Cool Card Design of the Day11/25/2015 - A very inexpensive way to add smoothing to your deck is through symmetric effects like Ruined Servitor. We want to give players smoothing, and giving both players smoothing with a single card that the first player won't feel bad playing could do a lot to improve games.
That last one is notably not smoothing, but it does help preserve game momentum.
The problem with these cards is the following: say you have Runed Wanderer. You want to play a creature, but you don't need that land. There is a chance your opponent needs that land. So suddenly it becomes an incredible riskfactor. You could give your opponent suddenly increadible vallue.
ReplyDeleteSo this should fix that problem: "if you do, all (or just target) may do the same"
Runed Sage looks strictly worse than Omenspeaker. Apart from that tiny dev quibble, yes, this looks like a solid mechanic. Reminds me of Parlay from Conspiracy. The approach there was that you (the controller) get the parlay benefits, but incidentally each player gets to draw a card as part of the effect.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing wrong with it being at a lower power level than Omenspeaker...
DeleteAs a Spike, playing these cards is often going to feel bad because helping my opponent could be a mistake. However, playing these can be cool in multiplayer or for different audiences.
ReplyDeleteParley in Conspiracy had a number of improvements on this. It was for a multiplayer set, so playing "group hug" cards can have good political usefulness. It also always made parley read very exciting, since the more non-land cards were revealed the better your card became. The randomness appeals perfectly to casual players.