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« on: December 23, 2014, 05:40:25 PM »
This...has been gone over before, btw. But the gist of it is: Invisible Stalker is a bad creature. It's not a *horrible* creature, such as the Psylocke, but it is bad. I provide a summary of the reasons below. Each individual reason can be countered with a yeah-but; it's all of them together that add up to why I will currently never, ever play a Stalker.
1) The Stalker costs 15 mana to cast, and 5 spellbook points.
2) It has an upkeep cost of 1 mana per turn.
3) It is both nonliving and incorporeal, so almost all buffs are useless to it, it cannot be healed, and it has the zero armour and low health typical of Ethereal creatures.
4) There are multiple reasonably convenient sources of ethereal damage that are perfectly viable for non-incorporeal uses (such as Mage Staff and various attack spells).
5) Invisible can be gotten around via ethereal and zone-attack spells.
6) While Invisible, it does not Hinder--but it is still Hindered by Druid Vine tokens.
7) You can just ignore the Stalker; since it is so expensive for the benefits it provides, concentrate on winning the damage race instead.
Now, to repeat: each and every one of these points have their counter-arguments. The problem is that when taken altogether, they add up to a rather poorly designed, overcosted creature.
However. It is also worth noting that the Invisible Stalker was a part of AW's very first expansion for Mage Wars. In my opinion, AW has vastly improved the quality of their expansions since CoK, and FM vs WL was still pretty good overall.
My point is, don't lose track of the fact that inherently weak cards like the Stalker are by far the exception, rather than the rule.