Alternatively, instead of stretching for combos due to limited design space, you could go the other way and change 'damage' to 'combat damage' and just let it be something that adds complexity to combat. I mean, Bushido didn't have much design space to work with either. That doesn't mean it was a bad ability.
2016-08-13 05:46:37:
someone
edited a mechanic in Rileria
@Izaac The ability itself doesn't have much design space, but if there's a critical mass of creatures with the ability we get to make lots of cards that work well with the ability. Cards like Rolling Thunder and Roil's Retribution get used in brand new ways. Combat tricks are suddenly much scarier.
The ability looks simple but I think it would play differently to anything we've seen before and it opens up a lot of brand new design space in other areas.
@Izaac The downside is that you lose a blocker for a turn for only a little upside and if you're using the ability over and over again your opponents get to get in a pile of damage. A mana cost could work, but then the mechanic might be too weak for limited.
Tapping the target could work.
I don't like putting a -1/-1 counter on this creature, the ability can also go on non-creature things so it wouldn't work to have the ability in reminder text. Also having -1/-1 counters and +1/+1 counters in the same set can get confusing.
It only works on creatures that entered the battlefield this turn, so there's no way you could get rid of the -1/-1 counters with Inflate later.
Perhaps we could have it as untapped creatures instead. It would mean the effect activates when you attack. Instants would mean you can use them but only after you've committed to an attack. It's kinda like Raid but harder to activate.
Alternatively you could run them both. Have Piety and Zealotry. One measures tapped and the other untapped.
It could work. The tribe would need a bunch of ways to deal a single damage to your guys though. Like a spell that dealt one to a creature you control and two to an opponents.
Ultimately though the design space feels too limited. I mean this cannot go on spells, lands or enchantments. Maybe we can have a single creature with this ability?
Idk about the name. I guess that frogs inflate in cartoons but it's a bit silly. However, the mechanic is solid. It's like Oran-Rief or its ruins.
The only problem I can see is that there's no downside beside tapping a creature. Maybe add a mana cost to it. Or tap down the target. What would be perfect is if you had to put a -1/-1 counter on THIS creature when you did it. Thats quite black, +1 counters are green. Perfect synergy. ALSO, it means that if you inflate a creature for a bunch, then you can inflate other creatures later and the -1 counters just remove his ones.
@Izaac Unfortunately naming is not a strong suit of mine. His costing works for me, it's a powerful effect and the ancestry is major upside. Maybe it should be a 4/2 or something like that though.
I agree with a lot of what you said, I think I might play around with consume. The resoning for wurms was because i was actually originally aiming for creatures made out of mass of Worms who share joint consciousness but i figured that would be too disgusting but i still wanted to see how this card would turn out. The thing about consume is it cost a lot of mana to get a lot of benefit. sure a 1/1 might die to buff this guy for 6 but you still have to pay 6 mana at that exact moment to do it. This is also where I feel it differs from scavenge. I will look at the mechanic and come up with a better approach soon.
Thanks for the feedback guys. jmgariepy, you are probably right about reducing the number of creatures. I am thinking too much about constructed and how an effect like this could be broken with lots of vigilance or tokens. Keep in mind this is a 2cc common so the pay off associated with this card is very low in comparison to the other cards I have in mind. I'll cover the instants near the end. You both make valid points about the colour and its place with both the mechanic and creature type. That probably kills this card right there. Piety is definitely a white effect so if it has to be paired with another color I figured the creature requirement was enough for red but perhaps not. As for where this mechanic could go, I figured a red/white could be very creature based and if you look at battalion this isn't too different of an effect. That being said, unlike battalion you could put a lot of extra power on an instant if it gains benefit from piety. Since its a trade off of do i use this for a combat trick vs gaining full benefit. That kind of thing is why I'm concerned about decreasing it to two creatures. It's a nice little thought experiment regardless. *maybe more of a white black mechanic?
