For comparison's sake, I've been deliberating for literally years as to whether this card, which is inferior to Staggering Blow, needs an extra 1 in its cost:
Brain DrainXUB
Sorcery
Target player discards X cards. Draw a card for each card discarded this way.
The pause this gives me is that in many cases it's positively *brutal* delivered on turn 5 (with X=3). At that point you can almost certainly still hit three cards. This version is *really* trash if you wait too long, though....
I'm not sure I know which side of this discussion I'm on, but I think it's clear that if this card needs the extra 1, so does yours.
Turn 2 Feral Hydra + Turn 3 Royal Jelly = Turn 3 Progenitus. That would be competitive in Legacy; in Standard it's broken. Accelerated Evolution is slightly better due to the increased costs and requirements, but any time you tutor for a creature and put it directly into play you're in dangerous waters. Compare to Chord of Calling, which has a much higher total cost, and Dramatic Entrance, which requires you to have the card in hand.
Oooh, that's...yeah, a pretty nice combo. In my defense, my card idea is older than all the cards you name; I didn't really think about how cards released in the interim might interact with it. (To illustrate how old, I was thinking of saccing Llanowar Elves for Elvish Aberrations back when I came up with it!)
Of course, in the mad fantasy world where the cards we all come up with actually saw print, we'd have control enough over what cards go in which sets to, say, wait for a Standard environment that didn't have an uber monster that shared a type with a 2-mana(-able) creature.
As it is, though, Royal Jelly might just be fixable with "~ enters the battlefield tapped." That would give the opponent a turn to avert disaster, at least, and put the arriving Progenitus on the same turn that Day of Judgment becomes available.
royal jelly - not sure I get the flavor on this one. the card itself is pretty powerful but probably worth just 3 mana.
When a bee colony needs a queen, it gorges a larva on royal jelly, which causes the larva to grow up to be a queen.
I like the flavor of this one. I've had a similar effect sitting in one of my card files for years, patterned after Natural Order:
Accelerated Evolution 2GG
Sorcery
As an additional cost to cast Accelerated Evolution, sacrifice a creature.
Search your library for a creature card that shares a type with the sacrificed creature and put it onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.
I'm not sure whether mine is overcosted, yours undercosted, or a bit of both. Mine does leave the creature in the graveyard for later tricks, though....
It's actually even worse than you think. If its "every name" ability also applies to deckbuilding restrictions, then this card is banned in any format that has at least one banned card.
(Then just on a sidenote, are the 79$ with taxes? in europe taxes are usually already inclusive in the price).
The US does not have a national sales tax / VAT. Individual states and localities set their own sales taxes. Because the applicable tax varies depending on the location of sale, prices for items in the US are generally quoted pre-tax to avoid confusion / provide a better baseline for comparison. 6% is an approximate average for the total of these sales taxes.
The US gets away without a national sales tax due to a heavier emphasis on income tax; the disparity between income tax rate progressions in the US and Germany more or less closes the apparent gap between the income figures you posted. So our average after-tax incomes are pretty comparable, but due to the lower sales taxes, the money remaining in my paycheck buys me more goods than the money remaining in yours. I'd pay $106 ($100 nominal price plus another ~$6 in taxes) at my Friendly Local Gaming Store for a booster box; yours costs ~$130 or so (90€).
with very, very much luck you can get 10-15€ per hour for helping pupils to get better grades (helping with homework, practise with him etc. sont know the word right now "Nachhilfe").
But I guess if you doing something like that in US you get like 25-30$/hour?
This is called "tutoring" (not in the Demonic way ;-)) in the US. It would probably take as much luck to earn $25/hr for that here as it would to make 15€/hr at it there, though....
Ok, no Y then but "amoung these cards" must apear before the start of the repetition ability as the repetition ability itself does not mention any cards.
Really? The whole thing looks like one ability to me - heck, it's all one sentence. I can point to numerous examples where "those cards" is used to reference cards from an earlier sentence of the same ability, and at least one (Colfenor's Urn) that has a separate ability referring to them; there's an implicit reference to the exiled cards first, but the cards get exiled by the other ability.
