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These articles ask for feedback about what people would like, but then don't deliver. That is disappointing. As far as discussing appearances, the most notable of those is the lack of a comma. Goldnight Commander is a rather unremarkable card except you remarked on it. Goldnight, Commander is a potentially cool legend for Commander.

I wonder if design realized that though the humans were on a rise and were banding together, making a large majority of the cards deal with humans was too lopsided, as well as create extremely powerful connections with token generators, unlike all the other tribes. I also found it amusing how he mentioned R/W was his favorite draft color, and he built a R/W deck to test with, and then mentions R/W a few times throughout the article (showing the amount of focus on these colors in design), and then many people who went to the prereleases saw a dominance in R/W decks being played/winning.

Should have made it 7 with some additional cost: loss of life (7 haha would make it astetically nice but much worse a card), perhaps sacrifice a creature instead.

Gallows at Willow Hill is an "awesome" or "cool" card?

-3 mana to cast
-3 mana and 3 untapped humans to activate to destroy, not exile, but just destroy a target creature.
-And even if I can assemble all this, I still am giving the other guy a 1/1 flyer.

This card is marginally functional in limited, and can only work in the human heavy environment that is AR limited. And even now, there's so much better removal. And speaking of removal, even if you manage to assemble all the pieces to make the gallows work, it is still subect to greet and and red's removal. Althought it wouldn't fit the story, making the gallows industructable would help.

I realize there's always some combo out there that might somehow make this worthwhile, but why oh why did it need to be RARE?!  It would have been fine as an uncommon...

Listen, WOTC: I've spent the last 15 months getting back into Magic, and I can't tell you how many times I've struggled and strived to build good decks, play good games, and win FNM's. And when that dilligence pays off, and you manage to win a pack, it is INCREDIBLY frustrating to open up a pack and get something like this, or like knowedge pool (admittedly KP found a home, but it took 2 releases before it happened.) 

Fortunately, I haven't gotten any Gallows yet, but when I do (of course I'lll get them) I'll see about sending them on to Maro since he's so pleased with them.  ^_~
 

Apr 29, 2012 -- 10:03PM, The_Great_Galendo wrote:

I'm glad to see the Gristlebrand "why didn't this cost 7" question addressed, although I find the answer rather lacking.  It's a little hard to believe that this would be overpowered at 7, especially if the cost were, say, BBBBBBB.  Or you could tone down the lifegain a bit, making it only trigger off of hitting players, or something similar.  Personally, I like the prohibitive casting cost solution better, and I'm willing to bet that it could have been done.

If the only viable choices for Griselbrand 's casting cost were  or , I'm glad they chose the latter. Either way you'd prefer to cheat it into play somehow, of course, but at least this version can be cast by some decks that aren't completely monoblack.

I think people are overthinking the aethetics of Griselbrand anyway. When I first saw people talking about it, someone had pointed out that it even had seven words of rules text, so the mana cost should obviously have been seven, right? but counting its rules text as seven words depends on templating "7 life" with a numeral but "seven cards" with a word, which is kind of arbitrary. And then why doesn't it have seven abilities, or seven words in its flavor text, or seven letters in its name? They have to stop somewhere.

Someday they should print a card named "Mike", a 4/4 creature with four CMC, four colors, four abilities (each one a keyword that uses only one word, so maybe haste but not first strike), and the flavor text "Yes, it is intentional." Only in an Un-set, though.

Apr 29, 2012 -- 11:56PM, Evaders99 wrote:

Should have made it 7 with some additional cost: loss of life (7 haha would make it astetically nice but much worse a card), perhaps sacrifice a creature instead.

"Sacrifice a creature" would have broken the symmetry too. But that gave me a great idea for what they should have done: "When Griselbrand enters the battlefield, sacrifice seven other creatures." Fits the black-wants-only-one-creature theme of this set, and it actually does maintain symmetry a bit. They could have given it a CMC of 7 with some colorless in there with a drawback like that.