Cool Card Design of the Day1/20/2016 - Inanimate's prompt to think about non-creature mechanics led me down this path: I'm still inspired by the way surge rewards playing multiple cards together. I don't want to copy cards or recur them, because that creates repetitive gameplay. Can I somehow do the opposite of that?
Forget allows you to play a full playset of conditional cards without having to worry about drawing multiples.
I can't say this is the first time I've thought about "free" cycling.
One notable function cycling serves that forget doesn't is getting rid of cards that are dead in the match-up or dead early. It only gets rid of cards you can use at least one of, and mostly only late.
But that does help for sideboarding. Instead of bringing in one Naturalize against your opponent's one broken artifact, you can bring in 2-4 Forgotten Relics and increase your ability to hit it, without clogging your deck (as badly).
With a very slight adjustment, it works on permanents too:
This mechanic seems quite lovely to me. I'd say that cycling pretty much fulfills all the functions this does and more, but if we want to narrow in on this specific category of cards and encouraging a more 'variable' game (by making new cards appear much faster), this is definitely one way to do it.
ReplyDeleteThe problem it solves is one I think most players have considered, but never quite worried much about. I like that this mechanic greatly changes deck construction and reliability of answers - but I also worry about that, and its deck-thinning capabilities.
Its strengths, then - powerful deck-thinning and ease of reliability - are also the weaknesses that push us to use cycling, which has the mana-cost safety valve to fix those problems, and give it a more universal usage.
One problem that both this and cycling have is that they are a bit opaque to new players. Generally, they'll need the benefit explained to them - why is this good? However, since this mechanic naturally pushes them to play as many as possible (since it says 'same name') that's good, as it'll lead more players to discover the lesson themselves.
Overall: Interesting but cycling definitely covers this ground. I think this does what it does very well, however.
This doesn't seem to help much with sideboarding, at least in formats where you get to play a playset of everything. The issue usually has less to do with how many cards you want for a particular matchup and more to do with fitting answers for all your bad matchups into the 15 card limit.
ReplyDeleteWhere I like this mechanic is on proactive but situational cards in the maindeck, such as a ramp spell. In the late game a random card off the top is probably better than a basic land of your choice.
For situational cards that require your opponent to cooperate in providing a legal target, I'd rather have cycling.
ETA: Forgotten Land is sweet. Possibly even dangerous, free cycling your way out of mana flood once you hit an adequate land count.
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