Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Card of the Day - Jungle Raptor and Cave Giant



Doublethink is the winner! Seven votes out of Eight. A veritable voting block. Doublethink, like vanishing, starts the card with a number of counters then gets rid of one a turn. But when the last doublethink counter is removed, instead of nuking the permanent, you just fill 'er right up again with counters. And maybe do something. But that's not part of the ability.




Woohoo! 10/10! And you only have to wait 6 turns! Doublethink's biggest problem is that it's wordy. I wanted to make a land with doublethink 2 that gained "T: Add [B] or [G] to your mana pool" until end of turn when the last counter went away, but there wasn't room for all the text. In fact, even with their relatively simple abilities, these two both violate the text length rule of thumb. If you can't fit it within seven lines, it's too long. Jungle Raptor and Cave Giant both take up eight. Oops.

That's actually the reason I gave up on doublethink. Sure, the name doesn't really fit in a fantasy card game, but names are easy to change. What isn't is the sheer mass of text that all doublethink cards have.

Doublethink origins tomorrow, with more doublethink cards. And by tomorrow, I mean Thursday.

Original Art - Jungle Raptor
Original Art - Cave Giant

2 comments:

  1. i found a similar mechanic in MTG Salvation that i was very fond of. it's called growing. which just puts counters on a permanent if there are N or less counters. it's more flexible than doublethink, because triggering when reaching the limit is optional. i also made a land with growing which i think will do what you wanted. you might have seen it before: http://shenafu.com/smf/index.php?topic=10.0

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  2. Doublethink is great and I should've kept my vote on it. Growth is similar, but not quite as exciting as doublethink. Aether snap can abuse them heavily, and Gilder Bairn can do horrible things to someone playing them heavily, or stop them when they've got drawbacks attached to their doublethinks.

    I can't think of any other cards that abuse doublethink at the moment, but I might come up with some other ones.

    -Nameless One

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