Original Card: Beast Walkers ­

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• Changed from White to Green.
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• Reduced cost by one colored mana.
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• Changed activation from to .
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• Changed activation from Banding to Guard.
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Note: This is the card where I figured out what Guard was, so the resulting conversation is a bit of a mess.

I think in order to "fix" Homelands, I would just remove banding entirely.

I almost cried when I looked at Beast Walkers. There are so many things going wrong with the card, it was hard to find a path through.

I'm still not done. I'm not sure which knobs are important to keep on this card, and which need to be dialed back. But I felt much better when I realized that this card should be a Green creature with a white activation, and not the other way around. That was a big stumbling block here.

So... now banding. I'm still not sure what to do about that. There's been a lot of design out there that's tried to replicate the feel of banding, but nothing's been close, really. That's because banding has so many moving parts, it refuses to be clearly understood. It's also a really awesome mechanic, once you get to know it, though. What a pain. My opinion of how to deal with banding is still evolving, but for right now, it stays on the card, gigantic wall of reminder text and all.

On rarity: Easily could be uncommon.

On power and toughness vs. casting cost: I chose this combination back when I still thought of this as a white card. I switched over to green, and didn't think to reconsider the cc vs. p/t. It probably should be a 3/3 for or though. I plan to change that when I change one of the other thingies.

UncleIstvan got in his comment before I did. It's a decent point, but it doesn't really supply an answer. What should I do instead?

I'm moving this over to Banding in the Restored Series over in Conversation, since this seems like a bigger question than just this one card.

Commented there; suggest for this particular instance: Keep the flavour; make it a werewolf. (Without silly innistrad mechanics, a normal ability cost to flip)

One side gets something like banding-on-block (Sacrifice to prevent target creature dealing damage - flavour the human throwing himself in the way; just like bands-on-block; you can multi block then to kill it, safely)

T'other side gets exalted, or "When ~ attacks, attacking creatures get +1/+1" or "~ must be blocked" or something to be like the other half of banding.

I'm giving Link's idea a spin. I'm curious if this passes the test. Since there are no rules about how creatures combine their power and toughness while on the battlefield, no one can complain that all the rules for how Guard works isn't spelled out on the card... that information would be found in the rulebook. But the idea may be grokkable enough, that people can navigate what those rule must be?

Maybe it's not the best answer, but maybe it's one of the better answers we're going to get?

Also, can we just agree this doesn't need to be a soldier? The soldier creature type is really just a holdover from the original creature type. 'Human Beast' was stapled on afterwards, and the type line just became a mess.

It's a pretty nifty and interesting idea. Am I right in thinking that it's meant to trigger both on your attack and on an opponent's attack? (And in this case, that does mean you'd need to activate the ability before the opponent attacks, preemptively.)

It triggers on the attack and your opponent's attack, to simulate declaring blockers. That prevents you from blocking a creature with a creature that has Guard, then Guarding another. So, yeah, you have to activate this before attacks. That's kind of annoying. But at least activating attacks isn't on all creatures with Guard. All of the creatures with Guard in this set, however...

Maybe I should just have this say "If you control a Plains."?

Then again, it's not like Master Decoy doesn't have this problem as well. Probably best to leave it alone. The card's been through enough.

Interesting take on Banding. Just pointing out that for templating purposes it should probably be 'guard' and not 'Guard'.

Good point, thank you and edited. I'm probably going to be changing this version of banding to another one suggested in another post, though. I do like this version, but it's bound to inspire a thousand and one questions when I finally get around to drafting with it.

Somehow this card slipped back to 2/2 for in the latest update. I'll have to revisit this when I've plugged all the other cards in.