Cool Card Design of the Day6/2/2015 - Here's another way for spawn to matter differently in the new Zendikar. Sacrificing them not only brings your battlecruisers online earlier, but makes them bigger too. A few points of added toughness will often make a huge difference on a card like Ulamog's Gorger.
As an added benefit, bloodfeast seems like a solid mechanic in its own right, living somewhere between morbid and bloodthirst, while avoiding the downside of devour but preserving most of its flavor.
This is by far my favorite of your suggestions for new Eldrazi mechanics, quite clever.
ReplyDeletePhilosophically, though, I think you're aiming at the wrong space. Why do you want to make a mechanic that rewards you for playing your Eldrazi with Eldrazi Spawn? Eldrazi Spawn are already incredibly powerful, providing mana ramp that lets players play things way faster than they should be able to. Eldrazi are some of those incredibly powerful things. I don't think you need to make the carrot even bigger.
Usually when you make cards like Ulamog's Gorger the goal is to prevent them from being drafted by other players at the table who are playing other archetypes. But it costs 8 mana, only the Eldrazi Spawn ramp deck wants to play it anyway. Adding an additional layer of "this expensive card is only good if you play it with the right ramp cards" seems to add an unnecessary level of variance to a strategy that is by nature already very high variance (as ramp always is).
If Bloodfeast were to appear in ROE2, I would expect it to primarily appear on cheap creatures in an aggressive strategy, allowing a pleasant overlapping synergy with Spawn tokens. The hallmark of a good draft format is overlapping synergy cards like that.
A 2R 2/2 with Bloodfeast is already a very interesting card. Great mechanic.
Good point and well said.
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