Vanilla Goodness...

[endersdouble]

Oops, my bad.  Swore I looked through the thread and didn't see it...

[Norm4eva]

The tenor of this discussion leads me to think that the general consensus is, it's practically inappropriate for White to have small vanilla creatures.  Everyone wants it to gain circumstansial double strike, or for it to earn power/toughness bonuses based on whether or not it's attacking or blocking.
Now we all know that Magic just established a benchmark for the 3/3 @ 2cc to be WG.  A quick Gatherer search reveals that the biggest White weenie printed for W is Tethered Griffin (2/3 flyer with significant drawback) while the biggest weenie printed for WW is a 2/2 with no drawback.  Interestingly enough, we often bitch about the 2/2 for WW slot being overfull but that's not actually the case; Gatherer suggests a mere 16 creatures over the last decade of Magic have actually made that slot, and the prevailing ability is tied between first strike (White Knight, Silver Knight, Longbow Archer) and vigilance (Steadfast Guard, Alaborn Grenadier and Veteran Cavalier).  Save the new Wolf card, no 3/3 below 3cc is without drawback until you start looking at Noble Panther and Ebony Treefolk.  Is  the whole concept just flawed, then?  No good way to give a white creature 3 power at WW?

[Matt]

There's that 1/1 guy who gets bigger if you have a Bird.

[Jacob Orlove]

You could always do:

Random Dude
WW
1/1
~This~ has +X/+X, where X is the number of untapped Plains you control.

[silvernail]

he'd be insane i think as a +x+x guy and that ability feels green to me. what about +x+0 when attacking and +0+x when blocking = number of creatures attakcing/blocking. that is somewhat red but also pretty white.

[Ephraim]

The tenor of this discussion leads me to think that the general consensus is, it's practically inappropriate for White to have small vanilla creatures. �Everyone wants it to gain circumstansial double strike, or for it to earn power/toughness bonuses based on whether or not it's attacking or blocking.

I don't object to white having small, vanilla creatures. It has been decided, however, that the CCF will typically not produce vanilla creatures. This card was a good example of an exception, since being unusually inexpensive for its numbers made this creature much more than Trained Armodon. Unfortunately, there are only so many permutations of numbers for which this model works, so it limits the number of vanilla creatures we can create.

[jcb193]

I know white rarely has drawbacks, but maybe this one could have: "for every other creature that attacks, ______ gets -1/-1.  Or something like that.  Or even make him a 4/4 and he gets a -1/-1 counter every turn.