Cool Card Design of the Day5/15/2014 - I wanted to mess with a black removal spell that could really pick on small creatures, like a tyrant would.
This first stab is kind of a love song to Smother and Strangling Soot. I love that it can kill one medium creature or three tiny ones. Note that it kills token creatures 'for free.' This couldn't live in a core set at common because of comprehension complexity.
Seeds of Atrophy is a simpler card that keys off of size rather than cost., which is stronger in many situations, though it had no additional effect against tokens. For most sets, it would be the better choice.
This last design is a bit of a tangent:
Bulk needs a better name, but for playtesting purposes it gets the idea across. When I originally costed Assassin's Wake, I was thinking it needed to cost extra (compared to Last Gasp) to make up for a potential savings of 2 or more mana, but I think it will come up infrequently enough that just making it a sorcery is enough of an offset. It could be even more efficient than Bile Blight as a rare, but bulk is irrelevant for Limited when you put it on a rare.
I love Fill the Gallows-- it seems really powerful and might do good things for Constructed metagames as a sideboard card. Seeds of Atrophy, on the other hand, strikes me as a clunkier black version of Flames of the Firebrand (which is already uncommon).
ReplyDeleteI feel like I've seen Bulk somewhere recently (under a different name), but I can't think where-- I checked last month's Weekend Art Challenges and came up empty. At any rate, I like the mechanic a lot; it's splashy, exciting, and novel, yet it doesn't do anything particularly broken under normal circumstances.
I think designers here lately are greatly exaggerating the design space for Kindle/Grandeur-like mechanics. I really don't believe there is design space for more than a cycle of cards like this every few years. I think Mark even admitted in his Future Sight podcast that he overestimated the design space for Grandeur.
DeleteI totally agree. I recently experiment with a mechanic that started as a riff on storm, then became the Accumulated Knowledge/Kindle mechanic and then dried up and went nowhere. In dozens of iterations and with ten or more cards supporting it, the ability just never came up in Limited and the spells just ended up being overcosted.
DeleteAnother mechanic that encourages players to play 4 copies of a card is Squadron Hawk effects. These can be really powerful, so it's probably still just a small cycle of cards. Maybe:
Delete1R Inspiring Jolt
CARDNAME deals 1 damage to target creature or player. Search your library for any number of cards named CARDNAME and put them into your hand, then shuffle your library.
I do love the Squadron Hawk effect, and I think it has a lot more design space than Kindle variants, but I agree it is also super powerful and probably doesn't want to be on so many cards it gets keyworded.
DeleteI came up with one of the Kindle variants, and I've been concerned about that too. I think my "exact mana cost" variant would make it usable limited, but I'm still not sure about the design space, especially at common in NWO. Fortunately, matching mana costs would even work on a rare, as long as there are commons with the same cost. I think it could either be a cycle or two, or a keyword on about 15 cards.
DeleteOoh, I like fill the gallows. Very flavourful.
ReplyDeleteIt may be too good, as it's so flexible, like arc trail, but hopefully not.
Killing small creatures is treading on red's toes a bit, but that happens often, so is probably OK.
I could see it going {B}{R} to parallel Seeds of Strength along with your reason.
DeleteI actually went mono-black to be the exact opposite of Seeds of Strength (B being the enemy of both G and W), but I could see BR for the more overt parallel.
DeleteI like both Fill the Gallows and Seeds of Atrophy, but I don't think either could be common in any set. They seem way too powerful to me for drafting purposes at common (and like you said, Gallows referencing total converted mana cost probably isn't common). Maybe that's just me. Certainly cool designs though.
ReplyDeleteI think Bulk would be too swingy. It seems like a harder to pull off Ripple.
ReplyDelete