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Switch to Forum Live View They mixed up the abilities for Avacyn and Angel of Serenity.
5 months ago  ::  Jan 13, 2013 - 9:33AM #1
NorseDT
Date Joined: Jan 30, 2012
Posts: 33
And Avacyn is a badly designed card. Let's talk about why.

Alright, so one of the main premises of the Innistrad block was that everyone was waiting for Avacyn to come back and save everyone and everything from the monsters. And then Wizards puts out Avacyn, Angel of Hope. It's a huge creature that can't really be effectively played in any straightforward way, and she is probably not going to prevent you from losing in a traditional game.

How did they mess this up? The whole premise of Avacyn as a character is "she shows up when the time is dire and saves you", not "she shows up too late with a flashbang that may doesn't actually help you if you're at 2 life and no other creatures". The flavor and mechanics pretty much wrote themselves down for this card. On top of that, she's the titular character of the whole set, but is actually the most mechanically boring and overall ineffectual of the 5 Legendary creatures introduced (Griselbrand, Bruna, Sigarda, Gisela). You can't really build a deck around Avacyn, and by nature she's not really any more of a worthwhile addition to a relevant deck than the other 50 huge monowhite Angels that exist. Gisela is a better "Avacyn" than Avacyn.

I was like "okay, they whiffed. maybe they just couldn't think of a good and interesting card so they played it safe"

And then RtR comes out and Angel of Serenity is released. Angel of Serenity is a reasonable costed giant beater that immediately swings the game in your favor if she hits the field, and has the definite ability to buy you a good amount of time. Removal be damned, she's already done her work when she came out. This card should've been Avacyn. It's everything she should've been, both flavorfully and mechanically. They most likely had this sitting around by the time AVR was in development, too.

Wizards should obviously fire someone over this
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5 months ago  ::  Jan 13, 2013 - 10:20AM #2
HairlessThoctar
Date Joined: Dec 27, 2009
Posts: 7,072

Jan 13, 2013 -- 9:33AM, NorseDT wrote:

You can't really build a deck around Avacyn,



Sure you can .


Wizards should obviously fire someone over this



Because you don't like a card?

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5 months ago  ::  Jan 13, 2013 - 3:55PM #3
Shiny_Umbreon
Date Joined: Jun 10, 2009
Posts: 1,910
Avacyn's ability is actually awesome and totally flavorful. She's not here to save you, though, just to save her people.

Also, I'm not sure an absurd enters-the-battlefield ability in a mythic would have been the best in a set about blinking. Maybe, but I'm not sure.

It would be cool if you could know important storyline cards are going to be tournament staples, but Avacyn's idea is fine, and I wouldn't have liked that ability being pushed.
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5 months ago  ::  Jan 15, 2013 - 3:15PM #4
bay_falconer
Date Joined: Oct 12, 2010
Posts: 9,710
She's there to maintain the balance more than anything else.

Jun 27, 2012 -- 12:04AM, GM_Champion wrote:

Clever deduction Watson! Maybe you can explain why Supergirl is trying to kill me.


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Autocard is your friend.

[c]Lightning Bolt[/c]
= Lightning Bolt
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4 months ago  ::  Jan 17, 2013 - 3:19PM #5
Shard_Fenix
Date Joined: Jan 24, 2011
Posts: 1,850
There are many other things Wizards should fire someone for. This is not one of them.

Set development has been pretty garbage since Time Spiral block ended. The only good bump was innistrad and DA. Wizards needs to put the bad developers on design teams (or elsewhere), then hire people who understand game theory and competitive play to work on development.
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Please autocard: [c]Disenchant[/c] = Disenchant .
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4 months ago  ::  Jan 18, 2013 - 11:54PM #6
zammm
Date Joined: Jul 3, 2003
Posts: 27,232
Um...not sure how you came to that conclusion, Fenix, because it doesn't seem at all accurate.
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3 months ago  ::  Feb 22, 2013 - 7:31PM #7
TPmanW
Date Joined: Oct 24, 2010
Posts: 2,204
It seems that the OP's problem is that Avacyn isn't very standard relevant. That's not the point. Avacyn was supposed to be powerful and impressive, which she definately is. She's just not as suited to standard as she is to other formats like edh. Since flavourful legends are much more important to edh than they are to standard, that's what they end up getting designed for.
I have to admit though that Angel of Serenity does mtch up with Avacyn's flavour pretty decently. Exiling things is definately what Avacyn does in the story, and the etb ability kind of plays up her escape from the helvault. I wouldn't doubt Serentity started life as an Avacyn design. I kind of suspect that the choice of which one became Avacyn had something to do with how the two cards' abilities interacted with being on a legend.
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