I was trying to do what I thought was the simplest expression of Vitenka's "buy twice" = "play a land twice" ability. I don't like the way the first ability sounds clunky, although I was trying to match the original idea as best as possible, and it's also nice that you can pay to play an extra land if you want, even if you don't draw one. (Although annoyingly, this will rarely be useful after turn 4, I imagine.)

Originally this was ", : draw a card, you may play an extra land", which was nice and simple, and I was surprised that 3, T to draw wasn't completely off the chart too powerful, but it was clearly too good having that and another ability. So I reduced the first ability to just filter for lands (which still helps late-game by getting them off your draw step); the combination of the two tap abilities still feels woodcutter-y although it's not as elegant as I'd hoped.

Interesting: somewhere between Greenweaver Druid and Oracle of Mul Daya.

Heh. "Legendary Creature - Human" is kind of funny. Reminds me of Perseus in Clash of the Titans constantly insisting that he is "JUST A MAN!"

Yeah, I should have given him/her a name as well, but I couldn't think of anything. I couldn't decide what other type would be appropriate for a woodcutter, so I left it off for now; I hadn't realised there were so few "Legendary Creature -- Human" cards, I guess because for a long time human was the default, they only used that when someone wasn't a wizard, warrior, etc. Although there are a few (Crovax, Ascendant Hero, Jasmine Boreal etc)

They generally don't print new cards with just type "Human". They want to give them a class type wherever possible. Time Spiral was a bit of an exception because they were doing the purple reprints (Jasmine Boreal just got the creature type that she had in Oracle at that point, as did Flying Men). Village Ironsmith is another exception, and a very odd one; it's bludgeoning home how much they need to bring back the "Townsfolk" class.

Personally, I just think they need to stop making so many creature types compatible with Tribal. I don't see there being a problem with having a "Human Blacksmith". In fact, there are probably 10 creatures in Magic that could have that type. But, no. Everything's got to be a warrior or a soldier, a shaman, a wizard or a rogue. Those are the only allowable creature classes.

Yeah. I think it makes sense to group types together somewhat (eg. having "birds" instead of "falcons" because we dont' have enough different types to be worth it), but not too much (I'm glad we have octopuses, etc) but there's room for some new groups like "blacksmith" even if they're quite small. Having a race as well as a class means the can't is totally tribally useless even if they branch out a bit. I guess wizards don't want to make lots of one-offs becuase they used to do that too much, and don't want to create new types they might want to errata out later. But I agree a bit of experimentation is good.

Maybe "artisan"? There's some of those?

"Artisans" are generally "Artificers". Of the 10 Something-smiths that should probably have type Blacksmith, most of them have type Artificer at the moment. The rest either have no class type or type Soldier - and unfortunately two of them are tribal Soldiers, Veteran Swordsmith and Veteran Armorsmith. How do you concept a Swordsmith as a Soldier? I mean, really.

On a slightly more on-topic note, the word Legendary seems out of place on this card. It's also making the class type Woodcutter unreadably narrow. Remove?

I didn't actually mind Veteran Swordsmith being a soldier: it makes sense that in a big army, everyone is a soldier, but some of them have more specific roles as well. But I agree it's a shame it wasn't a blacksmith instead or as well, I'd love a blacksmith deck :)

Doh. Good call on legendary: I put that on when it drew a card every turn and I wanted the extra minor downside. It's not necessary without that, and simplifies the name as well.