Friday, March 4, 2011

Da Bears!

So if you search Gatherer for type "bear" you'll notice that WotC has had trouble sticking to a name for their 1G, 2/2 bear creature.

All of these are bears and play EXACTLY the same; 1G for a plain 2/2.
They just couldn't make up their mind what to call these bears! It's a little hard-to-bear.

Then there's this whole thing with plurality. Grizzly and Balduvian Bears but the Forest or Runeclaw Bear stands alone. My guess is that some varieties of bears are more wild than others and can only bear-ly follow simple orders such as attack or block. In those cases you need more than one bear to accomplish the same goal.

Bear-in-mind that if you're looking to construct a legacy bear deck, you're certainly not limited to simple 2/2 bears...

With a well-constructed bear deck, you can use 2/2 Token bears to really bear-down your opponent. Use Bearscape, Grizzly Fate, Komahl's Summons, and Words of Wilding and crank'em out!

Words of Wilding is the best bear card ever! Give it a look. It's bear-token Panda-moneum! Your game table will quickly look like someone dumped out a box of Teddy Grahams. In fact, I highly recommend using Teddy Grahams or gummy bears as bear tokens. When your bears are destroyed, eating them will cheer you up!

If this has been an un-bear-able turn, and your bears have taken heavy casulties, fear not. Just play Caller of the Claw and voila! Token-bear reinforcements! ... unless you ate them all...

You can enchant your bears with Bear Umbra to create some totem-bears.
Next is the Ashcoat Bear. It bears a resemblance to our herd of identical 1G, 2/2 bears mentioned above, but it can also be cast as an instant-bear. No trade-off other than a filthy coat. It's just better.

A good option and probably the bear with the best name is the Ursine Fylgja. It's a healing-bear! You could call it a Care Bear, if you want to.

For your sideboard, nothing will shutdown your opponents blue deck quite like some soup-bears with Island walk: Pale Bears and River Bear.

Need some punch? There's Golden Bear (or Jack Nicklaus-Bear), Razorclaw Bear, and the ominous Were Bear and Spectral Bears.They can help you get out of a grizzly situation.

Need more style? Pop in some bear-y fashionable Striped Bears. FYI this works great with Words of Wilding.
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Anyway... This information should give you the bear-necessities to construct a legacy bear deck. I'm sorry if you thought all my puns were Pooh.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

With Tuppence for Paper and Booster Packs

Sometimes when I'm waiting for someone who's taking forever on their turn, I study the art on these cards. And sometimes when they take real long I begin to wonder how these cards would manifest themselves in the so-called "Magic Mulitverse". (You know, the world where the game really takes place; where there are two opposing magicians summoning creatures and casting spells.)

For example...

Hmmm.... Still not my turn... Hello Kitesail...

Based on the picture, what justification is there for awarding the equipped creature +1/+0?

There are stones attached, but those are counterweights, which can be adjusted for fine-tuning flight or perhaps to balance-out equipped creatures with questionable symmetry, such as our friend Phrexian Juggernaut. Those stones are not the reason for the +1.

I don't believe it does extra damage by crashing its weight into the target creature or player. Look at it; sticks, canvas, and a couple party streamers. In this multiverse equipment is supposed to be used over-and-over. No way this thing survives multiple crashes impactful enough to deal a point of damage.

So, the +1/+0 must come from the extra speed flight yields to the equipped creature's strike. That has to be it.

Dude. You're taking forever! Make a decision and finish your turn!

I glance back to my Kitesail.

Exactly how big is this thing? It's gotta be like the ring in Lord of the Rings, right? It magically accommodates its size to the bearer. So it's real small with the Scribb Nibblers but then it grows to the size of Ohio when equipped to the Jaddi Lifestrider.

What happens when you equip the Kitesail onto a creature that already has flying? Officially, nothing other than the +1/+0 effect, but........

Maybe there should be a new game mechanic called "High Altitude Flying", which can be bestowed on a creature with multiple denotations of flying. Creatures with High Altitude Flying can only be blocked by other creatures with High Altitude Flying or (I suppose) High Altitude Reach. So if the Deadly Recluse was equipped with the Kitesail, it would be able to block (and kill) a similarly equipped Lightkeeper of Emeria.

It sort of looks something akin to a Navajo Indian Blanket.

What if the Navajo had made hang-gliders?

I bet those would have looked like this Kitesail thing...

What? It's been my turn for five minutes?! My bad...