Weekend Art Challenge 022114 Review—Nightsong

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today. Note that blogger had some technical difficulties, partially inhibiting our usual back-and-forth.

Amesha's Prayer isn't a bad common without soulfilter and at a 1:1 cost, this keyword is a strong mana fixer, together making this a pretty high pick, but then every set needs some high-pick commons. I'd be very curious to test exactly how soulfilter affects a Draft (and Constructed for that matter) since it is both fixing and a card that wants fixing. I expect the player's hope is to run enough of these that they don't need to spend picks/slots on dedicated fixing, and filter their mana so that they don't lose any opportunities while waiting to draw enough of their basic lands. My instinct says this might be a lot of fun to play with, but it might prove too good.

You will likely wonder why Auspicious Augury isn't a simple modal card: It's apparently a coincidence that both modes cost the same here; usually they don't for this mechanic. You might then ask why it's not a split card. I'm not convinced there's a good answer for that. Regardless, this particular card isn't doing a huge amount of smoothing at a price of 4, and where the choice is between a Wind Drake or two mystery cards.

Fun fact: Auspicy is an actual form of divination based on the flight of birds.

Birth of Deity is a bit strange. You can trade each non-creature card you draw for a creature card, of a specific type, and you can choose which creature of that type you get. In contrast, you are stuck with whatever creature cards you naturally draw. I don't get the flavor of that at all, but I can't deny that this will card guarantee you draw nothing but gas from turn 5 on, if you can get that far on your own.

Collect is a variant of dredge that costs mana instead of putting cards into your graveyard, which has the upside of not fueling a graveyard strategy, but the downside of putting no upper limit on the number of times you recur the card. Conveniently, that's irrelevant for Bring New Seeds because you'd never want to recur it. Are there cards where you would want to use the collect ability? Are they broken? The world may never know.

Alternate template

Not unlike soulfilter, pray fixes your mana just by being on a card in your hand. This keyword accelerates you as well, but at the cost of your land drop. Hopefully players will mostly only use it when they're out of land to play, but it's not hard to imagine a player with a grip of Forests who wants to cast his Fleecemane Lion and skips playing a land on-curve in order to play a spell on curve. Note that you can reveal Chapel Garden in order to cast Chapel Garden. I'd want to test if that's okay, as well as what kind of cards pray makes the most sense on.

What if Mind Stone were a land? Church would indeed be an attractive card for any deck that can forego the colored mana. Might be too good or too strange for a common, but if it's meant to smooth out a set, I'd at least try it there.

I fudged what mechanically wants to be mono-green into hybrid because of the art and name, though I'll point out that hexproof is a subset of protection (which white is king of). The real question is whether improvise is any good or not. I wish I'd had time to propose it earlier to iterate with your feedback, because damn, designing smoothing mechanics ain't easy. Also, I feel like I stole this idea from one of your ideas like a month ago, but *shrug*. One thing I know isn't great is putting {X} in a common keyword. Fortunately, that's easy to fix: We can just make it always {2} for two, or so.

Cardshift X lets you trade X+1 cards (where the 1 is the card with cardshift) for X new cards. I'm skeptical that we'd see cardshift 2+ on more than a handful of cards ever, and probably two at common at most. Even so, "cycling: discard a card" has legitimate potential. It doesn't sound great, but it'll feel pretty great when you're sitting on a dead situational card like this and some extra land.

Divine Resanctification's last ability is what really sells me on cardshift. Even though you're really not losing out on the deal because you're trading cards for mana, getting a non-card-advantage effect that mirrors the card's primary function is a nice offset.

Blossom is scry 1 with the added upside that you can keep the card if it's a land. That's a significant power upgrade and so I'd expect to see card+blossom to cost +1.5 or +2 mana in contrast to card+scry's +1. Why isn't Faith's Bounty {1}{W} then? That's how weak gaining 3 life is!

I like this variant and would happily try it out. I would watch out for it being so swingy that it turns off a significant player base. Even though scrying away a spell when you need more land is a positive step, not immediately getting that land might be such a let down that players are unhappy anyhow.

