Uhmas the Despoiler

[serialjester]

For a long time I've thought that the City of Brass/Painland trait should exist on a creature.  The card below more than likely would be printed in red if it were made today, and the life loss changed to damage but I am a fan of the particular flavour of this card, and of black cards in general thus the design. I am also working on the structure of dark gods/evil demons that this guy would be a devotee of, so I made sure to reference his aim in the flavour text.

So, here it is:

Uhmas the Despoiler
1B
Legendary Creature-Cleric
1/2

Whenever a land is tapped for mana, that lands controller loses 1 life.

"I will not rest until the entire world speaks, breathes and bleeds the poison of my masters."

[stolen]

What this is is Manabarbs on a stick.

However, I do like it.  It's like that CHK red legend that has Ankh of Mishra's ability.  Perhaps the cost should be upped a little.
Maybe a 2/1 for {B}?  Or a 2/2 for {B}?

[Jacob Orlove]

Manabarbs is a red ability, and damage is a lot fairer than life loss.

This is definitely waaaaaay too cheap.

[serialjester]

Manabarbs is a red ability, and damage is a lot fairer than life loss.

This is definitely waaaaaay too cheap.

I had thought that the legendary supertype would offset the cost, he is cheap enough to get into play early enough for it to matter against control, against aggro he'd probably not matter or be removed, and against combo he'd only be good against something like Deathlong which is paying tons of life in order to win. I could see a cost of 1BB, but anything more than that makes the card nearly unplayable unless the legendary supertype was removed. 2BB for the same card sans legendary supertype would be fine.

I don't want it to be a beatstick, I want it to be something which can slip under counters, punish control and place an even greater premium on artifact mana, and give black a creature it can actually run. Thanks to Onslaught and Mirrodin block the black creaturebase is dumpster worthy, the colour has been relegated to discard and tutor effects with the occasional creature removal spell. That pretty much sucks.

[Jacob Orlove]

Keep in mind that we would like our cards to be balanced for formats like T2 and limited, not just T1. This would be far too good in T2, for example.