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CardName: Jovial Comrade Cost: 1W Type: Creature - Dwarf Survivor Pow/Tgh: 2/2 Rules Text: Jovial Comrade gets +1/+1 as long as you control exactly three Survivors. Flavour Text: After the calamity, competition for food was fierce - but the need for company was fiercer. Set/Rarity: GDS 3: Design Challenge Common |
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Flavor seems somewhat flimsy to me.
Would trying to keep exactly three creatures in play really be engaging gameplay? I could easily it leading to scenarios where you have some creatures stuck in hand. Your creatures getting slapped with a Pacifism or such would make this even worse. Also saccing your creatures with a card like Desperate Cannibal just so you can reach that condition could lead to some strong feel-bad moments if your opponent is able to place a well aimed removal in the mix.
A card like Friends in Need can "overshoot" the mark if you have two Survivors you would like to keep alive.
Rag-Tag Band features the same concept, but slightly modified which is inconsistent.
Yeah, I was going for the "have friends but keep your party small" theme that a lot of Zombie-related media tends to use. Looking back, I'd probably do a different tribal, but I wanted to do something a bit more offbeat, type-wise.
Friends in Need actually has the key "up to" phrase, meaning that you don't have to "overshoot" the mark if you need to. Ideally I'd add some discard outlets in both white and black in addition to the black sacrifice outlets, but you'd be right in that there'd need to be a greater-than-normal reward for dancing around having exactly 3 Survivors. That was what Rag-Tag Band was meant to be, though I wasn't too sure about whether or not they should care about being differently-named.
Looking at the comments given by WotC staff, it seems that they would say that Friends in Need is too much like a creature to qualify for any noncreature slot, if that's your intention.
I also forgot to mention with Jovial Comrade that this is the kind of buff that can lead to this dying to a 2/2 bear later on the turn if the condition is no longer met. For example, if one of the three creatures dies during combat or later on to some removal. That isn't particularly desirable interaction.
"Up to" in Friends in Need is very cute, but it's perhaps too much so since it's so easy to miss. I would either specify "Create one or two" or allude to that in a reminder text.
With this 'exactly three' pattern in mind, I would wager just having it be "three or more creatures" would be the best solution from practical standpoint yet it would lose all of its novelty with that change.
For Survivor tribe, I could see the persist keyword being a pretty good fit.