1) Okay well, do you really imagine there being serious issues here? With
your milikins and your DRS? In our closed boardgame style environment? You planning on putting something so "weird for the sake of weird" as milikin in there? Real library order interactions that have to be resolved before an ability or spell can finish resolution? This is the biggest marker of ill will I see here, and I hope it's not intentional. To play ball here you just have to be willing and use your imagination the smallest bit and all I see you using it for is looking for reasons to shut my (admit it, it's pretty neat) idea down. Can we just not include assinine cards like milikin that suck and feel insane anyway? And I have no idea why DRS would be such an issue. If you can't use it's ability in the middle of normal ability / spell playing you'd be expected to have used it to make mana earlier in the phase like any dumb similar situation.
Okay do we all know how
madness interacts with
frantic search? Can't we imagine a similar situation with this? We declare this card is in the process of being discarded and our INTENT to cast it via it's madness cost, we set it aside we look at our resources, our buddy says "HEY WAIT YOU DOLT YOU ISNT GOT THREE LANDS FOR THAT WURM!" You calmly reply that you have to finish resolving the effects currently processing before you can get into your new spell resolution process. You proceed to untap your three lands, your opponent smiles serenely as understanding dawns upon him and you both go back to your discussion of the last weeks episode of Game of Thrones.
Now the real difference here is that Madness presupposes a new state for your dumbass card to default to if you fail to pay the madness cost,
which I'm sure would not be an issue in most paper games of a custom form of magic that you play with your friends who you probably designed or tested your standalone game with. Your card is already on it's way to the discard pile and it can just continue on it's way there or you can have a judge called on your or whatever, normal stuff right? My card is a little more tricky, as it wasn't necessarily going anywhere. I guess if you failed to pay the bookmark cost after you finished your search you could just shuffle it back in. Maybe it needs to say that! Maybe it just fizzles and exiles itself lol. For simplicity sake it could be necessary to say, you have to pay the bookmark while you search, making sure your mana is in the pool when you begin the search, and that the spell is then playable for free from exile. There are a lot of workarounds here and that's why I think it's so funny you aren't helping me out here more. It's not like I'm going to drop it. You think that long list of complaints scared me off the trail before? If it's mainly silly technical things (That will probably never come up and be dealt with among friends) that are bothering you, maybe you'll love the card when it's all cleared up and you get to play with it!
Bookmark
(Whenever you search your library you may IMMEDIATELY pay this card's bookmark cost and exile it face up. If you do until end of turn you may play this card without paying it's mana cost)
And before you jump down my throat about how it makes things weird with timing that can be edited too. These are all ideas, I'm sure if you put a dash of effort into trying to enable the intent rather than admonishing the letter we could find something you'd be happy with. I remind you guys, in my day landfall would not have worked because lands coming into play could not interact with the stack until they printed like vinelasher and rethought it.
2) Okay,
repetitive gamestates. I gotcha. While we are at it lets go back down to 1 copy or maybe even no copies of
brainstorm and maybe apply singleton principle to the cube over again (modern banned 2 good cantrips for how repetitive they could force games). Card regrowth and tutors are a repetitive blemish too. Red should probably have a third of the burn spells it currently does. Okay enough jokes, but seriously, we are talking about creating a
future sight +
Brainstorm + shuffle environment and you are barking into my ear about how awful it would be if people could splice a cantrip into their rampant growth or fetchland from time to time? Like lets talk about
Green Sun's Zenith or fucking
birthing pod for chist sakes. We aren't talking about marvel vs system here. Being able to ensure access to certain effects and give decks access to certain types of extra cards on the regular is one of the strongest principles of modern cube and limited design.
Like Splice and Retrace have a lot in common with this ability, while yes, mine is a little weirder and tends to be played a less of a loss, you also have to remember it isn't repetitive, and for the most part you will only be getting a very simple spells worth from it. It's not like we can't adjust the cost of bookmark cards too. Maybe they require a discard?
3) No, people can't remember. They Shouldn't even have to look. Okay are we still talking about making a custom cube here or what? People are gonna wana hear about the nuances and specifics of your custom cube and see the sweet new cards they want to scoop up or be terrified of. When they realize it's a shock you can play from your fetchland for 3 mana they might even be relieved. If they aren't into looking at new cards then maybe you have found the wrong people to play with.
This is an eminently grockable ability to anyone that is trying in the least. "I can't cube with multiples because my cubers don't believe that is cube" "My cubers believe cube is a draft format made up of magic's most powerful cards, they expect upheaval to be in there." I'm really sorry for you mate, I wish things were better for you. I guess we could pander to these people but I don't think I have too much of that in me.
4) Weird for the sake of weird. Well I don't really know what to think of that. We've all discussed fetch lands that were kinda also spells before. This is just a little different than that. Some of my favourite mechanics are weird for the sake of weird when they came out, or might have been to a conservative. I was just exploring new terrain and the more I thought about it, the better it seemed to fit. Maybe not here, but I figured so long as they were low impact it would be fine.
5) Real custom card stuff? Woah you mean like the kind you'd find in a custom cube, the kind that you shape unique environments around? Get me the fuck outta here man, how did I end up here!? But in all seriousness, yes it's a little left field, but no, if you go about designing this with the sort of MARO principles where you don't give them too much to fuck with their understanding their new complicated ability (SAY MILIKIN), it becomes pretty simple. Within a couple drafts people will be looking at these cards like "lite-conspiracies" or "splice into fetchland" and get it pretty quickly. If theres a timing issue, take your friend aside when he does something stupid and tell him if he wants to cast his bookmark with his DRS he has to make the mana before the search is resolving etc. Lots of little misshaps have happened even because of inspired resolution timing, it's not that crazy to have to learn some nuance in a format like CUBE. We are using player knowledge here.
And for real? When people think of custom card stuff they don't think of a finely tuned environment built around dynamics and principles they think of dumbass planeswalkers and commander fodder. Or cards meant to shore up issues or fix things in standard that stick out like a sore thumb. At least that's what I think of and friends of mine. Most people don't think of pan-glacial wurm. They think of either an absolute mess Dwarf Lord or slightly tweaked version of existing spells.
Conclusion) Okay so I'm like supes sorry for being such an utter cad through this but I really hate having to write posts like this where I have to address a million points and offer a million potential fixes because it's physically exhausting of my god given day and there is always more criticism to be had to someone who isn't willing to hold my hand for a little bit and try to see what I'm trying to make. Can you really not see how this fits into the current ideas for this set pretty well? Especially if it's low impact? I'm sorry but I really will have a hard time drumming up interest for this environment if it's landfall guys redux + courser and brainstorm. Lets just play Jason's cube and save ourselves the time of designing comes into play abilities for lands stapled to small creatures.
Bruskly raising these issues is a lot easier than responding to them in print. Especially when it's more the attitudes surrounding these issues I have to respond to and less the letter of them because as I said, this is all early design days bros. Please take up some of the slack and help me. Suggestions for me or at least a new concept of your own whenever criticism is leveled?
