|
Home Decks Combos Articles Visual Spoilers Art Features Links Search Forum |
|
|
|
|
Design Contest: Robot Boy Learns to Hug a Rainbow. Welcome, welcome to today’s revelations. Both parts 3 and 4 shall be discussed in detail. This was the most open-to-interpretation portion of the contest, and there is some leeway. It also happens to be the most technical and boring! Part 3 - The Price is Right In which the contest user, must estimate an appropriate casting cost. Sparkle Beast 2000 -?- Hmm, what to do with this one! Well, the obvious start is what color. We have beast, we have trample and we have haste. trample and Beast scream Green, but it is hard to rule out Red, however haste seems to indicate Red. Truth be told, it could be argued Red, Green, or Red-Green. The next portion is the casting cost. Wild Elephant is a perfect starting point as a 3/3 for 3G that tramples. Now, we need to factor in haste. Talruum Minotaur is a 3/3 haster for 2RR. With both of these at the common level and ours at the uncommon level, we have some leeway in which power can be upped some. This lead me to using dual colors to produce some complexity in order to really justify a lower cost - 2RG as a highly viable, likely cost. 3GG and 3RR are both equally usable costs. With two abilities in color, you should easily be getting at least two colored mana requirements (GG,RR,RG), and while five converted casting cost seems high for a 3/3, it is pretty fair. Hexor Bot 2000 -?- Here we have a seemingly easy, yet very confounding choice. There are two obvious influences to this card - Archivist and Phyrexian Arena. Phyrexian Arena being 1BB enchantment and Archivist being a 2UU tap drawer. The advantage of Arena is it cheaper to cost, and harder to remove as an enchantment, while Archivist offers legs and potential for multiple draws. The disadvantage of Arena is you lose a life regardless, no choice - Archivist is basically easier to kill since it is a creature. If it’s not obvious this is a Black creature, due to paying life for a card. That being said the logical conclusion as a cost is 2BB. Yes, it is the same CC as Archivist, but at the same rarity and stats as Archivist you must conclude that Archivistwould be slightly better at drawing since it is a stronger feature in Blue. In truth, the card is flawed slightly and could be improved by making the Hexor Bot 2000 into a 2/1 and still being 2BB. Gizomatron 3000 -?- Okay, this stands out as a Power Sinkvariant. Should, because that was the intention. Notice some things about it, there is no forced drain of mana, you only draw a card if they don’t counter it. This is interesting to me, so lets look at it. Oh yeah, Blue is the color. No one should have problems with that part. Now with Power Sinkbeing XU, the question is how much does it change since it loses the forced mana drain, but gains a card on failure. Well, to be honest since it’s the same power we have to up the cost. Some may say 1, others 2. However since we are gaining and losing power 1 is more appropriate bringing us to X1U. You can verify this by comparing to Syncopate and Condescend, and realizing that the draw potential alone deserves a single bump in terms of casting cost. Slicer-Dicer Prototype XZA2 -?- Again, an obvious starting point should come to mind if you’re clueless - it’s Prismatic Lens. Lens, grants you a mana pumper or a filter for 2. In this case, you get a mana pumper or a one time boost. Notice the no tap on the second ability? It’s important, it enables the Lensto generate an additional mana a single time - Lotus Petal quality! Because of this and it being common it tells you one thing. There is no reason this should be casted anything less than 2. At 2 power you can cast it and cast another if you have to, creating a nice storm engine. Or you can pump out two mana the next turn. So if you said 2 or 3 you’re in the right area. Heck if you said 1G with the new artifact costing of Future Sight you might be right as well. However, if you compare it with the power of Coalition Relic, you’ll realize we definitely need to up the cost to 3. If the second ability required a tap, you could probably go 2 at the common level and get away with it. Rare-Smasher 2010 -?- Despite being poorly worded, this card is a powerhouse. It’s not only a Wrath of Godon steroids its also a psuedo-Morningtide for creatures. So where does that leave us? Well first off we need to get a better inspiration with Final Judgment. At 4WW we’re already pretty high up, however we need to account for killing the graveyard. Remember how I said it’s a combo card - so lets add in Morningtide’s cost bringing us to 5WWW total as a pure combine. If not painfully obvious after the last paragraph, this is a pure White card. So all that is left is how to combine the two cards. The obvious thing is we have to go up from 4WW so do we go up to seven or eight total CC. Since it’s creatures only removal from the yard, we can get away with seven. Bringing it to 5WW, however 4WWW might be even more correct, making it further restricted to White, and give Final Judgment a little more playability over this card. So my answers: Part 4 - Syntax Error Grammar sucks, talking about grammar sucks more. Here are your answers, no explanation necessary. Check newer cards to make sure you match how they word when you are creating a card. A big thing is to notice our abilities are complete sentences with punctuation and mana costs and tap symbols are separated by commas. Darn you grammar! R, T: Facesmasher deals 1 damage to target creature or player.
Apparently commenting is broken for many so - feel free to discuss on the forum here. Oh yeah, tomorrows final portion and results won’t be posted until around 2 or 3 am EST. Sorry. Tags: Contests, Darksteel Design Contest This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 1:41 am and is filed under MDV Contest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
You can discuss this article in the MDV forums
here.
Articles
Spotlights from 2008: |
|
