Spike of Insight

[Ephraim]

Spike of Insight

Legendary Artifact

You can't draw cards.

When Spike of Insight comes into play, search your library for up to three cards and put them into your hand.

When Spike of Insight leaves play, discard your hand.

***

I wanted to create something broken, today and this is the result. The tutoring power of this card is absolutely insane, but it comes at a high cost. Unless you relish the thought of discarding your entire hand, once you cast this thing, you'd better be prepared to with with what you dig up right away. If you can't, then there's nothing you can do, becasue you won't ever see another card. Of course, even if you're in a position where you might win, your opponent can Oxidize the Spike and you'll be left empty-handed.

By the by, the artwork I imagined for this would be a wizard dangling over a pit of electrical impulses from a narrow spike stuck all the way through his head.

[Ephraim]

Current Wording:

Spike of Insight
{4}
Legendary Artifact

You can't draw cards.

When Spike of Insight comes into play, search your library for up to three cards and put them into your hand.

When Spike of Insight leaves play, discard your hand.

[Nazdakka]

For Vintage this looks stupidly broken, what with Workshop and Tinker flying around... the meta could probably cope, but IMO this would be a candidate for a Desire-esque pre-emptive restriction due to blatant combo potential.

For 'normal' Magic this thing is still very dangerous, but you know that already... nice synergy with Gifts, Fact or Fiction, Impulse, etc. 4 mana probably makes it safe though, you couldn't really go off with this until turn 4, and most decks would either have a countermeasure or a goldfish kill lined up at that point.

As you say, how good this is also depends on the level of artifact hate present... if it were (say) printed in Saviours, then nothing bad could really happen until Affinity and the hate for it rotated out in the Autumn. How about this though: in a 'normal' environment, noone goes out of their way to run MD artifact hate, and one broken artifact like this in an environment would force people to run hate which would be useless otherwise. To counteract this, why not make this a 4 mana 2/2 legendary creature? That would up the risk factor of using this card and make it harder to break, while still maintaining the spectacular combo potential and risk-reward situation.

[Matt]

OKay, so I search for two cards, plus a Disenchant? Or worse, a Welder, A Claws of Gix, and a second one of these?

[Ephraim]

When it leaves play, you have to discard your hand. It doesn't do any good to stack card-drawing effects in response to the trigger, because you'll just end up discarding those cards, too.

Bah, it's too late at night for me to be trying to think. I didn't see the obvious response to my own protest -- obviously, you stack the card-drawing effects FIRST and then you sacrifice/destroy/weld this. Yeah, that's probably too broken. I suppose there really isn't a way to make the penalty stiff enough to merit this kind of power.

[Nefarias]

Workshop based decks can easily drop their entire hand by turn three, including this. They search up three cards and play all those next turn, and then Weld/Smokestack it the next turn, in many scenarios missing only one draw and discarding nothing.

Of course, this is a very specific scenario, but I can see many similar to it. You can play a draw seven and respond by killing it. With a small/no hand, you could grab two broken cards + a way to kill this. Another thing to do is two broken cards + another one. Imagine like Dark Ritual, Necropotence, and Time Walk.

I'm sure there are many, many more super broken things you could do with this.

It's probably too good any way you slice it, but making it a heavily black enchantment would decrease splashability and make it harder to remove.

[Nova442]

When it leaves play, you have to discard your hand. It doesn't do any good to stack card-drawing effects in response to the trigger, because you'll just end up discarding those cards, too.

Unless you put the card drawing on the stack, then destroyed this.  Say you got something like Oxidize, Ancestral Recall, X permanent  That would put you in a great position especially if you originally cast this with a small hand.  At only 4 mana for 3 cards as an artifact that's amazing.    I'm positive someone will come up with some much more powerful set of 3 cards, and that it would be horribly broken in T1.

Other, slower formats would probably be able to handle it, although it's still very very powerful to go demonic tutor for 3.

[Matt]

This is basically Doomsday without the life payment, hideous mana cost, or possibility of decking.

...yeah.

[Puschkin]

Matt beat me on this ... exactly what he said. Plus, you can use one of the three cards to get rid of this for good, lets say Tinker (Type I) or Shrapnell Blast (Type Screw).

This card would be much more interesting if it would read "You can only play one spell each turn" instead of "you cannot draw cards".

[Ephraim]

I'm just going to ask to have this thread closed. In the future, I'm going to stick to balanced cards. I'm no good at these broken things.