Discussion of Showdown! on Discussion: Showdown

3 mana for 6 damage 50% of the time is way cheap for a common. Maybe 2 and 4?

Thank you. Hm. Maybe. I think I want the damage to be enough to matter, so I'd rather increase the cost if I need to. But the variance can't be too high.

In fact, come to think of it, this could be "? damage to target creature. If you win, also ? damage to its controller". That's a little more complicated, but feels reasonably much like "a bonus on the effect it's always nice to have".

OK, lets try that out and see how it looks. May be too wordy. Need to make sure it's not too similar to other burn spells (red should have one good burn spell, one ok burn spell, and some weak burn spells, covering a range of amounts of damage).

I think that is the sensible approach. Comparisons to clash are going to be unavoidable, so it's probably pretty natural that this is where Lash Out ended up. I certainly think you don't want to go down to 2 damage for 3 mana base version, as that's really horrible.

I meant to suggest dropping it to 2 mana but this new version goes quite nicely.

Ans, as an aside, First Strike -> Quickdraw as a new keyword name??????

Oh yeah, this has turned into lash out. I guess that was inevitable.

I didn't like lash out much, but I think that's partly the art, and partly the perception that the bonus isn't a reward but just a random gift, I hope a showdown version may be better. I really liked searing blaze even when it was hard to get it to work.

I think this will keep changing for the moment. Ideally it would be an effect (a.) not the same as lash out (b.) in clear "effect and a little bit more on top" mode (c.) not as boring as just "player burn and more player burn".

Re: Quickdraw.

Wow, that's a really good fit. I don't think I want to change the standard keywords, but it pains me not to use that. (First strike creatures definitely have that flavour, even if not in mechanic name.)

You could keyword "Firstest strike" with it?

Though a set with a lot of that would be painful.

Ooh, hm, maybe there is a mechanic here. Maybe "Quickdraw X. (Before combat damage, you may pay X. It deals combat damage before creatures with less quickdraw.)"

Non-quickdraw would count as quickdraw 0. We could make first strike count as quickdraw 1 (or quickdraw max), although if we had quickdraw I'd drop first strike for this set.

I think that mechanic's a mess, but maybe there's something like it that would work. Thanks all!

Oh, ew. I was just thinking: "When ~ blocks or is blocked, it deals ~ damage to that creature"

Yeah, but I don't know if it's interesting to have a two-tier hierarchy where FS beats non-FS and QD beats FS. It feels like it would rarely come up, it'd be hard to flavour-justify the different between FS and QD, and it'd make things confusing when it did come up. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I'm not sure "firstest strike" is actually that interesting as a mechanic (I like "treble strike" though :)).

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