CCDD 030613—Orelian Lightkeeper, Caustic Fumes, Artificial Inception & Cyborgclops

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/6/2013 - This post tripled in length from what I intended when I started. Shrug.

Two of the mechanics suggested for Ekkremes are sunburst and colorless-hybrid mana, aka "twobrid." We've argued whether these mechanics are complementary or at odds influencing how many colors players will use in their Limited decks, but HavelockV and I agree that they at least shouldn't appear on the same card. While that creates fascinating interactions, it's complex both on paper and in practice. Let's explore a couple possibilities.

The only difference between sunburst on a colored creature and an artifact is that you're locked in to paying at least one color of mana. That and it feels different. Suntouched Myr is a card you can play in any deck but particularly one with as many artifacts and as few colored mana symbols as possible—so that you can run all five basic lands in roughly equal proportion. Orelian Lightkeeper instead prompts you to create either a three-color, base-green deck or a two-color deck with perhaps a third color splashed.

You would expect to see 2C sunburst creatures like this in a few other colors, if not all of them. You'd probably also expect some 1C or 3C sunburst creatures, and even a 4C version somewhere, perhaps only at uncommon. All of these require at least two colors to be decent and push you to splash more colors and/or add some Pentad Prisms or Shimmering Grottos.

While that's not the mechanic that will sell the set or lead to memorable combats, it's certainly a solid backbone for a set and easy enough to layer the flashier keywords onto.

Flame Javelin and Spectral Procession left their mark on Shadowmoor players and have a lot of us asking for more. Upon closer inspection, these cards were loved much more for their efficiency at their lowest cost than for their color flexibility. Yes, you usually played every copy you got of either in Limited regardless of your main colors, but the same could not be said for Beseech the Queen or, um, the other two. *cough*

I managed to make a reasonably appealing card in Caustic Fumes, but I'm not sure it's any more appropriate for the game than Dismember was. We can use the same justification they did for Phyrexian mana and just claim that it fits the flavor of the set and the bleed it affects is merely one swing of the great pendulum. I would prefer not to test our audience like that unless we're sure it'll be worth it. Which I'm not.

The problem being that it's really hard to design twobrid cards that are appealing but not as powerful as Flame Javelin or Spectral Procession. You know, common. Don't believe me? Let's make a black common creature.

2/B isn't going to get there. Let's move on.

2/B 2/B could get us a Walking Dead, Highborn Ghoul or maybe Giant Scorpion because that's about the best you could get at common for BB. Would you pay 2B for those? Mostly that'd be fine. Would you pay 4 to play any of those in your non-black deck? As anything but your 23rd card? Me neither.

2/B 2/B 2/B already doesn't look common, but let's pretend. Figure the average cheapest payment in Limited will be 2BB which gets you Highway Robber, Liliana's Shade or Perilous Shadow. I'd be happy to get any of those for BBB or 2BB. At 4B, they're all sub-par but potentially playable. At 6 mana, they're all miserable.

From that, I'm not sure twobrid will stand on its own. No problem, right? We'll just buddy it up with a mechanic that makes it awesome. Here are the possibilities I see…

You can reward players for spending more mana. That makes sense because it works like an X spell. You can pay less and get less or you can pay more and get more. The problem with that is even though you have more flexibility when running Artificial Inception in a blue deck, the card is at its most powerful in literally any deck.

We can reverse it and reward the player for trying to stick to the colored costs. That reinforces her instinct to try and cast the card as cheaply as possible, but it also makes casting Artificial Inception for 2U less appealing both in cost and effect.

This particular execution makes casting this for 4 a non-option, but I'm sure you could design cards where the most expensive effect is just a terrible terrible deal rather than a complete non-choice like this. Could you design cards like that without making the effect at the cheapest level broken? And while keeping the card common? I'm not so sure.

You could split the difference. Here, the blue effect is better, but both effects are fine. At UU, you get two cards (which is pretty damn good, but maybe justifiable), at 2U you get to draw two and discard 1 (worse than Divination), and at 4 you get to draw two and discard two (which isn't great, but I at least feel comfortable offering that effect to all colors).

I'm not condemning all three of these options, but I am skeptical they could carry twobrid in the set. Feel free to explain options I missed or other executions that make any of these options tantalizing.


A final possibility for twobrid:

We could explore stranger mana combinations like 1 2/B, but that's far too ugly for me to contemplate and seems to undermine the point/value of twobrid. What about 2/B B? Hmm. Maybe. Under the model that all twobrid spells have some number of 2/C symbols and exactly one C, you're now making XC cards. "You can cast this for 2B or BB." "You can cast this for 4W, 2WW or WWW." That sounds pretty good. Let's try one out:

That mana cost isn't pretty and it's a little hard to process, but I can imagine a fair proportion of decks being happy to pay RRR, 2RR or sometimes 4R for a 5/2. Push it to 4/3 and I think Cyborgclops could be an easy fifth pick or so in draft. So we've found one reasonable implementation of this model. Can we make enough to populate a set? Design some common 2/C C and 2/C 2/C C cards in the comments.

I can't leave without addressing this similarity between Cyborgclops and Orelian Lightkeeper: If you think of the former as costing 4C than both are NC creatures that are affected by how you cast them (another argument against using both in the same set): In one case, you're rewarded for playing more colors and in the other for playing fewer, but both cards are playable in both mono- and many-colored decks. Maybe that means they'll play well together because they're more similar than they look, or maybe it means we're making players learn two different mechanics where we could use just one. I'd be quite curious to test it out and see.