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CardName: Scalding Phoenix Cost: 2RR Type: Legendary Creature - Phoenix Pow/Tgh: 4/4 Rules Text: Flying, Haste Whenever Scalding Phoenix or another phoenix you control dies, it deals 4 damage to target creature or player and you may return it to its owner's hand. Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Multiverse Design Challenge Mythic |
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For Challenge # 111.
I tried to make a phoenix lord that also worked with the new legend rule to allow you to keep looping two of them.
However, it ends up a bit caught between those two aims, and there are flavour problems too:
Damage on death doesn't feel quite right flavour-wise or mechanic-wise, though phoenixes have done something similar before.
This has to be very aggressively costed to give you the dream of casting two in one turn.
It needs some way of returning itself, preferably immediately so you can loop them, but that's usually left off because it's sometimes abusable. And that doesn't fit on the card easily, so it's also applied to any other phoenix, but it's a strange bonus to give when most phoenixes return anyway. One the one hand, it's a bit of a superfluous bonus, on the other hand, it's just a cost reduction, it's not as broken as infinitely recurring any other creature type might be.
The whole concept of a phoenix lord is suspect, since there's only supposed to be one phoenix in most mythologies.
I think the new legend rule makes sense, but I'm not sure if cards should encourage players to deliberately make use of it: does it break the flavour if you deliberately want to cast multiple copies of your unique creature?
Why do you need to cast two in one turn? Casting one on t4 and another on t5 seems to work just fine.
And FWIW, this doesn't abuse the legend rule any more than Kokusho, the Evening Star did... though I guess that's not actually a very strong statement :P
It's true, maybe once a turn is plenty, but what drew me to the design was the idea that if you had one out, you could cast your second one, killing the first and bouncing it from your graveyard to your hand, and then recast it, getting one attack and two burns. Which is just possible at 8 mana, but implausible if you had to pay 3RR twice, or 2RR twice plus a mana cost for returning it to hand. But maybe that doesn't matter, maybe I should focus on making the card interesting in more straightforward ways.
Also, it still bothers me that a phoenix isn't a bird :)