CCDD 081611—Battlehonor Knight, Bloodlust Vampire or Warfury Barbarian

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/16/2011 - Ophidian has quite the legacy. A free draw as a reward for damaging your opponent feels great and has been used by twenty-some cards since. What then would come of the same mechanic if we just replaced "player/opponent" with "creature?"


We still have a creature that could draw you extra cards, but now it's impossible to force your opponent to let it happen (save Lure or provoke and cards that give your opponents tokens). That might sound terrible, but we've actually just turned the mechanic into a new form of evasion. Well, not brand new since the effect is basically identical to Infiltration Lens.

Conveniently, that precedent also answers the question of how interesting this twist on the mechanic is. Infiltration Lens led to some tricksy equip choices and skill-testing decisions. The two-card swing was huge though, and tended to simplify the decision toward not blocking whenever vaguely affordable. With a one card swing, the correct choice shouldn't be as immediately apparent every time and that suggests fairly deep gameplay.

You will have noticed that I left everything but the rules text blank on the card above. Since this is a (basically) new ability, it could go in any color, with room for execution and flavor to match. I don't know the best answer, but I'll run through some possibilities. The traditional ability we're playing off of is primarily blue and secondarily green. We usually don't want to put two similar abilities in one color because they will be confused too often and because we'd be missing an opportunity to show the differences between colors. So blue is almost certainly out and green is probably out.

This ability could be white. White currently depends on flying for evasion and first strike for virtual evasion. Adding a new form of virtual evasion could open up some options for the color. The white slice of the color pie isn't big on drawing cards, but it does care about bravery and honorable combat and wouldn't be averse to rewarding its bravest soldiers to charge into dangerous enemy ranks.

It's not until now, seeing it on an actual creature, that I fully realize this version of the ability triggers on defense too. It's not just evasion, it's also aversion. Or something... that describes your opponent hesitating before she swings in. That's not what I was going for, and it does change the feel, but it seems fine. I suppose we could make it "deals damage to a blocking creature" but that feels fiddly and we don't even know that encouraging blocking sometimes will be counter-productive.

This ability could be black. Black depends on intimidate (and occasionally flying) for evasion and death touch (or even regeneration) for virtual evasion. Maybe it doesn't need this ability? Black's color pie enjoys occasional card drawing, but usually at the expense of life or creatures. That said, black loves killing things and combat is fine place to do that. We could flavor this ability in black as a form of bloodlust.


That's not terrible, but black would really rather focus on death triggers rather than any old combat trigger.

This ability could be red. Red depends on mountainwalk and haste for evasion and sometimes first strike for virtual evasion. Of the three, it seems like red could use some new evasion the most. Card drawing is no more a priority in red's color pie than in white's and it even shares the love of combat (though its less hung up on the honorable part). It's really easy to see this mechanic in red, flavored as an euphoric love of battle.


I like this ability in red the best, but it's not a bad fit in white either. It wouldn't show up more frequently than its older brother, so it won't break the game or ruin the pie wherever it goes. What color would you put it in? How would you theme it?

I've listed all these guys at uncommon despite being basically vanilla. It's not a hard concept and Scroll Thief has shown its brother can be printed at common in a core set, so maybe this could be common too. I leaned toward uncommon exactly because it's so similar to a well-known ability, but, I dunno.