Cool Card Design of the Day3/03/2011 - I'm not going to sugar-coat it, Discorporate is neither innovative nor terribly exciting. It could easily, however, be a staple removal spell in limited. It came about when I stumbled upon some neat art while prettying up another submission and decided to do some top-down design. I'll talk more about top-down design and specifically art-based design another day.
One interesting thing about Discorporate is the use of blue-style milling on a black card. While both blue and black can remove cards from a player's deck, blue usually does it indiscriminately in an attempt to eventually mill the opponent while black does it precisely in an attempt to handicap the opponent or else to fill your own graveyard with reanimation targets. There has been some overlap and most of it is the result of "modern Magic design." At the end of the day, I see no problem with black attacking the mind indiscriminately and apparently a few people in R&D agree.
I went to look up the name of the card that is XB instant "Target creature gets -X/-X until EOT" and was surprised to see it doesn't actually exist. Disembowel kills a creature with CMC X while Profane Command and Sickening Shoal are both XBB. That's clearly a card that needs to be made and probably well before Discorporate (which I was going to say, could probably be an instant).
Actually, Havelock designed XB -X/-X for the GDS2, Devon submitted it as part of Challenge 1.
ReplyDeleteYour spell here reminds me of Psychic Drain (the existing "mill X" spell), except much stronger (since it kills things). I think that, like Psychic Drain, it should probably be uncommon.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&text=+[put]+[top]+[cards]+[library]+[graveyard]+[into]+![dredge]&color=+@(+[B]) would be a better search to run for monoblack milling.
ReplyDeleteof course XB -X/-X doesn't exist...
ReplyDeleteit was only mentioned like 50 times during gds2...