Cool Card Design of the Day
Every day, I design a new card and discuss it briefly. Sometimes I will examine new possibilities for colors or mechanics, sometimes I'll re-examine existing executions and sometimes I'll just design something I think is neat.
2/25/2011 - Spread the Sickness kind of exacerbates the fact that Wizards has never printed a mono-black spell that just straight up destroys a target creature. They've danced around it quite a bit but Bone Splinters is the closest they've come. I needed a simple black removal spell for Muraganda so I created a placeholder card with a silly playtest name, D-E-D Dead, which I think is costed fairly enough, but felt a little boring so I tried it on a creature.
Skilled Assassin follows in a long line of fun and useful ETB killers. This one has the strongest killing ability, so it gets the weakest body. Although—under modern creature standards—I wouldn't be surprised to see it printed with first strike or as a 2/2 or so. Skilled Assassin should be about as strong in limited as Skinrender and could even see constructed play if there are enough varied threats to confound the black aggro or tempo player as to whether he prefers Doom Blade or Go for the Throat.
I like it. I wouldn't put it with first strike though, I think at 3B the card cost would be correct already. I wouldn't want a card that is strictly better than Nekrataal after all!
ReplyDeleteThe card's evocative and effective, but it feels redundant with Nekrataal whenever you've got so many other ETB-kill options available.
ReplyDeletehow do I buy this card I want to make an assassins creed deck and that would be a perfect addition
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