Made for (((Challenge # 043))). A huge undercosted flyer, but with a considerable drawback. Since cards with drawbacks are often a turnoff for Timmy, I think Spike will most enjoy the challenge of finding the right deck to harness the power of it. I think it works reasonably well as a Johnny card, too. It might be a little strange to have a Demon that isn't completely black, but I think its ability makes it somewhat plausible.

The size begs a comparison to the extremely low-profile Goliath Sphinx.

The first thing I thought was "How do I negate the drawback?" That screams Johnny to me. To make this more of a Spike card, I would either cut the cost, give it trample, and/or grant immediate card advantage.

Yeah, I was thinking about making it trample already. I was also considering making it 10/10, but not sure if that would be too good since 10 is a lot more than 9 since it becomes a 2 turn clock.

It's a 3-turn clock as a 10/x, because the first turn it's eligible to attack, your opponent controls you and obviously won't choose to send it in if they can't do anything about it.

Kinda abusable in "My opponent is actually on my team" formats, but that's the format's problem, really. It's an interesting downside, I guess you'd need a black/blue aggro deck that doesn't have any bounce or other field control to run it safely.

Intriguing. Sky Swallower was certainly Johnny, and this definitely has leanings that way, but I could see this being a bit Spikey too.

I think the drawback is intriguing, I can't work out how often it'll be interesting, how often it'll be circumventable, and how often it'll be "skip your next turn".

However, I'm not sure how Spikey it can be. I think skipping your turn may not be that popular with spikes, who I imagine would like to gain the initiative. And I think Johnny/Jenny likes GIANT creatures with GIANT drawbacks, so you feel like you've got away with something. But Spike likes really cheap creatures with play-aroundable drawbacks. In other words, if this was a 4/4 for 2, I think Spike might be very interesting. But as SM says, even if this were all upside, I'm not sure it would be worth playing in a tournament compared to six and seven cost mythics that immediately affect the board.

You know, I was going to not poke my head in on this conversation, because you guys seem to be doing a fine job at it. But I'm rather surprised that no one had mentioned Eater of Days yet.

Eh, the comments are probably right, so I moved it out of the design challenge into a different set.