Cool Card Design of the Day6/9/2015 - A lot of Magic design consists of building something novel from existing parts. Once you have Metalcraft, it's an easy leap from Shock to Galvanic Blast.
More often than not, these designs come from trying to tie existing mechanics into a new theme. But every once in a while, you find a clean overlap between core mechanics that could appear in any set.
Distress, meet Memoricide.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAs Eradicate is to Doom Blade... :)
DeleteEradicate does beg a question - is this technology doable at uncommon? I think it's a bit too text-y for uncommon nowadays, but it is a very intuitive concept once you have it explained to you, so it might not be?
EDIT: Made a small error.
These effects read much better than they are (which adds splash) and cause extra shuffling. I don't think extraction is impossible at uncommon, but I think they belong at rare.
DeleteNice!
ReplyDeleteThis is a $20 card, no?
I think this is marginally Standard playable at best, but it would very likely preorder for that price.
DeleteThis is exactly Lobotomy, the original version of this card, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteIndeed it is! I should have known it was too intuitive to have been missed. I didn't catch it in text search because they used nonbasic instead of nonland.
DeleteHow strongly do you believe the original is overcosted by a factor of two and a color? I have no objection to it being mono Black, but I'm skeptical about upgrading Distress by this much without bumping the mana cost.
DeleteI would agree with this, and would rather see it see print at 1BB, or even 2BB as an ETB, maybe. I'd be interested to see a Distress variant that just exiled & exiled matching cards from the graveyard - that could be potentially playable, while still being not a strict upgrade if you wanted to go discard - reanimate, yourself.
DeleteAgainst the vast majority of decks extracting is a miniscule upside. For instance, this is much worse in Standard than Distress + gain 1 life. Distress hasn't been a constructed powerhouse, which means this card gets to read as insane without actually being very good, which is something we want a bit of for spoiler season.
DeleteThe only room for power problems (aside from combo-based Standard) is hitting two copies in hand. I could see opting for a slightly more convoluted wording to only take one.
Delete"this is much worse in Standard than Distress + gain 1 life" is a VERY strong statement. Extracting is a very often overrated ability (just ask LSV) but tacking it on to a guaranteed one for one is not the same. Even aside the incredibly swingy and powerful hitting two of the same card, I will take removing three gas cards from your deck as an upside over gaining a life any day. So many games come down to who draws fewer lands.
DeletePeople debate a lot whether the one life on a fetchland is worth running just to thin lands out of your deck. This is three cards. On the play I might take your Fleecemane Lions, and maybe you're happy not to have the two drops in your deck any more. Who can say.
I think the key takeaway for me is, Thoughtseize is awful and unfun to play against. I don't think Thoughtseize variants are the right place to push power level.
Running the fetchland math shows that the thinning is minimal. Even with each copy removing three action spells the games have to go really long to gain much benefit.
DeleteJust the existence of this card in Standard prevents players from building decks featuring a playset of a single threat.
DeleteAnd to be clear, I think the fetchland question is pretty much solved, although it doesn't take much at all the swing the math (for example, running Courser of Kruphix in your deck). But The card you are proposing does either three or six times that effect.
DeleteNotably when Mark designed the card a long time ago, part of his goal was to have a format the discouraged four ofs. I think that is an interesting goal in principle, but it creates so much variance.
I'm not convince the card accomplishes that goal except against control decks so extreme that they only have a couple of copies of the same win condition. Regardless, the efficiency isn't exactly central to the design. It could easily be {1}{B}{B}.
DeleteI like where this design is coming from (that it already exists shows the merits of the design), but agree that it's too powerful. Can we make it weaker but keep the cost low?
ReplyDeleteDecree of Censorship BW
Enchantment
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, look at target player's hand. You may name a card in that player's hand.
The named card costs 3 more to cast
Whatever the power level of the original design, this one is sweet (though I presume rare due to memory issues).
Delete