Thursday, September 20, 2018

CCDD 092018—Fever Dreamling

Cool Card Design of the Day
Fever Dreamling was designed to appeal to enfranchised players looking for new cards with great potential.

At face-value, this is a decent bit of smoothing: You trade a pair of late-stage cards for some that are more relevant now, and then get those cards back later. Not irrelevant, but not really a four-mana rare you'd play in Constructed. But there are very intentionally several loopholes that makes this much stronger:

The second ability isn't an LTB trigger but a death trigger, so exiling Dreamling or putting into a library doesn't trigger it, which you may want if the cards you ditched are totally dead. The two abilities aren't linked like Banishing Light, so you can respond to the first one by sacking Dreamling, making the exchange permanent. Flicker effects take advantage of both of these loopholes, giving you huge amounts of card selection.

Dreamling is no Memory Jar, but I believe it walks the line between printable and not.

8 comments:

  1. Put the cards into their owners hand. Is it balanced enough that I'm also giving away what today two cards are?

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  2. As flicker effects are usually in white, you'd need to play Jeskai to abuse this card, which makes the card seem balanced enough in addition to the other stats.

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    1. Blue has gotten some flicker effects, most notably Deadeye Navigator in commander and Ghostly Flicker in Pauper.

      That said, I don't think abusing a bad looting effect is necessarily worth it. Card seems mainly like a fine midrange beater to me. Toss some chaff on turn 4 to up the quality of your hand, then if it dies, you can just discard the cards you originally exiled if the rest of your hand is good, so it has no downside.

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  3. Interesting idea. Providing moderate card advantage with the option of more if it's synergistic seems good spike-bait, but I'm rubbish at judging cards, I feel like most spike cards are more broken than this but I'm really not sure.

    My first instinct was, can I play a deck aggressive enough to have emptied its hand by turn 4? :)

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  4. Maybe I'm a bad judge of power levels but I think this could possibly be uncommon. If it were "discard hand then draw that many cards" I could see rare.

    The "draw that many cards" clause means it can't be abused by being played with an empty hand. In fact, I could argue that because the discard component cannot be bypassed or cheated, this guy could maybe even be mono-red. It feels more flavorful in RU though.

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    1. I think this could be uncommon as written. Inclined to maybe remove one or two of the safety measures and make it rare.

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    2. With Maro last "State of Design" article, we know that we are going to see more complexity in uncommon, and I hope this is the kind of trickiness they're going to target

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