Cool Card Design of the Day4/12/2013 - It's been a while since we've talked about dig, and while there's not a whole lot to add, Chah's excellent recent articles about Frontier and gold as well as my own recent post about free cycling require me to share this thought: The reason that cycling usually has to cost mana doesn't apply to dig because dig can't get you spells, it can only undo mana screw (or help you turn spells into lands to help you cast more important spells).
Whether free dig belongs on expensive spells or cheap spells is debatable. For helping players stuck on two lands, you'd rather it be on the expensive spells you don't expect to reach anyhow. For getting you from six to seven mana to cast a card like Eartheater, you'd prefer it to be on small spells you don't mind pitching. It may well be that the set wants free dig to be on a variety of mana costs to help with both situations.
Dig should probably be a random order for the cards on the bottom, like cascade, otherwise you break some of the eternal formats where decks like Charbelcher exist.
ReplyDeleteI still think a mana cost of 1 is safer. Free things are dangerous. I wouldn't mind discarding Eartheater for a Bazaar of Baghdad in Vintage. (Disclaimer: I'm not an actual Vintage player, but it sounds like the sort of thing such people would enjoy.)
ReplyDeleteBut you don't know what land your discarding it for...
DeleteYou do if there's exactly one land in your deck.
Delete(or one to four copies of that one land.)
DeleteHaving the ability cost 0 is problematic even in Standard. Why play 20 lands in your RG aggro deck when you could just play 4 Stomping Ground and a bunch of these cards for perfect mana? Now every land drop takes 15 seconds to execute.
ReplyDeleteWhile 15 seconds seems like an over-estimation, the amount of time added to the game when you're running a lot of cards like Eartheater is the best argument I've heard against free dig. That said, it's really only a concern in Constructed and we can handle that by putting free dig on very few tournament-worthy cards.
DeleteIt does feel like Eartheater is a card that is going to spend 90%-95% of it's use digging and that it has a 7/7 body just in case you really couldn't think of a use for that extra land.
ReplyDeleteThe problem I always had with Duel Masters (not that I ever played it) was that it looked plain wrong turning a cool creature/spell into a mana source.