NWO violation - and also a really strong ability. Is there really space to put that ability on more than a handful of creatures? Combat's are gonna be short and messy.

First of all, what is a NWO violation? I will not be using impala on many creatures, for the reason that it is strong, but I like the idea of it, so maybe I could make creatures whose power and toughness cant change.

Yeah, Vitenka tends to jump in and assume everyone can follow his thought processes. NWO is "New World Order", which is a term used by Mark Rosewater, head of Magic R&D, to describe their current approach to complexity. Basically, cards with rarity "common" have several conditions that will cause them to be "red flagged", such as being able to repeatedly remove opponents' creatures; red flags are a warning, and under modern design philosophy a set is only allowed a small percentage of its commons to be red flagged (10%-20%).

There's lots more details on NWO and red-flagging in this excellent article.

Thank you. Impale won't be that common of an ability. So I'll let it happen this time.

I made it uncommon.

Fair enough - expanding my thought process out a bit.

A single creature with the Impale keyword is fine. It's repeatable removal - but just red-flagged, you can do a bit of it, and it's not like a 1/1 creature is going to get to attack very often.

It's just when you put together a deck with a whole bunch of them, it's going to be almost impossible to fight back against.

Which means, well, you really cannot have many creatures with the keyword - especially in draft. (To use another term from Maro: you need a relatively low as-fan).

But that, in its turn; is fighting against the whole point of bothering to keyword something. If it's only on, say, 3 creatures in the entire set (2 uncommons and a rare, maybe?) - then is it actually worth giving a keyword to it? It's quite likely someone would sit down at a draft and not see it at all.

I understand. I won't be having many impale creatures, I just thought it would be a flavorful ability. and it is also really easy to kill a 1/1 off, so i dont think it would be a dominating force.