Okay, I won’t lie and call this card a “commander sleeper”, it’s not actually very good, it has too much variance baked into it. But it’s a card I want to see more of because it’s a blast!
It’s a worse fight spell than usual for green, which isn’t a great starting point since those are already a pretty rare sight. However, it has the potential to be a mono-green board wipe? Sorta? If your opponents agree?
I won’t go into details about the base function of the card, however, I will highlight some points that are easy to miss or more specific bits of rules:
First, it can go around and around the table. As long as people keep copying it, it’s not limited to one table rotation if people want to keep fighting. The first person to bite the bullet and not copy it will lose one more creature than the rest, however, assuming all the fights are profitable, which incentivizes not to do that.
Second, the copying and changing of targets happens during the resolution of the spell, before damage is checked and creatures die from their wounds of fighting. But the copy itself doesn’t start resolving until after that check is done and creatures die from their fight. What that means in practice is that if someone wants to keep the chain going but doesn’t feel like making any of their living creature fight, they can choose for their target the creature of theirs that just fought, even if it’s gonna die in .35 seconds, and target something on their left. Since their creature is gonna die, they won’t actually fight, but the spell will still give the opportunity to copy it to the left.
Third, and mostly irrelevant: when someone copies it, they can keep the targets the same, even if it doesn’t involve any creature on their left. However, when the spell goes to resolve, the targets will be illegal and the spell will stop right there and do nothing.
For a two-mana spell, this one generates funny situations and politics and is pretty much a party spell. Pretty often though, one player won’t have creatures or only small ones and the spell will stop pretty short.
