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| Format | Legality |
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| Vintage | Legal |
Cabaretti Initiate
Creature — Raccoon Citizen
: This gains double strike until end of turn.
legendofa on Why Have Creatures in Recent …
3 months ago
This rule has never been more than a guideline. Savannah Lions breaks it in Alpha, as a 2/1 for .
Still, creatures have been getting better. In the first few years of the game, creatures were generally pretty weak and inefficient. Mold Demon is a 6/6 for that requires a two-land sacrifice, and that's one of the more cost-efficient creature cards from Legends.
Since is the most creature-centric color, it's seen more "creature power creep" than other colors. It also tends to have much heavier color weight and more expensive creatures. Craw Wurm and Scaled Wurm fall below the stats = mana value curve. In fact, it isn't until 1999 when green Trained Jackal got a creature above this curve with no drawbacks or restrictions, and that's it until 2002's Elvish Warrior. Those are the only two green creatures from the pre-Modern era to be that efficient. So even vanilla creatures in the color of big efficient creatures were generally below the curve.
Current creatures tend to be more efficient, but still stay close to the rule. Out of almost 600 creatures across all colors, Brokers Initiate, Cabaretti Initiate, Cavern Stomper, Civil Servant, Cogwork Wrestler, Goblin Blast-Runner, and Goblin Tomb Raider are the only common creatures in Standard that have a stats-mana ratio above 1, so the spirit is still very much present.
Mythic rare cards are explicitly made to be powerful and have a "wow" factor, so they're going to see a higher ceiling. Even so, very few mythic rare creatures break this ratio, and those that do generally stay close to 1. The exceptions are pretty much exclusively expensive green creatures that either are multicolor or have a heavy color weight. So the efficiency of large, expensive creatures is amplified in green, the focus color for large, expensive creatures.