Liege of Elysium (formerly Liege of Tartarus)

[Ephraim]

Liege of Tartarus
{B}{B}
Legendary Creature -- Demon Lord
5/3

Flying
Remove a card in your hand from the game: Return Liege of Tartarus from your graveyard to your hand.
{B}, : You may play a card removed from the game with a card named Liege of Tartarus without paying its mana cost.

***

I came up with this pair of abilities in response to calls for more ideas regarding Nevinyrral, Archlich. Since other ideas are prevailing in that thread, I decided to take them and give them their own card. As I said in that thread, I like the notion that if more than one person is playing with this card, then they can swipe cards removed by their opponents, since the necessary wording for this ability requires that the replay ability looks only for a creature named Liege of Tartarus. If this doesn't seem especially huge it's because I don't want it to end games so quickly that its ability never does anything and I want it to be fragile enough that it will be in the graveyard often enough to make a difference.

[Ephraim]

Current Wording:

Liege of Elysium
{3}{W}{W}{W}
Legendary Creature -- Angel Lord
3/3

Flying
Remove a card in your hand from the game: Return Liege of Elysium from your graveyard to your hand.
{2}{W}{W}, {T}: You may play a card removed from the game with a card named Liege of Elysium without paying its mana cost.

[Machinus]

The first ability seems too powerful. RFG 1 card from hand is pretty cheap to get a beast like this back.

[Ephraim]

It isn't any worse than Necrosavant. That appears to have a cost of {B} associated with it, but it also returns the creature to play. This appears to be free, but returns the creature to your hand, so you have to recast it. I suppose this can be played at any time, rather than just during one's upkeep. On the other hand, I don't consider Necrosavant to be a particularly good card.

[Matt]

Should be a 3/3 to keep it from killing too fast.

[Ephraim]

I'm actually thinking of changing this into a white creature (flavour overhaul, but otherwise, just change all to .) I realized that this ability is not red or green, but could be black, white, or blue. That said, I'd like to give it to white since black and blue tend to get all of the neat goodies. My first thought was to make it an angel, but if you think that it needs to be a 3/3, then it's too small to be an angel, right? As a legendary creature with an immortality ability and a powerful spellcasting ability, would it be an appropriate exception? The new name I was thinking of was "Liege of Elysium."

[Machinus]

Make it a phoenix and play with the tap ability, and it could be red.

[Godder]

Angels can be 3/3, especially if they have a powerful ability.

Edit: Blinding Angel, for example, is a 2/4 with a powerful ability.

[Ephraim]

This has been around long enough for me to start a clock on it, but there hasn't really been any discussion about the abilities.

[Anusien]

I'm not sure the rules work.  I'd think that every time you put it into your hand, play or graveyard it would lose track of all cards associated with it.  Specifically, the game rules don't remember that the graveyard Liege is the same Liege that the one in play had a card removed to.

[Ephraim]

You don't think that the game rules remember even that the cards were removed by a card named Liege of Elysium? I was pretty sure that they retain enough memory for that.

[Jacob Orlove]

As long as it merely specifies that they were removed by a card with the same name (as in the current wording), you're fine.

[Anusien]

I missed the "with a card named".  Under the rules, that will work, although I wonder what the war would be like with one of these on both sides of the table (obviously not at the same time - they're Legendary).  With the card worded that way, you can play cards your opponent removed.

I like it, by the way.

[Bram]

Closed and added.