Hey, turn 1 doesn’t always decide the game! Sometimes it’s turn 0.
(Protean Hulk is after the Modern cutoff, right?)
Hulk is, but Flash isn’t.
Well, my obvious way would be to literally say on the card “immune to Eye of Ugin” (or possibly something more general.) I seem to remember that Magic is much less heavy these days, but last time I watched it being played (circa 2005), text on the card trumped everything.
But, of course, I defer to you guys on what could’ve been done. It’d probably have looked weird anyways.
I take it they can’t ban and replace?
They can ban. Most likely, when they next update the ban list this spring, Eye of Ugin will be on the list for Modern, and maybe also Eldrazi Temple. They probably won’t specifically replace them with anything, though.
Aaron Forsythe said on Twitter there will be no emergency bans but they are considering things for the normal Ban announcement when Innistrad is released in April.
I hadn’t considered that…something like “[Creature Name]'s cost can’t be reduced by spells or abilities” might do it, though it’s not the most elegant solution, and would be confusing to new players cracking packs at FNM drafts. Still, you’re right, it was available as a solution.
They could ban one of the Eldrazi lands, and print a lesser version in a future set, yes.
If they want to ban, they can - but there’d be no reason to replace. The issue here is that, short of slapping the cards out of the format entirely, there’s no option to tweak them. ALso, they’d most like ban Eye of Ugin rather than the creatures.
Also, while they could create an effect to duplicate what you mean, one unwritten rule of Magic is “No interacting with one and only one card.” While on very, very rare occasions they’d broken that rule, the style in Magic is to never create a specific combo of named cards. It’s always the effects on the cards that interact. To clarify what I mean, many other card games might have a card called Alpha Guy, with an ability to then let you play Beta Dude or Delta Man or whatever.
In Magic, they might have a card Omega Warrior, who lets you search your deck for a 1BU creature and put it into play. In the latter case, they’d probably have a specialty card designed to work well with Omega Warrior, but other options exist and new strategies can pop up. The downside is that sometimes the designers get caught off-guard. The upside is more subtle, which is that the game is flexible and the designers are always thinking about new possibilities, which themselves help create more interesting sets in the future.
A couple of examples where they did break that rule:
Sift through Sands, if you’ve also cast two other specific spells this turn, lets you search your library for yet a fourth specific card and put it directly into play.
Urza’s Tower and the other two Urza lands (which were mentioned previously in this thread) all have increased effect if you have all three of them out at once. Some time back they retconned these cards to be based on land subtypes rather than on names, but that’s not really a change, since each of those cards is the only one in the game with its subtype.
I’m pretty sure there’s some other card that lets you search for a specific big nasty creature, too, but I can’t remember which one it is.
Arachnus Spinner lets you search for Arachnus Web,Dark Supplicant can search for Scion of Darkness.
Shards of Alara had a whole cycle of cards that search for a mythic fatty:Angel’s Herald lets you search for Empyrial Archangel, Behemoth’s Herald lets you search for Godsire, Demon’s Herald lets you search for Prince of Thralls, Dragon’s Herald lets you search for Hellkite Overlord, and Sphinx’s Herald lets you search for Sphinx Sovereign.
Kyscu Drake lets you search for Viashivan Dragon. It may have inspired the Alara cycle, both require you to sacrifice creatures to summon a named monster.
Dilligent Farmhand is a weird one: it counts as a card named Muscle Burst while in the graveyard; Muscle Burst is a pump spell that pumps more for each card named Muscle Burst in the graveyard. Pardic Firecat works the same way with Flame Burst.
I believe Renowned Weaponsmith is the only card that can search for a named card that’s not in the same set as itself; it’s from Fate Reforged and can get an artifact from Khans of Tarkir and one from Dragons of Tarkir. Weaponsmith overlapped with both during drafts.
So, naming a card from a set from years before would be unprecedented. But, if it stopped Eldrazi from breaking the format, I’d have been all for it. And as I said above, they could have added a line to the colorless Eldrazi preventing their cost from being reduced.
I think your idea is even worse game design than what they actually did. Devoid is a parasitic keyword - it does nothing taken in a vacuum, and requires other mechanics to make it anything more than misplaced flavour text. If you need to explicitly exclude your Colourless Eldrazi keyword from interacting with Colourless Eldrazi mechanics, what’s the point?
There was a cycle of equipment in Mirrodin (the first one) that all referenced each other. If you had all three you got a Token to wear all three of the equipment. What was fun is each one came out in a separate set so the first two referenced cards that didn’t yet exist.
One of the Core sets also had a cycle of equipment that referenced each other (they did more stuff if you had all three) but they all came out at the same time.
It allows you to make a full mana curve of colorless Eldrazi for Oath of the Gatewatch,thus fulfilling the design goal, without breaking Modern by allowing them to be discounted by Eye of Ugin. As a Magic player, and not a game designer, I only care about game design to the extent that it influences my experience of playing the game.
Further, every other colorless interaction - Ancient Stirrings, Eldrazi Temple, Ugin the Spirit Dragon, Vile Aggregate, Conduit of Ruin, Forerunner of Slaughter, whatever else you can think of - is unaffected. It’s the cost reduction of Eye of Ugin that’s the problem.
Do you have a proposal that would allow the Oath of the Gatewatch set to exist, and not ruin Modern for 2+ months?
Oh yeah, the Sword, Shield, and Helm of Kaldra! Forgot about those. So, Renowned Weaponmaster isn’t the only example of that.
Everyone always forgets about Kookus and his keepers.
I can tell you why it left the game, The guys answering the phones to answer rules questions were trying to explain banding about 50% of the time. It was literally half their help line budget. (I might be off a bit on those numbers, its been decades since I talked to my favorite rules guy)
For the record, I was tongue-in-cheek on Banding. Maybe some people had the rules down solid but 90% of the time it just led to confusion in games I played way back then.
I was serious, I lived in Kent at the time and knew one of the guys answering phones personally. It was very obvious very quickly that Banding was confusing the hell out of people which is to bad, it was an interesting dynamic.
The ability that referenced the others was only on the Helm, which was the last one printed. So there was never a card there that referenced a nonexistent card.
There is, however, a Future Sight card that works with creatures of type “rigger”, a type which doesn’t exist other than changelings and Mistform Ultimus.
Looking it up, I was half right. The middle card references the past card and the future one.
Vial of Dragonfire was referenced before it was printed.