Notice "twice its power". Is this crazy (as a common)?

Opponent plays Child of Melkor on Turn 5. "Well, I guess I am blocking this with 5 power worth of creatures so I don't take 7." Opponent plays this targetting Child of Melkor "Oh, I guess I just take 7 then."

I keep going back to Child of Melkor. It's a very notable card in this format, apparently. On the plus side, this probably means it's going to eat whatever removal you have before the above scenario happens to you.

Yeah, that scenario is rather absurd, but (hopefully) in a good way that makes me all giggly when I think about it.

Eh; Bloodfire Infusion lets you deal power to all creatures. So double-power to one is probably safe.

Um; somewhat worse is putting this on an opponents creature. Viewed that way, it's a delayed-action double-fork.

But it's probably cost appropriately for that much damage. It's crazy; and more complex than a common usually gets - so red-flag. But not a hard-stop. Cards of this craziness and complexity can exist.

The real craziness comes when combining this with, say Bloodshot Cyclops. One moderately sized creature then becomes a flat win-damage-to-the-face.

...Actually; I just realised a reason to not make this common. Facing off against a 45 card deck running 6 of it would not be fun.

Is a 45 running 6 of these anything other than a meme? It's not like this card is universally good in all situations - like having three of these in hand is pretty awkward in most cases. Hmmm... I think enchanting a creature twice with this does work.

Also, what's not fun about it? To me it sounds like it could be pretty fun trying to avoid triggering these. Arguably more so than going against straight-up burn/removal.

You're also likely to have 5+ turns before first of these drops... though that's not given all the ritual effects in the set.

Well, it's either "Ok, so.. burned me for lots, game over" or "I cannot block those creatures" neither of which are great fun to play against.

The casting cost is indeed a good mitigation. But red tends to own the aggro space, so killing them before they get it set up isn't going to be easy.

Well, ok, but if they are going with full aggro, the creatures they're having are likely to be small (if any are left). So this would deal, what, around 4 damage to face if the enchanted dies? That's sounds like a bad Lava Axe. Certainly not a bomb effect that wins you the game on the spot.

If they're going with bigger creatures, then they first need to play those creatures (and have them stick), hope you don't remove the creature in response to enchanting, and even after that, hope you don't have something like Abide in Waiting or Elvish Lyrist ready.

Honestly, the main issue stems a relative lack of defensive cards (they're mostly tied up in the chant archetype), and the abundance of face-burn in the set. To me, the existence of this, Child of Melkor, and Feed the Emptiness at common tells me that I have got to get a lot of lifegain if I don't wanna be burnt to death at 10 life. This is probably the best candidate to move to Uncommon, though if it were me, I'd probably do some testing with a ramp deck and see how oppressive it is.

Given the consistency and card advantage issues I can see arising in , I suspect that it actually isn't oppressive statistically, but it sure as hell might feel like it when you are forced to let your opponent's enchanted Child of Melkor hit you instead of taking 19 to the face, only to be burnt to death by Feed the Emptiness anyway.

I'll keep this in mind. So far, the reception to this card has usually been lukewarm but that may just mean it's more deceptive in its power.

In the physical playtest it looks like the one red player opted not to go with this at all:
http://www.magicmultiverse.net/cardsets/2161/details_pages/1726
­Varda's Progeny and Moon Dew (before it's latest change) were the most prominent cards of the draft

At NGA it was stated it should be of smaller size in general (I got the sense that they thought it sucked in general):
http://forum.nogoblinsallowed.com/viewtopic.php?t=19106

Yes. Twice its power is nuts for a common. Try reducing the mana cost and just make it the regular power. That would probably cost as little as 1R and be an all-star common. 2R if you wanted to play it safe.

Halving the mana cost and damage doesn't actually change the design that much. That's just fiddling with numbers and since I have enough lower CMC cards at common in red already, I think it's better this way.

This is a high risk card choice and in the second draft it saw no play either.