It could work. The tribe would need a bunch of ways to deal a single damage to your guys though. Like a spell that dealt one to a creature you control and two to an opponents.

Ultimately though the design space feels too limited. I mean this cannot go on spells, lands or enchantments. Maybe we can have a single creature with this ability?

@Izaac The ability itself doesn't have much design space, but if there's a critical mass of creatures with the ability we get to make lots of cards that work well with the ability. Cards like Rolling Thunder and Roil's Retribution get used in brand new ways. Combat tricks are suddenly much scarier.

The ability looks simple but I think it would play differently to anything we've seen before and it opens up a lot of brand new design space in other areas.

Alternatively, instead of stretching for combos due to limited design space, you could go the other way and change 'damage' to 'combat damage' and just let it be something that adds complexity to combat. I mean, Bushido didn't have much design space to work with either. That doesn't mean it was a bad ability.

Honestly I really like the ability. There have been a lot of mechanics that only belong on creatures and have limited design space but still worked in their sets. I am concerned it could easily become too powerful, depends on the other cards in the set though. Perhaps putting the counters on at end of turn, so that the higher battleforged are killable by multiple burn spells and you have to way up damaging your creatures for the turn to get long turn benifits. That way you can keep the damage from non-combat sources buffing them without it being too powerful.

My original design had them go on at EOT but that has memory issues, is worded much worse and leads to weird sequencing. If you want to deal a damage to a battleforged creature to buff him up during your opponents turn, you'd need to do it in their 2nd main phase for it to trigger during their EOT.

The burn spell thing isn't a big deal, it's a triggered ability so they can just respond to the damage trigger with the other burn spells if needed.

Thats kinda why I don't like it. I mean it's counter intuitive to what you want to do with your creatures. It's like the "ability" to discard cards. Sure, it might get you a good effect like madness or threshold but people don't like discarding cards and I don't think they'd like hurting their own guys.

My other pickle is that the ability has nothing to do with emus or the emu tribes personality. This ability could go on any angry army person.

Yeah, players might be a little weirded out by dealing damage to their own creatures instead of their opponent. That could prove to be a major problem with the mechanic, but I'm not convinced that's a likely scenario. Especially not for our playgroup which I imagine would be hugely enfranchised players looking for a new experience.

But absolute worst case scenario everyone plays with this as a combat only mechanic, which should be fine.

Have you ever met an emu? They're the most "angry army person" animal there is. Crazy vicious.

But if you would prefer a different tribe that's fine, flavour really isn't my area.

Edit: Okay, I think I've approached this the wrong way, instead of trying to justify my decision I should be explaining my vision for this as a whole. I never intended for the ability to be mostly about dealing damage to your own creatures, that was just the most controversial part so it got talked about the most.

I'm thinking 3 or 4 combos at common, 1 twin bolt style card and some creatures that etb to ping something. 2 or 3 combos at uncommon, like a rolling thunder variant and a good ol' fashioned prodigal sorcerer.

This effect is pretty broken as it stands, should be Battleforged 1 (Whenever this creature is dealt combat damage put 1 +1/+1 counter on it)