Today's prompt is: "spell"
I'm a big fan of the Izzet's "overload" mechanic and individual cards that let you trade color words or basic land types into something else. The ability to "hack" a spell by replacing text has had me thinking about what other words are easily replaceable by other kinds of words and still read fine an accurately-templated Magic card?
As it turns out, this is really hard to do. I figured "enters the battlefield" might be safe, but there are a lot of templated sentences where replacing "enters the battlefield" with something else would still not work.
For example, changing "enters the battlefield" for "When CARDNAME enters the battlefield" to "becomes the target of a spell or ability" to make "When CARDNAME becomes the target of a spell or ability" totally works fine. But another card that says "CARDNAME enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter" would read as "CARDNAME becomes the target of a spell or ability with a +1/+1 counter" ...isn't templated correctly to make sense.
I settled upon playing around with keywords in the execution. No mess to deal with, but still - the sandbox possibilities are large. I definitely wanted you to be able to "hack" as wide of a net as possible, so I allowed you to be able to change text on either spells or permanents.
Because of memory issues, every spellhack card exiles itself. That way, it can then be tucked under whatever permanent is hacked to help with memory, like an Aura. There's precedent for this technique, how cards become "haunted" by the haunt mechanic, and the haunting cards are exiled to... well, conveniently be able to help you remember what's being haunted.
For example, changing "enters the battlefield" for "When CARDNAME enters the battlefield" to "becomes the target of a spell or ability" to make "When CARDNAME becomes the target of a spell or ability" totally works fine. But another card that says "CARDNAME enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter" would read as "CARDNAME becomes the target of a spell or ability with a +1/+1 counter" ...isn't templated correctly to make sense.
I settled upon playing around with keywords in the execution. No mess to deal with, but still - the sandbox possibilities are large. I definitely wanted you to be able to "hack" as wide of a net as possible, so I allowed you to be able to change text on either spells or permanents.
Because of memory issues, every spellhack card exiles itself. That way, it can then be tucked under whatever permanent is hacked to help with memory, like an Aura. There's precedent for this technique, how cards become "haunted" by the haunt mechanic, and the haunting cards are exiled to... well, conveniently be able to help you remember what's being haunted.
The flavor text is totally a reference to Lightning Greaves being changed into granting whatever is being equipped to have defender instead of haste.
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