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The last post can be found here:
Hey Gamers! Part 2 is above, and we’re diving right in with minimal intro!
Playtest Cards N – S
In Parts 1 and 2, I covered cards starting from A to M. Next up, N through S!
I quite like this design. Cute play on Doran, the Siege Tower. I would totally try this guy as a Commander, and I’d love to get a copy for my Cube. It’s super weird that a flower isn’t Green, though. I guess it’s a Rogue.
Very playable, and hopefully printable, though I can just get one of these ones. The only hiccup here is the interaction with tokens. Most tokens have no mana value, but the introduction of Tarmogoyf tokens changes that. Keeping up on stuff like that is a must for playing Narod.
Numbered sequels often sound tacky or low-effort. It’s no different here. But the effect??? Destroying Emblems and Gameplay Trackers is very interesting. I would like to see this happen, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing.
As much as it’s annoying to have game elements that can’t be interacted with, we don’t need to create an endless cycle of printing an untouchable, then making it accessible, then having to print a new untouchable. Like with Exile. It used to mean gone forever, but now we cast things from there all the time. Face-up and face-down even matter in Exile. Another Test Card, Intangible Vibes implies another outside-the-game state that’s not Exile, which is where Tokens go. Maybe we’ll be casting spells from there in five years.
If you can destroy Emblems, that gives WotC license to print a new type of thing you can’t destroy. Is Naturalize 2 an answer to powercreep or powercreep itself? Regardless, it’s very playable.
I’m mildly surprised this wasn’t a card already. It could be, though it needs a little push to get it going. It’s not good enough for any current 60-card Constructed format. There have been a couple of Commander precons, and misc. Legends, that care about creatures being tapped down, and this could fit in one of those concepts. It needs a better way to tap blockers to be playable, but if you can consistently find that, it’s not bad.
I’m not so sure ‘Bedtime Story’ will be the name of the mechanic, but a Saga that triggers on end step instead of first main phase is really interesting and cool. The abilities are solid, good value, and fit well in a lot of decks, not just Merfolk. Great card, super playable, very printable. The K on the card behind is cute, because it makes this ‘Knight of the Flying Merfolk’, which is on brand.
The regrets from No-Regrets Egret might come from actually playing the card. A 2/2 Bird Scout flyer for 1U is decent. But the Mulligan aspect… Well, you’re sort of planning to fail.
There are decks that might want this, like combo decks. Serum Powder is a real card which interacts with Mulligans. And it’s true that No-Regrets Egret is a way to always see 9 cards deep in your deck at the start of a game, but is that worth a card? I don’t know, but would guess that it’s not. I would not be at all surprised to see this printed, or something like it, and competitive players can figure out if its any good.
Why is this a Test Card? Does this need testing? I think we’ve seen enough of all of the abilities here to know what’s going on. Is there a loophole I’m missing? This is a repeatable Fog effect at best. Maybe it’s a reference. I’m not interested enough to look it up. Next!
Cool card, cool idea. Probably good, and quite playable. A bit of a fail as a Commander being only a single colour, but there might be enough cards in Black/Colourless to make it fun. Most of the abilities are ‘Unblockable’ and a few others make combat easier so I don’t think anything’s too broken. Changeling and the sacrifice for mana ability are the scary ones, but interesting to build around.
As always, putting ‘Banding’ on a card makes people cringe, so this probably won’t be printed. If you’re curious about ‘Tantrum,’ it’s only on this card and one other Test Card, Toddler’s Rage, which I’ll cover in the next post. Spoiler alert: it’s like Trample for blockers.
Extremely printable, and probably pretty playable as a tri-land that comes in untapped. Some decks will turn the Vanishing into upside. I expect this will be real eventually. Instant Commander staple when it is. Omenpath is a very likely new land type.
Looks great, love this design. Hope this ends up being real. Not sure if it’ll cause problems, but they should be fun problems. Basic Creature? Hmmmm. Very playable.
I’m glad we left the days of Mono, Poly and Continuous Artifacts behind. If it was real, this card would probably be paired up with Winter Orb to make opponents suffer. This is playable, but not fun. It is unlikely to ever be printed, luckily, and can stay a cringe-worthy reference.
No, no, and no. Panglacial Wurm is a rules nightmare, and this only makes things worse. This should never be printed. I hope everyone who plays this as some sort of troll realizes it’s a mediocre payoff, and not worth the effort. Searching during combat seems stupid.
