CCDD 071212—Swarming Rats

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/12/2012 - I intentionally omitted a card from my recent batch of one-drops because it deserves its own post, particularly once we start discussing its variations. One way to keep a one-drop relevant later in the game is allowing it to grow. Scute Mob is a good example but a bit more drastic than what I'm thinking. One of the problems with one-drops is that if you're running any, you want enough to consistently get them early, but it's very easy to get so many that they ruin your late game.

From the original Plague Rats through to Relentless Rats, we've had swarms of virulent pests that grow more deadly in numbers and I think we can use this exact trope to make an excellent one-drop. I'm proposing knocking two mana off this old classic…

In a vacuum, I'm confident that's a fair card. In Magical Christmas Land, you drop two on the second turn, swinging for 3 and then the fourth on turn three (along with, what Bad Moon?), swinging for 12 (or 15), but the best real-world scenario is dropping a second copy on turn two, swinging for two with your t1 rat and following up with more tempo or aggression. Can we break it with other cards? Ranger of Eos fetching two of these could be pretty nice in some WB deck, but I suspect you'd do better to play Swarming Rats with Phantasmal Image and other cheap Clone friends. Wrath of God still ruins your day though, so I'm just not sure these Rats would break any format. Let me know if you see otherwise.

Once I was thinking about multitudes of rats, I couldn't help but wonder about other ways to represent their vast numbers.

One obvious characteristic of an endless horde is that they keep coming back. It doesn't matter how many you kill, there's always more. I added "or other rat" since the prospect of spending your draw every turn just to get an otherwise vanilla 1/1 for 1B seems... terrible. Slap this in a rat tribal deck on the other hand, and your endless supply of rats may just overwhelm your opponent.

If losing your draw step isn't appealing or if the card's unkillability causes every game to play out the same, we can get a very similar flavor without recursion. These rat tokens will climb your opponent's legs just as ravenously, but don't neutralize your deck.

I share this last rat just because it seems like madness that a traditional rat lord doesn't exist:

You could totally staple this ability onto one of the Unending Rats abilities, but I'm pretty fond of how simple it is. All is does is pump your rats?! Try telling Swarm of Rats that's not enough.