Cool Card Design of the Day7/7/2016 - Yesterday's Deluxe aims to help players stuck with cards in hand, but flies dangerously close to Saviors of Kamigawa's "don't play your cards" mechanic. It's also hard to develop and reads poorly. It might play quite well, but even if it does, we can surely find something that accomplishes similar goals without all those drawbacks.
Let's attack the problem from another angle.
Chip Beauvais (@the_FlyingSheep) suggests:
ReplyDelete"this costs 1 less per land (advantage)"
Screwed2 (This spell costs up to {1} less per land any opponent controls in excess of the number you control.)
That creates a gradient that will help you more the further behind you are. Since there's no threshold, it's harder to play around, and thus likely to affect play styles in a less binary way.
In theory, it hits ramp strategies harder because its power doesn't plateau after a certain point, but in practice each card only has so much colorless cost it can drop, so its power curve does slow down.
Curiously, playing a land doesn't make it easier to play your screwed2 cards, because you get more mana, but the cost reduction drops the same amount.
My main concern is the same reason I chose a threshold of 2, rather than 1: Simply being the second player allows you to cast spells cheaper before playing your land for the turn. I might be over-fearing that; it could actually prove to be fun (but it's definitely not in the spirit of the mechanic).
But the upside is a mechanic with greater potential.
Delete