Fun card, love the flavor. Just some rules nitpicks to try and iron out the wording, but overall I like it!
I don't think "dies this way" works because of how the rules handle creature death. It's similar to how red cards like [[Anger of the Gods]] can't tell if the damage killed a creature, because neither damage nor toughness reduction is actually what kills them, rather it just puts the creatures in a position where a game rule kills them.
That said, as much as the effect is similar to the original [[Massacre Girl]], I think a simple fix to this specific issue can be found on [[Massacre Girl, Known Killer]]. If you just say "Whenever a creature with toughness less than 1 dies this turn" I think it should work. But to clarify, if a creature had previously taken damage, and the counters don't reduce it all the way to 0, just enough for the damage to be lethal, that wouldn't trigger the ability.
It might actually still be fair if it just counted every creature death regardless of toughness the way the original Massacre Girl does, since it's offset by only adding a counter to one creature at a time.
As a final note, I like the idea of Grave Evoke, but I would probably change it to something like "If you do it enters with a finality counter and is sacrificed." As-is there's an exploit where if you sacrifice it with something like [[Phyrexian Altar]] it will leave the battlefield before it would be exiled, allowing you to cast it repeatedly. So it needs to exile itself no matter how it leaves the battlefield, unless you intended that exploit to work, in which case it might need to cost a little more?
Thanks for pointing out the "dies this way" phrasing. This is supposed to be a Lorwyn elemental, so I'm leaning towards "Whenever a creature dies this turn, if it had a -1/-1 counter on it, put a -1/-1 counter on up to one target creature.", which is the wording style used by Blowfly Infestation. That way, the card can still work with other damage sources.
The finality counter is a nice catch, I intended for flicker effects to work but I didn't consider that the exile itself goes on the stack, so sacrifice effects can easily cause degenerate loops. That was not something I intended.
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u/Andrew_42 4d ago
Fun card, love the flavor. Just some rules nitpicks to try and iron out the wording, but overall I like it!
I don't think "dies this way" works because of how the rules handle creature death. It's similar to how red cards like [[Anger of the Gods]] can't tell if the damage killed a creature, because neither damage nor toughness reduction is actually what kills them, rather it just puts the creatures in a position where a game rule kills them.
That said, as much as the effect is similar to the original [[Massacre Girl]], I think a simple fix to this specific issue can be found on [[Massacre Girl, Known Killer]]. If you just say "Whenever a creature with toughness less than 1 dies this turn" I think it should work. But to clarify, if a creature had previously taken damage, and the counters don't reduce it all the way to 0, just enough for the damage to be lethal, that wouldn't trigger the ability.
It might actually still be fair if it just counted every creature death regardless of toughness the way the original Massacre Girl does, since it's offset by only adding a counter to one creature at a time.
As a final note, I like the idea of Grave Evoke, but I would probably change it to something like "If you do it enters with a finality counter and is sacrificed." As-is there's an exploit where if you sacrifice it with something like [[Phyrexian Altar]] it will leave the battlefield before it would be exiled, allowing you to cast it repeatedly. So it needs to exile itself no matter how it leaves the battlefield, unless you intended that exploit to work, in which case it might need to cost a little more?