Friday, November 27, 2020

Weekend Design Challenge 112720 - Mind Rot Variant

Happy Friday, Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Your mission is to design a custom magic card that follows the guidelines. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. I'll try to offer some feedback of my own starting on Monday.

Today the random-card button gives us Tasigur's Cruelty, a six-mana, six-word variant on the Limited staple Mind Rot effect. So, the challenge for this week is to design another such variant: a common black sorcery that makes opponents discard two cards and tells us something about the set it's in. Bonus points for using a mechanic of your own creation.

Good luck and have fun!

12 comments:

  1. > Thought Shatter 3B
    >
    > Sorcery
    >
    > Target player discards two cards, then exiles their graveyard.

    Here's a mind rot for a set with a bit of a graveyard theme. Rather than caring about the graveyard, it acts as a hate card for the decks, essentially making you "discard" all your flashback cards in your graveyard. I could see this in a ravnica set especially, where you won't always need the graveyard hate but it'll be useful when you do.

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    Replies
    1. Given that black is the color that probably wants to reanimate your stuff, it feels a bit bad. I can see it printed as an answer to cluttered graveyard control if that was a strong deck in the previous standard set.

      Delete
    2. I wouldn't be surprised to see this in a real-life set! Graveyard hate doesn't have super-strong flavor or mechanical identity, but you're right that this being in the set at all says lots about the environment.

      Delete
  2. OK, not got any outstanding ideas. The best variant that came to mind was:

    Destroy Livelihood 3B
    Sorcery
    Target player discards two cards. That player loses 2 life for each land card discarded this way.

    I was tempted to mess around with discarding different types more directly but I wasn't sure what would be balanced.

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    Replies
    1. By the time you get to 3B, your opponent is either not holding lands any more, or holding them to protect themselves from discard. I like this punishing the "protect yourself from discard". I might have done it differently: if a land card was discarde this way, return CARDNAME to your hand.

      Delete
    2. Now I'm quite curious what kind of set this might show up in. The fact that it revolves around what your opponent does, rather than what you do, makes it a bit hard to trigger, and the effect is quite incidental (decks that play this spell will tend to be defensive rather than aggressive). Following up on A.'s suggestion, what about:

      Target player discards three cards unless they discard two nonland cards.

      Delete
  3. Thought for food 3B
    Sorcery
    Target opponent discards 2 cards. Make a food token for each card discarded this way.

    That one is name inspired.

    Reminder of loss 2BB
    Sorcery
    Target player discards two cards. For each card discarded that way that shares its name with a card under that players control, they loose life equal to its colored mana cost.

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    Replies
    1. Reminder of Loss is interesting! I'm a big fan of effects that punish multiples, so I like it, and then I get to the payoff and... huh? Does that count the colored mana symbols, like chroma? Definitely a strong indicator of the set theme but it's a lot of hoops to jump through overall for not so much payoff. How about deleting the shared-name condition?

      Delete
  4. Hi! Inspiration was not high this weekend but I still hope you guys like the card :)

    Chain of Loss 1B
    Sorcery
    Target player discards two cards. Then that player may pay {2}. If the player does, they may copy this spell and may choose a new target for that copy.

    Card image here: https://mtg.design/i/hqrz64.jpg

    Have a great one!

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    Replies
    1. This to me is a neat idea, but in practice quite a terrible card. Cards that opponents can copy are usually reserved to things that will accellerate the game. This can strip everyone of their cards, letting the game become a topdeck slow grind.

      Delete
    2. TIL about Chain of Smog, which is this without the 2-mana payment. Chain of Loss has the weird property of playing much better than it reads-- odds are good that you can catch the opponent without mana up or play it as your last card, nullifying the drawback. Most likely it just doesn't get cast when the drawback is live, which is sad because the opponent never gets the choice the card wants to give them (vs something like Chain of Plasma / Chain of Vapor which make sure they do). So this more or less reduces to "Target opponent discards 2 cards unless they pay 2" which itself is a fun design.

      This would be a very good card in most environments. Imagining one where it's bad-- because there are lots of flash spells, say-- is an interesting exercise.

      Delete
  5. https://old.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/mfr120/stx_go_blank/

    I HAVE BEEN VINDICATED

    ReplyDelete