Thursday, February 25, 2016

CCDD 022516—Jury-Rig

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/23/2016 - Inspired by Devin's initial Spotlight Challenge submission, I wanted to find a mechanic that combined unearth with a way to get your artifact into the graveyard, like cycling. That led me to something similar to dash.


Rook is big for a common, but very hard to cast (like an Eldrazi). Jury-Rig allows you to attack for 6 for less than a Lava Axe.


Glittering Totem is most likely too dangerous now, since it doesn't require any work beyond staying above 2 life on turn 1. Sexy though.

Here's a much safer version, that rewards more jury-rigging:




Exarch of the Singularity and Teetering Wellspring show how jury-rigging some cards is even better than casting them permanently.


Shoddy Replicant is our haste clone. Can't get the double-blue? Need your clone now? Jury-rig it. Maybe it's jury-rig cost could be just {3}?


Shrine of Ish-Behah is an amazing permanent, but sometimes you need help getting to the point where you can cast seven-mana spells, and this is a mythic cycling trigger.



There are a surprising number of ways to use Jury-Rig.Here's a bunch more cards if you're still curious about the mechanic:


There are situations I'd pay {3} for a sorcery that makes my creatures indestructible. If I happen to have double that and can make it permanent, awesome.


I kept thinking the default use for jury-rig should be to draw you a card to replace the one you're losing, but every time I started designing that card, I found something more interesting.







You could definitely make some jury-rig costs costs colors. Temporal Gate could be free to activate but cost {WU} to jury-rig. Shining Steed could have jury-rig {2G}; Teetering Wellspring {2}{U}; Exarch of the Singularity {2B}{2B}. It all depends whether the set wants hybrid, twobrid, colored activations, and/or colored artifacts.




Gah! I can't stop designing…



11 comments:

  1. I tried something similar with "Erupt", see: http://www.magicmultiverse.net/cardsets/507/mechanics I liked the idea, but found it difficult to cost them so casting the jury-rig cost was attractive without being too swingy. You may have done better than I did, I'm not sure.

    I do like a lot of these! The mechanic can be combined with a lot of different types of creature and enter/leave battlefield effects so there's quite a bit of design space.

    I have a personal expectation, that anything that looks like a "fixed" Lotus Petal, is going to be broken. Admittedly, that may only be true in eternal formats, in standard Glittering Totem may be fine.

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    1. The only thing that might make the 2-life Glittering Totem printable is how unlikely you are to get two of them in your opening hand. I suppose it also matters to the format how many cards become too good when you cast them a turn earlier. IDK. Probably busted.

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    2. I'm genuinely not sure. It seems like ONE lotus petal shouldn't make a big difference to a format, especially if it produces colourless. Most of the uses depend on having a critical mass of fast mana and combo pieces, especially ones which allow you to recur the fast mana from a graveyard.

      But on the other hand, wizards seem to have followed the principle of NOT printing any 0-cost mana-producing non-lands of any sort.

      Maybe the problem is, if it's not broken, it tends not to be useful? I'm not sure.

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  2. This seems like a fun mechanic. I'm not a big fan of the wellspring and and cleric with the higher jury-rig cost but I might feel differently if the first set in the block had lots of jury-rig and they were in the second set. My favorite ones here are the Imperial Guard and Battlefield Engineer.

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    1. I don't like giving lords to mechanics defined by a downside that remove the downside (see also Lord of the Unreal).

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    2. I'd prefer to obviate the downside in another way, such as "Whenever a Jury-Rigger permanent you control dies, draw two cards."

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  4. Great mechanic, and largely great designs, except for Desert Drakerunner which has active dis-synergy with its own ability.

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    1. It is very believable that Dash could have started out as this mechanic, and been developed to its current state.

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  5. The comparison to Dash makes me wonder how difficult this may be to develop. Losing an entire card worth of value means that the Jury-Rig costs will have to be quiet a lot lower to compensate. But will this make extremely fast aggro or combo decks the only beneficiaries of this mechanic?

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  6. I like this, but I wonder if it wouldn't just be better to go the Dash route. The drawback of using it only once is nice, and makes it very easy to push - but it means the costs are so aggressive (generally) that it would have a much higher variance in how good it is on a board for its Jury-Rig cost, compared to Dash. In addition, it has far more negative feelings. There's a reason Dash returned to hand rather than sacrificed, I think.

    Still, this is a fascinating mechanic and I think it's very promising.

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