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Recent updates to Cards With No Home: (Generated at 2025-05-03 13:23:59)
Sorry, Jack. I should have qualified my comment by saying that this card is nowhere near Ember Shot's level of suckitude. What I meant to infer was that this is a good card, and is a good card at a number of casting costs and/or rarities. Ember Shot would also have been a good card at a number of casting costs and/or rarities... but 7-mana for a common was not one of those combinations.
I liked your article about the worst cards, but I don't think this is quite that bad. I don't know what the ideal mana cost for each format is, and if they were different, I'm not sure of the best way of compromising.
But it seems like it must be somewhere between Divination and Concentrate. And since Divination seems playable but weak, and Concentrate seems playable but strong, it could be either.
Me neither. It's funny, because this falls right into the Ember Shot problem I had to write about in the 10 worst cards according to Gatherer. From the point of view of a drafter, this card's effect and Ember Shot's effect is awesome... you'd pay a lot of mana for that...
would be perfectly fair for Flowering Knowledge. 6 cost would be too much, but you'd play it if you didn't draft a good deck.
When is it okay to make a card better for draft by increasing its cost, thus making it worse for standard, and vice versa? There's no easy answer to that question.
Yeah, I liked that this was one of the few cards that specifically got better in 2HG, so I was happy if it was a little bit below curve, but I won't cost it on that basis.
I think the fair cost may be somewhere between. Divination seems the standard common spell, and even if this isn't always stronger than divination, I think it's a swingier, assuming you can play it when it's good for you.
But also, this is plainly less good than Concentrate. I felt "less good than concentrate" was probably still very playable, since concentrate doesn't seem to show up much, but occasional five-cost instant-speed draw-3 spells show up every so often. So I was happy for this to be a not-very-strong spell that's probably still well worth playing, especially in a U/G deck.
Conversely, I think it'd be strong at 3 mana, but probably not too strong. I was nervous about this at common, but I guess it's probably comparable to Amass the Components in that it gives three cards worth of "good stuff", but provides two cards worth of card advantage. So ok at common, but I'm not sure about common and costing three :)
Reminiscent of Probe.
Huh. Funny thing... this card costs
in my card from Magic 20XX called Extra Pages (Oh, hey, it turns out your card is a tad better in 2HG. Identical besides that). I do admit, though, that it's one of the better commons in the set (Especially in a set about Wisdom that could be shutting off Hellbent at the same time).
Playtesting has told me, though, that this card is probably fine at
. You could probably get away with "Draw 4. Opponents draw 2." at this casting cost.
The counterpart to Forbidden Knowledge. This is obviously weaker, but I decided I just had to accept that, even though the drawback is hefty, it can't really increase three cards for four mana (even though G and U have got 2CC draw three cards without the drawback).
This idea originally came to me thinking about things black and blue could do for Challenge # 066, but I decided it could perfectly well be Dimir.
There have been similar cards before, especially Syphon Mind. I felt there must be something exactly the same, but couldn't find it? But I liked the way UB melded "draw N cards, discard a card" with "each player discards a card".
Wording*
Bad link?
I should probably crosslink to ((C3113)) here ;)
I'm not sure of the best way of representing assembledness. If most contraptions start as artifacts and are assembled once, you could have a non-assembled mat (eg. like a poison token) to keep all your non-assembled contraptions on in a pile, and they become normal creatures afterwards.
If they mostly go from one active mode to a better one, there needs to be a counter or other visual reminder.
Either way repeatedly-assembleable contraptions need counters of some sort.
The only non-parastic solution I could find was that all creatures inherently have the ability "T: assemble target contraption" and common contraptions have reminder text to that effect.
(It has to be a property of creatures to make Steamflogger's haste ability relevant to assembling, else contraptions could have "Tap an untapped creature: assemble this.")
That way, riggers typically have some ADDITIONAL ability that helps with assembling or constructs.
It's still not perfect because Steamflogger Boss says "If a Rigger you control would assemble a Contraption, it assembles two Contraptions instead." But if you have two Steamflogger Bosses, do your other riggers assemble two contraptions each, or three, or four?
And does that mean, assembling can't target?
It's very strange to have this extra rules text on creatures. Possibly more likely, we'd ignore the haste problem and have "tap an untapped creature you control", or accept that there's some parasiticity and have "T: Assemble a contraption" as creature ability most (but not all) riggers have.
That last sentence is precisely what "parasitic" means in the context of Magic design. Cards that can only feed off things in their own block.
Clearly the solution is to make Contraptions and assembly something that gets used on a regular basis going forwards.
Skyhunter Cub was parasitic when it was printed, but it's basically modular now.
I dunno; I don't like the idea of making that generic. I do like having THIS card say "When you assemble this, put a charge counter on it /
:Add 
to your mana pool, you may remove a charge counter from this, if you do, add an additional 
to your mana pool." or something like that.
We also need more ways to assemble these things of course - which IS going to make them irritatingly "Can only use these with other cards from that block, and the odd steamflogger boss"
Adding counters is probably a reasonable idea to help with the memory issues, and it is rather flavourful (this thing is just a silly artifact until it's been infused with power / built).
So, "Assemble a Contraption" could mean "Put a charge/energy counter on target Contraption. It is assembled as long as it has a charge/energy counter on it". It's a little bit parasitic I guess.
@Chris: Yes, good call :)
Dunno; how good are you at Airfix?
Presumably with flying, since it's a bird?
make it so
Thank you! And yes, artefact.
Hm. I wanted to make a variety of contraptions so I avoided making them all take multiple assemblings, but that would be a reasonable idea.
In fact, maybe lots of multiple assembling is fine; maybe some simple cards are on/off and others just get better, they both fit the flavour.
Fun variation on Everflowing Chalice. I wonder if it could gain charge counters when assembled, and tap for mana equal to number of charge counters? (Adding 1 somewhere to maintain current functionality.)
Ooh. I like this approach more than many of the on/off designs. (Assuming this is meant to be an artifact creature.)
Inspired by Lumbering Giant