Reading Maro's card analysis on Huatli made me realize a planeswalking dinosaur would be one of the most terrifying things to happen to the multiverse. It doesn't plan. It doesn't rationalize its actions. It can't be negotiated with. It kills and eats whatever it wants. It can invade a plane out of nowhere and disappears as suddenly as it comes.

Here's a dinosaur planeswalker intended to transpire this savagery feel. It doesn't do anything more fancy than stomping on things and it loses loyalty fast without any way of getting it back. Eventually, you will lose grasp of it.

A planeswalking dino could also be intelligent or meek, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun.

I'm amused by this.

It'd be nice if it had some way to recharge loyalty a bit. Not really room on the card for it, but "Whenever a creature dealt damage by ~ dies, it gains 1 loyalty" on the +0?

It's fun as is, though.

The [0] is something Wizards have so far avoided doing: animating a planeswalker without preventing damage to it. I think this is because most players won't realise that damage to a creature-planeswalker both accumulates towards lethal damage and removes loyalty counters, primarily because that's extremely confusing :) So all the Gideons prevent damage (even the ones that are also indestructible); and Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker has that oh-so-clever "reminder" text to draw your attention to the fact he ceases to be a planeswalker while he's a Dragon. (SadisticMystic of course chose to instead embrace the confusion and create Jeska, Mending Medium.)

I think it'd be perfectly in-flavour for this to cease to be a planeswalker while it's actually rampaging. So I'd say just remove "that's still a planeswalker" and give it Sarkhan's reminder text instead.

I am aware of the damage interactions of a creature planeswalker. I gave Maw such a high starting loyalty exactly to remedy this a bit. I might change way this works if I find it leads to a better gameplay.

I think the gameplay is fine but double-counting the damage is just almost always going to be confusing. I'm not sure if wizards will eventually find a good template for this. Maybe something like "becomes a creature except damage removes loyalty counters instead of being marked on the creature"??

How about it flickers out, and brings a token dinosaur to replace it? That means it comes back with 10 loyalty again - but that's more of a feature than a bug.

Probably too wordy though.

You may be aware of the damage interactions, but lots of players won't. Given Wizards figured Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker needed reminder text, I think you'll be on a hard one to convince them to let this fly with no reminder text at all...

And I mean, it's totally fine to design homebrew cards aimed at players more experienced with rules than wizards usually aim for.

But I find this particular interaction just too unexpected, "damage is only counted once" is so prevalent even though it's not a written rule, if I saw it without knowing what you'd intended, I'd expect that it didn't and the designer make a mistake in writing it, not that it did what the rules technically say.

It's almost a Melvin/Vorthos test. A pure "what the rules say" Melvin is fine with this, but if you have even a little bit of Vorthos "what does this feel like" it feels completely out of nowhere. Or maybe not Vorthos, maybe literal-Melvin vs big-picture-Melvin?

It's just yet another edge case where if the rules say it double-counts, then the rules are obviously wrong.

The rules are perfectly fine - this is consistent with other interactions and making an exception here means you also have to reconsider all the other interactions with rules that alter the effect for damage e. g. lifelink, wither etc.

"I deal it one damage; remove 2 loyalty counters please." "Um; no. That's just stupid."

Why would you remove two loyalty counters? You have to be a little more specific with your example.

Ok, so I'm not understanding the complication here. Unless it's just "This effectively has toughness of the lowest of its stated toughness and its loyalty"

Which, huh; why not just make it 5/X where X is its loyalty?

It's crazy how one simple ruling generated so much discussion.

Changed color because it didn't have any particularly green ability. Decreased the loyalty because I don't need to compensate the damage anymore. Might change first ability to a [+1] later.