Excuse me for butting in, Trains. I really like Piety. I'm guessing that if you playtested it, you'd really want two untapped creatures, though. Four creatures on the battlefield is a lot for any environment except multiplayer... even in a draft it only would start happening later in the game. So unless the ability tied to it is explosive, it wouldn't seem worth the wait.
That said, while I think it makes for an excellent white mechanic, it makes for a confusing red mechanic. I can imagine environments where it could theoretically make sense. But I'd obviously be stretching to make the environment fit the mechanic, as opposed to making a mechanic that fits the environment.
2: There are no white lizards in mtg. While there is only 49 of them in the game, they mostly remain in green and red with a few in black. Keep them in mind for the second set as a gruul tribe?
3: Piety is pretty cool. I like the name and how it functions. Strange interactions though. It encourages going wide and then being defensive..? I feel the payoff needs to be higher perhaps. Cause when you have 3 creatures, you get a nice blocker. In order to attack with your 3/2, you'd need to have 3 piety-fodder creatures. Maybe if we make them a token heavy tribe.
4: Where could we take this mechanic? If you put it on a spell, then they'd almost always have piety because they cast it before combat. I like it but I'm worry about it's design space.
First off, I've avoided hybrid costs like these. As it is, this can be played in a mono-black deck or a mono-green deck. I'd change it to B/G.
Secondly, consume like this seems a bit strong. I mean if you have a 1/1 that dies, you can buff this guy by 6.
Thirdly, this seems very similar to the mechanic scavenge and I think we can get something different for our golgari tribe.
Finally, not sure how you'd have sentient/anthro wurms... They aren't real life animals (instead they are decidedly an mtg phenomenon) so we'd have to worry about what wurms can and can't do (according to the lore of mtg). In searching for wurms, there are 80 wurm creatures in mtg but they are spread across all 5 colours. Mostly green but I feel wurms have been well represented. Interestingly, I don't think consume could work on any other creature type without changing the name of the mechanic.
Now that ancestry creatures become remnants, this is an easy way to reference them.
Alternatively, instead of stretching for combos due to limited design space, you could go the other way and change 'damage' to 'combat damage' and just let it be something that adds complexity to combat. I mean, Bushido didn't have much design space to work with either. That doesn't mean it was a bad ability.
@Izaac The ability itself doesn't have much design space, but if there's a critical mass of creatures with the ability we get to make lots of cards that work well with the ability. Cards like Rolling Thunder and Roil's Retribution get used in brand new ways. Combat tricks are suddenly much scarier.
The ability looks simple but I think it would play differently to anything we've seen before and it opens up a lot of brand new design space in other areas.
@Izaac The downside is that you lose a blocker for a turn for only a little upside and if you're using the ability over and over again your opponents get to get in a pile of damage. A mana cost could work, but then the mechanic might be too weak for limited.
Tapping the target could work.
I don't like putting a -1/-1 counter on this creature, the ability can also go on non-creature things so it wouldn't work to have the ability in reminder text. Also having -1/-1 counters and +1/+1 counters in the same set can get confusing.
It only works on creatures that entered the battlefield this turn, so there's no way you could get rid of the -1/-1 counters with Inflate later.
Perhaps we could have it as untapped creatures instead. It would mean the effect activates when you attack. Instants would mean you can use them but only after you've committed to an attack. It's kinda like Raid but harder to activate.
Alternatively you could run them both. Have Piety and Zealotry. One measures tapped and the other untapped.
It could work. The tribe would need a bunch of ways to deal a single damage to your guys though. Like a spell that dealt one to a creature you control and two to an opponents.
Ultimately though the design space feels too limited. I mean this cannot go on spells, lands or enchantments. Maybe we can have a single creature with this ability?
Idk about the name. I guess that frogs inflate in cartoons but it's a bit silly. However, the mechanic is solid. It's like Oran-Rief or its ruins.
