Saturday, February 29, 2020

CCDD 022920 - Mama Bear

Bear with Set's Mechanic has become such a design cliche that it's now an official joke card. But it's a cliche for a reason. Sometimes the best way to show off a neat bread-and-butter mechanic idea really is to put it on a bear.



I think of Reproduce as the Replicate to Embalm's Flashback, but you could also think of it as a more restrictive Multikicker effect. (There's another design cliche for you: All Mechanics Are Just Subsets Of Multikicker/Kicker/Split Cards!) The point is, it isn't breaking much new ground, just combining existing proven design ideas from Embalm and Replicate / Multikicker.

That's actually an encouraging sign for a set mechanic if you ask me. Being well-understood means it can go on a lot of different cards, including commons, without warping play too much. And a good test for that kind of mechanic is whether a common bear can, well, bear it.

2 comments:

  1. Back in the Suvnica days, literally any time someone put a mechanic in a green-aligned guild, the first playtest card was always a bear.

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  2. Wizards would probably change the name of the ability. A shame prolifarate is taken.

    This feels fair and, quite honestly, cool, but I doubt it could be a set mechanic due to the ammount of tokens this would require printing.

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