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Well, I like the card!  For all that it should cost 4 mana to actually be played.  But oh well.  Nice artwork, and far better flavor than some of the other cards mentioned - a Thalakos guy walks through the shadows and deceives your troops into switching sides, or something.  Spirit possession is a better expression of this, and also explains why the creature itself vanishes (unlike the Deceiver).

The third set usually has some twist or turn to it; something always happens in the third act. The second act, though, is about continuing down the path set up by the first act.  ...If you study story, you will find that the second act is all about watching things get worse for the protagonist(s).

Correction, Mark - if you study formulaic, cliche story you find that.  Millions of such stories have been done, and their impact has been watered down to almost nothing.  The audience expects this sort of thing and is easily bored unless something really special is happening.  You should strongly consider shaking it up sometimes.  Have a story with a second-act twist which is developed further in the fhird act, ending with unresolved tension that makes players want to come back later.  (Avacyn is found dead in act 2, and act 3 shows the repercussions of the Innistradians learning that they truly have no hope.)  Have a story with a second-act twist and then a third-act re-twist, creating something completely strange and different which will be memorable enough to get talked about for years.  (Avacyn is killed by Gristlebrand who in turn is killed by Liliana in act 2, then in act 3 the Eldrazi invade Innistrad and Liliana finds herself needing to defend her new prize.)   Have a story with no twists whatsoever, one so rich and vibrant that it needs no shock value to succeed - show a plane being awesome, then being more awesome, then being still more awesome after that, all with no narrative progress at all.  (Avacyn never comes back, but the people of Innistrad rise to the occasion, embrace once-forbidden technologies, successfully push back the darkness and build a mighty and progressive civilization, which the vampires and werewolves then must negotiate with for land rights and trade equity and such, or else it'll be their own survival which is threatened.)  There's absolutely nothing wrong with this.  Get out of your rut and enjoy pure innovation sometime.

Whatever the problem is that first popped up at the end of the first act just keeps getting more complicated. Solutions slowly get stripped away as more and more attempts to solve the problem fail. This was where I started. I knew things were going to get worse for the humans. If Innistrad was things looking bad, Dark Ascension was things looking much, much worse.

Which is boring and is exactly why second sets seldom seem to have a terribly distinct identity from the core - MBS did, because it did something revolutionary, and Worldwake and Conflux both came pretty close with animate lands and Domain, but still rode too much on the coattails of their predecessor.  Lorwyn doesn't really count because of its variant structure, nor does Ravnica with the guild thing, but other than that, what do you have?  Planar Chaos was "Time Spiral with fancy frames and slightly more color-pie bending".  Betrayers of Kamigawa was "Champions of Kamigawa plus Ninjas".  Darksteel was "Mirrodin plus indestructible artifacts".  Legions was "Onslaught with a no-spells gimmick".  Torment was distinctive for a change, but before that Planeshift was "Invasion plus Gating".  And despite being set on a completely different plane, Nemesis didn't differ that much from Masques, nor did Legacy from Urza's Saga, nor Stronghold from Tempest.  Whereas in nearly every case from Prophecy's "rhystic" spells on (again with Odyssey block being something of an exception), the third set offered a huge twist which completely changed how things worked in a fundamental way - "size matters" in Scourge, sunburst in 5D, "hand size matters" in Saviors, and pretty much everything the game could possibly contain in Future Sight.  In all cases, the winter set gets somewhat short shrift.

The card is extremely cool flavor-wise, but as already pointed out it is mechanically useless.  Since you'll be turning it into a Mind Control, and it costs the same as Mind Control but waits a turn and needs to connect in combat, it just isn't really wise to use.  (I applaud Pedrodyf's attempt to make its weakness sound like a strength, but you could just sit there saying "I have a Mind Control in my hand", or to be formal using a Liar's Pendulum or something to prove this claim, and accomplish the same effect without having to proactively spend the mana and attack first.)

What the card really needs is for Ghastly Haunting (and by the way, how unfortunate that you already blew the name Ghostly Possession on something less fitting) to return to your hand or untransform back into the ghost when its creature dies.  You can almost get this now since ways to return a creature card from graveyard to hand are more plentiful than such methods for an Aura, but it's at most a very slim advantage to be able to Corpse Dance this (which I think would still get the Haunting exiled at EOT, correct?) or get it back with a Gravedigger , given the difficulties involved.

In other words I think we just got a sneaky preview of Avacyn Restored - Morbid was already stated as being something of a "workhorse" mechanic which wasn't being used to do anything fancy, and here we again heard that it's being used in a normal and non-innovative way.  So I'm betting that when Avacyn comes back she'll start slaughtering anything that seems even slightly evil, and the central mechanical basis of the entire AVR set is going to be several evolutions on Morbid.

Jan 8, 2012 -- 9:54PM, Dragon_Nut wrote:

To me the most interesting line was the one where he mentioned casually in one sentence that we weren't getting any DFCs in Avacyn Restored. I mean, I know they're pretty divisive, but that means Werewolves have this set, and that is it. Seven more werewolves, and then no more for a very long time. They better have made them count, but the line about the fronts not being that good does not fill me with hope. 

He only said DFCs wouldn't be in the third set. Werewolves could very well be in the last set, just minus transform. Maybe when Avacyn comes back, not everyone is saved, and some people get stuck forever in wolf form (or choose to be stuck in wolf form).

Jan 8, 2012 -- 9:33PM, Qilong wrote:

No, Mark, you re-did Dominating Licid . Maybe someone topped-down a card, but this is a Licid, and will have just as much rules issues with it as Licids do. Also, your other version of "ghost haunts person" was done with Cloistered Youth , only now you've just blended that with Thalakos Deceiver . Really top-down (/snark).

But that's how top-down works. You're coming from another direction, so even if you end up in the same place as something else, the process behind it is different. So "Really top-down" isn't saying much in connection to the rest. 

I also like third sets far more than second ones, but it seems that second sets have been doing fine in sales and popularity whereas third sets have been referred to as the problem child multiple times in the past.