Deathtouch and First Strike Interaction with New Blocking and Attacking System
Recently the method of blocking has been changed in the game which simply feels awful to play against under certain circumstances. If a creature has both deathtouch and either first strike or double strike. So long as it has the attack power to hit each blocking creature for one damage each, it applies the effect of deathtouch to all of them, which while it does make sense mechanically-wise it can essentially make the defender invulnerable if it has high enough power. This does not feel balanced as unless the defending player has effectively double the number of defenders than the attacking creature's power, as there is no way to actually defend against that monster outside of removal spells without a horde of defenders. While it does make sense that a powerful creature like that to be countered mostly by spells specifically designed for that purpose the new system makes less sense and is less fun than the previous method of choosing the order of which defending creature the attacker fights first. It feels like a ham-fisted way of forcing players into certain play styles, or to play certain cards and combinations. All while being just as cumbersome when dealing with hordes of defending creatures.
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Rezzahan#77802
commented
This "new" system is actually the old one, before the conga line of death was introduced. Which was nessessary at the time to keep play mostly consistent with how the game played out before combat damage was removed from the stack. (Combat damage used to be an item on the stack pre M10, that could be responded to.) The system before that already let attacking/blockeing creatures assign combat damage freely among their adversaries.
That aside, nothing really changed in regards to deathtouch by reintroducing the old damage assignment. The "new" system allows to distribute the damage among all blockers. The "old" system did as well. Because 1 damage from a source with deathtouch is and was lethal even for damage assignment, so even under the "old" system, the deathtoucher could plow through the line of defenders. The old system gave you the advantage to know the order in which the damage would be assigned, and you could use spells and abilities to disrupt optimal damage assignmment and keep your creatures alive due to that knowledge.
Basically, first strike plus deathtouch is as powerful now as it was before. The change to damage assignment did not nerf or empower it.