CCDD 061914—Bound to…

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/19/2014 - This is likely a terrible idea. It's helpful to guess how useful an idea is early on, but never discard one until you've explored it; until you can explain why it's not worth pursuing, and are sure it doesn't lead to other, better ideas.

Bound to [thing] is a keyword that means you have to run at least as many copies of THING as CARDNAME. The idea is that we can make a card more powerful than normal by requiring you to run specific cards, particularly (but not necessarily) less powerful cards.

Nightsong Oracle is an efficient vampire that can potentially draw you a card every turn, but you've got to play Child of Night to use her. In Limited, you'll be happy to, but in Constructed not every black deck that would consider Oracle would consider Child.

This pairing is even more limiting than Marauding Maulhorn and Advocate of the Beast, a pairing that not all players appreciate. Oracle isn't jut worse when you don't have the card it names, it's literally unplayable. Since we know this won't appeal to those players, and expect it to appeal to fewer players, the only way it would be worth considering is if it appeals more to the audience it does keep. The upside is substantial, and the flavor is good, so if the audience for Maulhorn and Advocate is new players who appreciate a touch of deck-building direction and Vorthos, it may qualify. Not sure, but it's possible.

Bound should always reference common cards. The goal is not to stop players from playing them, but to make them consider cards they otherwise wouldn't. Adept Pike Novice could teach a new player who's never experienced the joy of swarming her opponent to death with 'bad' cheap creatures. It also gives experienced players a reason to keep an eye out for late Goblin Pikers they might otherwise ignore.

The worse the creature that CARDNAME is bound to, the stronger CARDNAME can be. That's not a choice we want to make every time, or even a majority of the time—I'm guessing—but there's a certain joy to realizing the value of cards we thought we understood has changed dramatically and capitalizing on that. As the poster boy for bad creatures, Squire has a number of [mostly ironic] fans and Bannered Knight can make playing them reasonable in the right deck, or at least justifiable.

Prey Upon

Given the random nature of Magic decks, it's entirely possible you could go three matches without seeing the card you included in order to run CARDNAME, but it's just as likely you'll see the prescribed card and not CARDNAME. That much variability makes it impossible for me to predict the true cost of Bound and so if I were to try it out, I'd want to test it on cards ranging from above-average to downright terrifying, and I'd want to test that range both with good commons and bad ones.

While bound should appeal to a subset of players, my instinct says that it won't appeal to enough players to justify making a keyword. Like Maulhorn and Advocate, this idea probably just wants to go one one card ever to make a single clever pair of cards.

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Does this inspire any other ideas? Here's one:

Rivals [thing] (A deck can't have both CARDNAME and THING.)

That's significantly less restrictive and could be used to give a single archetype a choice between two powerful cards without letting it run both, theoretically adding variety to the Constructed metagame.