Hope Amid Suffering

[Ephraim]

Hope Amid Suffering
{W}{W}
Sorcery

If an opponent has more life than you, you may draw two cards. If an opponent has at least ten more life than you, you may draw four cards instead.

***

I don't know if this qualifies as a white common. It's pretty conditional and isn't exactly cheap. It is most playable when you're already losing and works best when you're losing badly. I've given it a {W} in the casting cost to make sure it doesn't see play, splashed in black decks. Deep Analysis, which has been touted as about the high end of current card drawing, is almost certainly better than this. White is blue's ally, so it seems appropriate for card drawing to bleed into white somewhat. This plays into white's 'protection' theme, without being a protective card. Furthermore, I recently saw it pointed out that white doesn't have any card drawing, so providing it with one good-ish card drawer, even at common level, wouldn't necessarily be bad.

[Ephraim]

Current Wording:

Hope Amid Suffering
{1}{W}{W}
Sorcery

If an opponent has at least three more life than you, you may draw two cards. If an opponent has at least seven more life than you, you may draw four cards instead.

[Jacob Orlove]

This is a sorcery, so it's fine.

[Ephraim]

Okay, if the premise is okay, I want to tune some of the other aspects of the card. At present, I think that {W}{W} is fine, but I am going to allow that to remain fluid, subject to other changes that may be made to this card.

The second aspect that could receive tuning is the requirements of the card drawing. It would, for example, weaken the card if I increased the requirement on the first card drawing, but would strengthen the card if I were to decrease the requirment on the alternate possibility. For example, the card might be changed to read something like,

If an opponent has at least three more life than you, you may draw two cards. If an opponent has at least six more life than you, you may draw four cards instead.

What I would like to do is to come up with a split that results in the card drawing two cards about the same frequency as it is used to draw four cards. Will any life difference be sufficient for drawing two cards? Is ten too great for the drawing of four cards?

[Jacob Orlove]

Between stuff like fetchlands and cities of brass, I think anything more restrictive than the first condition is probably too harsh. 10 is pretty high, though.

[Ephraim]

I'm going to make the upper limit seven, if there are no objections. If one is seven points down from an opponent, that's a fairly significant discrepancy.

[combo_dude]

I'm not sure about whether it is too harsh, really - the fetch argument works both ways. If the white player is using fetches, then he can get a pretty cheap draw spell. I think your "3 life = 2 cards" clause is probably fairer - it'll need more than just self-harming lands to do that on any regular basis.

Also, cheap draw doesn't really fit White, despite the conditions. Very neat concept, but still feels slightly wrong.

[Ephraim]

I think I'm going to go with 3 Life/7 Life for now. As an added bonus (kind of an Easter Egg), 3 and 7 are Biblically significant numbers, which makes this sort of a Divine Card Drawer

[Ephraim]

24 Hour Clock

[Matt]

Closed and added.[/color]