Cool Card Design of the Day7/30/2012 - I'm not sure how I came to this design. Couldn't have been top-down from the art. Maybe I started with the primary effect as a no-shuffling version of Rampant Growth, found the flavor that would match the random wandering effect and that some somehow triggered the idea to add madness. Maybe I was just looking for madness effects and realized there wasn't a land fetch card with madness yet.
The more I think about it, though, I suspect I was looking for a card that could you save you from a one-land hand. It doesn't have the mana acceleration consistency of Llanowar Elves, nor the mana-fixing consistency of Rampant Growth, but if you keep a one-land hand with this card and don't draw a land on your next turn (or the one after that, playing first) then you can discard this during your end step and cast it for 1, getting you to that precious second land.Alleviating mana screw is a worthy cause.
It's worth pointing out how similar this is to Land Grant.
ReplyDeleteSuggestions from Twitter include replacing madness with Land Grant's alternate cost (in which case I would make the land ETB tapped) and just straight up removing the madness ability, both of which are simpler and could be printed in a sets without madness.
How about: "If you have at least seven other cards in your hand, you may cast ~ without paying its mana cost."
ReplyDeleteI'm not keen on how this plays in Constructed decks with mostly nonbasic manabases. It's going to be a lot more fiddly than Rampant Growth then, because suppose you flip 20 cards, you still have to shuffle those 20 cards (no saving on shuffling time) but the process of flipping each one at a time is more laborious than picking up your deck and quickly skimming it. Plus it reveals a big hunk of your deck to the opponent, which both might give away some of your plans, and against certain opponents will make them start scribbling notes, further slowing things down.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of a madness Rampant Growth, but I think I'd make it just Rampant Growth for perhaps 2G with madness 1 (or G).
Would decks with mostly nonbasic manabases even play this card?
DeleteYou could remove the "basic" requirement.