Is this a real card? It seems like it totally could be. Shouldn’t this be in a Commander precon? Penumbra and Umbra are both fine abilities, and while this seems very strong, there are plenty of very broken cards kicking around these days. It is an Aura, after all.
If you kicked the mana cost up to at least 2GG, this could be real. It’s very playable either way. Paying 1G to ‘regenerate’ a creature while making a token copy of it is a great deal. The Black token is upside sometimes, like during a Bad Moon. This card might even have some demand behind it.
Proliferatelink sounds like something Princess Zelda might try in one of the darker Hyrule games. Maintain the bloodline or something. As a Magic ability, it’s almost possible. It’s not too complicated to understand, and fairly intuitive. And we have a similar ability on creatures already, like Contaminant Grafter
Now Phyrexian Plant is better because it Proliferates for each damage dealt, and isn’t restricted to combat damage, which opens it up to more tricks, but it’s probably okay for the kitchen table. It’s very playable overall. To make this card real, I think it would have to be combat damage only.
I wish the Thingy-McThingThing trope sank to the bottom of the ocean with Boaty McBoatface. It’s toddler-level humour. The card would be way better with a better name. It’s even kind of neat, and revitalizes some unused cards. Playable? Probably not.
Also not so printable for real. I’ve already talked about the issues with Conjure in my part 1 post in this series, but I think the phrase ‘Treat conjured cards like cards’ says it all.
No love for Starscream, Seeker Leader? Starscream is a Plane and a Magic card, and since they’re doing a card based entirely around a Plane/Plain pun, I feel like that’s a miss.
I think this card might have been fun and funny in the 1990’s, when Plainswalk was actually a thing, and the pun potential of Plainswalkers/Planeswalkers was fresh. Now it just seems like a stale joke with a bunch of random effects stapled together. I say random, but the first two abilities of this card are basically the same, and are both inferior to ‘can’t be blocked.’
Having the word ‘Planechase’ on it normally pushes a card towards Magic’s fringes. It’s a divisive mechanic, and tends to be overcomplicated and sometimes unfriendly to gameplay. There’s few ways to leverage it as well, so you’re mostly just introducing chaos to the game. Slapping it onto this card as part of a pun only makes it less playable and more cringe. I’m not sure who this card is for, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s nobody.
Finally, it’s time for Wall of Stone to shine. The 0/8 red Wall from Alpha is one of the best creatures ever to Planeswalkerificate, naturally. And that makes soooo much sense. And didn’t they just do a whole story arc about de-sparking Planeswalkers to reduce their numbers and impact and focus more on regular creatures?
I think this card is probably decent to play, and seems printable, but giving some Planeswalker abilities to some rando doesn’t seem like fun. It’s more Chandrafy than Planeswalkerificate because the abilities are Chandra abilities. Mediocre ones. Are you stoked at the ability to turn any creature into one of the less-good Chandras? I’m not. You can also get a better Chandra than this makes for the same mana cost (or less), which doesn’t require a Creature, and won’t 2-for-1 you when your opponent kills the target of the Aura in response.
Neat ability, and while convoluted, could be achieved with substitute cards like with other DFCs. The card itself is okay. Getting a big Treefolk for 1 mana is good, but it has no evasion or other abilities. Having it shuffled into your deck makes it hard to leverage. This is a little playable. A few decks would like it a lot, but it’s not going to wreck any games.
I think Magic will get to the point where a DFC functions like this. Once that happens, we’ll see more complicated and dangerous designs. Watch out!
I guess Brushwaggs still have an appreciative following somewhere. I guess. It’s weird because the cards are few, far-between, asynergistic, and underpowered. Pokey, the Scallywagg is punny, and the abilities are sort of interesting. Not being Green is annoying, because Brushwagg enthusiasts who want to build a very casual Commander deck can’t use the 4 existing Brushwaggs with Pokey. All Green. As is Embiggen, which references Brushwaggs in the text. Big whiff on fan service.
The thing that Pokey does is let you cheese the requirements for a card like Chance Encounter. Getting a lot of coin flips in Magic is tough, but it’s getting easier and easier to roll a lot of dice. Finding a sneaky way to trigger a ‘you win the game’ card is really appealing to a lot of players, so this may have some demand, and even be somewhat playable. But expect Shenanigans, not Brushwaggs. This could be a real card, and like many others here, I’m surprised we didn’t see it in a Commander precon.