I know (or at least strongly suspect; my knowledge of existing cards is not encyclopedic, given my occasional absences from the game) this is a template combination that's never been done before, but I really don't think it's as hard as you seem to think.
you have picked the hardest to word card idea I have ever seen by the way.
Doesn't surprise me; I tend to come up with the mechanic I want to implement first, and worry about how to make it fit within the rules framework of the game later. Were I ever to go to work for Wizards, I just might be able to give MaRo a run for his money as far as being MaGo's nemesis.
(Diversity Censure) :xmana::symu:
Instant
Target player puts the top X cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard, then repeats this process except that X is the number of colors among cards put into a graveyard this way.
This is a really subtle multicolored hoser, and I like it a lot.
Hmm. This wording might be worth considering too (with the "among those cards" fix as necessary to avoid "blowing up"). As for its subtlety, well, it seems kind of blatant to me, but then I knew what I was trying to do when I made it. Glad you like it!
your way however, has the X setting as part of the repetition ability, not the main ability and so will see cards previously milled aswell, leading to infinite mill if you hit a non-land first time.
That is indeed my concern. I think, however, that just using "among those cards" in place of "among cards put into his or her graveyard this way" should fix it, or at least make it much more clear that only the cards from the most recent "packet" should be considered; the original wording I used, I concede, leads to the conclusion that one keeps counting everything milled by this card ever. I *definitely* don't want to end up using Y - I'd prefer to drop the card entirely rather than do that, as even Wizards has apparently decided that Y was a mistake (on Fireball).
"Target player puts the top X cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard, X becomes equal to the number of colors amoung those cards. repeat this process until X equals 0."
while this is a really annoying way to word it, I can't see any other way that works.
"Among those cards" might be a piece of templating to use, but the rest...I don't know that that works any better. "Becomes" implies that the original X changes in some way, which may confuse some issues (so what was the CMC of this card again?).
are you sure "non-land card types" or simply "non-land cards" wouldn't work better than colours? (the wording would be no easier but it would stop it being as apallingly bad against mono colour decks)
Sure, it'd probably be a more powerful card in general that way. My mind just happened to be on punishing absurd decks like the 5 Color Control concoctions from recent Standard history.
It's kind of an inverse of Grindstone; the more colors in the library of the player you target, the *more* it will mill. It's pretty rotten against monocolor decks - you'll probably only mill for X + 1 or 2 more - but against heavily multicolor stuff you may go X, 5, 4 or 5.... I figure on average (and without spending stupid amounts of mana on X) you could expect to mill for about twice X.
While pondering on a way to make a reasonable milling card with X in the cost (straight up XU: Mill for X looks pretty weak compared to Tome Scour, Mind Funeral, Archive Trap and the like), I came across Grindstone in my memory banks and came up with this way to punish ridiculously multicolor decks instead of monocolor ones:
(Diversity Censure) XU
Instant
Target player puts the top X cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard, then repeats this process with X equal to the number of colors among cards put into his or her graveyard this way.
I'm not sure I've got this templated right, but I couldn't come up with any examples of cards where a process with X in it was repeated. The intent is that, each time you mill, you mill again for the number of colors represented amongst all the cards you milled the previous time (only). This should eventually decline to 0 (when you mill all lands/artifacts).
Tumbleweed Elemental
Creature — Elemental (Rare)
Tumbleweed Elemental enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter on it.
:xmana:: If there are X or less +1/+1 counters on ~, put a +1/+1 counter on it. Spend only green mana this way.
0/0
greetings
Z
I considered this template at first, but I went looking through Oracle to be sure, and I found Skeleton Scavengers, which suggested the one I used, despite the fact that it could easily have been X given that the ability takes generic.
