For Challenge # 074. My first thought was that we're clearly going to have the Pirate creature type in Pirate World. I mean, if Ninjas get a type in Kamigawa, then Pirates. Pirates should also have a keyword associated with them, like Ninjitsu, but I didn't want to make it deal with stealing stuff. This set is bound to have a lot of pirates, and that would get really nasty, really fast. So I started working on something that made Pirates fearsome and really good in large numbers.

Meanwhile, I knew that Green would somehow need to be represented in this set. Pirates can be Blue, Black and Red (strangely, I'd put them third in blue. The only thing tying pirates to blue is the sea, and stealing.) White can be privateer, some trade vessels and royal navies. What's green? Some pirates, perhaps, and some traders, maybe. But green also gives Magic a chance to really delve into Polynesian Myth and culture. Jungle Islands filled with deadly traps and fearsome sea warriors. I couldn't help making them Kithkin.

Savage makes sense for both Pirates and the Umchut, which means that much of this set may center on flooding the board with utility creatures by means of defense. I don't have a real problem with that... most Tribal sets do the same thing. My real problem is the length of this reminder text... I really like the math on Savage, but I can't seem to reduce the number of words below this. There's a mild "Triggers multiple times" problem, but (not counting MTGO) this solves itself when the defending player just declares the same 3 blockers 3 times. You could probably set a default in MTGO for Savage anyway.

Hmm... Thought of another way to write this that requires less words, but I don't know if it's too confusion or not:

"Savage (For each attacking savage creature, the defending player cannot block with that many creatures.)"

Why not have each savage knock out one defender, and let "Oh, three savages, three can't defend" work out the natural way?

That's not a terrible idea... but it isn't very different than ": Target creature can't block." Personally, I think it would be kind of cool to see a tribe or a color go nuts with that mechanic some block.

It wasn't really what I was going for, though. It occurs to me that what I want is easy to explain, but hard to get a great wording. I went to explain what I wanted, ideally, stumbled upon the current reminder text, so I just put it there instead. That reminder text isn't perfect, since it isn't very exact... but I think it gets the idea across without mucking around with the details.

So to be clear:

If I attack with a savage creature, and you have a creature, you can't block.
If I attack with a savage creature, and you have two creatures, you can block with one of your creatures.
If I attack with 3 savage creatures, and you have five creatures, two of which are tapped, three creatures of your choice can't block, and you can block with the other two (which are presumably untapped).

Why can't this just read "Savage (When this attacks, target creature [of the defending player's choice] can't block this turn)?"

It's tricky, because it's not that simple: it's something like "target creature of an opponent's choice that player controls".

"Target creature of the defending player's choice that player controls?" I feel like it would be more clear that what we've got now.

Technically, reminder text just has to make sense and be unambiguous. It doesn't have to be real rules text.

Yeah, I'm not sure how this should be phrased.

The trouble with "defending player chooses a creature" is that you have to specify they have to choose a different creature.

The trouble with "For each attacking creature with savage you control," is it sounds like if you have two creatures, each reduces the number of blockers by two.

Both of those ought to be obvious, but between beginners who don't know how to read the cards, and people who think too much who will parse reminder text as if it were rules text it may not quite work.

And it's interesting that it does count creatures that couldn't block anyway, but I bet people will get it wrong.

I think it should be easy to choose good reminder text; it's a good candidate for the keyword because the reminder only has to be clear, the unnecessary complication can go in the comprehensive rules. But I can't actually decide how it should be phrased.

Neither do I. What I do know is that, if I kept designing this set, that I'd have a bunch of tribal drummers kicking around. Then when it came time to make theme decks, I'd be able to call this one "Savage Beats". ;)

LOL.