Original Card: Deathgrip ­

• Re-wrote ability to both no longer counter spells in black, and no longer penalize green decks specifically.

See also: Lifeforce.

I redesigned these two cards because they had new flavor text in Fifth Edition that tied them to the Homelands mythos. This is probably the biggest stretch in the set, and I thought about not going here, considering how anachronistic these two cards are, and how much they'd need to be changed to be 'modern' again. But I figured I might as well do it anyway.

Since there was no perfect way to update the abilities correctly, I tried to take a clue from the flavor. The Baron is saying that each new tree is heaped on the death of many trees before it. The Autumn Willow is saying the same thing... She just sees that as a success.

This seems pretty strange. I'd be more in favour of ditching Deathgrip & Lifeforce rather than designing cards that aren't colour hosers at all, because being a mirrored pair of colour hosers is so key to what those two are about.

...Huh, wait, they're not even in Homelands at all originally? They seem exceedingly strange candidates to add, then. Especially if you're not staying especially close to the original designs (which are certainly completely foreign to the colour pie).

Mm. I agree. I pushed the limits of what could be in the set for the sake of doing it, seeing what I could pull out. But now that they're here, it's pretty obvious that they superfluous. I'll be pulling them shortly... them and Wanderlust which slipped into the set for similar reasons, but had to be warped in order to make sense in a Modern environment.

Nice thought pushing this far to get everything I could, but in the end I just pushed too far.

And... pulled from the skeleton.