3. Lab Man Cool card, very understandable why you would think of it. But it puts sweeping, uninteresting, and nonobvious chilling effects on what kinds of cards you can print. Any one of those adjectives alone would make a card a disaster. Thassa's Oracle more obviously should not have been made, but it doesn't carry the stench of the original sin, and at least it made Doomsday playable :P
2. Rain of Gore If you do not know what this card does, look it up. How do you think this card works with the ability lifelink. Would you believe that it does not work, because of an argument that sounds completely fake to anyone who isn't like me and loves rules more than life itself? I love this card dearly. It was so easy to fix her.
1. Laughing Hyena This may seem wild but hear me out.
Gotcha is the worst mechanic in Magic on account of the combination of "miserable" and "obviously should not have been printed". You don't need to be a game designer to figure out that disincentivizing out-of-game conversation is not good, and it would take zealous adherence to the belief that the ideal spherical Timmy exists to argue your way out of that hole. Even if you don't like the play patterns of storm, you have to admit that it does good things for the world. It's more grokkable than a deck like Tight Sight (which I love, but has to exist in moderation) and the chilling effects it provides (stuff like making an egg with "T: Return ~ to your hand" unprintable) are undeniably good for the game.
Gotcha is not this. It is undeniable that Gotcha is the problem, and it makes the game around it worse. The endpoint of whining "games are about fuuuun not rules!!!" every time you meet a player that cares about rules is this: printing a card that punishes your opponent for laughing. Like, I understand that you are also trying to make your opponent laugh, that's the redeeming idea behind this card, but trying to break into the paragame with a crowbar is just going to cause people to shut down, competitive or not. To me this card is a microcosm of how unsets assume neuronormative ideas of fun, play, humor, et cetera, and how it ruins them.
More than anything I think this card is unprincipled. There are lots of bad designs, there are lots of designs that follow from bad principles, and then there's this, which is hard to justify from any design philosophy I can think of other than "We're breaking rules in the Unsets, let's go all out". Hell, I am vehemently against MaRo's player psychographics theory, but even that sputtering junker of a worldview gets you across the finish line here.
Maybe I'm being unfair to this card. Maybe this card-- which at least triggers off an involuntary behavior rather than a voluntary one-- is a better use of Gotcha than Creature Guy. But what puts the Hyena over the top, to me, is that tries so brazenly to steal the paragame from the players. It tries to encompass the entirety of the play in the game that Wizards knows how to create-- and out of the other corner of its mouth, suggests that it is a deviation from the world of stuck-up rules lawyers and frowns. Absolutely not. To you, Laughing Hyena, death is too good; I toss you in the fire and laugh until my voice grows hoarse, bringing you back, watching you cease to exist again and again.
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