I have a good example of the "Psychological Foible #3 – Players Assume Similar Things Work the Same".
I had built a Multiplayer MonoGreen 10-land Stompy deck during
Mercadian Masques. It was much faster than normal Stompy because I could play
Invigorate, giving one opponent +3 life while taking 4 life from another for zero mana, which is faster damage than any other card. Since Multiplayer Free-for-All decks aren't built to survive 10+ damage on turn 2 from green creatures with a kill on turn 3, I played this deck simply to suicide into the one player in the Free-for-All that I hated for whatever reason, and to teach them to be nice to me across many games.
Nemesis gave the deck
Skyshroud Cutter, a stupendously fast 'free' 2/2, with the 'downside' of making one opponent die while making a different opponent your friend. The more of these kinds of cards I could get, the better!
After playing my deck for a year or more and because my deck is so fast that the plodding pace of everyone else is boring, I was reading all the text and flavor text of my cards to try and memorize them.
My discovery was absolutely infuriating, and it's even a set mechanic that changed. My previous knowledge of
Invigorate led me to assume
Skyshroud Cutter works the same way, when in fact Invigorate is fantastic for my deck while Skyshroud Cutter is spectacularly terrible, even though they presumably use the same set mechanic.
I even emailed Brian Tinsman, whose reply said the reason was lost somewhere in the annals of evil card designers.
While Sheltering Ancient is an ok replacement, every time I play the deck I wish I could punch the game designer in the face that robbed me of all the fun that could have been
Skyshroud Cutter.
