papa_funk wrote: ↑4 years ago
As I said, if they keep it up, we'll likely revisit. Thus far, they haven't shown any inclination to take advantage of this loophole.
I think describing it as madness is kind of wildly overstating. It's a weird corner involving 13 cards (of which 3 are played in any numbers) where there are valid cases to be made on both sides. We make the change and they print Crypt Ghast in another set where the foils don't have reminder text, it's pretty weird the other way (a card with only black mana symbols on it can't go in a mono-black deck). No answer is particularly great here. Frankly, it's less madness than, say, Mtenda Lion. Corners happen.
(Actually, I lie. There is a great answer: Wizards non-functional erratas Extort to be Extort <cost>, which makes the whole problem go away. Thus far, they have shown no interest in doing so.)
My concern isn't really that they'll do it to exploit loopholes as though they're doing to spite us. I'm just seeing it as design space I feel they're likely to touch on again in the future considering how the game expands.
Most abilities (e.g. kicker/madness) vary in costs and therefore need to present their costs upfront on the card text, which makes it easy for CI to identify, but I can see them assigning "hidden/intrinsic" (colored) costs to relatively simple abilities like Extort which only have 1 consistent cost. Imagine an ability "Cantrip" written without costs that costs
(U/B) all the time and is piggybacking off spells of various colors.
Well, I'm the type that focuses more on "future-proofing", so I'd rather there be the answer that future-proofs against similar designs in the future (whether they happen or not). Sure, it'll look weird for
Crypt Ghast to be unable to fit inside a mono-black deck visually (but as you said, corners happen), but at least the word "Extort" itself is identified and acknowledged for its CI written in its comprehensive rules, the same way the basic land types are recognized that way.
Not the first time I pushed for a similar agenda, before Rule 4 was abolished, I was pushing for it to either be abolished or reinforced further because of existence of cards that allow a player "to spend mana as though as it were of any color" bypassing it (mainly I was just salty
Daxos of Meletis was basically "superior" to
Sen Triplets and it felt really wrong). While I did get a satisfactory end result in the end, it still nags me a bit that it was actually Colorless Mana as a requirement that brought it down.
Sorry if I sounded overly-nagging - I've always been stickler for the "spirit of color identity" as a major pillar/definition of the format itself and therefore am easily annoyed when I feel like rules make themselves "hypocritical" of the spirit behind it, especially when it's already written to cover some aspects but not others. Basic land types being covered but Extort not basically annoys me the same way Rule 4 covered mana rocks but not
Mycosynth Lattice did, bluntly put.
Either way, thanks for taking the time to indulge us. I do really hope the RC revisits the topic a bit more pro-actively than re-actively though.