A Personal Favourite – Killer Bees

Everyone has to admit that no matter how long they have been playing, no matter what style of gameplay they enjoy, no matter what mana combinations or archetypes they build, there’s one card that they love. There’s always one card that reminds you of an amazing match or a fun deck build or sometimes its purely for the artwork that’s on one of the cards. More often than not, the card is not a strong card in a particular format or has long since been replaced with something more powerful or more useful in deck builds. It doesn’t matter what the reasoning is, everyone has their favorite card and for me, that card comes from way, way, way back in the good ol’ days. The card in question is ‘Killer Bees’

For me Killer Bees will always hold fond memories of playing back in my early years, friends all gathered round for a ‘winner stays on’ style of gameplay. Entire weekends could go by with us all playing, refining and tweaking our decks and building our own mini meta as its called today (back then it was just playing). My preferred deck was always mono green with a splash of artifacts to keep my opponents on their toes. Even back then any green deck had a weakness and that would usually be its lack of aerial attack. In today’s ‘Standard’ gameplay I cant think of anything that a mono green deck could put in to fly above the enemy battlefield and do some damage. Back then though I had my crack unit of flying monsters. My Killer Bees would fly above and get pumped up to some ridiculous numbers for the win. Shivan Dragons cowered at the Killer Bee air force that I could lay on the board not just for the fact that back then Shivan Dragons were hard to come by and by comparison, Killer Bees were somewhat easier to get hold of. That said, no one else in my play group played them. Partly because we generally stayed in our own little mana groups and partly because it was known that I had the monopoly on Killer Bees. The game winning combination that i loved to play was to cast Killer Bees and then cast ‘Blanchwood Armor’ on to it (Blanchwood armor adds +1/+1 for each forest the player controls). On the next turn pump the Killer Bee for all its worth and send it over in a devastating attack of 20, 30 sometimes 40 points of damage. I love this card so much that when I got back into playing MTG, even though I knew it wouldn’t be playable in most decks I would be using anywhere other than the kitchen table, I had to hunt down a new play-set of them and add them to my collection. I will admit to a gleeful dance around the room when they arrived in the post.

I would love to see Killer Bees reprinted in a ‘Standard’ format again as I would love to see mono green get some air support and to be honest, I don’t see Killer Bees to be an overpowered card in todays game. If you take a critical look at the card and stats itself its not overly impressive or over game breaking at all. a 0/1 flying creature for 3 mana is no different to what a lot of white cards are doing in the recent releases and even with it’s pump ability of adding +1/+1 for each green mana spent won’t stop it from being vunerable to many, many removal or exile spells out there. Each and every deck already has some way of main boarding or side boarding a threat for flying creatures and in its cast state of 0/1 it dies to literally anything that can be thrown at it.

Do I really think that Killer Bees will be reprinted for ‘Standard’ Play? Well probably not as I think its one of those cards that just fell by the wayside and is almost forgotten now. That said, stranger things have happened and I would Be the first to jump on the opportunity to release the flying monsters onto my opponents again. I would love to see it reprinted with either the same lovely artwork that graced the card originally by Phil Foglio or maybe even updated with a new design from an amazing artist in the form of Filip Burburan, they guy who among others created the artwork for other mono green beasts such as Aggressive Mammoth and a recent favorite card, Nullhide Ferox.

Please WotC, reprint this stunning piece of my MTG gaming past.