#I feel like we've seen one get split in half and both halves still be usable so that suggests two

[inventors-fair]

The Number After Zero: The Origin Runners-Up

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Our runners-up this week are @izzet-always-r-versus-u, @reaperfromtheabyss, and @sombramainexe!

@izzet-always-r-versus-u — Indulgence

We've certainly come a long way since the days of Maro, haven't we? There's been plenty of variations on the effect over the years, but few quite this weird. It's so inherently paradoxical, in fact, that I wouldn't have batted an eye if you had just made this a Weird! But I digress. This fella's got a bone to pick with all things Reliquary Tower, and stubbornly insists you keep your hand reasonably sized at all times. In fact, it revels in an empty hand, which is normally the bane of any Maro. I wouldn't really be able to judge without actually playing it, but it's hard to tell how often you'll be happy to get the draw three rather than just keeping a large hand and therefore a large creature. Maybe just swing early when you still have cards, and let it naturally shrink as you burn through resources? Again, I really don't know, but these are the kind of questions that make me like the card more. The big problem, though...I'm not entirely sure I see the black here? The Maro effect has rather decisively shifted to blue, and both the draw on an empty hand and discarding your hand as a punishment both feel pretty squarely red. Not a huge issue, though, so take it under advisement.

@reaperfromtheabyss — Phantasmal Panther

Hey, remember fading? Well, you clearly do, but I can't imagine many other people would. This fits right in with the rest of the Phantasmal illusions, although it goes about expressing ephemerality in in a very different way than its predecessors. More than that, we've seen a similar concept for creatures before, but usually the creature starts out above-rate and shrivels over time. Not so here, and in fact it's at its strongest right before it's gone. It's weird, but in a way that just makes sense in a way I really can't explain. Just a cool concept, well executed. Although, as much as I love the gumption to bring back fading, part of me thinks that it would be better off with vanishing and requiring one or fewer time counters to be active. That way, some clever counter manipulation could allow you to keep it in its empowered state over multiple turns, rather than being hard locked to a single turn of power. It wouldn't exactly be valid for the contest in that case, but food for thought.

@sombramainexe — Thick // Thin

Oh, this is just adorable! I just want to pinch this card's cheeks, it's such a darling. Shrinking toughness is already a tried-and-true part of black's arsenal, so this feels like such a natural variant. It's hilarious, too, the idea of just slashing the number down to a big ol' goose egg and watching the creature abruptly cease to be. Indestructible who? Could maybe use some reminder text to spell out exactly what it's doing to the target, though, because it might not be obvious to some. Thick makes for a good companion piece, as well. A pure toughness increase feels a bit out of place in green, but doing it by way of doubling feels like the most reasonable of doing it. Great name, too, and one that I'm actually kind of surprised they haven't used on a split card yet. On that subject, though, I'm not sure I like this as a Fuse card. It runs into the issue that one half is mostly reactive while the other is mostly proactive, so you wouldn't want to cast the halves together much. Like, I could see maybe protecting a creature with Thick and throwing in a Thin to remove something threating, or casting Thick to remove an attacker and using Thin to shore up a blocker while you're at it, but that's not a spectacularly long list.

I'm hard at work penning the rest of the commentary, which hopefully won't take too much longer.

@spooky-bard