Here's one for the "weird Spikey subgame" files (my favorite is still Zyym, Mesmeric Lord).
I feel like I might have posted this somewhere before-- apologies if so. The mechanic is an all-pay auction, a structure notorious for getting people to pay more than they should. In a two-player game of Magic it's a little more balanced, but still anxiety-inducing. It's a terrible deal for the caster if the opponent pays slightly more, so one strategy is to semi-unpredictably bid zero (turning this into a burn spell) or quite a bit (turning it into a painful hard counter). Even with such a strategy it probably isn't a good card, but the gameplay fascinates me.
The name here is perfection. I could see this going into a revisit to eldraine. It had a lot of cheeky phrase card names (didn't say please comes to mind). I feel like the mana and the life loss are a pretty big ask unless you're slotting this into a deck where you intend to gain a lot of life, but you make some great points about using it as pseudo burn. I actually think this would be really fun in a politics heavy game of commander. get someone playing a white life commander to take the hit for the whole table. I think you're spot on with the neat interactions it could cause.
ReplyDeleteIts a cool expedition into some fresh territory!
I feel like this is a little too spikey for most people, in that you have to invest a ton of mental energy for a very mundane effect. I like the concept, and if your goal is just to appeal to spike then it absolutely succeeds, but I think it could have more widespread appeal if you went for a more splashy effect than "counter target spell".
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