Yesterday, I said Wizards of the Coast had saved up some of the very best Magic: The Gathering cards from Avatar until the end of spoiler season, and it looks like I was right.
I was very taken with yesterday's big card, Zhao the Moonslayer, but Koh, the Face Stealer is - at least from a mechanical standpoint - even cooler. It's certainly one of the best Mythic Rare cards we've seen in this entire MTG set, and a great card for fans who like mindbending interactions and combos that cause your entire LGS to crack open Magic: The Gathering's comprehensive ruleset.
This horrifying centipede-like spirit is one of the creepiest creatures in any cartoon. It can steal people's faces and swap between them in the blink of an eye - literally! Its face is in the giant eye socket on the center of its head, and it blinks to change forms between those it has taken.
That's represented in Magic by the ability to exile cards as they die, then gain all of their activated or triggered abilities. Koh can only have the abilities of one creature at a time, but it can swap between those abilities at instant speed. You don't even have to pay mana for this effect, just a single point of life.
This is such cool card design, and I'm kind of amazed that there's still interesting new ways for Magic to play around with copy effects. It's not hard to dream up all kinds of shenanigans with this card. For instance, you could cycle back and forth between Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose and Bloodthirsty Conqueror for infinite life loss.
It's a real brewer's paradise. The only trouble is, it's also extremely confusing. Take Eater of the Dead. This could be a really useful way to get some more strong abilities onto Koh. It's much easier to exile stuff from player's graveyards than killing them on the battlefield, so what if you exiled Eater of the Dead, gave Koh its ability, then started snuffling up useful cards from the graveyard?
This seems great, but unfortunately it doesn't work, thanks to rule 607.2a:
"If an object has an activated or triggered ability printed on it that instructs a player to exile one or more cards and an ability printed on it that refers either to "the exiled cards" or to cards "exiled with [this object]," these abilities are linked. The second ability refers only to cards in the exile zone that were put there as a result of an instruction to exile them in the first ability."
Rats. It could still be worth using Eater of the Dead with this card though, as a simple way to keep untapping Koh. Then you just swap to something like Heartless Hidetsugu to keep blasting your foes. But you can't use it to steal new faces.
You can also use Koh to get around 'once per turn' restrictions on abilities like Vivi Ornitier by swapping to another creature and then swapping back. Or at least, you might be able to. We're going to need to wait for Wizards of the Coast's clarification on this one, I think, because it doesn't seem like there's a clear-cut answer, even in the rulebook.
See, existing Vivi combos like the one with Quicksilver Elemental depend on you getting multiple copies of the same 'once per turn' ability. Here, that's very nearly what is happening. The question is - does swapping back to the same creature with Koh and giving it the abilities again count as a new instance of that ability, or the same one?
We're not sure, but you can come share your view on this with us over at the Wargamer Discord! Come on, 'Um actually' me. You know you want to!