Belligerent Brontodon + Surge Mare doesn't work

BL00DL34F

If Belligerent Brontodon (while on the board, when a creature attacks it gets +X/+0 where X is the difference between its toughness and power) and Surge Mare (0/6) are both on the board, Surge Mare should be attacking as a 6/6. Since the game is programmed in a way that creatures with 0 power don't even attack, this combo doesn't work. Surge Mare doesn't get the boost from Belligerent Brontodon because it won't attack.

thesmallesthuman

You know, I haven’t played enough paper to consider whether you could swing with a zero attack creature, always just figured no power = no swing per PQ rules until you just inspired me to look it up. 

It’s an interesting point and seems like an easy enough “fix”, if they were interested in making the rules more magic-like. Which...they generally aren’t, but I don’t see the harm in this one. Would clearly open up some interesting new possibilities if we could swing for zero. 

Windy

0 pwr does not atk, otherwise indeed that is a big change. Think when you have a defender or vigilant creature out, that would kill a 0/x probably when that creature atks.

Also happens with Tammy's first, if the - 6 gets you creature to 0, it does not atk nor do any evergreens  
trigger that are dependent on atk. 

Mburn7

thesmallesthuman said:

You know, I haven’t played enough paper to consider whether you could swing with a zero attack creature, always just figured no power = no swing per PQ rules until you just inspired me to look it up. 

It’s an interesting point and seems like an easy enough “fix”, if they were interested in making the rules more magic-like. Which...they generally aren’t, but I don’t see the harm in this one. Would clearly open up some interesting new possibilities if we could swing for zero. 

Yeah, in paper you can swing with a 0 (or less) power creature, although any abilities that trigger off of damage to players will not.  I agree with @Windy, though, that forcing 0 power creatures to attack would cause more problems than it would solve.  Ideally of course you would have an option, but that would require changing the fundamental rules of PQ and I really doubt that'll happen.
(or of course you could add text to abilities like the Brontodon that would allow 0 power creatures to attack when it is out, but that's waaaay too much work for a dev team that takes 1+ years to make Agrus legendary)