I can’t stop thinking about this card.I am sitting up late at night and trying to imagine something to write about and the only thing that keeps coming into my mind as a thing to write about at all is, well, this card.
This one card.
This isn’t one of my designs, though I can imagine if you’re not familiar with Magic: The Gathering Arena, you might not realise it. I can certainly imagine if I had created this card, you could see my fingerprints on it. First of all, it’s a card with a keyword you probably don’t know, but which Wizards made, and I didn’t. That’s conjure, a digital-only mechanic that puts a newly created version of the card in a zone. I don’t think digital-only mechanics are great, but I do appreciate what Conjure is trying to do, and the way it takes advantage of a digital format. It’s not like Specialise, which is a mechanic that induces a lot of confusion, or god help me the card with a scroll bar in its text field.
It’s a green card that cares about the graveyard, and that’s a thing I’ve loved since getting to play with Eternal Witness when it was standard legal. Yeah I have copies of TERF art Eternal Witness, which probably are going to be valuable at some point but I don’t want to sell them to anyone. I think that green’s use of its graveyard is one of its most appealing things, aside from the generically fat bodies. Give me a chance to play a green card that can promise to survive an early game and make the end game more impressive and I will make excuses, even if I’m going to get run over by red creatures every step.
It’s also a green card that grows slowly over time, pressure in a box that builds up and eventually hits a tipping point. If you’re not seeing it, this thing can build up 3 fungus counters and summon one of the copies out of the graveyard. That copy is then building up 3 fungus counters, and both get two copies out of the graveyard. Because they’re putting brand new cards in your graveyard, they’re never going to run out of things to put on the field, and while it’s only happening every third turn, it’s still relentless and it all grew out of a single card.
Oh and also, it’s a 3/3 for 2 without any drawback.
My Magic: The Gathering history starts at Scourge; after Scourge, we got Mirrodin, which sucked ass, and whose world I disliked, and then we had the first Kamigawa block, a world I loved, and then we got into Ravnica. While I liked Kamigawa, I could feel the brakes being put on the set, I could feel the way that the set was made up of cards that just weren’t as powerful as previous cards, and that’s back in 2005, when the game had 11 years of history to work with. Ravnica, the first time, was the first time I felt the structure of the game doing things that excited me, that I felt the story space of the world forming around a new whole, and also, importantly, addressing mistakes from the previous era.
Like, the way the game works, the balance in the game, what’s strong and what’s weak, are typically described as a pendulum. Sometimes this thing is strong, sometimes this other thing is strong, but it’s never an escalation of all things. This wound up not quite being true – if you do a comprehensive study of tournament results over time, you’ll find that generally, blue and white control decks are very strong, even if there are times when other types of deck and other kinds of colour are weaker. But at this stage in the game’s life, the pendulum wasn’t around a sensible centre; simply put, green’s creatures weren’t good enough, and blue had a lot of its power concentrated in a small pool of creatures and a lot of utility removal effects. There were other things, but those stood out to me a lot.
In Ravnica, as part of a push to show us what creatures could be, showed us a new vanilla creature, to present the idea that green-white, the creature combat colours, had the best creatures at 2 mana. And they gave us Watchwolf.
Watchwolf was an important card. It wasn’t a strong card; in fact, thanks to the environment it got put into, we already had Watchwolf. In Onslaught I’d played with Wretched Anurid, in Mirrodin I’d tried to work with Blind Creeper, I’d even used Nezumi Shortfang (and I still love you, Stabwhisker). Black, in Hand of Cruelty, even had a Watchwolf that beat Watchwolf, and while being a 3/3 was cool, being able to swing an Umezawa's Jitte and run past Watchwolf was better.
But it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter that Watchwolf wasn’t that good, what mattered is what Watchwolf says. Watchwolf says that green and white, in the simplest way, can have a 3/3 for 2. Even now, Watchwolf has never been printed at common, even though we have a lot of 3/2s for 2 in green. A 3/3 for 2 is, still, in my mind, an iconically powerful, important creature for green and white to have as a benchmark for what colours can do. In the same way I hate 3/2 bodies for 3, I really love a 3/3 body for 2.
Which this fungus is! It’s all of these things!
Is this overpowered?
Nah, not really.
Honestly, I think this card is a bit on the meh side. I’ve played it a lot in a sort of ‘naked’ way – just treating it as a big creature for 2 mana that I can use to synergise with other cards. But none of those cards make it better, and it makes those cards better – things that check my graveyard for the number of cards there, or if a card went into my graveyard. And even in that situation, it’s a creature that’s probably bigger than anything my opponent spent the same amount of mana on!
Imagine that though. Imagine making a card so much for my tastes, and it’s… fine. It’s not overpowered. It’s a Graveyard Recursion Watchwolf, and…
It’s fine!