ORIGINAL:
REDESIGN:
Barring cards that deal damage to a creature, Terror is the only black spell card that straights up destroys a creature. Of course, with its own flavorful caveats.
So, I made sure to keep the destroy effect. There's not much else I can do to vary from the old Terror. Especially when the subject in the art is quite terrified. Playing off of that, I did away with "you can't terrify black creatures" and went with "black creatures can terrify."
I did away with the "nonartifact" clause to keep this card clean and free from clutter-y text. There are other spells in Magic that destroy that refer to flesh-only creatures, so I'm not bothered that this can hit artifact creatures, too.
While you have more freedom when hitting creatures, you also have the drawback of this spell not being useful later on due to a scarcity of cards in your hand, let alone black creature cards in your hand. Also, this is besides the drawback of revealing what your upcoming creature will be (but that's a minor drawback).
Well, I believe this is a very good design. The anticipation of the black creature comming is enough to frighten the opposing creature to death; litterally! (Well figurativelly, since the creature is nothing but a piece of cardboard upon which we project our immagination).
ReplyDeleteI like revealing cards mechanisms, such as used in the tribelands of shadowmoor, and feel that it is a design space that can be very flavorfull and had not yet been explored enough. In a set where revealing would be a cost, you also would play with cards that require to name cards in your opponent's hand perhaps, creating delemas.
I imagine that all colors could get flavorfull use of the ability:
White would reveal creatures in a "reinforcment" style, aiding in the battle, not requiring you to commit all your creatures to the battlefield to get the best advantage of that.
Blue could having to reveal a certain number of cards, preferably instants, in order to get an effect (like draw more cards). This reveal of instant would make the choise of revealing or not more difficult: spoil the surprise effect?
Black is already very well positioned with your design, I feel.
Red could get intimidation effects ( for every creature card you reveal target creature cannot block this turn) or damage dealing effects, or one-shot mana producing effects.
Green would "evolve" their creatures. In Naya there is Sacellum Godspeaker already doing something like that. Could also fetch lands if you have no lands in hand.