Tuesday, June 19, 2018

B/W Identity: Survival at Any Cost

People who have been afflicted with the various plagues that have cropped up along with the overgrowing abundance of life get pushed out of The Arbor and other communities and end up in various small encampments. There's a long collection of them along what's now known as The Blightcoast. 

There people struggle to survive, and to deal with the horror of their own pending zombification when they do. It's a riff on the familiar zombie apocalypse trope, but in this case, the zombies aren't inherently predatory and they're not just randomly attacking and eating people. They don't need brains. They don't need anything, actually. They just shamble along in a brutal unlife. They respond to threats. So when the encampments get attacked by raiders or outsiders, zombies will actually help defend the humans.

The B/W identity is focused on using recursive creatures and token creatures as resources to help survive. The G/B vermin theme is about going wide in attacking with your tokens. B/W is about using tokens and recursion as tools to keep yourself alive.

Reave in black will play significant role. Here's what will likely be a staple common:


A simple zombie that would be too odd in any other set but makes sense here at common. Whenever you have a reave kicker show up on a card, you can target this zombie and he'll return to the battlefield instead of being exiled.

Here's an important uncommon build-around for this playstyle:


Note that you can get several zombies from this card. This is why I separated reave as a cost from the effect. At common, reave will cause a thing to happen once. At uncommon, a reave effect can iterate multiple times from a single trigger. At rare/mythic, a reave effect can be a recurring trigger.

Getting white involved is a little tricky. This all reads pretty black. In fact, I'm looking at this next card, and it feels black instead of white. I may need to tweak how it works:


I want white to represent some devoted healer types who were not willing to abandon people who have been touched by plagues. The way the sacrifice is triggered here feels black, not white I need to figure a white way to trigger a very limited recursion effect with Desperate Stitcher.

Here's a weird rare that I think works with this color combo:


I'm not really sure it's actually rare. Note that white will have access to fecund, so this actually also works as a bridge rare with other color combos that aren't focused on zombie tokens. There's a rules question here as to whether spells that create tokens directly, as with Disrupted Peace, count as being cast from your hand. Should it? Maybe the card should read "wasn't cast from your hand as a creature spell."

And the signpost uncommon:


Pretty straightforward.

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