The only problem I can see is that there's no downside beside tapping a creature. Maybe add a mana cost to it. Or tap down the target. What would be perfect is if you had to put a -1/-1 counter on THIS creature when you did it. Thats quite black, +1 counters are green. Perfect synergy. ALSO, it means that if you inflate a creature for a bunch, then you can inflate other creatures later and the -1 counters just remove his ones.
@Izaac Unfortunately naming is not a strong suit of mine. His costing works for me, it's a powerful effect and the ancestry is major upside. Maybe it should be a 4/2 or something like that though.
I agree with a lot of what you said, I think I might play around with consume. The resoning for wurms was because i was actually originally aiming for creatures made out of mass of Worms who share joint consciousness but i figured that would be too disgusting but i still wanted to see how this card would turn out. The thing about consume is it cost a lot of mana to get a lot of benefit. sure a 1/1 might die to buff this guy for 6 but you still have to pay 6 mana at that exact moment to do it. This is also where I feel it differs from scavenge. I will look at the mechanic and come up with a better approach soon.
Thanks for the feedback guys. jmgariepy, you are probably right about reducing the number of creatures. I am thinking too much about constructed and how an effect like this could be broken with lots of vigilance or tokens. Keep in mind this is a 2cc common so the pay off associated with this card is very low in comparison to the other cards I have in mind. I'll cover the instants near the end. You both make valid points about the colour and its place with both the mechanic and creature type. That probably kills this card right there. Piety is definitely a white effect so if it has to be paired with another color I figured the creature requirement was enough for red but perhaps not. As for where this mechanic could go, I figured a red/white could be very creature based and if you look at battalion this isn't too different of an effect. That being said, unlike battalion you could put a lot of extra power on an instant if it gains benefit from piety. Since its a trade off of do i use this for a combat trick vs gaining full benefit. That kind of thing is why I'm concerned about decreasing it to two creatures. It's a nice little thought experiment regardless. *maybe more of a white black mechanic?
Excuse me for butting in, Trains. I really like Piety. I'm guessing that if you playtested it, you'd really want two untapped creatures, though. Four creatures on the battlefield is a lot for any environment except multiplayer... even in a draft it only would start happening later in the game. So unless the ability tied to it is explosive, it wouldn't seem worth the wait.
That said, while I think it makes for an excellent white mechanic, it makes for a confusing red mechanic. I can imagine environments where it could theoretically make sense. But I'd obviously be stretching to make the environment fit the mechanic, as opposed to making a mechanic that fits the environment.
1: See hybrid cost reasonings on wurm
2: There are no white lizards in mtg. While there is only 49 of them in the game, they mostly remain in green and red with a few in black. Keep them in mind for the second set as a gruul tribe?
3: Piety is pretty cool. I like the name and how it functions. Strange interactions though. It encourages going wide and then being defensive..? I feel the payoff needs to be higher perhaps. Cause when you have 3 creatures, you get a nice blocker. In order to attack with your 3/2, you'd need to have 3 piety-fodder creatures. Maybe if we make them a token heavy tribe.
4: Where could we take this mechanic? If you put it on a spell, then they'd almost always have piety because they cast it before combat. I like it but I'm worry about it's design space.
First off, I've avoided hybrid costs like these. As it is, this can be played in a mono-black deck or a mono-green deck. I'd change it to B/G.
Secondly, consume like this seems a bit strong. I mean if you have a 1/1 that dies, you can buff this guy by 6.
Thirdly, this seems very similar to the mechanic scavenge and I think we can get something different for our golgari tribe.
Finally, not sure how you'd have sentient/anthro wurms... They aren't real life animals (instead they are decidedly an mtg phenomenon) so we'd have to worry about what wurms can and can't do (according to the lore of mtg). In searching for wurms, there are 80 wurm creatures in mtg but they are spread across all 5 colours. Mostly green but I feel wurms have been well represented. Interestingly, I don't think consume could work on any other creature type without changing the name of the mechanic.
Undecided on the rarity and P/T to give this thing
@Link, yeah gonna have to rework this one.