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CardName: Napalm Cost: 2R Type: Enchantment Summon - Ooze Pow/Tgh: 2/2 Rules Text: Bestow {R}{R}{R} At the beginning of each upkeep, Napalm deals 10 damage to enchanted creature. Whenever Napalm blocks or becomes blocked, it becomes an Aura with enchant creature. Attach it to target creature blocking or blocked by it. Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Magic Essentials: The Eternal Core Set Rare |
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Just wondering, does this read right?
"becomes an Aura with enchant creature." Other than that it seems fine. Starting with bestow might be a bit much; that's already a lot of text.
Bestow is a really complicated ability. If the customers of this eternal core set are intended to include any who aren't long-time enfranchised players, I rather doubt they'll include any mechanics on the complexity level of bestow, suspend, madness etc. (I could see them including morph, though only if the set had a good number of morphs across all rarities.)
Kinda disagree - the templating of it is horrific; but the idea is fairly simple. "When this gets into a fight with a creature, instead of doing normal power damage, it turns into a thing on the thing your fighting"
I'd suggest, then, spelling it out that way:
If ~ would deal combat damage to a creature, instead it deals 10 damage to it at the start of your next turn
(I think I'd also just say 'destroys it' if this is a beginner set; I know I know, red does damage instead, but fiddly. And this is really just a weakened, activated, version of deathtouch... which makes me wonder why the heck it's so expensive? I'm pretty sure a vanilla 6/2 costs less than this, for red - and is almost always a heck of a lot better)
Oh, wait, hang on - there's a trick that you can do with the way you currently have it. Drop this onto one of your creatures, it blows up and becomes the creature version, ready to be stuck onto an opponents creature. And you can do that cheapish.
... frankly, I'd just ditch that complexity completely. YAGNI.
I'm not designing this with customers in mind. I'm making the set of cards that I would like to see. And despite saying 'core set' I mean an ultimate collection of cards, not something tailored for beginners to the game. I want to see WotC put out a set of cards that has no reminder text and tons of mechanics from years past. Think Time Spiral block meets Modern/Vintage Masters but general enough in setting that the players don't need a whole block's worth of flavor text and a lite novel to make sense of it.
Aha. "no reminder text and tons of mechanics from years past". That does clear up a lot of things.
Do note that Time Spiral and Modern Masters, despite including a ton of mechanics from years gone by, still put reminder text on them all (except current evergreen mechanics). Blastoderm's Vintage Masters printing has reminder text for shroud as well as for fading. Gustcloak Cavalier has reminder text for flanking, Engineered Explosives has reminder text for sunburst, and Grizzly Fate has reminder text for flashback even though they need to squish up to eight lines of text for it. Check out that reminder text on Molten Disaster, even though it's in a set specifically targeted at expert and long-time players.
In other words, I think you greatly underestimate the number of longtime players who'd still find it necessary or helpful to have a little reminder of what a mechanic means, especially a mechanic from long ago. You're basically designing a set for yourself and a handful of friends, with no resemblance to the considerations that Wizards would actually have to think about if they were going to settle on one final collection of cards to be printed continually from now on.