Great! Not sure why it makes coloured mana, or those colours, but this is a very playable land. Establishing ‘Ulamog’s’ as a land type is interesting. I’m not opposed to it, but it raises a lot of questions. The ability to process an exiled card to make this enter untapped is good. The ability to exile a card from each opponent’s deck otherwise is also good. This does seem unfinished, and I don’t think it’ll be printed in this form, but it’s not out of the question.
This may not look like much, but this card has a lot of scary potential. First off, it’s a Lesson, which makes it good as part of a toolbox of cards in a sideboard. We’ve learned that even a point of damage for a single mana is decent in the toolbox. If it stopped there, it might still be playable.
But we also have Teach, which is a lot like Haunt, on cards like Orzhov Pontiff, or Imprint on cards like Isochron Scepter, which has a proven pedigree as a broken powerhouse of a card. The right spell with Teach might be a problem. There are a growing number of payoffs for casting and copying spells.
I think this one should stay unprinted. It’s okay by itself, and very playable, but I don’t trust WotC to get a mechanic like this right and not break something. Making this a Lesson is a red flag, as is the awkward wording of the reminder text after Teach. More testing required.
Hold on, I have to consult the owner’s manual for my Questing Beast to make sure I know what all the features are. Back in a week or so.
Okay back. Luckily I started this post a week ago.
So… yep, lots of text on Questing Beast, and like a Tarmogoyf token, WotC has discovered another new way to shoehorn a wordy card into the textbox of another card, and force you to look up the original. This is a terrible trend, and so very unfriendly to new players. I’d also like to point out that the way the mana symbols are depicted here makes it look like the card might cost either 1G or 1GG, which is, well, annoying.
The Questing Cosplayer card is quite good, however, and somewhat printable. Giving a Creature the abilities of Questing Beast is strong and gets stronger once you factor in Commanders. Making a very specific Role token isn’t without precedent, even if it is a little far-fetched here. The potential to put the Role on any creature is puzzling, however, as a cosplayer isn’t someone who dresses someone else. They’re the one dressed. Powerful as it should be, this card is kinda off-putting.
I’m sure there are plenty of people stoked on the idea of Catdogs. Remember when The Simpsons did it? They spliced Santa’s Little Helper and the cat in a Hallowe’en episode inspired by the film The Fly, producing two Catdogs: one with a head at both ends, and one with each end as a butt. Bart famously quips ‘You can be Lisa’s’ at the second one. Hahaha!
So this card lets you live that fantasy on the tabletop. It’s playable, but the feel and the Scientist type suggest an Acorn or a silver border. Or they would if we hadn’t just had Bloomburrow. In that set, animal Duos on cards are very prominent. Here’s a Rat Otter.
So a Creature that’s both a Cat and a Dog isn’t really remarkable, and doesn’t really represent splicing or anything. It could just be a Duo. I guess you can get fun tokens, but since the Catdogs don’t do anything unique, why bother? I expect something like this will be printed because fuzzy animals sell, but it’s not terribly interesting.
This is what Conspiracies should be: a weird restriction combined with a great payoff. That’s basically the entire premise behind Commander. I hope they print this, and an entire swath of Conspiracies that function like it.
While this card is very complicated and probably creates a lot of situations that flat-out break the game of Magic, it’s at least an interesting way to consider playing. Maybe as a Planechase card?
I doubt this will ever be a real card, and who knows if it’s playable. Can you leverage what it does? Does it really do anything other than be a 6/6? What’s with Champion as a creature type? That seems pointless, unnecessary and if they implement it, requires tons of unintuitive errata. And how is this Creature a Champion exactly?
Players love to search libraries. Not me, I think Tutor cards are a net negative for the Magic the Gathering experience, but the price tag on those cards tell me they’re very popular. Cards like Worldly Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and other powerful options like Goblin Recruiter.
I brought those specific cards up for a reason, as they’re all heavily played through Magic’s history… and they’re all a complete nonbo with the Search Elemental here. They all search for a card or cards, then put them on top of your library, where the Elemental’s trigger can let you scry one to the bottom! Yeah! Or even better, leave it there!!! What an epic ability! What synergy!
I think this card is really poorly thought through, and as a result, loses a ton of playability. A card like this makes me wonder if the designers ever actually play the game. It’s printable, though, and we’ll probably see something like it in future. The positive here, I guess, is that Scryfall (too bad they ripped the name off of the website) seems like an obvious evolution of a wordy trigger, like Landfall. Which gives WotC more room to put more words on cards. Great.
