Lottery Charm

[Ephraim]

Lottery Charm

Instant

Choose a number. Put cards from the top of your library into your graveyard until you reveal a nonland card. If that card's converted mana cost is equal to the chosen number, choose one -- Add {R}{R} to your mana pool; or deal 3 damage to target creature or player; or destroy up to two target artifacts.

***

My goal here was to create something a little bit broken. After all, this is Dark Ritual, Lightning Bolt, Shatter, and Rack and Ruin all in one card. That's a ridiculous amount of power. On the other hand, it's tied to a randomization mechanic. Traditional wisdom suggests that it's improper to give broken effects to coin flip cards. This, however, is not a coin flip by any means. What makes this more reasonable is that a skillful player with either construct a deck so that the odds are in his favour or he'll actively stack the top card, so that he's guaranteed to win. That said, it might be too easy to get this benefit, so I can make this cost if necessary.

[Ephraim]

Current Wording:

Explosive Lots
{R}
Instant

Shuffle your library, then choose a number. Put cards from the top of your library into your graveyard until you reveal a nonland card. If that card's converted mana cost is equal to the chosen number, destroy up to two target artifacts.

[Negator131]

This seems completely insane in Sligh. You could conceivably build a deck where every converted mana cost in the deck is one, including this. It acts as Dark Ritual turn 1, and Lightning Bolt 9-12 thereafter. For this deck alone, this card seems too powerful. Turn 1 triple-two power 1 drop, turn 2-3 burn you out seems overpowered.

[Matt]

1R or even 2R, I think. Or tone down the effect, but you're probably least inclined to do that.

If you wanted to make it less likely to hit, you could have them try to guess how many cards deep their next land is. You can still set it up with Scroll Rack & Co. but you can't do as Negator131 describes and build a deck with only one CMC.

[Ephraim]

I like the suggestion of guessing how many cards until your next land. That is harder to set up while still maintaining a more skill-oriented randomizer than a coin flip.

[asmoranomardicodais]

I like the card a lot, good work ephraim. My only concern is that wizards doesn't like random cards to be tournement viable, because then if someone wins with something like this, it makes the other person feel cheated, since the game was decided by luck and not by skill. Just something to think about.

[Matt]

This isn't random though, because you can use other cards to set it up. Like Predict or Erratic Explosion.

[Ephraim]

This is getting retasked. I've reused the damage and mana generation abilities in another couple of cards I designed. Therefore, I'm just going to cut this to be an artifact destroyer with the original mill/CMC randomizer. I'm adding a shuffle to make it harder to set up (ie: good deckbuilding will be the only way to gain an advantage.)

Proposed wording:
Shuffle your library, then choose a number. Put cards from the top of your library into your graveyard until you reveal a nonland card. If that card's converted mana cost is equal to the chosen number, destroy up to two target artifacts.

The new name would be something like, "Keldon Roulette" or "Explosive Lots."

[Anusien]

Ick.  I really don't like that.  It's a mill effect instead of a put on the bottom like Kaboom! and Erratic Explosion, but more importantly, it's so damn random.  The problem is, 3 mana is rather set for destroying 2 artifacts (Dust to Dust, Rack and Ruin), and that's fairly stable in terms of power.  You could cost this at R, at which point it's what, 33% of the time a really good hoser, and 67% of the time a blank?

What about this, as a 1RR Sorcery?
For each artifact in play, reveal the top card of your library.  If that card is a nonland card, destroy that artifact.  Then put the revealed card on the bottom of your library.

It's more likely to effect the game at all, it's fun, whimsical and it's 2/3 of a Shatterstorm.  Actually, I could see this at RR also.

[leviat]

Lottery Charm

Instant

Choose a number. Put cards from the top of your library into your graveyard until you reveal a nonland card. If the number of cards revealed (including the land card) is equal to the chosen number, choose one -- Add {R}{R} to your mana pool; or deal 3 damage to target creature or player; or destroy up to two target artifacts.

I think this must be a mistake. Let me walk through it. I choose the number 1. I flip over my next card which happens to be a lightning bolt. It's a nonland card so I stop. I revealed one card so I'm good to go?

I like the original wording a lot better except that it should be your opponent's deck that gets revealed so as to prevent any sort of stacking and such. (Plus revealed cards should be put on the bottom of opponent's deck).

[BurningIce]

Well, in that case, leviat, it gets even better because you can use it to screw up vampiric tutor, mystical tutor and other cards.

[Jacob Orlove]

Is this card choosing mode and targets during resolution?

[Ephraim]

The latest propossal for this card (which isn't the one in the Current Wording, since it hasn't been adopted yet) has just one function. The proposed ability is the 1-or-2 artifact destruction, which would allow for selection of targets upon casting.

[Ephraim]

I updated the current wording to reflect the most recently accepted variant of this card. I am still not sure that it is satisfactory, so I would appreciate more opinions.

[Ephraim]

24 Hour Clock

[Bram]

Closed and added.