Robot Viking

It’s been a long while since we had an edition of Crash Test Magic. Conjecturing about hypothetical Magic cards seems like a fun way to pass an afternoon, so here we are: a card that doesn’t exist. But if it did, could you make a broken combo or brutally efficient deck out of it?

Oracle of Pain — black because the effect is clearly black; a vampire because they’re all the rage these days. The image is from an early Michelangelo painting called The Torment of Saint Anthony, and my depicting him as a sadomasochistic vampire ought to earn me a few blasphemy points.

The idea comes from the weird religious fervor of the Dark Ages, when pious people would walk around whipping themselves bloody and Inquisitioning the crap out of anyone who crossed their path. What if you had a religious fanatic vampire? He stirs his followers into a blood frenzy, and as they draw blood from his wounds, they redirect their ire toward their enemies. Too twisted and dark for a Magic card?

I actually feel like this is pretty balanced, although the casting cost might be a little low for repeatable creature removal. Compared to Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief, I think it would be fine. The templating might be off – I’m not sure, but I think the way it’s worded now, you might be able to stack effects by tapping a bunch of different creatures, and even though the Oracle would take lethal damage as the first few resolve, all the damage would still happen after it dies. Dealing damage to the Oracle might have to be moved before the colon. It also needs to be clearer that the damage comes from the creature you tap, not necessarily the Oracle.

Not being able to target a player keeps this relatively sane, and the Oracle’s toughness limits how much damage can be dealt in one turn (aforementioned templating issue aside). You can have him ping himself each turn and destroy smaller creatures, or have a Hill Giant equivalent do the dirty work for him for that extra point. Or get a one-shot hit from him by tapping something huge, killing the Oracle and targeting…something huge.

What if the Oracle gained a +1/+1 counter each time the effect was used? Too strong?

Combos? Ideas for similar cards? Weird interactions I didn’t anticipate? I have a weird feeling there’s a Magic card already in existence that does this, but I can’t think of it. What say you, Vikings?

Update: After some thought and checking out some comments, I made a revised version of the card. I decided not to go red/black with it because that’s not usually how vampires roll, although mechanically, it’s a very red/black card. I added the +1/+1 Sengir Vampire ability, and adjusted the casting cost to make it oh-so-evil. The second damage is now dealt by the Oracle, not the other creature.

Strangely enough, there’s actually no way, as far as I can tell, to make this card not abusable by stacking triggers. There’s some rules nerd talk ahead, so bear with me. Removing the source of an effect in Magic doesn’t cause the effect to stop if it’s already on the stack. It’s why you can do as much damage as you have the mana for with a Thrashing Wumpus. The Wumpus dies after the third point of damage, but the other damage effects on the stack continue to go off. So if you have a whole bunch of 4/4 creatures for some reason, you could tap them all to activate the Oracle’s ability, deal a ton of damage to the Oracle (killing it almost immediately), but then dealing out gobs of damage to all sorts of other targetable creatures.

I tried playing around with making the Oracle a target at some point in the process. All of an effect’s targets must be legal when it is activated or you can’t activate it. If you make the Oracle the target of the creature you tap (which leads to awkward wording in any case) and make that part of the cost (that is, to the left of the colon), it’s the same problem we had with stacked triggers — it will be a legal target when you stack all the triggers, so they’ll all resolve even though the Oracle dies. On the other hand, an effect with multiple targets only fizzles if all the targets are illegal when it resolves. If we make the creature you tap target the Oracle as part of the effect (ie, to the right of the colon), the effect will look for two targets on resolution: the Oracle and whatever creature you target with the Oracle’s damage. If one target is missing, an effect will still go off and target the remaining targets as best it can. That means if the Oracles dies while there are still Oracle abilities on the stack, it won’t stop those remaining abilities from resolving.

The bottom line is, even though I didn’t intend for massive creature destruction with this, it’s not so bad I’d call it broken. If you have so many creatures out that it matters, you probably have better things to do with them, and in any case it’s still a one-shot deal not much worse than a Chain Reaction. The +1/+1 counters make it a little more complicated, since you can put those on the stack and possibly rig things — kill a 3/3, add a counter, then kill a bunch of 1/1s. Is that relevant? Nah.

That got a lot more complicated than I intended. Makes you realize what Magic’s designers have to deal with. If it’s a good card, someone can read it and “get it” at face value, without even having to consider all that behind-the-scenes stuff.

Related posts:

1. Crash Test Magic — How to Simulate Military Supply with a Magic Card
2. Crash Test Magic — Gallows Road
3. Crash Test Magic — Vedalken Fever
4. Crash Test Magic – Feathers of Mercy
5. Crash Test Magic: Cursed Equipment