Cool Card Design of the Day6/20/2013 - I was thinking about mechanics that could combo with Scrap without being parasitic. Barter technically fulfills that goal, but I expect that it's not strong enough in its current form to be playable with more than a handful of other cards from older sets (among which Puppet Conjurer is by far my favorite). Even so, it's not a terrible idea to start from.
You can see Bartering Thief might be slightly better than a 23rd card in a Limited set with lots of scrap thanks to barter, but it's still just not very inspiring. One clear solution is to put it on more expensive spells. Another is to key off of what was bartered:
If we're not keen on using that trick most of the time, another option to consider is adding a variable to barter that lets you save {2} or more mana for each artifact. Ultimately, barter is Affinity that you can't reuse. That's definitely less appealing, but I think you need something like that in a set making lots of scrap tokens, which by the way, isn't anything we've committed to but are still considering for Tesla.
What about a devour variant?
ReplyDeleteScrap Drudger (common)
3
Artifact Creature - Construct
Salvage 2 (As this enters the battlefield, you may sacrifice any number of artifacts. This creature enters the battlefield with twice that many +1/+1 counters on it.)
2/2
Absolutely a possibility.
DeleteFor a little more uniqueness, maybe we pull an Infect, and combine the two:
Barter Artifacts (Each artifact you sacrifice while casting ~ reduces its cost by {1}. When ~ ETB, put a +1/+1 counter on it for each artifact bartered.)
what about some sort of Viscera seer like effect but it lets you sacrifice both artifacts or creatures. giving the option makes it still parasitic but less reliant on just artifacts.
ReplyDeleteRefuge reuser {1}{B}
creature- human wizard
{B}, sacrifice a creature or artifact: target player loses 1 life.
1/1