Isn't Egg a poison condition?
The thing that bothers me about poison conditions is that icthelid larva are a poison condition.
Sure is. Tried to imply in a previous post that I dislike that classification. I admit 100% that the larva screw up the theme of that idea. The larva aren't so good that I think it would be game breaking to spread the tokens, however. Max cap at 4, and you have to kill creatures to get any real use of the marker.
People keep saying they don't think Ichtalids would be that good. I don't know, I've played them and they worked great for me several times. Their big weakness is that they're useless against nonliving, but I've found that what they can do, they do well.
Three free Bugs would be very good, and remember that while you're capped at 4 in play simultaneously, you can always bring back bugs from the discard pile as well as the spellbook. That can easily be more than 4 over the course of the game.
The big thing Bugs do is they offset the long term action disadvantage of using attack spells to kill creatures. If you put a larva on an opponents creature, then kill it with Force Hammer (or Fireball, or Drain Soul or whatever ) you've gained tempo by using a quick action to take out a full action, which means that your opponent (hopefully) lost a move action, and while your attack spell probably cost as much as your opponent's creature, you at least get a critter out of it too.
One of these days I'm going to come up with a good line of play for Necro against mana denial Wizard and other Necros. On that day I'll play in a national tournament with both Sardonyx and Bugs, and then you'll all see! You'll all see!! Haha!
Er, yes.
Anyway, people aren't shy about using attack spells against Conjurations, so it's weird to me that they'd balk at attack spelling creatures. From a cost per health & armor perspective, conjurations are often more durrible than equiv cost creatures.