Thursday, January 28, 2016

CCDD 012816—Tandem Betrayal

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/28/2016 - Yesterday, there was a complex rare that built off of a relatively simple variation on Act of Treason. Today, I'd like to strip off that added complexity so that we can enjoy the variation on its own.


Intentionally not "up to two targets."

Might need to be rare? It's no Insurrection.

5 comments:

  1. "Up to two" vs exactly two doesn't matter much here, because you can target your own creature. The only time you can't play it is when there is exactly one creature on the whole battlefield.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would rather play this than Mob Rule, and Mob Rule was a very powerful card.

      Also, I can't decide if making this target slightly differently than Threaten makes it more or less intuitive. At first I thought that having the text box be so similar would make a lot of people half-read it as an overcosted Threaten. But then I thought that since most people know at least one Threaten card, they'd be able to chunk "Threaten" as one idea, and chunk the "two targets" as another idea in order to understand this card more easily.

      In either case, knowing that you can target your own creatures (or that you can't even put this on the stack if there is only one creature in play) seems like the bad kind of lenticular design. Like flickering O-Ring or Fiend Hunter, sweet, but ultimately mostly going to come up when one player exploits the weirdness of the card and the other player feels like they are cheating.

      Delete
    2. My thought, I like the design, but think it's much cleaner as either "up to two" or "two target creatures you don't control" since then it will work intuitively, and only be marginally less powerful.

      Delete
    3. I don't think this can be be Uncommon, this is an incredibly frustrating card to play against. This is nearly strictly better than Harness by Force, which was rightfully rare.

      Delete
    4. I don't think this can be be Uncommon, this is an incredibly frustrating card to play against. This is nearly strictly better than Harness by Force, which was rightfully rare.

      Delete