Cards With No Home: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity
Mechanics | Other non-themed cardsets | Skeleton

CardName: Combat Mage Guy Cost: 2{U/R}{U/R} Type: Creature - Wizard Pow/Tgh: 1/3 Rules Text: *Imprint* - when Combat Mage Guy enters the battlefield, you may exile an instant card from your hand. First strike Whenever Combat Mage Guy deals combat damage to a permanent or player, if it's attacking and the exiled spell could target that permanent or player, copy the exiled card and cast it without paying its mana cost, targeting that permanent or player Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Cards With No Home Common

Combat Mage Guy
{2}{u/r}{u/r}
 
 C 
Creature – Wizard
Imprint – when Combat Mage Guy enters the battlefield, you may exile an instant card from your hand.
First strike
Whenever Combat Mage Guy deals combat damage to a permanent or player, if it's attacking and the exiled spell could target that permanent or player, copy the exiled card and cast it without paying its mana cost, targeting that permanent or player
1/3
Updated on 18 Feb 2016 by Alex

History: [-]

2011-06-27 16:07:17: Edwin created the card Combat Mage Guy
2011-06-27 16:09:12: Edwin edited Combat Mage Guy

Hm. Nice idea. Fiddly wording.

"Whenever ~ deals combat damage to a permanent or player, if it's attacking and the exiled spell could target that permanent or player, copy the exiled card and cast it without paying its mana cost, targeting that permanent or player"?

2011-06-27 16:13:22: Alex edited Combat Mage Guy

Can't you just saying "Targeting it"? And let "Spells with Illegal targets fizzle" handle it?

Simpler. "When Combat Mage Guy deals combat damage to a player, you may copy the inprinted spell. The target must be the attacked player."

The combination of 'may' and 'must' simplify when and whether you can do it. The rest of the templating, including the fact that you don't have to talk about not paying the mana cost, comes off of Twincast.

Twincast copies a spell that's already on the stack (which is a way of ensuring the spell has been properly initialized); making a copy of a card in another zone doesn't do much good unless you actually cast that copy, in which case you do need to mention the mana cost avoidance.

That said, what happens if this gets a power increase and then gets double blocked? Or if it gains trample to hit both the creature and the player? (In those cases, one of the creatures will almost certainly receive lethal damage, so you won't be able to use it as the target anyway.) What if it could target the damage recipient and also something else, like Consume Strength? What if it can only target a creature conditionally, like Orim's Thunder when you might not even have a red source up?

Aah... I assumed "recipient of the damage" meant player, but now I see it means "anything that just took damage... including Planeswalkers. Well, when you get that specific, you're asking for problems I suppose.

2011-07-13 09:20:28: Edwin edited Combat Mage Guy:

Stealing Alex's wording

I'm hoping that with the wording it has, if its power is increased and it hits two things, you get two spells (if both things survived). But sadly with the way combat damage assignment gets done these days, it's quite hard to get two spells out of it.

Double-targeting spells I did think of and felt were worth allowing. Orim's Thunder I didn't think of, and I have no idea what's supposed to happen in that case.

Actually, the main thing I don't like about the card is that there aren't terribly many interesting spells that can target both creatures and players. Damage is the obvious one, but that just amounts to boosting the guy's power on attacking.

2011-07-13 09:31:57: Edwin edited Combat Mage Guy:

Boost CMC and toughness

Heh. This is a card that would have been better with pre-M10 damage rules. That way you could stick Lure on this guy, assign one damage to each of N blockers, and then get N copies of Hideous End.

Probably one of the more effective things to imprint is something like Boomerang, actually. That way if you hit a creature or planeswalker and fail to kill it, you at least get to bounce it. Or, heh, Crosis's Charm. Funeral Charm can also profitably target both creatures and players, though not planeswalkers.

(Of course, most effective of all is Searing Wind. Not subtle, but undeniably effective.)

Alex, you're M10 trick still works with deathtouch... or banding. But noone likes banding.

Not so well with deathtouch, unless you regenerate all the opponent's creatures first... since the whole point is to get lots of copies of Hideous End on the stack.

Oh, yes, because they will be dead and have no target... even if the point was to play twitch 4 times. Duh.

Well, I guess you have to bring back banding, then. Good luck!

2012-07-30 12:04:35: Alex moved the card Combat Mage Guy from Bunch of random cards into Cards With No Home

Add your comments:


(formatting help)
Enter mana symbols like this: {2}{U}{U/R}{PR}, {T} becomes {2}{u}{u/r}{pr}, {t}
You can use Markdown such as _italic_, **bold**, ## headings ##
Link to [[[Official Magic card]]] or (((Card in Multiverse)))
Include [[image of official card]] or ((image or mockup of card in Multiverse))
Make hyperlinks like this: [text to show](destination url)
What is this card's power? Hollowhenge Beast
(Signed-in users don't get captchas and can edit their comments)