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CardName: Heart of Winter Cost: 4 Type: Snow Artifact Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: If Heart of Winter untapped at the beginning of a player's upkeep, that player taps a non-snow permanent they control. {T}: Untap target snow permanent you control. Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Ulaqat Uncommon

Heart of Winter
{4}
 
 U 
Snow Artifact
If Heart of Winter untapped at the beginning of a player's upkeep, that player taps a non-snow permanent they control.

{t}: Untap target snow permanent you control.
Updated on 12 Nov 2018 by Sorrow

History: [-]

2018-11-11 04:19:42: Sorrow created and commented on the card Heart of Winter

Not sure what the CMC should be.

Really depends on how good your best snow card (that you get to use twice as much) is, compared to your worst one (snow land, I guess?)

[Edit: I misread the card, so half of this diatribe is useless. I'm leaving it intact, though, as a reminder of just how much of a n00b I can be sometimes. Feel free to skip it all, though. Too much thought went into a completely different spell that you didn't design. 🙄]

At its worst, as Vitenka points out, it untaps a land every turn. I would think that's a hair weaker than Manalith. Admittedly, it's got a problem that if you never drew into the right color, it won't give you the right color mana. But if you have the right colors out, it produces every color.

This is, of course, unless there's a reason to not go all-in with snow land in Ulaqat. I'm assuming that this is a set where, if you have a few snow lands, you might as well be all snow lands. But cards that hurt only when a player has a lot of snow lands seems viable (a Mana Leak equal to the number of snow permanents the opponent controls for example.) Also, good non-snow nonbasic lands can cut into a mana base, cutting into the general utility of this card.

But Vitenka is also missing the absolute worst case scenario, where you don't have any other snow permanents. It still does something, messing with your opponent's tempo. That pushes the power of this card past Manalith in my opinion. I would gladly trade out a Manalith for a rock that only produced colorless mana if it forced my opponent to tap a permanent on the rounds I didn't have a use for one extra mana (which is most rounds.) Sure, that ability won't do much most of the time... but there will be games where you won because your opponent needs to choose between keeping up a blocker and casting a spell. The ability is even better if you can cast spells during your opponent's turn, allowing you to get the best of both worlds.

If you combine both worst case scenarios with even marginal better case scenarios (I use it to untap my 4/4 snow creature... after my opponent declares attackers and after my opponent had to tap a nonsnow permanent) then this card starts to become very strong. Stronger than Chromatic Lantern as far as I'm concerned. And we haven't even begun to explore combo potential. If an artifact is stronger than Chromatic Lantern, I don't think it should stay at {3}.

Which is unfortunate, because I assume you intend this to mostly be a mana accelerator, but you also couldn't resist keeping that first line. If you want the card to remain balanced, though, I think you either need to remove the first line (you could always sneak it onto a different card. Perhaps an Arcane Encyclopedia variant?) or increase the cost to {4}.

It doens't get a free land untap; it untaps a thing now, at the cost of your tapping something (probably a land) later. So it's not great at making mana. I guess it gives you a quick mana bump now, pay it back later - and of course it colour fixes.

It also has a 'sneaky mode' if you can get it itself to untap on an opponents upkeep. It's a pretty interesting combo with Unwinding Clock. Which, unfortunately, probably also does mean it needs a slight upcost.

Oh geez. My reading comprehension skills are through the floor lately. I read that as "If Heart of Winter {is} untapped at the beginning of a player's upkeep, do X" not "if it untapped, do X". I thought it was tapping down a random permanent your opponent controlled during their upkeep, as long as your artifact was untapped. That's a very different card and now I don't know what's going on.

That said, "When ~ untaps" might have stopped me from making that mistake. But probably not.

I meant the card to be "If Heart of Winter is untapped", but my lack of proofreading had me miss the "is." While I figured mana acceleration would be the primary use of this card, that was only secondary. I wanted the first ability as a shout-out to Icy Manipulator and then added the second ability to give Heart of Winter a reason it might be tapped.

2018-11-12 21:11:55: Sorrow edited Heart of Winter:

Increased cmc from 3 to 4.

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