Afraid is a game term introduced on the Mystery Booster 2 test card Creepy Crawler. It is a player designation and a player status and a form of batching.

Description

An opponent is afraid of you if a Horror, Nightmare, enchantment, or face-down creature you control entered the battlefield or attacked them this turn.

History

Afraid started as a solution to the problem of having cards that cared mechanically about enchantments in Duskmourn: House of Horror vision design.^[1][2] Design started by looking at constellation from the Theros block but the name constellation wasn't a good fit for the haunted house flavor of the set. Constellation could not also interact with additional parts of the set. The final version of Afraid that was handed off from vision design had the rules text "If an enchantment, Horror, or Nightmare you control entered the battlefield or attacked this turn, all opponents are afraid."

In Set Design it was realized the non-enchantment creature types didn't add much additional value in an enchantment-heavy set. The removal of the Horror and Nightmare references also meant the attack trigger was mostly unnecessary because all the sets' Nightmares were typed as enchantment creatures. In parallel with the changes to Afraid, Rooms had been redesigned such that you unlocked one door when cast and the second door unlocked later. Ultimately, afraid was replaced with Eerie.

For Mystery Booster 2, Gavin reprised the original vision design mechanic and added face-down creatures as a secret nod to Duskmourn: House of Horror's Manifest Dread mechanic.

Example

Rulings

• You don't need to control Creepy Crawler to make an opponent afraid of you. (Mechanically, I mean. Please don't jump scare your opponents!)^[3]
• Each time a Horror creature, Nightmare creature, enchantment creature, or face-down creature enters the battlefield under your control, all of your opponents become afraid of you for the rest of the turn, regardless of what happens to the creature that entered.
• Similarly, each time a Horror creature, Nightmare creature, enchantment creature, or face-down creature you control attacks an opponent, that opponent become afraid of you for the rest of the turn, regardless of what happens to the creature that attacked. Attacking a planeswalker or battle, however, won't cause anyone (your opponent or the planeswalker) to become afraid of you; most planeswalkers have seen some wild stuff.

References