Typing "Legends" into expansion in advanced search ... check.
Aaand Abomination.
I have a soft spot for Abomination. It was still easy enough to get when I started playing in Revised, and it became a staple meta card once Fourth Edition rolled around. It had a huge ass, it took down green ground pounders, and it was easy to get. Home run for the 15-year-olds.
Today, I still have a twinge of love for it, and not just for nostalgia. The card "feels" right in ways that many modern cards don't -- it hearkens back to a time when cards could coast almost entirely on flavor, and when the colors were less defined by what they did mechanically and more by what they ought to be able to do in a story. Abomination's a star in that second department. It's got a mind-bending portrait of horror and it's the enemy of all that's right, pure and natural in the world. It actually fills the niche of the modern Biblical abomination -- something so loathsome that it literally offends God himself.
All that being said -- Jiminy Cricket, this card's one hot mess. Mechanically, it's all over the place; it's overpriced for defense, but it's got a power and toughness of a wall. ... It's got the power and toughness of a wall, in black. There are a few cards that I'll give a pass to on that particular offense, like Cemetery Gate; this isn't one. The ability sets up a delayed trigger that kills the blocking or blocked creature at the end of combat. Delayed triggers are one of the worst things in Magic, and slapping it on something routine like blocking is just needless complication. The delayed trigger also undermines the creature's power and toughness; any x/2s it would block will die anyway, but they'll get their damage in. It's an awkward card no matter how you slice it.
There's a temptation to make this guy a sleek attacker, but I think that's the wrong tack. See, the Abomination is supposed to be this damning, daunting presence, stymieing the plans of the good. In that sense, he should be a wall-like presence. He's there to ward off the forces of good, picking them off one by one if they dare assault his lair; only when the time is right, when he's worn them down, will he lumber forth to battle his foes. The flavor and mechanical problem is twofold: getting a discount on big toughness isn't in black's color pie; and making the card cheap enough to make it relevant on defense without being too good on offense implies low power and high toughness.
Without totally redesigning the card -- and with art and a name that are so cool, it's a shame that we won't -- there's two paths to take.
In both cases, we've corrected that horrible delayed trigger. I didn't opt to go with "When ~ blocks or becomes blocked by a green or white creature, it gains deathtouch until end of turn" because I didn't want it killing red or black or blue dudes, and I didn't want to mess with layers.
The version on the left keeps the mana cost intact, but gives it a beefier front end. With the new wording, the toughness is far less relevant -- any unfortunate green or white guys will die before hurting Abomination with this new template -- and the new, four-power teeth are far more black than those on a 2/6. (Without a damn good reason, a 2/6 should only be showing up on white cards.)
The version on the right is probably more powerful (not that it's exactly earth-shaking). It comes down earlier and deals with many problematic creatures, and it's a limited-playable dork that gets in for 2 when its job on defense is done -- and maybe slides through white and green barriers on your opponent's side. It could even see play in constructed given the right Standard environment. (That's true for all cards, I suppose, but we're talking feasible Standard environments.) The reason he's a 2/3 rather than a 3/3? Black rarely gets dorks that efficient, and the 2/3 honors the flavor of the original better than 3/3 does. (Why 4/4 on the first, you ask? It's because there's a certain cutoff where big is big. In my opinion, that cutoff is around 4/4 -- that's about the time you're talking about real threats, possibly game-enders. A 4/4 trades with most creatures in Magic and lives to tell the tale. In other words, you don't need to bump up a 4/4's toughness to show that it's a hard-to-kill menace.)
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