Crash Test Magic – Jealous Rage
The feature formerly known as “Break This Card” now has a new name: Crash Test Magic (thanks to qhartman for the suggestion that lead to me to the idea). With the new name, we are free to explore beyond card games, and since the number of tabletop games without some kind of magic in them is vanishingly low, there should be room for lots of variety. That said, I stuck with Magic: the Gathering this week because I had a cool idea for a card. Jealous Rage!
Recapping last week’s edition, Incendiary Ash, we learned that high-cost cards are tough to break, something I’ll remember in the future. Not that ggodo didn’t take a good shot at it, coming up with a nasty way to fire one off turn four and almost certainly get a kill with the combined Ripple and Gravestorm effects. Interesting that the only Gravestorm card appeared in Future Sight. Can we assume we’ll be seeing it as a featured mechanic in some future set? Feel free to throw out some suggestions for cool Gravestorm cards.
Now, on to this week’s card, Jealous Rage. This isn’t a “Turn two kill” kind of broken card, but I’m pretty sure in its current form it is broken. However, I think it’s very fixable (without just bumping up the mana cost). I have a few ideas for it, but I’m curious what the Vikings (that’s what I’m calling Robot Viking’s readers now, by the way, because I’m too lazy to keep typing “Robot Viking’s readers”) have to say.
I actually really like this card – the mechanic fits together with the name rather elegantly, if I do say so myself. But I also like that it forces the player to make interesting choices. Sure, you can get this out early on a 1/1 and have a big, cheap creature, but do you hold onto creatures you could have summoned during subsequent turns, or bring them out and shrink your early advantage?
Of course, if you’d rather abuse the heck out of a card than redesign it, by all means, fire away. Off the top of my head, I’d slap this on an Indestructible creature and then cast Wrath of God.
May 18th, 2009 10:26 AM
Ok, let’s see what I can do here. The obvious is to run a lot of non creature exalted stuff, the slightly less obvious is to put two out on two different guys to get +8/+8 total. I personally don’t think it’s broken too bad, but the fix I would see is to just reduce the boost to +4/+4 or make it so it’s +5/+0 and fix the power down accordingly. I like that because that means that if you play six guys your 1/1 won’t commit suicide to over-crowding. This is a good card, not game breaking, maybe, but the scariest I can get to are two Wild Nacatls with a Jealous rage apiece. That scenario is 10 mana, unwieldy, and requires epic draws in the colors least known for deck fixing. It’s hard to break creature pump in an exciting way.
May 18th, 2009 10:48 AM
The problem with all creature enchantments as always been that your opponent can just blast the creature out from under the enchantment, and boom… you’re out two cards for their one. That said, your best bet would be to run it with creatures your opponent can’t target (or like you said… indestructible ones). That said, something like this would be good… but broken? Probably not.
Turn 1: Forest, Slippery Bogle (1/1, can’t be targetted by opponent)
Turn 2: Mountain, Fertile Ground (Enchanted land provides 1 extra mana of any color) cast on Forest.
Turn 3: Play land, cast Jealous Rage on the Bogle making him a 6/6 untargettable threat.
Pretty serious and tough to deal with. That said, you might only get a couple rounds to attack with him considering the board sweepers start flying on turns 4 and 5 (Wrath of God, Evacuation, etc.) and those could still get him.
Now that I start thinking about big enchantments on hard to remove creatures though, maybe I should go make a deck with Slippery Bogle, Troll Ascetic, Drove of Elves, and some nasty enchantments like Blanchwood Armor. >:)
May 18th, 2009 10:50 AM
Making it Power only is a great idea, and more in line with how red buffs usually work. And that way your creatures are still vulnerable to smaller burn spells for removal. Very balancing. (Originally, this card had R and G in the casting cost, so the Toughness part is an artifact of that. Also, the working title for the card was Jealous Girlfriend).
May 18th, 2009 10:54 AM
morose: That’s always been the challenge of designing decent creature enchantments. Rancor kind of cheated by coming back. Armadillo Cloak was so good it was worth the risk. But creature enchantments that see regular use in constructed formats, you could probably count them on two hands.
May 18th, 2009 11:01 AM
I remember trying to break the Magemarks from the Ravnica block and failing hard. They had such potential, but you’d need too many creatures to make them worth it, and you have to play 5 colors to be scary. One Magemark is a waste of mana, two makes a target, three is a threat, four is a win, five is overkill. the problem is that you never make it past two cuz they cost a ton with a creature, not all the secondary abilities are useful, they look scarier than they are so they get popped quick.
May 19th, 2009 12:49 PM
Yeah, Rancor and the other auras that returned to your hand were awesome. The only other enchants that I’ve seen get play recently were the 1 cost Eventide ones (Edge of Divinity and something of the Dominus) since they only cost 1 and both significantly boosted the survivability of the creatures they enchanted.
May 19th, 2009 6:31 PM
Just testing something with the comments.
May 20th, 2009 12:38 AM
The problem with this card is that it assumes you will play fair. Even if you make it just power, it falls prey to being on an undercosted double strike creature like Hearthfire Hobgoblin or Viashino Slaughtermaster. The only restriction is that they are your only creature, which is not much of a restriction at all. You don’t need to make a play on turn one, then can play a burn spell on two, make a Hobgoblin on three, and this on four.
Oh! And the template is bad. As it is phrased, if I play a lot of creatures, and play it on an opponent’s creature, I can kill it. I don’t think the intent is to be a removal spell, you might want to make it either “enchant creature you control” or “each other creature its controller controls.” Though this template is interesting in 2HG, where it suddenly has no drawback at all.