CCDD 101918—mystery

Cool Card Design of the Day
In the last Beacon of Creation podcast I listened to (I'm a bit behind), they speculated briefly about a mystery card type / mechanic and how that might interact with clues. It seemed like having a clue should help you solve a mystery. Here are five executions of that idea.

What are clues for? We sack them to draw cards. What does that represent? Following leads to solve a mystery. Obviously, that'll help us figure out how to sneak into the temple and steal the artifact.

Once we've sacked a clue, it's not around anymore, so it's hard to set up an engine. This convoke-alike lets you build up clues to play all your mysteries cheaper. Actually, this is strictly-narrower improvise, and upon reflection, building up a permanent mana discount to a bunch of cards in your deck sounds like a bad plan. *cough*Affinity*cough*

There's one other action we always take with clues; actually, we do it even more often than sacrificing them: Triggering off discovering a clue is basically as thematic, but the play is a bit different: Sacking a clue costs {2}, so the discount for mugging is really just making that free (until you play another mystery that turn). Here, the discount depends on what effect is making your clues. Confront the Unknown is cheaper than 2, so that's a gain.  Confirm Suspicions costs 5, but makes three clues, another gain. Fleeting Memories costs more than the discount at 3, but still lets you chain the two spells a bit earlier. Triggers, though, that's where this version shines. Dangerously, actually. Is this too good with Briarbridge Patrol or Erdawl Illuminator? We'd have to test.

Vandalism's version of mystery is like Mugging's, but doesn't require tapping them. Since tapping them is extra busy work and preventing the player from sacking their clues wasn't a goal of this mechanic, this seems like a real upgrade. (Still not sure a permanent discount is a great idea, but if it is, we're going this way.)

Finally, any time you're looking at cost reduction mechanics, it's a good idea to ask what happens if you turn a discount into a bonus. The first card I made like this just had a kicker effect / multikicker based on your clues, but I had already made this card and realized it was a great place to use multikicker. Generally, bonuses are more Fun than discounts, but I see two problems with this ability word: First, doing a thing better rather then figuring out how to do the thing earlier feels less like solving a mystery (and the flavor's already suffering a touch from the effect itself feeling more like a crime you're committing rather than a crime you're solving).

Second, this builds up a permanent bonus for hoarding clues, like Vandalism's keyword—which is potentially dangerous—but also tells players not to do with clues what clues were built to do. That's not great. We can fix that by counting clue sacrifices or creations, though. In this version to the right, I decided to key off both.