Weekend Art Challenge Review 082214—Aaron Miller

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Banding Croc looks to improve upon banding. The good news is, it's a low bar to hurdle. The bad news is, it's not terribly exciting either.

Band is a strictly linear mechanic, because it does absolutely nothing in a deck where it's the lone card with its mechanic. It allows creatures with band to attack as a single unit; the downside is that the opponent can block your entire band with a single creature, but the upside is that they can take out anything big that happens to block and can't be picked off one-by-one. You also get to divide the combat damage dealt to your band, which is very reminiscent of the original mechanic, but a bit contradictory to modern rules of Magic combat, making ordering of creatures irrelevant.

Except for being more linear than the original, I would rather print band than banding, though I don't think it's a massive improvement, or enough to make me want to print it. Especially not with this art depicting a single mount and rider.

Bojuka Hopper Patrol is a "fighter" ally with the added twist that it gains a temporary ability the turn it triggers. Zendikar featured "clerics" like Highland Berserker that granted an ability to all your allies whenever they triggered, and I can see some appeal to making non-common allies that are "dual-classed." I love the choice to use this art for an ally—the name is perfect—but I wish the ability granting part worked for all your allies to keep consistent with their fundamental working-together concept.

Crocodile Guide is a bestow creature that can't be cast as a creature. Effectively, it's an Elephant Guide, but you still get something if your opponent kills the aura target in response. This is technically a devolution since it's strictly worse than existing bestow in the abstract, but it certainly could have worked as the third set twist in place of enemy-bestow auras. Might have been better. I wouldn't use this in another block, though, because bestow was complex enough and null mana can be quite vexing on its own. I do love the flavor here.

Crocolurk Rider iterates on the mercenary-fetch mechanic from Mercadian Masques and Nemesis. Where rebels searched up 'better' rebels, mercenaries searched up 'worse' mercenaries, but both searched your entire library and cost one more to search than the best CMC they could find. Rider seemingly does away entirely with the connection between the creature's cost and what it can find, and lines up the cost to search with how deep you can search.

That eliminates the need for shuffling, introduces the possibility for failure (and thus introduces risk into the cost), and also affords a dream scenario where you stumble upon your biggest mercenary the first (or each) time you try. Players will be disappointed when they miss, but given the potential upside of very real card advantage every turn, this remains a powerful mechanic. That it now costs more to profit from on average is largely invisible, so this "nerfing" won't even feel like a nerfing to a lot of players.

Despite all those little gains, the big win is that mercenary decks won't play out the same way every game. Good flavor. It's a bit awkward having an efficient evasive creature with a tap ability; something all rebel/merc searchers would have to watch for.

Karst Combatant loves hanging out with quadrupeds. And bipeds. Anything but other humans. Which is totally racist. I'm guessing the flavor is meant to be that this guy rides whatever you pair it with, but you can pair it with Elves and Zombies, Germs and Gods.

The shared ability is too fiddly. Just grammatically speaking, "this creature" / "that creature" is mighty awkward, but even conceptually, flanking against everything except other soulbonded creatures is strange. I mean, it's not a coincidence the ability here is effectively flanking, and that flanking was usually flavored to represent mounted creatures back in the day, but I'm having trouble buying soulbond as a strictly mount-rider relationship.

Mire-Bound Militant seems to take a page from Kaijudo and similar games where you can play any spell as a land instead. I've long been enamored with the idea of mixing that mechanic with Magic's explicit lands because the choice of how many of each kind to play is quite interesting.

That said, both sides of this card are too strong for a card that gives you a free choice between them. First strike and deathtouch should be combined on a single card very rarely, not just for power level, but for specialness. Getting a dual-land out of this gold card is awesome, even if having an ETBT dual that cycles into a creature for free is pushing the power level, but giving it both basic lands types is way too much.

There's also an execution concern. It's clear that you can put the spell-side of this in your deck, and choose to play it as a land instead, but it's not clear whether you can put the land-side of this in your deck as front face or, if you do, whether you can still play the creature side. That's important because of effects that look at and/or search up creatures or lands.

I'm reading this as landwalk for six or more lands. That isn't exactly dripping with flavor, but it does have pretty great gameplay ramifications, helping long games to end, without being too aggressive. I think this card is a bit too good for a {2}{U} common (Elf?), and I wouldn't want to see this mechanic on more than five cards ever, but I do want to see it.

Level-up based on a trigger condition rather than mana payments; that's a natural enough evolution of a mechanic that experienced players enjoy. It doesn't make it any less complex, but I still think level up is worth some complexity points. Will all the triggers be the same in Murajunni Mucktrailer's theoretical set? I would hope they're at least all the same at common, or by color, if not across the board. "Whenever you draw a card" is a reasonable trigger, though skewed toward blue as the color best equipped to trigger it more than an upkeep trigger. It would make sense as the blue trigger, or one-off trigger on rarer cards that happen to blue, though I'll say I'm not feeling a strong flavor connection between a mucktrailer and the power of learning, especially with trample as the first prize.

I'm reading hunt as a different direction from landwalk. Rather than making the creature unblockable, you make it bigger. That offers more interactivity, and I can get behind that. I'd want a name that makes it clear the terrain in question is where the hunter is at home, and not the thing that she hunts; maybe 'familiar with forests' or 'swamp tracker.' We may want to add a number so that we can have 'Hunt 2' instead of 'Hunt, Hunt.' Nonbasic land is a distracting choice for the first card of the mechanic, but when you consider it would appear in a set alongside common creatures than hunt in single specific basic land types, it's a cool card.

Slither Scout also turns level-up in a triggered item, this time triggering on untap, which we know works thematically and flavorfully from Theros' inspired, and would likely appear on all the levelers in this card's set. It's odd how a {G}{U} creature is good at attacking {U} and/or {B} players, but there's certainly precedent for those green swampwalkers and blue islandwalkers. I'd personally rather see a mono-green creature here, if not for the final ability. Evasion, it has to be noted, is the "cheatiest" ability to put on an inspired-leveler since it mitigates the challenge of attacking and surviving. Which is not to say Wizards wouldn't make one or two like that.

Strike range is super-first-strike, with a number. That number allows you make designs closer to Ashmouth Hound, but it's so not worth it. I really don't want to see a 3/3 or 1/1 with strike range 2 because there's nothing intuitive about either. There's also the issue that this ability appears to be upside and downside because of the way it works, when it should appear all-upside: It could either be just like first strike but firstier (which would require a third combat damage step, and isn't going to happen), or it could work like Ashmouth Hound.

I was about to suggest a simpler template—"Whenever CARDNAME becomes blocked, it deals its power in damage to target creature blocking it."—when I realized I didn't read this one correctly. I mention that rather than re-writing because a lot of players will do the same because this is two abilities, not one. What I missed is that strike range lets you hit any attacking or blocking creature. If that mechanic were my goal, I'd say "you can assign CARDNAME's combat damage to any attacking or blocking creature." Both of these abilities are interesting. Could we combine them? Sure. Should we? I believe not: the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, except in board complexity.

The evolution here being that Valley Searcher is merely very good instead of acronym-worthy. I'm pretty sure Bloodbraid Elf would have been this fair if not for JTMS.

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There are some really neat cards here, and a lot of impressive improvement over old mechanics. The biggest improvement over an old mechanic is definitely the mercenary mechanic, the most novel is the redirection portion of strike range, the one I'm most confident about is inspiration-leveling, and the one I most want to test is hunt, with DFC land/spells right behind. Nice work, artisans!