I have asked Maro if Psychatog could ever see a reprint in standard. His response is "I'm not a developer, but I believe it's too strong." Well, you're a developer. So what gives? Is he too strong, or was it the other cards available that broke him?

In my opinion, from a pure power-level standpoint I think we could do Pyschatog in standard. It’s at least close enough that we could test it in our FFL. It would have to make sense in the context of the set and environment. So my answer is “not too strong to test”.

Putting on my developer hat for a moment for the sake of discussion:

Psychatog has a couple things about it that we’d want to be careful about. We always have to be mindful of activated abilities that don’t cost mana. In some cases they can cause fast combo kills or even infinite loops. And they can also make board states harder for some players to process (when “tapped out” isn’t a full “shields down” moment). That’s generally fine in small doses, but it’s easy to go overboard and end up with very “chess-like” board states which can be paralyzing for less-experienced players.

Second, a lot of the strength of Psychatog is that you can’t attack me because I could use this ability, therefore you don’t attack me and I don’t have to use the ability. We like when cards that convert resources into an advantage actually make you spend the resource, not just threaten to. That way, the game is more likely to progress forward rather than remain a stalemate.

Lastly, Psychatog has a lot of potential for synergy, so if we had mechanics that work with it in the format (like madness) we’d need to balance those things around each other. Which is fine, but if we found that having Psychatog would make us have to nerf a whole bunch of other cards, we’d usually rather spread the power around.

None of those things mean we can’t or wouldn’t do it, I’m just trying to give some insight into the things we think about when considering it.

-Ian