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This thread is for discussion of this week's Latest Developments, which goes live Friday morning on magicthegathering.com.

Morbid only disincentivises blocking if either a) they have all the morbid stuff and you don't have any (more likely once morbid is moved to specific colours/decktypes) or b) All your morbid stuff is sorcery speed, so you need stuff to die on your turn, not theirs.

If we're talking about morbid instants then you have all the incentive in the world to keep your guys back to block because you want your guys and their guys to die to turn on the instants.

I like the flow in the article.

Nov 11, 2011 -- 1:27AM, Baconradar wrote:

If we're talking about morbid instants then you have all the incentive in the world to keep your guys back to block because you want your guys and their guys to die to turn on the instants.

Putting morbid on a lot of instants just makes everyone terrified to do anything at all, because it makes you leave your mana untapped for the opponent's turn. Heaven forbid you try to play around an opponent's morbid instants when they have creatures with first strike. You might as well just reprint Standstill . Happily, the developers foresaw this risk as well.

As for the article, the only way I can condense my feeling is that, while I don't always get Zac's jokes ("Arf"?), something about his tone makes me really want to get them. My one gripe is that all the praise for Lauer's genius doesn't result in nearly enough new tweets from the @eriklauerquotes account.

"Instead, you sat with your cards in your hand wishing they could do all the awesome things they told you they could do."

Funny, this describes exactly how I feel whenever a Morkut Banshee or Woodland Sleuth is in my hand.

Nice to read your writing again, Zac.

I actually like "Deathwatch" as a mechanic name - it makes me think of deathwatch beetles (which themselves might've been a good fit for this set).

I appreciate the history of the design, but I don't think it really ended up being that strong in green/black.  Blue got the best morbid creature outside of the rare range (murder of crows), with an ability that is always active, and red got the best morbid instant (brimstone volley).  The only really good morbid cards in green are the festerhide boar and the somberwild spider, and they are generally mid-range picks at best.  Compare, for example, the very lame hollowhenge scavenger with murder of crows.  Green/black needed more morbid abilities that could trigger at any time.

"Unfortunately, barring some crazy Deflection tricks or some weird splicing of the Spellskite ability, the awesome effect that card promises is basically never going to happen, and you're going to remain disappointed. Your opponent is just going to work around having to target that creature, and you just used a billion lines of text to (in essence) write "hexproof" on the card. I feel like these kinds of cards are lies. I hate them."

This is how I felt about phyrexian obliterator. I wish it just said unblockable

Nov 11, 2011 -- 2:24PM, mlanier131 wrote:

"Unfortunately, barring some crazy Deflection tricks or some weird splicing of the Spellskite ability, the awesome effect that card promises is basically never going to happen, and you're going to remain disappointed. Your opponent is just going to work around having to target that creature, and you just used a billion lines of text to (in essence) write "hexproof" on the card. I feel like these kinds of cards are lies. I hate them."

This is how I felt about phyrexian obliterator. I wish it just said unblockable

Except if you hold it back on defence, they won't want to attack with ground creatures.
And they can't easily kill it with burn spells.
And as printed, it comboes with Fights spells, or Lure , or Pariah's Shield ...

It does quite a lot more than "unblockable" would.

On a related note, think how awesome Morbid would be in M12, where everyone was trading in order to avoid letting Bloodthirst turn on.

Nov 11, 2011 -- 11:15PM, fractal wrote:

On a related note, think how awesome Morbid would be in M12, where everyone was trading in order to avoid letting Bloodthirst turn on.

This is why you draft INN/INN/M12/M12.