Nemephosis: If one were just to make a card that was GGGGGG for a 6/6, there'd probably be nothing wrong with that. I rankle, though, to create a card that a) dynamically sizes in such a way and b) performs so differently than the text scans. Many players, on first reading the card without that "once each turn" text, will think they know what it does: "oh, I pay G for a counter, then GG, then GGG". When someone more versed in the minutiae of the rules pulls that "in response in response in response" stuff, there's going to be a rules argument and the newbie is going to be upset. By making the card operate on the "principle of least surprise", I tried to avoid that.
bryanmeerkat: It was intentional that Tumbleweed Elemental didn't double in size with each activation. Yes, Figure does, but it does so at more mana cost than this would and has a limitation on the number of times it can - but Green rarely has any limitation on the extent to which it can grow. By having smaller steps, it also helps fill in the curve better.
You do provide an interesting template for the ability that gets around the need for "once each turn", but I think it scans kind of clunkily too - I never really did like the cards that have to check the implicit condition in the cost again, explicitly, in the effect.
Of course, this guy could stand to be a little bit better in general. As it stands, by the time you've spent the 10 total additional mana you would spend on making Figure 8/8 flying first-strike, this guy's only 5/5 with no abilities. On the other hand, you've only had to muster 4 of that mana at any given time. So maybe in order to avoid microtext, he should have one or two static abilities at all times rather than at counter thresholds? Trample is kind of a funny thing for a tumbleweed, but the name isn't necessarily final. Shroud might just make this guy nutty....
Inspired by the posts in the Scute Mob preview thread that keep comparing it to Figure of Destiny, I came up with a much more straightforward green "Figure":
Tumbleweed Elemental* G
Creature — Elemental (Rare)
Tumbleweed Elemental enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter on it.
Pay G for each +1/+1 counter on Tumbleweed Elemental: Put a +1/+1 counter on Tumbleweed Elemental. Activate this ability only once each turn.
0/0
There. This gives you the Sligh-esque "use all of your mana each turn" ability that made Figure so nice. It might want some sort of "If this has at least X +1/+1 counters on it, it gains a bunch of awesome abilities" thing too, but at this point I'm not sure it'd fit on the card. "Activate this ability only once each turn" is necessary to avoid a bunch of activations in response to one another that end up making the guy immediately, say, 6/6 for GGGGGG. I didn't want to make it "play as a sorcery" because it felt more important to preserve the admittedly limited and obvious combat trick, as well as to provide the option to use it during the opponent's turn.
Thoughts?
* If I were more Un-, I would just name this card "Katamari" and be done with it.
In my opinion, this is powerful enough to be played, but only in a deck with which it has specific synergies (yeah, it's good with Landfall). It is, I admit, very fragile, easy to catch even as if by accident in a Fallout or Infest (which aren't going anywhere unless the metagame does something REALLY strange; they're not only good against Faeries), but in the right type of deck, even one turn's worth of Futurexploration may be enough.
I'd like to see someone try a BRG Warp World deck with this. Ob Nixilis and Rampaging Baloths are both crushing finishers post-Warp (though the latter really wants Madrush Cyclops support if you're going for the combo-kill), but they're also castable without it and good enough to win games on their own with some supporting land shenanigans. The Oracle is everything you could want here: mana acceleration, permanent inflation, a permanent itself, and a landfall enabler.
Back around the time of Urza block, I had created Last Laugh in a more restricted form (was just "whenever a creature is put into a graveyard from play") and called it Sudden Death (under the assumption that this was what would happen to all creatures in play more or less immediately). So they've used both my card name and my mechanic, just on different cards
Brain Drain XUB
Sorcery
Target player discards X cards. Draw a card for each card discarded this way.
The pause this gives me is that in many cases it's positively *brutal* delivered on turn 5 (with X=3). At that point you can almost certainly still hit three cards. This version is *really* trash if you wait too long, though....
I'm not sure I know which side of this discussion I'm on, but I think it's clear that if this card needs the extra 1, so does yours.
EDIT: Brain moving slow today thanks to cold meds; there are simpler and more common ways of doing it too, but they have splash damage to consider.
"Play this ability only when you could play a sorcery and only if there are no +1/+1 counters on Daggersmith."
