Frenzied Baloth

Creature — Beast

This spell can't be countered.

Trample, haste

Creature spells you control can't be countered.

Combat damage can't be prevented.

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Alchemy	Legal
Archenemy	Legal
Arena	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Canadian Highlander	Legal
Casual	Legal
Commander / EDH	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Custom	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Freeform	Legal
Gladiator	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Historic	Legal
Historic Brawl	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Modern	Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Pioneer	Legal
Planar Constructed	Legal
Planechase	Legal
Pre-release	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Standard	Legal
Standard Brawl	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (4)

legendofa on Thoughts about magic the gathering …

2 weeks ago

These are all interesting thoughts and concerns, so please don't take any of my thoughts as saying you're objectively wrong or anything. But I do want to make some points of my own.

1. The plane of Eldraine's the Arthurian/Matter of Britain/Grimm's Fairy Tales place right now. Throne of Eldraine was a pretty even mix, and Wilds of Eldraine was heavy on the fairy tales side, to the point where each color pair had an associated well-known fairy tale. I'd like to see an Arthurian-inspired Courts of Eldraine set. On a broader note, the design team has been open to making sets based on certain public domain properties, for pretty much the reasons you mention.

2. I've been having a lot of this kind of discussion recently, and I'm learning that I'm pretty permissive with what themes and styles I'm okay with. The way I see it, TMNT + Spider-Man New York is thematically one urbanization and industrialization away from Bloomburrow, with maybe an Omenpath for the humans, goblins, and random weirdness. If I went to Theros, made a tight roll of copper wire, and dropped a chunk of magnetite or lodestone through it, would it make an electric current? Or would I have to make an offering to Keranos for it to work? How about mashing up charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, putting it in a tube with a lead ball, and lighting it on fire? Fantasy shouldn't preclude technology, in my not at all humble opinion. Also, again turning to the designers, there's a strict boundary between Universes Beyond and in-house story. Jace and Chandra won't be meeting Cloud and Aerith. And I completely agree with this--one of my hard lines is that UB stays its own thing and doesn't interact with in-house. If that happens, I'm done with the story.

3. How do you feel about cards like Black Knight, or Fog, or Exile, or Festival? These are all simple, nonmagical, yet still evocative names from the early days. If every card is as parsimonious as you suggest, then that almost puts a hard cap on the number of unique and interesting effects that can be made. Complexity creep is definitely a concern, but each new ability or effect that gets made, or each ability or effect that gets interpreted in a new way, will bring additional rules along with it. If the keyword creature ability list was locked into something like flying, haste, trample, first strike, deathtouch, and vigilance, and each creature at most two abilities, you can get just 21 cards out of this list. After that each creature gets at most one of these plus a unique ability, and then you're locked into adjusting the P/T stats. Depending on what you're willing to do with unique abilities, you're going to stretch to get even a thousand creatures. That's about Alpha to Visions. Yeah, there's stuff like Questing Beast, Frenzied Baloth, and Magma Opus, but those come out like once every few years. And some people get excited by big splashy piles of words or weird rules edge cases and try to figure out how to maximize them. I'm still proud of finding (and putting off getting judge confirmation for) a way to use Obeka, Brute Chronologist to lock and take over the game. Weird rules interactions are fun places to explore for a lot of people, including me.

And to add my own thought, it really does break my immersion of a huge, potentially infinite multiverse full of potential and discovery, when it turns out everything is some version of swords and castles and looks like Middle Kingdom Egypt or Age of Exploration Mesoamerica or Jidaigeki Japan or some real-world history. Alara is my favorite plane because it avoids that so hard. Sure, there's some western European + Arabian influence in Bant, and some Mesoamerica in Naya, but Grixis and Esper are pure original fantasy with no real-world counterpart, or at least really worked to hide their sources.

Bookrook on Is Anyone Else Concerned with …

3 months ago

Frenzied Baloth is the one card you mentioned that is actually half-decent. Overpowered? Not in a million years. I agree with wallisface about zacama.

wallisface on Is Anyone Else Concerned with …

3 months ago

DemonDragonJ

Frenzied Baloth has a lot of abilities but the vast majority of them are only extremely-situationally relevant. It is not part of the 50 most played creatures in standard, and obviously sees no play in any other formats, so the card can hardly be considered overpowered at all.

9 mana to cast a creature like Zacama, Primal Calamity is extremely steep. In modern most 6-7 cost creatures like Primeval Titan or Griselbrand just win the game immediately. Note also that in practically all formats you wouldn’t ever want to cast a card costing this much mana, because the cost its just too high. This card has the effects you should expect for something costing a whopping 9 mana.

I feel you need to find a way to apply objective metrics to determine a cards power, instead of relying on your own intuition/judgement (which, with all-die respect, seems flawed). Check out card play-rates in formats, for example. Overpowered cards are typically either over-represented in one-or-more formats, or have been banned in one-or-more formats. They’ll often also show up in decks that are just doing “goodstuff” (i.e. decks without any coherent gameplan other than just trying to out-value the opponent).

DemonDragonJ on Is Anyone Else Concerned with …

3 months ago

Bookrook, yes, that is true, but "destroy target creature" would actually be less cruel and insulting, since 100 damage gives a creature a chance, however minuscule, to survive, but outright destruction does not.

wallisface, yes, that is very true, so what about some other recent cards? I personally believe that both Frenzied Baloth and Zacama, Primal Calamity are overpowered, because the baloth simply has too many abilities for its mana cost, and Zacama untaps its controller's lands; if Zacama did not untap lands, then I would agree that it is balanced, but that u8ntap ability makes it too powerful, in my mind (yes, I understand that its controller needs to hard cast it in order for that ability to trigger, but that is a fairly minor drawback, in my mind).