R admits Feed the Birds isn't really a smoothing card, and I agree. I'm not sure I get the flavor of making birds or growing your team (you feed them bird seed with hormones, I guess), but I do like desperation as a Fateful Hour / Entwine hybrid.

Hope's Sanctum is an exciting card for draw-go decks but comes with a significant drawback. Sure, you can cast instants and flash creatures during your opponent's turn, but never playing another land is a significant blow to a control deck. Even so, the ability to draw a card every turn—or even twice ever—is potentially game-winning at one mana. Would be most curious to see how Development responds to this card.

Conjure lets you fetch a land from your sideboard, which means you don't have to search through your deck or shuffle, saving a lot of time. There are logistical issues in making conjured cards readily accessible and remembering to remove them from your deck after each game, but I think this is enough of a step up from plainscycling that it's worth trying.

Humble Offering is a good candidate for a smoothing mechanic since it is both a later game card and conditionally useful. The choice to make the conjuration cost {W} means this will fix land-screw but not color-screw, which might be correct depending entirely on the set.

Olive Branch Accord would be one of a cycle that lets you cast a spell without mana, at the cost of giving your opponent something tangible. I'm impressed with any card that can make giving four power of flying creatures to your opponent feel good, thanks to the Congregate. (Whether the Fog part feels a bit extraneous is another matter.)

You can cast Ornithomancy normally if you're land-poor, or you can upgrade it to a repeatable effect if you've got spare mana and creatures. That's not smoothing in the sense that scry and cycling are, but it is in the sense that kicker is: Basically, there's an awesome card that isn't cheap, but if you need to you can cast it at reduced value for a discount. (And vice versa: If you're land-flooded, you've got something to do with all that mana.)

Critterform seems like a fairly inevitable evolution from cycling and reinforce. We definitely want a generic creature type that can work across the colors it appears in, and we may want some way to vary the size or quantity of creatures we can get. Sanctum of Form is a good example of a card where getting a 1/1 isn't a huge upgrade over getting a land whether you're in the early, mid- or late game.

Evanescent borrows miracle technology to give us free cycling. That technology comes at a cost, but there's a real possibility that using it at common alleviates a great deal of that cost, at least within the block. It's not hard to imagine drawing a Scatter in Sunlight, immediately wishing you had drawn something more relevant to the situation at hand, and then having that wish come true. I'd fight for that.

Shrine of Deliverance is sort of a Diabolic Tutor for the people. Any color can use it, and the price is broken into two easy installments. Instead of getting exactly what you want, you can name creature, or land, or removal (kiiinda) and get something that satisfies your current requirements. What's not to love?

Monetize works a bit like conjure in that you can pay a small fee to trade a card you can't cast for something that will help you cast your other cards. Monetize's gold doesn't stick around as long, but it can make any kind of mana and it can even accelerate you ahead for a turn. At {1} I would be concerned about players ramping too much, and if the card were discarded I would be concerned about graveyard shenanigans, but the power level we see in Song of the Sanctuary seems safe (except there's no way a card that makes 5 power of flying should be common). I do worry that this mechanic reads poorly and players will be turned off by it, but perhaps playing with it will make it all worthwhile?

Requisition is tutor-for-a-card-you-don't-have, which is about as good as tutor-for-a-card. In this case, we've basically got plainscycling. The interesting part is that Sunlit Cathedral doesn't cycle from hand, but from play. So you can use the primary effect for a turn or as long as you like, before cracking it. Of course, the longer you keep it the less you'll want to crack it.

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Designing a good, simple smoothing mechanic is quite hard, because it's such an important area of design space that Wizards has gobbled up many of the best / most obvious solutions. There are a lot of parameters to stick to, like avoiding slowing the game down, and avoiding degenerate use. There are a lot of pitfalls like making a mechanic no one would be happy to use or that's so good it overshadows the rest of the card. You could even make smoothing so effective that it removes too much variance from the game, leaving us with Chess Cards.