Once again, a useless black common creature, unless you like to sec your own creatures without getting anything in return.
Drawbacks should usually have advantages to make up for them...
desolation_masticore
☆☆☆☆☆ (0.0/5.0)
Power creep gives us things like Moriok Reavers now-a-days.
Aradimar
★★★★★ (5.0/5.0)(3 votes)
@scumbling1 python costs 2 black and a colorless and is a 3/2, thats not a fair comparison to this card which is a 3/3 2 colorless 1 black. Now admittedly its drawback was too much, even back then, but I look at half the cards nowadays and the drawbacks that used to require careful thought no longer exist. tribals generally dont pump both sides anymore, iona back in the day would have prevented all players from playing that color, and we even have one sided shroud now
scumbling1
★★★☆☆ (3.5/5.0)(3 votes)
"Power creep gives us things like Moriok Reavers now-a-days."
Python was printed before this guy. Do not ignore that power levels fluctuate; they don't simply progress to ever-higher levels. Most people who mention power creep seem to pretend this doesn't happen.
@ Aradimar:
"python costs 2 black and a colorless and is a 3/2, thats not a fair comparison to this card which is a 3/3 2 colorless 1 black"
I'm not making the argument that Python is strictly better, but I don't think I have to argue that it's generally a better card.
"tribals generally dont pump both sides anymore, iona back in the day would have prevented all players from playing that color, and we even have one sided shroud now"
Tribal generals don't always have the same quaility cohort to pump: Goblin Chieftan isn't getting printed alongside Lackey, Matron and Ringleader, for example. They also have to content with an increasingly-powerful arsenal of removal. We see less absolutely terrible non-creature spells, too.
As for Iona, that's just speculation.
phyrexiantrygon
☆☆☆☆☆ (0.0/5.0)
Nowdays, Iona is freaking POWERFUL, and was close to being more so...
And at the time, the power for mana cost WAS an advantage. and now, there are quite a few cards that WANT to be sacced...
ZEvilMustache
☆☆☆☆☆ (0.0/5.0)
Ban Ban Ca Calaban!
DarthParallax
★★★★★ (5.0/5.0)(1 vote)
Tempest set had Altar of Dementia...and that's a thing and all....but Tempest was no Odyssey Block.
This creature was born from the same minds that gave us Juzam Djinn: "Black is allowed to have Green rates of P/T only if It pays for it".
They were not seriously thinking "Let's make a card that interacts well with graveyard-based sacrificing and death trigger decks", they were thinking "this creature is too strong, let's give it a problem." In that sense, yes, Power Creep means that there is no way we'll get saddled with 'guaranteed card disadvantage' for a 3/3 for 3. I say 'guaranteed' in quotation marks because, yes, not only have we since discovered card advantage, we've also discovered Graveyard decks.
This guy might see, not reprint, but get ported onto a new name, in a block like Odyssey or Innistrad, where graveyard mechanics like Morbid, Unearth (not actually in those but on theme) and Flashback get featured. Sacrificing our own creatures would be pretty bad, but if you had it in a place where it's easy to bring your creatures back, and 'the main thing' was less the Attacking and more some powerful ETB ability, or you sacked a creature that had Haste and was easy to Reanimate or something, idkn...I can imagine situations where this card would be useable.
We would MUCH MORE easily see a 3/3 for {2}{B} and nothing. It would be kinda weird, possibly boring, but it's not something they would look at say 'zomgsh, that's too good a creature', which is fairly clearly what they did here.
I mean. {2}{B} would be better than normal, since it was only Scars Block just recently that gave us a 3/2. A 3/3 would be mildly interesting, it would even be 'news', but not BIG news. It would most likely happen during a Standard Rotation which contained Lightning Bolt in a Core Set, and Limited for the set it appeared in would be impacted by it's high toughness, but nobody else would really even CARE because it still wouldn't be a Constructable card unless it had the 'Zombie' type or something.
Python was clearly also judged as being powerful by R&D, because they gave it the drawback of weighty mana requirements. You cannot just look at old cards with OUR idea of what's good or not and believe that R&D was pulling back or scaling up power with actual factual knowledge of what power even was. What R&D must have thought when they put Python in Visions was 'this is going to be such a beatstick in Standard Red-Black decks, better make it harder to use so many mountains and non-creature spells with it.'
Comments (7)
Drawbacks should usually have advantages to make up for them...
Python was printed before this guy. Do not ignore that power levels fluctuate; they don't simply progress to ever-higher levels. Most people who mention power creep seem to pretend this doesn't happen.
@ Aradimar:
"python costs 2 black and a colorless and is a 3/2, thats not a fair comparison to this card which is a 3/3 2 colorless 1 black"
I'm not making the argument that Python is strictly better, but I don't think I have to argue that it's generally a better card.
"tribals generally dont pump both sides anymore, iona back in the day would have prevented all players from playing that color, and we even have one sided shroud now"
Tribal generals don't always have the same quaility cohort to pump: Goblin Chieftan isn't getting printed alongside Lackey, Matron and Ringleader, for example. They also have to content with an increasingly-powerful arsenal of removal. We see less absolutely terrible non-creature spells, too.
As for Iona, that's just speculation.
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/856
And at the time, the power for mana cost WAS an advantage. and now, there are quite a few cards that WANT to be sacced...
This creature was born from the same minds that gave us Juzam Djinn: "Black is allowed to have Green rates of P/T only if It pays for it".
They were not seriously thinking "Let's make a card that interacts well with graveyard-based sacrificing and death trigger decks", they were thinking "this creature is too strong, let's give it a problem." In that sense, yes, Power Creep means that there is no way we'll get saddled with 'guaranteed card disadvantage' for a 3/3 for 3. I say 'guaranteed' in quotation marks because, yes, not only have we since discovered card advantage, we've also discovered Graveyard decks.
This guy might see, not reprint, but get ported onto a new name, in a block like Odyssey or Innistrad, where graveyard mechanics like Morbid, Unearth (not actually in those but on theme) and Flashback get featured. Sacrificing our own creatures would be pretty bad, but if you had it in a place where it's easy to bring your creatures back, and 'the main thing' was less the Attacking and more some powerful ETB ability, or you sacked a creature that had Haste and was easy to Reanimate or something, idkn...I can imagine situations where this card would be useable.
We would MUCH MORE easily see a 3/3 for {2}{B} and nothing. It would be kinda weird, possibly boring, but it's not something they would look at say 'zomgsh, that's too good a creature', which is fairly clearly what they did here.
I mean. {2}{B} would be better than normal, since it was only Scars Block just recently that gave us a 3/2. A 3/3 would be mildly interesting, it would even be 'news', but not BIG news. It would most likely happen during a Standard Rotation which contained Lightning Bolt in a Core Set, and Limited for the set it appeared in would be impacted by it's high toughness, but nobody else would really even CARE because it still wouldn't be a Constructable card unless it had the 'Zombie' type or something.
Python was clearly also judged as being powerful by R&D, because they gave it the drawback of weighty mana requirements. You cannot just look at old cards with OUR idea of what's good or not and believe that R&D was pulling back or scaling up power with actual factual knowledge of what power even was. What R&D must have thought when they put Python in Visions was 'this is going to be such a beatstick in Standard Red-Black decks, better make it harder to use so many mountains and non-creature spells with it.'