Costing a White Plague Wind

[zimagic]

I'm discussing the following card with some friends at the moment and we can't decide on the appropriate cost. It's essentially a Plague Wind but in white. We all want to keep the CC exclusively in white mana so no  unless we can avoid it.

This is where we started from:

Wrath of Our God
 
Sorcery
Destroy all creatures you don't control. They can't be regenerated.

We accept that this is probably very aggressively costed and would equate to WOGs 4-8 in a lot of heavy white, creature lite decks. How far up does the cost need to go so that it's playable but not off the scale in the current Limited, Standard and Extended enviornments?

Thanks

[asi]

Why not ? I think with triple white, it's extremely hard to splash. 4 white mana means that even mono-white decks packing cards such as Wasteland, Port, Mouth of Ronom etc. have problems playing this. It also makes colourless mana accelerators really bad in conjunction with that card, which I don't like. I want to be able to play Minstone in my mono white deck, and it should accelerate every card in the deck.

[Matt]

Making it cost ONLY white means it pretty much can ONLY be played in one kind of deck, making it extremely narrow. At WWWWW (five white), it's so hard to use that even though it's massively undercosted compared to the fair Plague Wind (nine mana), it would actually be more useless.

[Titanium Dragon]

I think the biggest problem with this is that the card simply isn't white. White has mass removal through its "balancing things" aspect; Wrath of God "balances" the creatures both players have the same way Armageddon "balances" the lands both players have. Plague Wind really isn't a white effect.

[Norm4eva]

It's not that the spirit of Plague Wind isn't White but this execution isn't.
Example; the handful of effects that have the potential to destroy all creatures with power/cmc 4 or greater, or 3 or less; build your deck around Solar Tide and it's a veritable Plague Wind for 4WW.  This works, IMO, not because of the whole "balancing" thing but rather because of White's affiliation with law and order, thus being able to say "Henceforth, creatures with converted mana cost 4 or more are ILLEGAL, CLOWN" is within White's prevue.

[zimagic]

It's not that the spirit of Plague Wind isn't White but this execution isn't.
Example; the handful of effects that have the potential to destroy all creatures with power/cmc 4 or greater, or 3 or less; build your deck around Solar Tide and it's a veritable Plague Wind for 4WW.  This works, IMO, not because of the whole "balancing" thing but rather because of White's affiliation with law and order, thus being able to say "Henceforth, creatures with converted mana cost 4 or more are ILLEGAL, CLOWN" is within White's prevue.

Problem with that approach is that we already have Austere Command that does that for 
"Choose two - Destroy all artifacts; or destroy all enchantments; or destroy all creatures with converted mana cost 3 or less; or destroy all creatures with converted mana cost 4 or greater."

Essentially what you're saying is that regardless of cost the original ability won't work in the colour pie. That's not fun.

I'm going to work on a "tapped creatures" WoG in a Vengeance style hoser as an alternative. Either that or a creature-based Balance.

[Anusien]

What about an Instant speed Wrath that destroys only attacking creatures?  I can see that being too close to Wing Shards, but I'd push you to look in that direction. Or "Each player chooses a color.  Destroy all creatures of the chosen colors."

[zimagic]

What about an Instant speed Wrath that destroys only attacking creatures?  I can see that being too close to Wing Shards, but I'd push you to look in that direction. Or "Each player chooses a color.  Destroy all creatures of the chosen colors."

I like it. That's still a good effect for a blanket one sided WOG effect. How would you cost it? 2WW like a WOG? That's good, especially in the current creature based standard enviornment.

[zimagic]

So, over christmas we got to playing with our White Plague Wind and discussing it's implications and flavour.

Essentially what's being looked for here is a way for your creatures to trump your opponents and destroying them was seen as the simplest way of doing this. The suggestions on the forum here were brought up and we started looking for an alternative.

While playing a cube draft, someone played a Humility which immediatly suggested the following:

White Humility Wind
 
Sorcery
Destroy all creatures you don't control. Each player puts a 1/1 Citizen creature into play for each creature they controlled that was destroyed in this way.

As a flavourful-acceptable alternative to sweeping the board, would a one sided Humility effect be acceptable at this cost?

[Matt]

It's pretty strong - a mass Afterlife or Crib Swap for only one more mana. But is it TOO strong? I don't think so.

It's probably not too strong for constructed. It would be a power card for sure, but it clearly has no actual degeneracy potential the way a new Ritual or Ancestral might. It would be a $20 Standard or Block card immediately, but probably never be played as more than a 1- or 2-of in Extended or Legacy, and obviously weak or useless for Vintage.

It's ludicrously strong in draft but making it a rare fixes that. I don't think I would ever pick it over Jitte, Clamp, Masticore, or Phyrexian Processor, which are all at the upper limit of how good a rare card can be in draft. But I WOULD pick it over a Wrath or similar effect. Honestly, to make it acceptable in limited I would probably be sure to include some good common uses for those leftover tokens - maybe the set has some equipment in it, or Attrition-style cards, stuff that cues off the number and not quality of your creatures, etc etc etc.

If you wanted to weaken it slightly, you could have it target each creature individually (giving Shroud as a way out) or make it destroy only the creature target player controls (making True Believer effects stop it, and also drastically reducing its effectiveness in multiplayer).

[Anusien]

I'm not even sure it would be a $20 Standard or Block card.  Damnation is arguably much better and only hit $15.  I'm comfortable with that version too.