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CardName: Caustic Vein Cost: 3 Type: Artifact Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: At the beginning of each player's upkeep, that player draws cards and gains poison counters equal to the number of charge counters on Caustic Vein. (A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.) {3}: Add or remove a charge counter to Caustic Vein. Any player may play this ability. Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Multiverse Design Challenge Rare
Caustic Vein
 At the beginning of each player's upkeep, that player draws cards and gains poison counters equal to the number of charge counters on Caustic Vein. (A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.)
: Add or remove a charge counter to Caustic Vein. Any player may play this ability. |
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For Challenge # 072. Linking up Fifth Dawn, and going Straight into Scars of Mirrodin. This card is supposed to be a teaser for what's coming down the line. The point is meant to be subtle. It's supposed to look like a goofy one-of artifact in a set filled with artifacts. Meanwhile, it gets a segment of players excited to see a poison card again. Boy will they be surprised in 6 months.
I kind of like my first thought, too, which went something like this:
Creature - Golem
Sunburst
At the beginning of your upkeep, draw cards and gain poison counters equal to the number of +1/+1 counters on ~.
0/0
It was supposed to be a very risk v. reward card... but it occurred to me that that card would get much worse in a set filled with infect. Wouldn't you want the teaser card to have extra value when the set it teases hits?
This isn't subtle at all. Also, to me it would seem extremely bizarre to see poison just randomly pop up.
Ah, I should have qualified that. It seems subtle to me, but only because Mirrodin was chock full of bizarre artifacts like this. This will be sitting next to Lightning Coils, Darksteel Reactor, Door to Nothingness and Gate to the Aether... I could go on. There's a ton of them. That, and before Scars, poison had a tendency to just randomly pop up. It was rarely seen in large numbers.
The subtlety part of this card is that it looks like the poison is only here for this one card. It doesn't tell you that the next block is chock full of poison.
Mmm... I'm not sure about "had a tendency to just randomly pop up". It hadn't been seen for... Mirrodin, Onslaught, Odyssey, Invasion, Masques, Urza, Tempest, and then Suq'Ata Assassin in Visions. Eight years. I... guess that's not actually as long as all that. This would be quite a notable card in its set, but yeah, people probably would see it as just "a random poison card" rather than "the long-awaited Return Of Poison Counters!"
I really like this. It's like it sits in the middle of the table and growls at you.