Tuesday, February 18, 2020

CCDD 021820 - Boogeyman

Reanimation spells like Cauldron's Gift usually have to target expensive creatures to be worth it. If you're spending 4-5 mana and a card, you want to be getting a creature that's worth at least that much, not some random 3/3. Even creatures with reanimation built-in often want extra bonuses when they come back-- like Pharika's Spawn and the other Escape creatures from Theros Beyond Death. So what would it take to make a 1-mana creature an appealing reanimation target?




I like how picking the most obvious answer to the problem still created a novel design. (The wording itself isn't new, though; it shows up on River Kelpie and Treacherous Pit-Dweller.) I don't want to make the reanimation trigger too powerful because spells like Unearth exist. Also, Boogeyman is more likely than most reanimation targets to die naturally (instead of having to get discarded), so it generates more value and requires less set-up. It wouldn't replace dedicated reanimation targets like Griselbrand, but maybe it'd make reanimation effects better in aggressive black decks.

1 comment:

  1. White has a judiscious use of cheap, targeted / mass return target creature with power 2 or less or with CMC 2 or less. This would be very hard to balance optimally, creating a very annoying aristocrats recursion. The players who love aristocrats (which seem to be numerous) would love it, but it would be despised by the rest. I would expect it to need to be toned down a notch to follow more of a Torment of Hailfire wording.

    ReplyDelete