#horsemanship
I don’t have any cohesive thoughts on this but the convo today on @markrosewater‘s blog today about flying and replacing/adding another major form of evasion has me thinking about like, for instance, if horsemanship just got used about as much as flying in every set
some of the stuff floating in my head is…
1. maybe this gives a sixth color some space to play in (which is basically another non-starter so this is all definitely just sky castles and hypotheticals). this is the least substantive thought on it but I just wanted to toss it out there
2. being parasitic is a problem so I’d errata it (assuming you used horsemanship and didn’t make up a new evasion mechanic altogether), like it can’t be blocked except by other creatures with horsemanship or creatures with haste (the flavor being they’re fast enough to intercept the horses though it could be a different evergreen keyword if that made more sense/played better)
3. no matter what you do, even if it wasn’t a matter of trying to squeeze in a sixth color into boosters designed for five, you are talking about matching or getting close to matching flying numbers in a set and that’s gonna dramatically warp design, especially limited. that’s something you just have to accept if you were gonna do this, but it is a significant design challenge the game would have to adjust to (mitigated in part by building in like haste blocking to the keyword)
4. this would address the “it’s basically just unblockable” issue over time if it shows up in every set. so then the question is what color gets it. blue doesn’t need more evasion, nor do red or black I think. that leaves green and/or white. white is second in flying, so despite the flavor making sense I’d probably lean toward it being primary green. maybe secondary white (again, assuming it isn’t primary sixth color)
5. actually maybe you call the new mechanic like “mounted” or something, though I do wonder how much that means creative wouldn’t want to make/depict art of creatures that are obviously mounted but wouldn’t have this mechanic. the flip side is I don’t think you want horsemanship since it implies, you know, the art should show someone on a horse, which is even more limiting
anyway that’s what’s been on my mind today but it’s all just kind of adjacent to the conversation on that blog and none of it seemed to quite fit as an addition to any questions Maro has answered so far
in all fairness, horses arent all that fragile. they’re a bit like tempered glass; they can take a good beating, but once they break they really break and your left wondering how the hell it broke so dramatically because you’ve seen it get smacked around a lot harder and not break
Arya Stark Appreciation Month
Day 19 - Intelligence, Skills, and Learning