Cruel Living
4/9/7
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Discuss in the Conquest thread!
One week down and one to go. Today I’m going to discuss the Conquest Creature color, black. Why is black the creature coupled color in Conquest? I chose it for two reasons. First, black has traditionally had a relationship with all the different events in a creature’s existence. It can play them from hand, sacrifice them for an effect, destroy them or make their controller sacrifice them, and then when they’re in the graveyard, it can play them all over again. That’s a lot of points of interaction.
The second reason is that of all the colors, Black has the best variety of creatures. White has good weenies, but not midrange creatures. Blue offers a lot of evasion, but its creatures are not inexpensive. Red has a good range of creatures, with a gap in the middle around the 2 and 3-mana cost range. And green has small utility creatures and, midrange creatures and big beefy creatures, but no real evasion or combat tricks. Black has access to the best creatures across all ranges, and has powerful evasion abilities too. If I wanted to explore Creature as a type, Black would offer the most flexibility without forcing me to choose a play style (Aggro, control, combo.)
Once I choose black, I also chose to capitalize on black’s control over all areas of a creature’s life. So Conquest Black has destruction and sacrifice effects, graveyard filling, reanimation and fatties. It is working its best when it’s forcing cards to jump from hand to play to graveyard over and over again. It’s an approach that was first touched upon in Weatherlight. I wanted to do it right. There is no tutoring directly to the graveyard, like Entomb, so the color is fair when it starts. I think the game has relaxed a bit in terms of Raise Dead type affects, and I decided to make a better Gravedigger. It requires a lot of black mana and can grab more than one card from the yard, but playing it with no creatures to return won’t work in a pinch like it would with Gravedigger. So moving creature cards from one zone to another are vital to playing Conquest black. Get things into play, sacrifice them, and then raise them from the dead, that’s the scenario. The synergy of the effects came about pretty readily.
Once I started making creatures that interacted with the game in this manner, I came upon a common mechanic that would eventually become the ability word, Spite. Black has a few different ways to destroy and sacrifice creatures, so all the spite creatures would have effects that trigger when destroy or sacrifice occurred. The nice thing about this is that normal combat could also trigger the ability, so they weren’t situational triggers and would really happen if your deck was working or not.
Another thing I discovered about the life cycle of a creature is the neat quality of lethal damage. I have made a number of black creatures that deal lethal damage no matter what the amount is and in this way have made creatures with an excellent alternative to the usual evasion ability. Or at the least, it’s a pseudo-evasion ability. A lot more on these two elements can be found Here. And the rare for the day is actually in that section so be sure to check it out.
So, to recap, Conquest Black, likes to play creatures, sacrifice them for an effect, raise them from the dead for an effect and then replay them. As a nice bonus, its creatures are very hard to get rid of and offer disincentives if they do get destroyed. So your opponent will sort of have to grin and bear it. It offers them lose-lose situations. Doom Harvester is actually one of my personal favorites for the set. I don’t know how good players may think it is, but it’s a great symbol of this strategy. It’s low toughness high power plays into the colors devil-may-care attitude, and its spellshaping ability doesn’t require a tap, so you can use it even while you’re on the offense. (Spellshaping? That's right I gave the ability an ability word. Some will require tapping, just like older Spellshapers, some won't and some will have haste.)
Discuss in the Conquest thread!