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If Narcomoeba appeared to fill a blue rare hole, I'm guessing another card changed from uncommon to rare, right? Probably Nix ?

I wanna know what they were trying out for Grixis that wasn't working out.

Just wanted to mention that I actually had an opponent tear up a Lobotomy that I cast on him.  He had another copy to give to me, but I think it's worth noting the griefer aspects of the card and others inspired by it.  This same guy played a deck that was literally all land destruction spells, and counterspells, no creatures, or even anything that functioned as a win condition (I got him to stop playing it by claiming I could beat it with a stack of lands larger than his deck).  There seems to have been a shift in frequency and quality in designing land destruction spells, and counterspells, but "lobotomy" type spells have been pushed, in my opinion (surgical extraction, extirpate, for example), while other types of percieved unacceptable griefer tactics have been weakened maybe a little too much.

Something I learned long ago is that Spikes are the ones that love comprehending what makes the game tick. They love digging in deep to understand the minutiae of what matters.

No Mark, that's Melvin.  He plays the game too, sometimes, and just like a Vorthos (or some Vorthoi at any rate) would rather give Dragon Armor to an actual dragon than to a Savannah Lions , so Melvin is going to look for opportunities to see the clockworks of the game in action.  Spike just wants to prove himself superior; if he pursues this kind of understanding it's simply a way of demonstrating that he's smarter than (or at least as smart as) his buddies, or showing that he's learned better about the game than he knew before, either way so he can get an ego boost from the knowledge of his accomplishments.  He's not about understanding in the abstract, he's about harnessing the practical effects of it.  Melvin is the pure theorist who would appreciate Grim Lavamancer's ingenuity as a trailblazing design even if it was unplayably overcosted.
Also Bridge from Below is a design failure because it doesn't care what it's mana cost is.  Unless you have an Auratog or something, you never actually cast it, and it works better in a blue deck with Merfolk Looter than it does in a black deck that probably has to Mind Peel itself.

Nov 20, 2011 -- 11:13PM, Nyktos wrote:

I don't see how Lobotomy is particularly griefer. Its immediate effect is just Distress . Obviously against a deck dependant on one card in particular it's much more devastating, but against an aggro deck (which as we all know is the only kind of deck True Casual Players play) it's really just an overcosted Despise .

Milling and extraction are griefer because they take the opponent's toys away; that he hadn't yet opened the toybox doesn't diminish the fact that he's been deprived of something he was looking forward to maybe using.  And I agree that it's odd they push this while undercutting nearly all other control strategies; I suspect it's a metagame decision designed to thwart otherwise-unstoppable combo decks.  They make the spells cheap mostly because they'll never get cast unless it's on turn 1 or 2 before the combo deck can win.

Who wants to throw away his or her entire hand to give a creature first strike even though that creature doesn't even need first strike? Spikes.

This seems more like a Johnny thing to me.  Spike looks at a drawback and asks if the card is sufficiently powerful to live with the drawback; Johnny asks if there is some way to circumvent the drawback or turn it into an advantage.  Of course, Spike will do the latter if it is a powerful enough strategy (as it was with discarding stuff in Odyssey block), but that doesn't mean it's automatically Spike's domain.