkers are plenty special already and that a spell that targets a planeswalker is, by definition, not just any old spell.

Interestingly, everyone with whom I've discussed Liquefy Soul that also has a problem with Murder does not have a problem with "counter target planeswalker." Despise seems to fall in the same camp. I believe the idea is that you're meddling with the spell that summons that 'walker to your aid rather than the 'walker himself. Perhaps we can expand upon that logic to argue that a planeswalker card doesn't represent the planeswalker himself—It certainly doesn't work like another player would and each planeswalker card clearly doesn't represent the whole of that character's abilities—but rather an agreement with that 'walker to help you out for a while. "You gave me four mana so I'm going to do this, this, and this for you. Nothing more. Oh, and if you don't protect my interests, the deal's off."

In that light, it seems like it wouldn't be such a rare spell that can end that relationship prematurely. Perhaps "Destroy target planeswalker" isn't so unpalatable in that context? Does that make Murder okay? Maybe not. In fact, it might even solidify the argument that a spell that can put a creature into the graveyard can put a planeswalker there too, since you're not killing the 'walker like you were the creature. Let's try one more twist.

If I can attack your planeswalker and piss her off so that she abandons you, who's to say that I can't level some insufficient but still nasty death magic at her and have the same effect. She's not dead, because it's not that easy to off a 'walker, but she's just as annoyed that you would let me do that to her as she was when you let my creatures nip at her.

While the reason for all these arguments has been mechanical (to keep the game fun and balanced), the arguments themselves (both for and against) have mostly been based in flavor. I'll offer one more, entirely mechanical argument. Why can red kill planeswalkers out of combat when no one else can? The ability to redirect damage from a player to her 'walker effectively changes every burn spell to read "Target [creature or] player or planeswalker." If you can use fire magic to scare off annoying interplanar allies, why not death magic?

Finally, how do you justify cards that do deal with planeswalker but not explicitly. Oblivion Ring and Bramblecrush can both answer a planeswalker despite not having that word in their text box. For now at least, "nonland permanent" is interchangeable with "artifact, enchantment, creature or planeswalker" and likewise "noncreature permanent." There's an interesting argument against using the word "planeswalker" explicitly on common spells because 'walkers are so rare that most new players won't encounter them for a while and we don't want to make them learn another set of rules on top of all the other great many they're already absorbing if we can avoid it.

O-Ring and 'Crush get around that problem, but they don't get around the problem that they're handling planeswalkers just as easily as anything else. If you can't reconcile that—and I don't see how you can without some major smoke and mirrors—then I believe you must concede the major argument against planeswalker-explicit targeting. On the upside, you can cling to the not-at-common argument as I have no response to that. In fact, I agree with it wholeheartedly

While I clearly have a side in this discussion, I don't take it for granted that it's correct (and have to assume it's not flawless, at the very least). I certainly don't want to squelch the other side's voice; In fact, I'm rather hoping that you can add your perspective and point out some tasty nuances of perhaps even entirely missing arguments so that we can consider each side more fully.