CCDD 051414—Chaostrike

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/14/2014 - I wanted to mess with a random spell a bit. I've got three versions, each with merits and flaws, that appeal to different kinds of players.

The first is the purest and simplest. There's a 50-50 chance you'll get a doubled effect or nothing at all. Most players will hate this version the most, because there's nothing you can do it make it more reliable (*cough*Krark's Thumb*cough*) and losing the flip leaves you down a card and three mana for no return. The upside is that this offers the best deal to players who are happy to gamble. Right now, the EV is on par with a {2}{R} for 3 damage guaranteed spell, so you could really push this down to {R} or up to 9 damage so that more players have a reason to take the risk.

All or nothing isn't the only option for a random spell, of course. This version all but guarantees your spell will eventually fire, but makes randomizes how many times you have to try before it works, and thus how much mana it costs. That should be a lot more palatable to most players, and this particularly implementation could also appeal to Storm players since you can get multiple castings out of this one card. Again, I was pretty conservative with the numbers, and this could potentially be more efficient.

The last design I'm presenting today: This version guarantees you will do damage, how much damage, and how much it will cost, letting the random element be what gets fried. This is directly related to Wild Swing and offers the same guarantee that you will get something for your mana. While Spike enjoys precision implements, I think this design will appeal to her the most of these three, because you will always get value when you cast it, which is good enough for certain decks (RDW, mostly) even if it's not good enough for others.

There are swaths of other ways to make random burn spells, but it's worth mentioning Riddle of Lightning here because it combines the damage-is-random and use-only-in-game-components goodness of Erratic Explosion with a little built-in race fixing, making it substantially more likely you'll do as much damage as you need, and offering some card selection on the side. That is, of course, even better for Spike (in the abstract—its notably worse for RDW than the last Chaostrike).