Cool Card Design of the Day1/27/2016 - Impress is the exact opposite of idea of Forget. It's potentially un-develop-able, but easily neat enough to warrant exploration.
As with any keyword, I tried quite a few different templates to express the core idea.
This one proved tricky to express both clearly and concisely.
But I finally got there:
It's important that you don't just copy the spell exactly, because that doesn't create interesting decisions or feelings of triumph for the player.
When I spend {R} to turn my Lavastep Raider into a Lightning Bolt (and still keep my Procedural Lightning), that feels really good.
When I spend {4}{U} to run my Ulamog's Reclaimer into a Turn the Tide that really turns the tide, recognizing that the extra mana I paid was worth it makes me feel wise.
As with any spell keyword, certain effects are more relevant than others. Potentially too relevant.
The fact that it creates repetition means we have to be careful how strong (or reliable) effects are that could dominate a game when played every turn.
And because the cost depends on the other part of the equation, there's a limit to how big the effects can be, though there are sneaky ways to work around that a bit.
What do you think of impress?
I only made red and/or blue cards. What kinds of cards might use impress in other colors?
I believe that it could perhaps be developpable if the spells with impress are not that good (more of cosmic distraction than anything else).
ReplyDeletePerhaps the spells can scale off the CMC of the card? That is not too NWO friendly but it could be interesting.
Yet another way to go would be to only allow to pitch cards with cmc>= to the impress card's cmc.
It is a very interesting design space, but quite risky.
Blightfull Reverbations 2BB
Sorcery - Uncommon
Impress - you may reveal CARDNAME from your hand to cast another card of equal or greater converted mana cost that shares a color with it as a copy of it , except for its mana cost.
Non-black creatures get -2/-2 until end of turn.
I don't think this is fun to play against.
ReplyDeleteIt's like buyback except now you can't even get rid of it with a counterspell. I think you need to be careful to only put this on effects that feel interactive. Don't put this effect on a card if you wouldn't want to fight someone who has 40 copies of a 1 mana version of that card in their deck.