Wednesday, August 5, 2020

CCDD 080520 - Vault of the Dross

I designed a scry (and cascade, etc.) reward that works along the same lines as Bag of Holding. The Bag works more smoothly in a couple of ways, though. See what they are?



The first way that Bag of Holding works better is that it can trigger itself. Scry is an even narrower theme to build around than discard, so I really should have put a Treasure Map-type activated ability on here. Second, the Bag puts less of the mana payment up front and more into the card-advantage activation, which improves the ability's balance and helps avoid running out of exiled cards. Together, these differences mean that Bag of Holding is a less swingy card than Vault of the Dross-- less useless when it's bad and less oppressive when it's good. If I had a fresh crack at this design, I'd probably cost it at 2 mana with 1, T to scry 1 and 2, T to get back an exiled card.

3 comments:

  1. With a single cascade card with CMC 3 this would let you mill out and win with Laboratory Maniac style cards AND tutor for that card. Maybe limit it to the first ~3 cards put on the bottom of the deck each turn?

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    1. Hmm, good point, I'd forgotten how open-ended some of those "bottom of library" effects were. A 2-card combo that requires ~7 mana on 1 turn (3 for the cascade spell, 1 to get back LabMan, 3 to cast it) doesn't seem too scary compared to Living End, but it's worth keeping in mind (and might actually be a good reason to change the costs around as I described).

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    2. Another option could be to only let you exile cards that are put there in a non-random order. Might lead to a strange wording though, especially to make it clear that a single card can be put there in a random order.

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