Cool Card Design of the Day12/22/2014 - Gilded Archfriar lets you transmute cards from your hand into cards in your sideboard, effectively widening your repertoire by up to 15 spells.
I'm once again introducing the term 'sideboard' which doesn't currently exist on Magic cards. The cost of this term is that it doesn't work in formats without a sideboard (Commander has a variant with sideboards, but its not official), but for this effect it's important not to use "cards you own from outside the game" as that would be too powerful in black-bordered Magic and slow games down painfully.
Anyone catch the reason for the name?
"With the same mana cost" worries me slightly if there are X's involved.
ReplyDeleteObviously this does horribly broken things with Cascade, but, well, what else is new.
I'm really surprised Magic hasn't explored this space. It must be because the vast majority of Magic games don't have sideboards on account of being casual. I do think that, if they want to bring back the Wishes, they'll have to do it with wording that actually says what the cards do (instead of the current fanciful language that has nothing to do with the actual implementation of the cards) but perhaps Spawnsire of Ulamog suggests they disagree with me.
Also worth considering, there are a lot of places you can put this card. Here you've chosen a Gray Ogre, but since this card is so squarely aimed at constructed, I have to imagine it wants to be somewhere else. I also imagine a constructed player would want it to have flash, so they could end of turn it, and then play their combo piece for the win. Whether we want to encourage that is certainly debatable.
I might be tempted to put this on a cantripping artifact.
I didn't think of X spells or cascade when I templated this. "Exile a card in your hand for a card with the same mana cost from your sideboard" should solve those issues (where "for" is standing in for quite some text.)
DeleteWhenever I play casual, I bring a Standard legal deck (or a deck legal in some format) and a sideboard. I'm sure not everyone does that, but I know quite a few do.
When WOTC says "casual" I think they are usually picturing people who play with whatever cards they have. That is certainly how I played for many years, blissfully unaware of competitive formats. I certainly have many friends who still play "casual legacy" although I can't possibly imagine how you could do that and not have everyone playing totally degenerate decks.
DeleteAs far as the Comp. Rules are concerned, the Wishes and Spawnsire do exactly what they say they do. In competitive formats, you are treated as not owning anything outside of your deck and sideboard to avoid perverse, unbounded wealth-based competitive advantages.
DeleteIn similar style, I don't think having this card use the "card you own from outside the game" template would actually be problematic. The Storm and Cascade interactions are a bit of problem, so I'd word it as a replacement effect: "As you cast a spell, you may exchange that spell for a card you own outside the game with the same mana cost. (Choose new targets for the new card.)"
I understand that, my point was that I disagree with it. I would rather they just explicitly reference sideboards on the card. I really don't like the "secret vocabulary" method.
DeleteThe reason they didn't say sideboard to start with, if I recall correctly, was that they feared many casual players wouldn't know what a sideboard is. That may still be true for some players, but with the advent of coverage I think the proportion of players who know what a sideboard is is higher (though far from universal, I'm sure).
Most offensively, this card blatantly doesn't do what it says it does in limited, a format that has enormously grown in popularity since the original printing of the wishes.
Ba-dah-ba-ba-bah...
ReplyDeleteWould it be easier to exile card from hand and put card into hand?
ReplyDeleteI'm oblivious of the reason of the name. Curiosity is killing me: can someone illuminate me?
ReplyDeleteI keep reading it as "Gilded Armchair."
DeleteIt's an anagram…
DeleteThe "card from outside the game" in anything sanctioned, means the sideboard and only the sideboard. So that would do it fine IMO.
ReplyDeleteRichard Garfield PhD.
ReplyDeleteWe have a winner!
Delete(Although "PhD" didn't make it into the anagram.)