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Decks / Wicked R&R

« on: January 07, 2024, 04:09:01 pm »

Wicked R&R

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The basic concept of the deck is to use  Rejuvenation to lobotomize  Wicked Shield, which gives you a solid 4-point shield (and 5 healing) for five quanta.

It's a good exemplar of the quintessential problems of "some assembly required" decks:

• Contains "dependencies" between cards. This hurts mulligans, and makes recovery from blowouts much harder.
• Vulnerable to "2 for 1" removal (a single  Steal is usually curtains)
• Drawing redundant pieces after the thing has been "assembled" is often useless.
• The above is a bigger problem than it looks, since you need to run many copies to get the "pieces" reliably, so there isn't really a good way of ensuring that you have a card early without also ensuring that you'll draw extras later.)

I'd guess this has been talked about before, but I haven't found the discussion if so.

Spoiler for Scorpion Claws version:

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This was the original list, and the idea was to give Rejuvenation some versatility with  Scorpion Claws, and to then "fix" the fact that you can only have one weapon at a time with  Lifesmith.

This doesn't really make sense. The first reason would be that the deck needs damage, not healing, and this provides healing, not damage. The other reason is that the deck doesn't really have the draw power to be assembling multiple things.

Spoiler for Firebrand Synergy:

Rejuvenation also "breaks"  Fire Brand in a similar way, but this seems to be strictly worse than just playing creatures to deal the damage; it requires two cards, and like the shield synergy, the cards are mutually dependent. Plus, to have multiple at the same time, you need  Flying Weapon, which makes it even more inconsistent and card-intensive.

 Firebrand and  Wicked Shield have an interesting similarity in that you can limp along for a while by playing redundant copies if you don't draw a  Rejuvenation.

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New Card Suggestions / A 13th element - Time

« on: November 15, 2023, 08:00:26 pm »

This isn't really a card suggestion, and it's kind of a half-baked idea in general, but I thought I'd share it while it's still in the oven.

Elements, whether on accident or purpose, has no "turn mixing": Players do not make decisions on other players' turns. This means that it would be possible to have a set amount of time a la Chess clocks.

But unlike Chess, EtG cards could reference and change that clock time, turning it into another fundamental resource like Quanta or Life.

For example, a "Time Dragon" that deals big damage for small Quanta, but costs 5 minutes of clock time. (That's probably not very balanced, but hopefully it communicates the broad concept well enough.)

The thread title is because adding this mechanic would require the Time element to be renamed or to change radically for it to make any flavor sense. That said, it would probably be best to spread changes across the elements, and I think it might help to make some of them more distinct. Just off the top of my head:

• Spending clock time to get damage out faster would make Fire feel a lot like Red in Magic, but actually moreso.
• Light could have cards that restore clock time
• Dark (but not Death) could have a new "Temporotoxin" whose poison counters consume your clock time instead of your life. (Represented like  in the same way that Neurotoxin is  .)
• Water's Purity counters could be used to fix Temporotoxin counters.
• Or maybe Purity counters can be "Temporotoxic", and add clocktime instead of subtracting it.
• Maybe instead of things costing X clock time, they'd usually add X Temporotoxin counters, so if a deck can't capitalize on its early advantage, it's more vulnerable to a clockout.
• Interestingly, converting normal poison to Temporotoxin could be a cheeky, situational way to dodge the damage.
• Maybe some new mana spells could cost clocktime or something. (Though Singularity already does the job of balancing Nova in a more interesting way.)
• With three fundamental resources instead of two, it would be a new way to divide the twelve elements, though I'm not sure if it makes sense to have four "Quanta" elements, four "Damage" elements, and four "Clocktime" elements.

Thoughts?