Why Do Self-Recurring Creatures Need a Restriction?
General forum
Posted on Sept. 1, 2024, 9:48 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
In this post, Mark Rosewater said that creatures that can reanimate themselves need to have a restriction, such as entering the battlefield tapped or not being able to block, but I do not understand why that is the case; would those creatures be too powerful if they could block after being resurrected? What does everyone else say about this matter?
DemonDragonJ says... #3
wallisface, that makes sense, although I think that, if the cost of recursion was sufficiently high, then being able to block should ideally not be an issue.
wallisface says... #2
The idea is that if a creature can easily reanimate itself and block, that it becomes a permanent blockade for enemy attackers, effectively rendering the enemies strongest threat useless. Magic is a game that is finely tuned around a game being able to end in a reasonable space of time, and the reanimation effect you’re describing would slow games down to a crawl.
Note some reanimation-creatures are able to block, by virtue of that creatures reanimation being limited-use (or hard to realistically recur for long) - Nethergoyf is a good example of this (although this is still a powerful-enough reanimation effect that i’d expect would never show up in a standard set as-is)
September 1, 2024 9:53 p.m.