Thursday, December 15, 2016

CCDD 121516—Hold for Questioning

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/15/2016 - It's rough when you have to spend four mana to Sleep Paralysis a two-drop. Hold for Questioning tries to make you feel better about that by repaying you the mana over time.


That achieves our goals best, but we can simplify it so much at the 'cost' of opening it up to work on any creature.


And in practice, if you care about the mana you'll want to cast this as early as possible, so we're still effectively hitting our design goal.

9 comments:

  1. If the creature has an activated ability that requires tapping whoever gets priority first gets to activate, right? That would result in fighting between players to pay a cost with the same resource every turn.

    I'm pretty sure that's completely new territory. It would add this little "Beginning of combat, any responses?" moment during the controlling player's upkeep, but it would mean if they do ANYTHING they suddenly lose. Seems like it would be really hard to explain to new players.

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    1. This doesn't give the creature the ability. It's an ability of our aura.

      Whether it's kosher to tap a permanent you don't control to pay a cost, I'm less sure, but if not, templating fix.

      Delete
    2. Right, but who gets to pay their cost first?

      Delete
    3. Oh, we're talking about a creature has its own tap ability. My misunderstanding.

      Active player gets priority first, and the first priority each turn is in your upkeep.

      Mostly, you'd draw for your turn, and I'd tap your creature "in response to you passing priority during your upkeep."

      Delete
    4. The controller doesn't get to activate first?

      Either way, there is an optimal sequence where either the creature can't activate, or it always activates right away. That feels like a more frustrating version of missible upkeep triggers. Sometimes you not only don't get your bonus, but your opponent gets to cast an instant off of your mistake.

      Seems like it doesn't bother you to prevent the creature from activating, you should just add "Can't activate abilities."

      Delete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. It just makes me wish they had made

      Imprisoned in the Moon 3UU
      Legendary Enchantment — Aura R
      Enchant creature, land, or planeswalker
      Gain control of enchanted permanent.
      Enchanted permanent is a colorless land with "{T}: Add {C}{C}{C} to your mana pool" and loses all other card types and abilities.

      Delete
    2. Actually, that card should be 2UGW or maybe 1UGW and only produce 2 mana. Putting it in mono-blue is just so weird.

      Delete