Cool Card Design of the Day1/7/2015 - I was reading Latest Developments and Sam was talking about giving red more resilient threats to help it support an archetype other than aggro-burn. The phoenix is an awesome creature and I hope they continue to make a couple every year, but it's a problem that red's two most iconic creatures both always have flying.
Is there anywhere else red could justify resilience/recursion?
Spark Elemental and its grandfather Ball Lightning are another classic part of red's color pie and I thought what better to recur, mechanically, than a creature that kills itself. What better to recur, thematically, than a being formed from energy? I lifted the Chandra's Phoenix recursion trigger and it's not a bad fit, but it's certainly not the only way red can trigger recursion.
I like this trigger quite a bit, but there are other good options.
I'm not at all sure whether the card should cost 1 or 2. At 1, it's strictly better than Spark Elemental, but we see that in the shift from common to rare all the time. The more important question is just how powerful is the card in practice at each number, and that requires playtesting.
I'll note that Daretti, Scrap Savant provides a scary degree of grindy resilience to a monored deck with him as commander, to a degree not seen since Goblin Welder.
ReplyDeleteI know you were talking about resilience or recursion rather than card advantage per se, I was looking for a red take on pure card advantage when I designed Fervor Stoker. I think it's pushing a boundary somewhere a bit more than it should be pushed, though I can't quite put my finger on why.
Neat.
DeleteIt says a lot when "Draw two, discard one" isn't the most inspiring part of a card.
I think even at 1R your second design is still too strong. Compare to Pyrewild Shaman, a card development said they pushed for constructed (even though I don't think it quite made it).
ReplyDeleteI should also say, by the way, that I do agree with the central premise that Red needs some broadening in focus, and I think this is true both in limited and constructed.
DeleteI think WOTC's hesitance to expand Red a bit for fear that it will make legacy burn decks too strong is very unfortunate, and I think a benefit cost analysis would lean strongly in the direction of expanding Red at the cost of possibly upsetting Legacy players (a very small minority in Magic).
Did they really claim to have pushed Pyrewild Shaman? It looks pretty nerfed to me.
DeleteIt is possible I misremember, but if you recall they even put it in the cube online!
DeleteIf you're trying to create a card to support strategies other than aggro burn, making a more resilient spark elemental hardly seems the way to do it. This is absolutely an aggro burn card.
ReplyDeleteI conflated two of the ideas in Sam's article. Unquenchable Spark is very aggro and the first one is clearly aggro-burn. It is a more resilient threat, and that can help red win a game that goes longer than intended. You're absolutely right, this card doesn't support other archetypes as much as it does aggro. (I can imagine a combo deck that sacrifices it every round.)
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