Oppenheim: Comments

I like this set conceptually a lot. It's surprisingly fresh to go with the concept pf 'fallout MTG'. However, before going too far, I would strongly advise to rework those mechanics since they set the basement for the whole set to build around.

At the moment, neither reap nor irradiate are in a good place. Reap encourages you to land screw itself (as seen in Masterless Golem) while irradiate, well, I think most of that has been covered in (((Dirty Remnant))).

I think irradiate might be salvageable, likely by making it so that you can irradiate your opponents as well, but that just make the 'irradiate yourself' even worse. How about having cards that get bonuses for radiation counters or use them as a cost? It would be fairly parasitic though, but it would make the 'irradiate yourself' cards a lot more sensible.

I don't really know what I would do with reap, but I just don't see it working as it is. The name is also pretty weird, eh? Okay, I could be wrong on this since supposedly landscape in Clockwood works nicely and it's very similar. I think the stronger part here is the anywhere clause so that you can discard or mill the land cards.

How would you feel about the SecretInfiltrator's implied variation of irradiate where you mill instead of losing life? It would mesh well with this reap as well. My only concern with that is that it doesn't match the flavor well, but that might be something that could be lived with. Regardless, this would make a singular coherent mechanical theme though it would yet again be the 'gravewatch' theme where players keep checking out what is and what was put into their graveyards.

Thanks a lot for your comments everyone. I'll reply to everyone here so it's a bit easier to manage.

@Tahazzar - I didn't know Clockwood existed, so thanks for linking that. As of right now, I think I'm pretty settled on Reap but committed to making sure it's developed correctly. From my completely inaccurate and wild guesstimates of play patterns, I think that having Reap function as a finisher-type mechanic (or giving bonuses that can break stalls or push the game to a close) is the most potent way of using it, since generally if the game is stalled out you probably don't want too many lands anymore. Aside from Masterless Golem, I think most of the common ways to turn Reap on will not involve sacrificing your lands, but rather discarding them or milling them. I'll take your word for it that Landscape plays well, but from my initial impression of it, it does have some of the issues that I was worrying about with Reap - it encourages you to sac lands while you're still developing a board in order to maintain dominance, which is something that I kind of want to avoid. To that extent, I will probably rework (((Greenhouse Guardian))) and (((Utselev Scavenger))) so that their abilities will be more desirable to break stalls rather than to develop board.

As for the name, it's to imply harvesting/scavenging a land for resources, i.e. the flavor of Reap. So with irradiate - and this is to @Vitenka too - I didn't want to use poison counters (and, thinking about it, mill) to represent it because there's no real cost for it up until the point at which you would lose. In other words, if I were to use poison counters instead of life loss, the first three activations would essentially be free - and then you just wouldn't do anything with it afterwards. I could add ways to punish people who poison themselves/mill themselves a lot by including a few cards that would give opponents poison counters/mill them, but I feel like there's much more tension when you have to pay life to activate abilities. So with Irradiate, the opponent can more easily put pressure on you by being aggressive or by adding counters to threaten via cards like (((Fission Theorist))).

Developmentally, yeah, I think that irradiating yourself is less than ideal. That sort of oppressive "should I go for this high risk play?" feel is what I want to go for with this set, though, so I'm going to be pretty stubborn on this point. There will be a lot of ways to manage both -1/-1 counters and radiation counters in the set, though. I tried to imply that with (((Fission Theorist))), but I haven't yet fully committed as to giving you bonuses for having lots of radiation counters. I have a couple of conceptual designs for Irradiate that I'll post that might better illustrate what an irradiate-heavy deck might look like.

As for irradiating opponents, I do want to include a couple of cards that do that, but I'm not sure if it would detract or add to the gameplay of the set. There will be cards that let you add radiation counters to opponents though, and I will definitely include a card or two at higher rarities that says "Irradiate each player."

As far as singular coherent themes go, the general theme of the set is "high risk, high reward" - all of the mechanics (minus persist) require you to give up a certain type of resource in order to give you more powerful effects. I'm not particularly interested in two mechanics feeding each other, honestly. I've never understood the logic behind that - when was the last time a Wizards set had two mechanics that directly fed into each other? Since irradiate and reap (or whatever would replace them) are in completely separate colors, I don't see why you'd want them to feed into each other.

@Secret - That's a good point, thanks for putting it into words. I'll see if I can design some cards that function as a sort of "payoff" for Irradiating yourself as a way for players to be more incentivized to run more cards that do so.