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It's high time "Elusive" becomes an actual keyword
Happy Feast of Winter Veil, everyone!
For those who don't know about "Elusive", I'm talking about the "Cannot be targeted by spells and Hero Powers" effect. I mean, this already has its own visual effect on minions, and Blizzard has started to play around it in KnC with cards like [[Kobold Monk]] and [[Shimmering Courser]].
If I recall correctly, Ben Brode once stated it could become a thing if enough minions use it in the future. I think this expansion (or the next) is the right time, or else it will lead to more and more complicated card texts.
For instance, Shimmering Courser actually just "has Elusive during your opponent's turn". It would also give room for effects such as "Destroy all Elusive minions" or gaining this ability upon certain conditions like Nesting Roc does for Taunt. Or even creating Elusive tokens.
What do you think?
Iksar
We've talked about this before but opted to spell it out. A keyword is essentially something we ask you to read and understand, so in the future you can look at a card and quickly understand what it does without having to parse through a bunch of text. Sometimes when we can use the right word, you already have a pretty good idea of what a keyword does without reading the description. Divine Shield does a pretty good job of this. People on the team have different opinions on this subject, but one of the reasons not to keyword it is that there isn't a great word for 'can't be targeted by spells or hero powers' that would clue you in to what it does. It's sort of a strange concept to begin with that something can be targeted by a battlecry or an attack but not by a spell. When we used something like 'elusive' or 'ethereal' or various other words I think it ended up being more misleading rather than increasing the ability to understand it quickly, which is counter to the point of making a keyword in the first place. Lastly, this isn't a concept we plan on using on many cards in the future. It's cool to have one-offs like Shimmering Courser or Soggoth but having too many of these types of minions greatly decreases your ability to interact with your opponent.
Iksar
We often state, then restate, then restate this again.... but trying to keep the game easy to pick up and grasp does not also equal a belief that the playerbase lacks intelligence. It's very rare that one particular thing is so complicated that no one will understand it, it's more that in order to protect against a death by a thousand cuts we have to stay vigilant when accessing all decisions (no matter how minor) to make sure that by adding an increase in complexity we are getting something valuable in return.
Iksar
Cheers :).