­Camouflage + Hilltop Shrine

Well, for once it's the official card that's ridiculous. Especially since it pretty much boils down to: "This turn, assign blockers randomly"

And, uh, we appear to have a card from multiverse that contains nothing but flavourtext. So, hmmm. I think we can make this simple.

Nice! The ability from General Jarkeld on a land, except that it's random rather than your choice. Remarkably simple rules text. I've never been quite sure how much use General Jarkeld's ability would be, because I've never expected it to be good enough to be worth putting in a deck. But the marginal cost of putting in a colourless-producing land into a deck is very low, so this would likely see play in some aggressive decks. It's no Contested War Zone, but it's got potential to screw with blockers. And it is as you say impressively simple.

Gets a bit more fiddly if I add the "That it can legally block" or some kind of "Attempts to block" but yes. I quite like this one. Probably not game breakingly awesome, but kinda intriguing and might see some play. Which is where I usually try to aim.

Although getting one of the banned-from-fourth cards and ending up with this is amusing. (It never really made sense for camo to be in the power-nine set, I think it was just the complexity, really)

Crosslink to Maze of Ith as a comparison (and name stealing, obviously) I figured camouflage involved jungles. So it's kinda unofficially a 3-way mash ;)

I misremembered; Maze doesn't tap for mana. So this jungle may actually be too good (but then again, the blocker you redirect still blocks SOMETHING and could end up doing nasty things to your attackers, and it's blockers not attacks so it's not as much of a mousetrap... maybe.)

Ooh... you almost trolled me into talking about why some cards were pulled from 4th. I'm not falling for it that easy.

By the way... nice card. I'd like it even more if I wasn't jealous. ;)

Awwww.

I remember the reasons given in: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/arcana/217

and yeah, camouflage was just "Too confusing, bye bye" But hey, at least we got Shatterstorm out of it.

Oddly, False Orders (which also let you change blocking) was just "Cycled out, it might come back" - seems odd. But I guess they hadn't made the whole "Look, let's just kill banding, ok?" decision yet.