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Original Card: Ghost Hounds ­

Ghost Hounds is a black card with vigilance and first strike. It's the only black, non-white, non-green card with vigilance, unless you count Cairn Wanderer.

But it still makes sense to me, flavor wise. These hounds were once the loyal pets of Ulgrothans, now twisted into undead spirits. They're a mockery of their former selves, but their abilities only really peak when they see their former masters.

Neat. I'd like to see black do this to green to. Oh, yeah... I'm making a timeshifted sheet. One more thing to add to it. ­

"As long as an opponent controls a white creature, Ghost Hounds has first strike and vigilance."
It's a bit odd that this is a 2/2 for 1C with no drawbacks, since Wizards seems to be on the fence about whether or not that's okay.

That bugs me too, and I kept bouncing back and forth between 2/1 and 2/2. But I didn't want this to become a poor sideboard option. I'd like it better if it was good enough to see some main deck play, then sided out for something more appropriate.

I did pull aside all the black common and uncommon creatures in the last four blocks for , to get a better idea of what's going on. There's Bane Alley Blackguard... but I don't think he really hurts the argument. After that, Walking Corpse and Gutter Skulk are both 2/2s, and there are no 2/1s without bonus abilities anymore. That, and Tavern Swindler infers that 2/2 with an ability is fine in uncommon. Albeit, that's a very weak ability, and Ghost Hounds is much better. But it looks to me like this is where we're going.

A pure upside bears? And the upside is decent? And the art is good? Gimmee!

But it's not unreasonably good, for a modern version of a card.

I like what you've done with this!

I'm not sure about the P/T. At common, wizards are still printing 1W and 1G 2/2 upside in every set and 1B vanilla 2/2 some of the time, so this would probably be better at 2/1. At uncommon, 1B 2/2 small upside is apparently ok. But OTOH, color-hosers should maybe be slightly below the best stats so people are encouraged to not quite play them and sideboard them in when necessary.

I'm very confused by the fact that the image shows Funeral March.

So am I. Fixed, and thank you Link.