"Play this ability only once per turn and only if there are no +1/+1 counters on Daggersmith."
Or, my original suggestion that maintains the ability to get tricky with this guy:
"1W: If there are no +1/+1 counters on Daggersmith, put a +1/+1 counter on it."
Oooh, that's...yeah, a pretty nice combo. In my defense, my card idea is older than all the cards you name; I didn't really think about how cards released in the interim might interact with it. (To illustrate how old, I was thinking of saccing Llanowar Elves for Elvish Aberrations back when I came up with it!)
Of course, in the mad fantasy world where the cards we all come up with actually saw print, we'd have control enough over what cards go in which sets to, say, wait for a Standard environment that didn't have an uber monster that shared a type with a 2-mana(-able) creature.
As it is, though, Royal Jelly might just be fixable with "~ enters the battlefield tapped." That would give the opponent a turn to avert disaster, at least, and put the arriving Progenitus on the same turn that Day of Judgment becomes available.
When a bee colony needs a queen, it gorges a larva on royal jelly, which causes the larva to grow up to be a queen.
I like the flavor of this one. I've had a similar effect sitting in one of my card files for years, patterned after Natural Order:
Accelerated Evolution 2GG
Sorcery
As an additional cost to cast Accelerated Evolution, sacrifice a creature.
Search your library for a creature card that shares a type with the sacrificed creature and put it onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.
I'm not sure whether mine is overcosted, yours undercosted, or a bit of both. Mine does leave the creature in the graveyard for later tricks, though....
The US does not have a national sales tax / VAT. Individual states and localities set their own sales taxes. Because the applicable tax varies depending on the location of sale, prices for items in the US are generally quoted pre-tax to avoid confusion / provide a better baseline for comparison. 6% is an approximate average for the total of these sales taxes.
The US gets away without a national sales tax due to a heavier emphasis on income tax; the disparity between income tax rate progressions in the US and Germany more or less closes the apparent gap between the income figures you posted. So our average after-tax incomes are pretty comparable, but due to the lower sales taxes, the money remaining in my paycheck buys me more goods than the money remaining in yours. I'd pay $106 ($100 nominal price plus another ~$6 in taxes) at my Friendly Local Gaming Store for a booster box; yours costs ~$130 or so (90€).
This is called "tutoring" (not in the Demonic way ;-)) in the US. It would probably take as much luck to earn $25/hr for that here as it would to make 15€/hr at it there, though....
Really? The whole thing looks like one ability to me - heck, it's all one sentence. I can point to numerous examples where "those cards" is used to reference cards from an earlier sentence of the same ability, and at least one (Colfenor's Urn) that has a separate ability referring to them; there's an implicit reference to the exiled cards first, but the cards get exiled by the other ability.
I know (or at least strongly suspect; my knowledge of existing cards is not encyclopedic, given my occasional absences from the game) this is a template combination that's never been done before, but I really don't think it's as hard as you seem to think.
Doesn't surprise me; I tend to come up with the mechanic I want to implement first, and worry about how to make it fit within the rules framework of the game later. Were I ever to go to work for Wizards, I just might be able to give MaRo a run for his money as far as being MaGo's nemesis.
Hmm. This wording might be worth considering too (with the "among those cards" fix as necessary to avoid "blowing up"). As for its subtlety, well, it seems kind of blatant to me, but then I knew what I was trying to do when I made it. Glad you like it!
That is indeed my concern. I think, however, that just using "among those cards" in place of "among cards put into his or her graveyard this way" should fix it, or at least make it much more clear that only the cards from the most recent "packet" should be considered; the original wording I used, I concede, leads to the conclusion that one keeps counting everything milled by this card ever. I *definitely* don't want to end up using Y - I'd prefer to drop the card entirely rather than do that, as even Wizards has apparently decided that Y was a mistake (on Fireball).
"Among those cards" might be a piece of templating to use, but the rest...I don't know that that works any better. "Becomes" implies that the original X changes in some way, which may confuse some issues (so what was the CMC of this card again?).
