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Recent updates to Verdia: (Generated at 2025-04-30 11:45:12)
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Oh yes, morphs. That would have been a better example for me to give :) And yes, that does make this make more sense to me. But OTOH, if it doesn't gain anything over "destroy target artifact or land" then maybe it doesn't need it?
At first I thought "messing with the stack is blue", but I don't think that's quite true, I think stack manipulation would be blue, and counterspells are blue, but other colours get to (very rarely) target spells when it's appropriate to change targets, or prevent or cause damage. So this is probably the equivalent of "target creature loses all abilities" but more so.
I assume this means the eventual creature loses all abilities (not just that it loses abilities which matter while it's on the stack)?
I think "lose all abilities and become 0/1 or 1/1" has slowly crept into blue and I think that makes more sense than anything else. And may still be in green (especially since this set was designed a while ago!)
I personally think "loses all abilities and become 3/3 or 0/4" should be green! I like lignifiy. But I'm not sure if wizards would agree or not.
However, does this card solve the question of what happens to P/T setting abilities and other characteristic setting abilities? Removing all activated abilities and some triggered abilities I agree makes sense in green for the flavour Alex proposes, although I don't think we have official precedent from wizards. But if I understand correctly this also kills Hydras by losing the "ETB put X +1/+1 counters on" and "P/T equal to the number of forests" creatures which seems anti-green. And also potentially ambiguous. So maybe this needs to remove only a subset of abilities? Or we agree that it MOSTLY makes creatures fight fair, and ignore the exceptions where the flavour doesn't quite work?
For what it's worth, I'd be against this card being included in a heavy morph block. Red can Shock morphs all it likes, but it shouldn't be using the word "destroy" on creatures normally (except for Molten Frame). But in this block, face-down cards are lands, making them fair game for red to blow them up.
Hm. Now I'm not sure. I think it's really clever the way "colorless" is just a small generalisation of lands and artifacts that red can usually hit. But somehow, it feels to me like red's destruction is "only" whereas green's is "all except", so it feels strange that red gets to round up to include Karn Planeswalker and Eldrazi even though it won't make a practical difference.
But that's just a vague feeling, I suspect other people have the opposite impression.
If you don't like red having destroy effects that can hit anything with the help of other cards, you must be gutted about Shatter, thanks to Liquimetal Coating / Ashnod's Transmogrant / Mycosynth Lattice / Argent Mutation / Neurok Transmuter / Karn's Touch / ...
And Stone Rain must be at least on the watchlist, thanks to Song of the Dryads / Life and Limb+Conspiracy/Imagecrafter/Unnatural Selection.
I don't argue it's a rather unlikely ability for Green. I just don't see it as being completely blue. I mean the only time we've seen it happen in modern Magic is when blue transforms a creature into another creature. That's not quite the same thing... that's the de facto removal of abilities, not an intentional removal.
Personally, I think I like this better in white. There's just more of a history of restriction in White, where Blue seems to be more about change.
"Green doesn't depower creatures. It empowers them."
Yes, that would be my argument. Green may not like the abilities you have, they're yours and it's not going to take them away.
Personally I don't think they would do it in red. Besides land searching not being red, that color formally only destroys artifact and lands, and for that Demolish does the job well enough. I don't like red having a "destroy" effect that can hit anything even if that requires Moonlace. I've used that effect myself, but I put it in Green: Lock // Load, Reject Structures.
Lignify is an acknowledged break of the color pie, as is Song of the Dryads, and I'm pretty sure Snakeform is, too. Causing creatures to temporarily lose all abilities is completely blue. Doing it "permanently" by use of an enchantment is white. Doing it to a spell? That's probably blue, since it's pretty similar to countermagic or things like Stifle.
Green removing abilities makes no sense. Green doesn't depower creatures. It empowers them.
Funny thing. I saw 'this card' a long time ago when it premiered as a custom card in an old issue of InQuest magazine. 'Cept that version was a Black Enchant Creature called "Unnatural aging".
As far as I'm concerned, Black makes sense too, since it makes creatures worse, and Black's all over that. Black doesn't need it, though, so I doubt we'll ever see it in that color. Green makes sense... but it would make even more sense if the creature became more powerful in the process. If you cast this on Archivist, he should end up a 3/3. Maybe trample.
@Link: White I get, since this isn't too far away from the final third of Arrest. I'm trying to think of any precedent for blue removing abilities, but can't outside of Walking Sponge and (ugh) Cephalid Snitch, both of which are pretty old. I suppose there're cards like Turn to Frog. But green has Lignify, and both colors share Snakeform. Blue does have more power and toughness setting cards... but I don't know if that automatically means it's #1 at removing abilities (keeping in mind that I'm not saying it isn't. I just think a fair argument could be made for four of the five colors.)
Because removing abilities is in blue or White's color pie, not green, no matter what the flavor justification.
Interestingly, when we playtested Verdia all those years ago, this unimpressive-looking tweak on Dream Thrush was an all-star. It's one of the only two common mana-fixers (Syravon Watchspires being the other one), while also following in the fine tradition of Tidal Visionary, Imagecrafter, Jhoira's Timebug of being "the common that adds/removes the set's main theme from other cards". For example, it can change the type of a land to set up or prevent cultivate triggers, make your earthform produce coloured mana, and so on.
Impressive work on Fallingman's part indeed. This is word-for-word identical (modulo M10 terminology) to a card that'd be printed six years later!
Oh yes. It seems that although I loved Cinder Blast when I first saw it, I'd forgotten about this six-year-old card when I saw Vivid Rejection. I'm glad to have finally got Verdia imported to Multiverse, because Fallingman had so many nifty ideas in this set.
More blue than green? What's blue about "All your clever skills and learning don't matter - we just care about how good you are in a fist fight"?
Seedmind Archdruid's daddy!
This was recently printed as Illusory Gains. I find the cost here to be more sensible — Wizards has been hating on control magic lately.
Reminiscent of Vivid Rejection, though obviously a bit more pushed.
This seems more like a blue card than a green card to me. It a pleasant card, though.
This is another of the really memorable custom card designs. This strikes me as a really interesting way to do Palisade Giant.
This is one of the most elegant custom card designs I've ever seen. Very memorable even 7 years after I first saw it. A beautifully green kind of "removal". Turns tricky cards like Archivist and Triskelion into vanilla 1/1s.
Like the rest of the set, this was designed pre-NWO, just at the end of the Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block. It'd be uncommon these days. But still. How come there's never been a lifelink rangestriker printed?
Sadly my text file got slightly corrupted. I don't have a record of Ikuu's ultimate's cost. What would be fair? [-8]? All you need to do is play N/2 lands after this one, avoid drawing mana from this rainbow land, and protect it from attack.
I thought this was beautifully simple and still within red's colour pie.
Well, it took me a little longer than I'd expected. But anyway. Here's Fallingman's set Verdia. I take no credit for it.
It was designed in 2008-2009, and reflects the terminology of the day (in particular it still says "in play" and "remove from the game" rather than "battlefield" and "exile"). But I think the set has a good amount to show about creative ideas for how to do custom set design. In particular, this set managed to be themed around lands in a much more interesting way than Zendikar which came out a year or two later.