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CardName: Howling Bell Cost: 3 Type: Artifact Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: As an additional cost to cast Howling Bell, pay {X} * {x}. Obscure (This permanent cannot be the target of spells or abilities you control) Howling Bell enters the battlefield with X charge counters on it. {T}: Draw cards equal to the amount of charge counters on Howling Bell Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: UnReserved Rare |
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I kinda feel this is balanced. 4 mana it draws you a card each turn. 7 mana it draws 2. 12 mana to draw 3 cards each turn ok right? Considering arcanic, the omnipotent does it and he can attack, block and save himself.
That's not how multikicker works. This effectively costs X3, since there's no reason to kick it more than once. If you want it to scale like that, it needs to cost XX3 or have kicker XX.
An alternative way to cost this:
Howling Bell
, Kicker
, Kicker 
: Draw cards equal to the number of charge counters on ~.
Artifact
Kicker
~ enters the battlefield with a counter on it for each time you kicked it.
As an aside, I totally didn't get the Multikicker
, and I assume I would've missed 
as well. My mind just translated that to Multikicker
. Had I thought about it, I would have realized that was much too cheap, and would have to rethink the card... but I don't know if I would have come up with "Pay X X number of times." I presume a new player would be lost... but maybe the stumbling block is just in my head.
Izaac, I don't understand your math. Currently this would enter with 4 charge counters if you spent 7 mana.
Yeah; I don't think this works the way you think it does - X isn't automatically the number of times you kicked it. I think I could set X to be 40; choose not to kick it at all - and draw 40. I can certainly set it to 4 and then kick it once.
(@link the math intent is "X=2, so kick twicve, total 4, +3 = 7" But that's just not how it works)
Think you want:
Multikicker
, where X is the number of times you kick CARDNAME.
Thromok the Insatiable
The X in the activated ability is no defined anywhere, so it is whatever value you choose for X independent of e. g. the number of charge counters, right? And the number of charge counters is independent of the number of times this was kicked.
You could just choose 6 for X and not pay the multikicker cost even once and still draw plenty of cards because none of the pieces actually connect.
Also using X multiple times on a card to refer to different values is a terrible practice and technically just a rules nightmare if you actually try to parse it through the rules. (Since WotC simply doesn't print cards like that they never bothered to build a priority system in the rules that solves any contradictions your wording might produce.)
At the very least this needs to correct itself to the last two lines of jmgariepy's suggestion above to work at all in a meaningful way. I actually like the overall design there quite a lot.
PSA: 33 = 27
The last ability still doesn't do anything, because once this is on the battlefield, X is defined as 0 again. It needs to say "draw cards equal to the number of counters on it"
Ok, I think I got everything. If I was wizards, I'd probably just print x*x in the mana cost to save text space. It is an unset afterall.