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CardName: Painful Contract Cost: 1b Type: Instant Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: Painful Contract deals 1 damage to target creature or player. You gain life equal to the damage dealt this way. Recover {B} (When a creature is put into your graveyard from the battlefield, you may pay {B}. If you do, return this card from your graveyard to your hand. Otherwise, exile this card.) Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Madoka Magi-ka Common

Painful Contract
{1}{b}
 
 C 
Instant
Painful Contract deals 1 damage to target creature or player. You gain life equal to the damage dealt this way.
Recover {b} (When a creature is put into your graveyard from the battlefield, you may pay {b}. If you do, return this card from your graveyard to your hand. Otherwise, exile this card.)
Updated on 01 Oct 2012 by Alexander

History: [-]

2012-09-29 03:28:46: Alexander created the card Painful Contract

The problem with recover is that as soon as a creature dies, you must either return this to your hand or exile it. Recover makes it too easy to fail to remember triggers; that's why beneficial triggers now get "You may".

Well, Alexander does have some precendence to work with when using recover. I kind of doubt Wizards would use that mechanic again for a little while, since I think it caused a few more nose wrinkles than nods... and I do think it's important to note that it comes from an expansion with intentionally anachronist design... but most non-desingers don't think it's weird to return a mechanic that some people liked. Actually, I'm in the camp of liking Recover, because I like working with stress, even though I'd avoid designing around it myself because I know most players do not like stress.

That being said, I think if one was to recover Recover, you'd need to have it do a few new backflips to get the "I like new things" group on board, and diminish the voice of the "I don't like drawbacks" crowd. Maybe a heavy flavor resonance? Ooh... or maybe a "When you Recover"? Or possibly an "If this is exiled from your graveyard" beneficial effect, so that the down side is mitigated...

With "Memory" being the major mechanic of this set I'm designing, I needed a returning mechanic since it's R&D's policy to include a returning mechanic every set (with the exception of RTR) and it had to be something that helped Memory. So Recover isn't going to be as much of a drawback in this set as it appears in a vacuum.

I think (((Another Chance))) has some really interactive qualities as well since its recover trigger combos with the card's text.

I'm also designing this set as a nod to my favorite Magic set of all time--Odyssey. Odyssey is the set I first started playing for standard and I loved the puzzle challenge of working with Threshold, Flashback, Incarnations and Madness.

I love Odyssey for those exact reasons too. Odyssey, however, is generally considered by Wizards staff to be a mistake. A lot of people hate it for the exact reason why we love it.

I'm not saying you shouldn't work with mechanics inspired by Odyssey. Far from it. I'm rather interested in what you have. I just wanted to give a general warning, since you're probably going to see a lot of complaints similar to Dude's complaint up there, from a lot of different people.

My best advice is to make sure you know your audience. Some of the worst designed Magic cards in existance stem from the fact that they weren't intended for anyone. It was just assumed that someone would like the card, so it was printed. But no one appreciated the card, and the entire game was made worse for it. If, however, you're desinging a card with a specific audience in mind... even just people who think the way you do... then you can't go wrong.

Ugh, I just realized this is basically a much better version of Grim Harvest so I gotta change it to some other effect.

2012-10-01 11:22:56: Alexander edited Painful Contract:

Changed the name and the card text so it's not a strictly better Grim Harvest anymore.

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