See Challenge # 105.

An answer to a deck where Pentavus is part of a broken combo! Yay, go Pentavus, wait, when did Pentavus become the bad guy? :)

Wow, answer cards are hard to design. I took the constraints that:

• in order to have a significant affect, it has to be a complete answer to the problem card, effectively winning you the game if they were relying on it (since even if everyone plays 4 of the answer card, they won't draw it every game)
• if it's an answer to a single card, not a strategy, it has to be worth playing when they don't draw that, or it may weaken your deck too much to play it
• but not so strong that everyone runs it all the time (yes, Thragtusk, you're awesome, now do the walk of shame)

It was a struggle to make this better than doom blade! I decided to slightly remake Vampire Hexmage which was supposed to solve a similar problem.

I increased its effectiveness against the target card a bit by adding the life loss. And made it more blatant by explicitly calling out "+1/+1 counters", so beginner players can hopefully realise they're supposed to play it, and not fail realise that this might be the answer they're looking for.

However, I'm worried this still isn't effective enough! I assumed you could use it as a threat before the pentavus-player had "turn it into fliers" mana up, but maybe it needs to be a stronger answer in advance?

Works; I guess it's pretty hard to cast a pentavus and already have mana up to save the counters.

I might suggest a more vampiric twist would be "Whenever a +1/+1 counter is removed from another creature, put one on ~"

Tricky. While I can't imagine why Pentavus became busted in Standard, I would wonder if its because something else is consistently dropping its activation costs to . Maybe this is the "Expensive activated environment" block, and there's a lot of cards that drop the activation, and they threw in Pentavus because it's silly here, but it turns out it's too good? I blame the fact that they reprinted Cathars' Crusade in the same set.