Cool Card Design of the Day5/22/2012 - There's a tension between supporting multicolor decks and keeping basic lands important. Cards like Glacial Fortress and Verdant Catacombs demonstrate (very successful) attempts to create lands to support multicolor decks but that promote playing a combination of basic lands as well. Bustling Waypoint may not compare well to Reflecting Pool, but it's not hard to argue that the Pool was a mistake, particularly reprinting with both the Vivid Crag cycle and the Graven Cairns cycle. That said, it's not strictly worse...
I'm not entirely sure what the threshold should be to turn this on. Five is way too much and four seems prohibitive too. Two seems a bit easy, which is why I went with three, but testing could easily push it up or down. I was also tempted to go off template and require that you have three different basic lands, rather than just basic land types (so you can't turn it on with just a Taiga and Savannah, for example), but I doubt the non-traditional wording is worth the stricter condition.EDIT: Bass' suggestion was too good not to mock up and include here. I added reminder text (which might be a little heavy-handed). (Also, I'm impressed no one called out the fact that the original used the common symbol—it's definitely not a common.)
Wouldn't that read better as two effects? One being tap for 1 colorless. The other being tap for 1 mana of any color if you own X basic lands (where X is currently 3?)
ReplyDeleteCould definitely be templated either way (in fact, I started your way until I realized I could make it one). How would two abilities read better?
ReplyDeleteA single dense paragraph is less readable than two separate abilities, if only by a small margin.
DeleteFrom a gameplay perspective, replacement effects are also somewhat more complex than the alternative of having an ability that can only be activated under particular circumstances.
Yea, templating!
DeleteFor our set, it might be useful to have "T: Add 1." and "If you control 5 or more lands, ~ has every basic land type. (It can tap for mana of any color)."
ReplyDeleteI wonder, what if it was just, "CARDNAME has all land types among basic lands you control."
ReplyDeleteThat might be poor templating, but the idea is; if you have a plains, its a plains. An island, an island. Both, both, etc. A 'fixed' Reflecting Pool with a single line of text.
There are a lot of things I don't know about that, but one thing I do know is I want it to be.
DeleteThanks for nod. :)
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