Siluras: Comments

One problem that I've been thinking about with this "Has more lands" mechanic is that it favors the person who goes first, and also strongly favors green. What steps are you taking to minimize this imbalance?

Good question. And a question like that deserves a good answer. Which I can't give at the moment. :-P Options though, include costing the Explorer spells up a bit, so you can't really pull a huge bonus out in the first few turns where the lead of who went first makes a big difference; offering land-search cards in other colors; adjusting the mechanic to activate per a specific number of lands rather than who has more.

As it stands, most of the cards with Explorer currently have effects that won't really be useful until later in the game. Of the current set, the only one I could forsee being problematic is probably Explorer's Perch, as it takes a quick lead and immediately makes it difficult for the opponent to catch up.

I can't ever think of a time where a spell card in my hand would be with putting one +1/+1 counter on a creature I control (for feral 1). Maybe I just haven't play tested the cards and saw the power, or I overvalue card advantage too much. :)

For Explorer: My first thought was that you could feature a bunch of cards in your set that encourage returning a land to your hand as part of the cost, to increase stress. That said, it would take a lot of cards with that mechanic to matter, since the Explorer deck would simply choose not to play with them. You could force the explorer deck to play with them, but I don't know how much fun the explorer player would have. Example:

­
Instant
As an additional cost to play ~, return X lands to your hand.
Deal X damage to all flying creatures.
Explorer - If you have more lands than all other players, target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn.

Personally, I love stress. Many other players don't however. Ah well.

Maybe the Explorer cards should care about lands that are in your hand instead? That brings a fair amount of variability... though, it's probably very different from whatever you were planning.

jmg's idea sounds like a classic example of the kind of "forcing players to make hard decisions" kind of tension that so many designers got criticised for in GDS2.

Considering the recent change in the rules regarding playing land, what if Explorer became - As an additional cost, you may put a land card into play from your hand. If you do, blah blah effect. ?