The pun is cute, but the ability is kinda bland. This could have been Dolmen Sliver instead, like Dolmen Gate, and they could have saved Sliver of Hope for a more appropriate ability. Like a riff on Fateful Hour, as seen on cards like Faith’s Shield.
A Fateful Hour Sliver would have been cool. There’s enough combat Slivers already, and between all the stat boosts, evasion, Regenerate and Indestructible kicking around, ‘hope’ isn’t anything special. I think the rush to get the Sliver of Hope pun on a card wasn’t worth it.
Cool concept: keywords on dual lands. Makes for good animation targets using Living Plane, Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper or stuff like that. Maybe there will be better options if they print a cycle like Slumbering Waterways. Seems very plausible.
It’s always going to be hard to top cards like Drossforge Bridge and Darksteel Citadel, however, as they have Indestructible. The right combination of keywords could get there, though. Vigilance is especially intriguing as an ability on a Land Creature. Probably only a matter of time before we see these for real.
I wonder about the future of this card. It’ll probably be limited to the kind of casual play that does ‘matches’, but I can totally see a day where stuff like this is legal in some format or other. If that happens, and it’s not best-of-one, this could be a part of a weird Storm strategy. Competitive players might object, but I’d be really curious if this card would be playable in Modern or Legacy, too. A weird design that got me thinking, which is great for a Test Card.
This is just a waste of cardboard. The ‘joke’ is pretty lame. It calls back to Floral Spuzzem, a weird old Legends card with a mistake in the text. Can you spot it?
According to the card, Floral Spuzzem makes the decision, not you. Hahaha. So the Spuzzem Strategist is a good joke, providing that WotC doesn’t make any text box mistakes any more. Oops, they do. A lot. And speaking of mistakes, Floral Spuzzem has received errata and has the type-line Elemental, so the Spuzzem Strategist only affects itself and your Changelings. Not the card it was intended to spoof. Oof.
Who exactly was this joke for? How many players even remember Floral Spuzzem? I feel sorry for people who open Spuzzem Strategist in a pack.
They need to be careful with this one, but it’s very, very awesome. Giving all your creatures a fun little sidequest to do is exactly the sort of evolution that would jazz up Adventures. This fits Final Fantasy very well, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this there.
Is giving all your creatures an Adventure too good, though? Emptying your hand and/or casting from exile are potential payoffs, among many others. I think it could be scaled to be ok, but WotC tends to not test things, and we’d see some Blue or Green or Blue/Green value engine that would break a bunch of formats.
I would like this to be a card, and would love to have a series of NPCs like it for my Cube.
Apparently this is a reference to World of Warcraft. I don’t know if I speak for WoW fans, but the amount of thought and effort put into this card and its abilities seems weak at best.
In WoW, the Stone Drake is a mount, which it is not here, despite Magic having that keyword available. If you believe the calendar of design-to-production, that keyword would have been available for this card.
Instead we get a Creature that’s barely playable in current Magic outside of Limited. A 4/4 flyer for 5 mana that provides a small amount of card advantage simply isn’t good enough. It’s good in a vacuum, but feel free to look up what 5 mana gets you these days for comparison. Here’s an example in Bonehoard Dracosaur.
So the Drake is a mediocre Creature missing the keyword that would make it a cool reference. It’s quite printable though, and we haven’t seen a WoW Secret Lair or other product yet, so stay tuned. At least this isn’t a Wind Drake with a WoW screenshot in place of the artwork, because I could totally see WotC doing that in order to peel dimes from WoW fans. We definitely have precedent in the shameful Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings Secret Lair.
When a game becomes a chore, people often stop playing it. Keeping track of this card is a chore.
This is pretty spot-on for contemporary Magic design: a whole lot of complicated nonsense with a questionable payoff. It really doesn’t matter if it’s good. I hope it’s never printed.
I don’t think WotC is capitalizing on Lhurgoyf nostalgia so much as they’re hoping to bring back the era where players paid upwards of $1000 for a playset of Tarmogoyfs. Secret Lair anyone?
Wrap-Up
What a bunch of cards. Very wacky! And more yet that seem pretty reasonable. We’ll pick up next time with Playtest cards beginning with the Letter T!
In case you missed it, here’s Part 1:
Thanks for reading!
You’re wrong on how Search Elemental works. See Scryfall:
“Search Elemental’s first ability won’t be put onto the stack until after the spell or ability that caused you to search your library finishes resolving.”
Great spot! The stack can be really tricky.
Thanks for reading!