Original Card: Truce ­

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• Changed cost from to .
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• Increased life gain per card from 2 to 4.
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• Changed wonky wording (for each card not drawn?), making the spell modal in the process.
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Annoying problem. Narwhals and Truce are now competing for the same casting cost, and are the only gold uncommon in the set. I thought about warping Truce to respond to Narwhals, but I figured it was best to just make Truce be the best card it could be, then solve the issue after.

But now what? I could make Narwhals mono-white (the idea of a White fish bothers me, but not that much I guess.) Change Narwhals to mono-blue and replace first strike with something like hexproof or flash, or really bend the color pie and put Truce back in mono-white. I don't know. I think Pro-red, flash may be for the best.

Should probably also promote Truce to rare, so we don't have any gold uncommons.

I asked Maro what monocolor this would be some time ago, and he never answered. It doesn't really fit in the modern pie. I could probably see it as green, but is the best bet.

I don't like the modal wording here. It means everyone has to make their choices when the spell is announced rather than resolves, and it slightly hides the symmetry. It is quite hard to find a sensible template though, I'll give you that.

I was thinking of putting a copy of the spell on the stack for each player, but I suppose that just makes it more complicated, and the copies would still have sucky wording, or be modal, so nothing is accomplished.

Nah, I think modal is better. It's awkward because we're not used to the card operating this way. But the argument against modal is the argument against every charm ever made. They all have that flaw. It's just a little more pronounced here.

Not just that, but this isn't actually a spell with 3 modes... it's a spell with 3^N modes where N is the number of players in the game. I don't think there's any precedent for templating a card like this where the choices made on announcement count as modes. It's not very different to Cryptic Command, or Blatant Thievery... but it's definitely extremely unusual templating.