Cool Card Design of the Day12/3/2014 - Inspired by Czynski's Flame Aurora, Searing Armory looks for more ways to remove the card disadvantage of Crushing Pain. Turns out, affecting multiple creatures does the trick nicely.
Could easily affect just creatures.
Could easily key off any of your damage sources.
Could also key off damage dealt by creatures/sources you don't control, but that sacrifices some flavor.
The result does look vastly more common, I must say.
Inflame?
ReplyDeleteEveryone forgets Prophecy.
ReplyDeleteWow. My 'cleaned up' version is word-for-word identical.
ReplyDeleteI can claim relative ignorance of Prophecy, but I was playing in Darksteel.
Ah well.
I think, as a designer, it is definitely worth mulling over cards from sets you weren't playing during. There are a lot of interesting effects (and people "invent" them all the time) and you can ask yourself "why hasn't this come back?" Usually the answer isn't "They forgot it existed."
DeleteMy guess as to why Inflame hasn't been printed in a while, by the way, is that it is too directionless. Today's Magic cards are almost all tools with a clear purpose. You might be clever and think of another purpose, but they aren't just neat effects with no clear benefit. "Interesting" is death knell of cards in modern Magic, and that is just what Inflame is... interesting. The same is generally true of symmetric effects, which is why we don't see them much anymore, and almost always at rare.
I think it only takes a bit of angling to bring this in line with modern templating, though, a la your earlier suggestions:
Inflame (NWO) 1R
Instant (U)
~ deals 2 damage to each damaged creature target player controls.
well I like variant good cards anyways, why not. There are so many card with the same text and effect on Wizard after all.
DeleteInflame being symmetrical definitely reduces its value a bit, and its perceived value a ton, so I agree that modification could revive the design.
Delete