­Nicol Bolas, the Deceiver + Exotic Emanation

Cost 8 gold mythic. That doesn't have "Win the game" printed on it. 7 damage to each opponent and draw 7 cards is close; but you have to futz around for at least 2 turns first. Big fat meh.

Flavourwise: I kills you and your stuff and I gets learnings from it. Oh, and it's the big bad dragon.

And a vampire that... huh, it's just a straight up sengir variation. Smaller, but grows faster. And, uh, doesn't fly. Because, um.

The heck? Bolas can be damaged by non fliers. He's got wings! He ought to fly!

So, planeswalker vampire. Bad guy. Flying - I think we can make that work for a planeswalker.

Clearly, Baron Sengir suggests killing stuff and getting stronger from it is the primary mode. And raising new vampires is definitely a thing.

So what's an ultimate for a vampire? Taking away the sun?

Meh, it's gone all grab-bag on me. Can't even think of a good name.

Yeah, Deceiver is the "bad" planeswalker from the planeswalker decks. It's intended for new players and deliberately low-power. The corresponding "good" one in the same set was Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh.

This looks like a nice design. The innovative bit is obviously flying, which is certainly flavourful, making the planeswalker much harder to attack. The problem with that is it's innovation in a way that reduces interaction. I worry that, when coupled with the +1 that eats creatures, that's going to make this really hard to deal with. One of the inherent balancing factors to planeswalkers is that "any" deck can deal with them by attacking with creatures; and this is in turn why one big factor in the power of a planeswalker is whether it has some way to protect themselves (either make them harder to attack, or make blockers, or bounce/kill/shrink creatures). This one has both a thing making it much harder to attack, and a further way to kill whatever problematic flyers the opponent may have. I fear that's going to end up too non-interactive.

My suggestions would be: 1) To keep "destroy target creature" but move it down to the middle, costing [-2] or [-3]. Even Vraska, the notorious assassin, costs -2 or -3 to kill a creature on each of her cards; likewise Chandra will charge you -3 to kill a creature for most of her cards.

If you really want to keep the "kill stuff and get stronger from it", then I think you should change the [+1] to something like Sorin Markov's: deal 2 damage to target and you gain 2 life.

Short rules question if I animate this, will it be immune to damage from Daybreak Ranger?

What if I animate a random Nicol Bolas, the Deceiver and give it flying as a creature? Is that an intended functional change?

I think it has actual flying keyword; I just don't need to spell out all of the reminder text because, well, planeswalkers usually cannot attack.

I mean, reach exists, so this has some weird other mechanic that happens to have the same name, like legendary sorceries. So not only is your flying mechanically disjoint from real flying, it's not even what I'd intuitively think a planeswalker with flying would do. I'd expect "can't be attacked by creatures without flying."

> I think it has actual flying keyword; I just don't need to spell out all of the reminder text because, well, planeswalkers usually cannot attack.

But the current rules for flying do not fit the reminder text (Abbey Griffin can be damaged by creatures without flying), so my question asks what your intended interactions are with the new rules you make up for this pre-existing keyword.

> I'd expect "can't be attacked by creatures without flying."

Oooh. That would mean the rules for evasion keywords would match my rules for the assault action I'm experimenting with.

I don't understand why quibbling over the reminder text. It has flying. The consequences of flying on a planeswalker are obvious "No, a non flying creature cannot reach it to hit it" but aren't spelled out in the rules, so I added some reminder text - precisely to try and forestall this kind of pointlessness.

I guess, I just don't see how it is "obvious" that a planeswalker with flying can be damaged by the activated ability of Fledgling Mawcor, but not by the activated ability of Prodigal Pyromancer - while both are equally able to ping an Aven Skirmisher.

It's like adding trample to a planeswalker with the reminder text "Prevent all noncombat damage this would be dealt." In someone's mind it might make perfect sense, but to me it's weird that the effect is not consistent across even permanent types.

I think what Vitenka intended was "can't be attacked by", a la Form of the Dragon, and he just brainglitched that into "can't be damaged by". But, well, it's Vitenka, so who can tell? :)