Cool Card Design of the Day4/16/2014 - I was designing a card with a mechanic I knew was iffy at best, and while trying to find a discard effect worth 1.5 mana, came up with this idea which I immediately extracted for its own card. And that's why you needn't avoid seemingly dead-ends.
I kinda phoned in the title, but I like the idea of rat-flavored discard. This could easily be a cycle, though its debatable whether it should be vertical or horizontal.
I suppose you could call this "black storm" (ugh) and open up other storm variants like "creature storm." Not sure whether that association would attract more attention or scare more players off. It's also possible limiting the color isn't enough to nerf a mechanic as broken as storm, though limiting it to colors with bad mono-storm decks would help. (I totally wasn't thinking of this design as storm-like until I started writing.)
This is awesome! Given how dangerous Storm is and how well this fits black's "play more black" mentality, I'd be fine giving this a vertical cycle rather than a horizontal one.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure it counting itself is going to be intuitive most of the time.
ReplyDeleteAdding an "including this one" would work.
DeleteI think it's more unintuitive to cast this as the only card and have nothing happen.
Reminder text would be fine and easy.
DeleteI've been playing around with an idea somewhat like this, which would template the effect as:
ReplyDeleteTarget player discards a card.
If you've cast another black spell this turn, that player discards two cards instead.
Not precisely the same, I know, but the fact that it can't be ramped up indefinitely is probably a good thing in most cases. It also solves the problem of being intuitive.
Definitely safer. Not quite as exciting. Probably worth the trade?
DeleteAh, Storm. Once again you flutter your pretty little eyes and we think, "This time, she won't burn us."
ReplyDelete