This card seems like one of the strongest hate bears ever…
Even helps in a UR deck so that your counters are uncounterable!
Yet another subtype with no support to dilute the spellslinger concept. At least Warlocks got batched into Outlaws so it got a tiny bit of support. Also sorcerer might be too linguistically similar to Sorcery but that one is probably just me speculating a bit too hard.
This is an absolutely insane card and just kind of obliterates a whole archetype. No clue what they’re thinking with this but I think this will push Jeskai control out of standard entirely and possibly cause a huge impact on Legacy and Vintage. Shutting off countermagic 1-way like this is just crazy strong to me.
What does ward do?
If the card is targeted by a spell or ability, it gets countered unless the other player pays the ward cost (MTG Wiki).
If I tried to Shock your Hexing Squelcher, for instance, I’d have to pay 2 life or else the Shock would get countered.
Notably, because the ward ability counters spells, you can just decline to pay ward costs if your spells can’t be countered (like maybe you control your own Hexing Squelcher).
Ok, well at least for a cost is kinda easy to pay.
Not super easy, actually. It gives your other creatures that ward as well, so losing 10% of your life every time you target something against a red deck adds up.
Nowhere to run is legal though, so hopefully that can counter it if it becomes a problem.
But this is going to be targeted immediately. Best case scenario, you end equal in cards and lose just 2 lifes to it. If the cost were mana, the tempo would make it harder to remove.
“Opponent discards a card and loses 2 life” for 1R is not horrible. No idea if burn is anywhere near the meta but if it is this is gonna be in there.
Worst case, against a deck with no counters and no creature interaction it’s a bear that you can side out game 2.
Alt art:

I guess this is just a strictly better Vexing Shusher? I feel like that card was already good enough, it didn’t need a better one with Ward and no need to keep mana up
So I noticed this one isn’t legendary as well… Should you have 4 or god knows how many copies out, does the Ward effect stack per spell or creature?
Yeah each one of these gives the ability, so if you have 2 in play then all other creatures have essentially
ward: pay 4 life(it’s 2 triggered abilities of 2 life each though).Oh no lol… the tokens… Thanks for letting me know~





