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« on: April 11, 2019, 08:10:57 AM »
I've just watched the card reveal video (good job, guys! Everyone else, go watch it!) and was about to post about this card as well.
I've reached a different conclusion, keejchen.
My reading is that if this creature (The Embalmed) is made into an Eternal Servant, then it is the vanilla 'The Embalmed' card that is reanimated following destruction, and each time it is so reanimated it needs to take a fresh discarded creature to copy. That is, the first copied creature is not a permanent form.
I base this conclusion on the interaction of the following three excerpts of rules:
1) The 'The Embalmed' card says: "When Summoning The Embalmed, remove a non-Epic living creature from any discard pile from the game. This creature [The Embalmed] becomes a copy of the removed creature, gaining The Embalmed's traits and subtypes."
2) Eternal Servant says "should the servant be destroyed, the Necromancer may Reanimate it"
3) Reanimate says: "at the end of the round the creature is Summoned into play."
So if Reanimate Summons a creature into play, and if the 'The Embalmed' has to copy a discarded creature each time it is Summoned, then each Eternal Servant use has to utilise a fresh body from a discard pile, and the Necromancer needs to pay 2+the casting cost of the dead creature as the casting cost of the Eternal Servant.
To use keejchen's example:
The 'The Embalmed' comes into play. The Necromancer chooses to have it copy a dead Feral Bobcat, spending (2+5=) 7 mana to do so, and makes it his Eternal Servant. Later in the game the 'The Embalmed' is destroyed. The Necromancer chooses to bring his Eternal Servant back, reanimating 'The Embalmed'. At the end of the round the 'The Embalmed' is Summoned back to the arena. Part of this Summoning process requires the removal from the game of a discarded living creature, so the Necromancer looks through his opponent's discard pile and finds a Timber Wolf he killed earlier. He decides that his newly Summoned 'The Embalmed' will take the form of that Timber Wolf, so he pays the casting cost of the 'The Embalmed', which in this case is (2+9=) 11 mana. His Eternal Servant now functions as a Timber Wolf with Undead and Mummy traits.
Confused?
If so, perhaps it might be appropriate to think of 'The Embalmed' as some form of spirit that animates corpses, rather than as a physically chemically treated corpse.
TL/DR: Each time an Eternal Servant is brought back into play it is a fresh Summoning, and every time the The Embalmed is Summoned, it needs to take the form of a dead creature from a discard pile. It cannot be the same creature it copied in its initial summons, since that creature is removed from the game and is no longer in a discard pile.