Sure, it'd probably be a more powerful card in general that way. My mind just happened to be on punishing absurd decks like the 5 Color Control concoctions from recent Standard history.
It's kind of an inverse of Grindstone; the more colors in the library of the player you target, the *more* it will mill. It's pretty rotten against monocolor decks - you'll probably only mill for X + 1 or 2 more - but against heavily multicolor stuff you may go X, 5, 4 or 5.... I figure on average (and without spending stupid amounts of mana on X) you could expect to mill for about twice X.
(Diversity Censure) XU
Instant
Target player puts the top X cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard, then repeats this process with X equal to the number of colors among cards put into his or her graveyard this way.
I'm not sure I've got this templated right, but I couldn't come up with any examples of cards where a process with X in it was repeated. The intent is that, each time you mill, you mill again for the number of colors represented amongst all the cards you milled the previous time (only). This should eventually decline to 0 (when you mill all lands/artifacts).
Thoughts? Suggestions? Names?
I considered this template at first, but I went looking through Oracle to be sure, and I found Skeleton Scavengers, which suggested the one I used, despite the fact that it could easily have been X given that the ability takes generic.
Nemephosis: If one were just to make a card that was GGGGGG for a 6/6, there'd probably be nothing wrong with that. I rankle, though, to create a card that a) dynamically sizes in such a way and b) performs so differently than the text scans. Many players, on first reading the card without that "once each turn" text, will think they know what it does: "oh, I pay G for a counter, then GG, then GGG". When someone more versed in the minutiae of the rules pulls that "in response in response in response" stuff, there's going to be a rules argument and the newbie is going to be upset. By making the card operate on the "principle of least surprise", I tried to avoid that.
bryanmeerkat: It was intentional that Tumbleweed Elemental didn't double in size with each activation. Yes, Figure does, but it does so at more mana cost than this would and has a limitation on the number of times it can - but Green rarely has any limitation on the extent to which it can grow. By having smaller steps, it also helps fill in the curve better.
You do provide an interesting template for the ability that gets around the need for "once each turn", but I think it scans kind of clunkily too - I never really did like the cards that have to check the implicit condition in the cost again, explicitly, in the effect.
Of course, this guy could stand to be a little bit better in general. As it stands, by the time you've spent the 10 total additional mana you would spend on making Figure 8/8 flying first-strike, this guy's only 5/5 with no abilities. On the other hand, you've only had to muster 4 of that mana at any given time. So maybe in order to avoid microtext, he should have one or two static abilities at all times rather than at counter thresholds? Trample is kind of a funny thing for a tumbleweed, but the name isn't necessarily final. Shroud might just make this guy nutty....
Tumbleweed Elemental* G
Creature — Elemental (Rare)
Tumbleweed Elemental enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter on it.
Pay G for each +1/+1 counter on Tumbleweed Elemental: Put a +1/+1 counter on Tumbleweed Elemental. Activate this ability only once each turn.
0/0
There. This gives you the Sligh-esque "use all of your mana each turn" ability that made Figure so nice. It might want some sort of "If this has at least X +1/+1 counters on it, it gains a bunch of awesome abilities" thing too, but at this point I'm not sure it'd fit on the card. "Activate this ability only once each turn" is necessary to avoid a bunch of activations in response to one another that end up making the guy immediately, say, 6/6 for GGGGGG. I didn't want to make it "play as a sorcery" because it felt more important to preserve the admittedly limited and obvious combat trick, as well as to provide the option to use it during the opponent's turn.
Thoughts?
* If I were more Un-, I would just name this card "Katamari" and be done with it.
I'd like to see someone try a BRG Warp World deck with this. Ob Nixilis and Rampaging Baloths are both crushing finishers post-Warp (though the latter really wants Madrush Cyclops support if you're going for the combo-kill), but they're also castable without it and good enough to win games on their own with some supporting land shenanigans. The Oracle is everything you could want here: mana acceleration, permanent inflation, a permanent itself, and a landfall enabler.