Thursday, April 13, 2017

CCDD 041317—devotion

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/13/2017 - How about devotion as a cost-reduction mechanic? It's a lot like affinity for [color] permanents, but we've actually only seen affinity used for artifacts and lands, so it's still novel functionality.


You'll note that these cards are vague about exactly how devotion reduces their cost. Does it reduce generic mana cost only? Any kind? I left them intentionally vague as I brainstormed cards. Tiamat—in its pentupled wisdom—will help us decide:

If a card like Tiamat can exist, then each colored mana symbol among permanents you control must pay for one of the same mana symbol in its cost (or one generic mana). That's fairly intuitive, but we'll have to spell that out in reminder text on the commons and that'll take a lot of space. If we nix the possibility of cards like Tiamat, then we can just reduce generic mana costs. But we'll need reminder text for that too.

What do you think? Design a card.

4 comments:

  1. The mechanic asks you to play creatures with heavy colored mana requirements and rewards you with creatures with light colored mana requirements. I'm not sure I like it more than Affinity for Basic Lands, which is easier to track

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    1. Devotion is far more interactive than affinity for lands (or any noncreatures).

      Testing might well show that we want all these creatures to have MM or even MMM costs, but I was cautious with the commons because we've seen how quickly cost reduction effects compound before.

      T1: Forest, Elvish Mystic
      T2: Land, 4 Elven Rangers and a Long Arms of the Larch on our attacking Mystic.

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