The Planeswalker Thread

Just so people know who we are talking about:

I like the concept of Nissa as Golgari (albeit not immediately possible in canon) or at least as having black mana - as she was meant to be going down that route until the new rosy cheeked Nissa Worldwaker turned up...

Not sure I overly like the actual card though. It's slow and she'd die before doing anything of any serious note. I don't especially like the -X ability. The other two are reasonable. Starting Loyalty of either 3 or 4 would stop her being burned out at the end of the turn she joined the battlefield on...

Agreed - although I could have lived with the ultimate (as they go it's not a bad one) but it's not exactly on golgari flavor either. There may be better options out there.

I want to meet evil (amoral) Nissa...

...Liliana.

It was a good thought.

Elves - that would be just the tiniest bit broken I think. Don't forget that there are various interactions that can double the starting loyalty of planeswalkers so giving them a truly broken ultimate (Not just "my field gets a lot bigger" but also "Yours disappears") is an invitation for decks built simply to tutor for and abuse that.

If we are looking at 'Golgari' Nissa then we could use Scavenge on an emblem but as that would offend me flavor wise we could perhaps go for something similar. Black likes to use it's graveyard and green is about creatures so how about - for an ultimate - the following:

"Place an emblem onto the battlefield which states: You may cast creature spells from your graveyard. When casting creature spells creatures you control have convoke. At the beginning of your upkeep place the top 2 cards from your library into your graveyard"

That would fit black's theme of graveyard recursion alongside the Golgari scavenge (but not actually using it). It has also been done before on various legends and rares that have either been playable from the graveyard themselves (Gravecrawler) or have allowed other cards to be played from there.

The convoke aspect fits with green and again rewards a heavy creature theme.

The self mill it the 'sting' that always accompanies something good in black but it is also potentially useful as it places more fodder into the graveyard to case and essentially increases your hand size by 2 each turn. Again it will naturally reward a creature heavy build as it would be a pain to see instants or sorcery spells disappear.

What do you think?

Lol - on the 00000.5% chance that someone from wizards R&D dept ever does read this thread I have two things to say.

1. Can we just pretend morph never existed?
2. Enough with Jace - he's had more sequels than Police Acadamy. Can we move to another blue planeswalker - like Tamiyo - for a while?

Oh yeah, and 3. Pls reprint Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker...

Well they have done just about every other version. Hopefully they will give him a rest now and we'll get a 4th version of Lily, a new Tamiyo and no more Ajanis until they can decide if he's white, red or green and then - at that point - have only one in rotation at once...

At the moment - and based purely on their last version (not necessarily current standard legal edition) we have:

Jace the barrel-scraping (just about every blue ability to do with library / hand manipulation tried already)
Ajani the overworked (2 legal version running at once)
Liliana the under appreciated (only 3 version and the last one wasn't bad but completely off flavor and theme)
Chandra the combo device (actually quite useful in the current standard)
Garruk the somewhat ignored (Well he was good briefly but the combined mana cost of 'Apex Predator' keeps him out of R/G monsters where he'd be a lot more useful if he was castable)

So there we have the Lorwyn five in current form.

Also in the mix are:

Ashiok the gender neutral
Xenagos the mana freak (I do happen to love this card)
Elspeth the made for control decks.
Kiora the underused

And now:

Ugin the potentially broken (at least he will be in EDH...)

However did you guess?
Actually it's not been too bad a day - I've just had that mini-rant building up for a few weeks.

On a side not I ultimated Xenagos a week ago in a Standard tournament and used that to put 2 stormbreath dragons and a courser of Kruphix out along with the 6/6 mistcutter I'd used my normal mana to cast immediately prior. That was a backbreaking turn for my opponent

Gruul Monsters kind of suits me I think.

...although now having used Xenagos quite a bit I think I'm going to have to bid a tearful farewell to the mistutters as I put them into the sideboard. They are good and I love them but there has got to be something better for this deck.

More... dragony

Yeah, the first ability is overpowered slightly. One beast would be reasonable but two (and the casting cost of 4 mana - not even commenting that Garruk has suddenly gone Jund) make it a little too hard to race against.

The -3 is a flat out red ability and not consistent with any previous Garruck.

The -6 (which essentially is a '3 turn after dropping' ultimate) is beyond broken. If you removed librarys and possibly kept it at graveyard OR battlefield then it would be moderately reasonable. There do exist cards that let you tutor for and play cards from your opponents libraries or exile them (mostly the latter) but I can count the ones I know of on one hand.

Yeah... little bit broken. Ramp the cost up to 7, amend the ultimate and it might be playable (Bolas after all has a 'gain control' ability) but as it is.. not so much.

Even if it wasn't only gods the actual ability itself is broken. In fact even if your opponent doesn't have any gods at all it is still moderately broken as (even though it's really badly worded) it implies that you search those places for the cards in question - therefore it's a free look at an opponents deck / hand etc.

Agreed - not well thought out.