Cool Card Design of the Day4/2/2011 - The game store I draft at each week is building a custom cube for fun. By 'custom' I mean all the cards in the cube are custom designs by the participants for the cube. In this particular case, 'custom' also happens to mean silly. Not silly-terrible, but silly-powerful and/or silly-funny. Before I go any further, let me clear. I love me some silly and a lot of these cards have a lot more than just that going for them.
The reason I bring this up is that I was chatting with one of the owners last night about a fun new vein of design they were thinking about after one of their regulars suggested that whenever you draft a Squadron Hawk, you should get a free copy for your deck.
That is awesome. Whether it's over-powered or not is another question, but it got us thinking about other neat effects that could happen outside the game itself. I am frothing fanatic of limited, and in particular draft, so I've wondered about effects that could happen during the drafting stage before. I have yet to come up with one that is remotely printable, but you can't look at this card and tell me you haven't wished you could do that in a draft at some point:
I'm sure there are more possibilities for meta-abilities like these, even if none of them could ever be black-bordered. That won't stop me thinking about them. And, who knows, maybe one will actually be reasonable and useful. Wouldn't that be awesome?
Swippy-Swap reminds me of Serum Powder, which was almost as meta (although more meaningful in Constructed). Using that as an example, maybe a card like that could be printed? Probably Swippy-Swap should be weaker (cost 3, like Serum Powder?), so that you're less motivated to take it for its own sake, and more for the ability to manipulate future picks. Either way, Uncommon is definitely the right place for it.
ReplyDeleteThese cards remind me of the custom cards Richard Garfield brought to Worlds in Memphis, which did things like exchange cards in an opponent's hand for cards in your hand, or shuffle "gunk" cards into an opponent's deck. Obviously those could never be printed, but always experiment! Maybe something will turn out to work.
Squadron Hawks is overpowered. You could sideboard it in and out repeatedly between games to abuse its ETD trigger.
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