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Feb 16, 2013 -- 1:15PM, bay_falconer wrote:

Ask Blogatog. That's what Maro said.

No. This is what Maro said:

It’s not a color pie philosophy thing. Obviously nature has fliers. It’s a game balance thing. In order for evasion to work best, especially things like flying where things with it get to block other things with it, you want to have the ability scale in effectiveness allowing it to be stronger and weaker in certain match-ups.

In other words, Magic works best when each ability excels only in certain color(s). Everyone doing everything makes the color pie meaningless and cuts at the heart of how a trading card game works.

Source.

Also this:

Blue is the central flying color so Richard put flying hate in green and red, blue’s enemies.  With time, it stuck more in green than red probably because red already had good answers for fliers.

Source. 

Feb 16, 2013 -- 1:30PM, HairlessThoctar wrote:

There's considerably more design space to flying/anti-flying than there is to "can't be countered".

Also, the later is almost entirely pushed for constructed. 

Except there's not. There's no more design space for flying hate than hate for any other keyword. Take this:

Infiltrate Barrier 

Instant

Target player sacrifices a creature with hexproof.

See? This actually accomplishes something. It gets around a green mechanic that black actually has trouble getting around. It also hurts blue, of course, but the last creature with flying and pro-black was what? Akroma, Angel of Wrath ? Green hosing white when black and red can't does not a happy color pie make.

Feb 16, 2013 -- 6:13PM, Astarael7 wrote:

Blue is the central flying color so Richard put flying hate in green and red, blue’s enemies.  With time, it stuck more in green than red probably because red already had good answers for fliers.

Source.

That's sorta exactly what I said he said. But...it's still not a very good hoser. It doesn't hit blue where it hurts at all; if it did, we'd all be siding in Plummets over the last two years, what with this guy and this guy all over the place in Scars and Innistrad respectively. We didn't, they don't, and we weren't even siding in Crushing Vines .

Feb 18, 2013 -- 2:52PM, bay_falconer wrote:

Except there's not. There's no more design space for flying hate than hate for any other keyword.

Except Flying is the only keyword which appears in both sufficient quantity and sufficient quality to merit dedicated hate. The Limited game won by the solitary unanswered creature with Flying is arguably the most persistent trope of the Magic experience; so much so, that in nearly any draft environment it is entirely plausible (and, in some cases, an excellent strategy) to just throw together a bunch of blue and white guys with flying, backed up with a judicious sprinkling of permission and answers so that at least one flying dude hits them every turn.

This. Deck. Wins. Tournaments. Try that with Hexproof. (And before you cry Invisible Stalker , he won tournaments because he was unblockable; the Hexproof just meant that it was slightly easier to make him stick.)

Because this flying archetype is a thing nearly always, Development is always careful to seed answers to it into all of the colors, so it can't completely dominate the draft environment. Let's run through the colors.

• White gets removal and its own dudes with flying.
• Blue gets better dudes with flying, and often Paralyzing Grasp -type effects. (Also, bounce and counterspells, but those usually aren't great at dealing with something they've already made stick.)
• Black gets really good removal. Also, a small smattering of Dead Weight -type effects (which are also removal).
• Red gets direct damage. (Direct damage is so good at doing this that Red doesn't need anything else.)
• Green gets Reach and......................dedicated flying hate. (Nothing like a hammer for solving all your nail-related problems.)

Oh, I give up. Plummet's an awesome bomb that has won me over nine thousand games just yesterday alone. Why, I would say that it's so overpowered, it should be banned. It's definitely, totally as good as Stoneforge Mystic , after all.

Sarcasm aside, you'll notice one card in a sideboard. Hell, I've put random cards in my sideboard when I really couldn't find a weakness to my deck.

If not having flying imbalances limited, then they should just give green limited (pardon the pun) amounts of flying, and limit (again, pardon the pun) green's removal to fight, which at least is consistent with green's flavor. It would perform the same hypothetical function anyway, outside of Cho-Manno and protection from creatures. And there's far more design space there.

Unless the whole point is to make green the color of coinflips because thanks, I don't like them, but if we have to have them, put them in the color of randomness and impulsiveness.