growing mana flare

[Liam-K]

Ok, like pretty much everything I've posted here this card started as a flavor idea.  The image in my mind is an energy field around the player that is causing distortions to mana based on wave behaviour (gogo physics) possibly induced by some sort of trance.  I want it to be an enchantment, not an artefact, and I only want it to effect the controller.  I'm not sure about the colour or costing, mana flare is red but that's pre-colourpie and I'm really not too sure.  Also, isn't there an enchant player aura or something now I could use?

(name) (cost)
enchantment
~this~ comes into play with a reverbration counter
Whenever you would add (colour) to your mana pool, instead add (colour) plus (colour) for each reverbration counter on ~this~
XX: add a reverbration counter to ~this~.  X is equal to the number of reverbration counters on ~this~.
Near the end, all you could see was the lightning.

On colour, I think for the sake of simplicity it should be just whatever colour this thing ends up being.  I thought about it being any colour but that has major templating issues.

Cost: it's going to have to be pretty high.  Note that although the XX cost to grow it seems like it would get ungainly pretty fast, it doesn't.  It goes something like this... tap a land, add , add a counter.  Tap 2 lands, add , add a counter, 2 floating.  Tap a land, add , spend , add a counter.  Now all your on-colour sources produce 5 mana a tap.  This will probably require an untap to do, so it's a tempo investment.  I think a CMC of 5 might not be unreasonable, as if you spend your first 4 land taps next turn ramping this thing you break even.  At 5 CMC it would eat a turn, then take a turn to come online, then be stupid good (20 extra mana without ramping more lol).  So yeah it might turn out to be absolutely beyond broken in slower formats.

Names: "power helix" came to mind.  I'm not sure I like it though.





Current Wording

Life Begets Life {G}{G}
enchantment

Life Begets Life comes into play with a vitality counter.
Whenever you would add to your mana pool, instead add to your mana pool once for each vitality counter on Life Begets Life.
{X}: add a vitality counter to Life Begets Life.  is equal to the number of vitality counters on Life Begets Life.  Play this ability only any time you could play a sorcery.

[JAG]

major templating issues is right.  I've read this thing about 5 times and i have only a vague inkling of what it's supposed to do.

I'm fairly sure the wording you're aiming for is something like:

"<This> comes into play with a reverberation counter on it.
Whenever you would add colored mana to your mana pool, instead add that much mana plus 1 colorless (dunno how to do the mana symbols) for each reverberation counter on <this>.
XX: Put a reverberation counter on <this>.  X is the number of reverberation counters on <this>."

You know, the whole thing might be cleaner if you used Cumulative Upkeep instead of reverberation counters.

"Cumulative Upkeep 1.
This comes into play with an age counter on it.
Whenever you would add colored mana to your...."

A bit simpler, and probably a bit less degenerate.  Yes, you don't control it's growth, but as it is, i'm fairly sure it fuels itself to the point where you generate absolutely absurd amounts of mana and just go "I'll tap my mountain and fireball you for 49924582457.  Go."

even if you keep it as is, you probably need to make the add-counters-ability a play-only-as-a-sorcery, otherwise i see this: "I'll add 6 to my pool.  It has one counter.  I'll add one, in response I'll add one, in response I'll add one."

-JM

[dandan]

I think this should be Red. If you don't put a counter on it when it comes into play, this would act as a brake on any silly combo. The caster would get a benefit on the next turn rather than immediately. It would start getting pretty sick after 2 turns but so what? If you are playing Red and cast something this expensive and then a Fireball in 2 turns time, then fair enough.

I'm fairly sure giving it an XX activation is dangerous, especially as you could stack activations (meaning you HAVE to start with at least 1 counter or you can stack los and get huge mana. Even if you start at 1 counter, imagine this costs 4. With 8 lands you could cast this, and stack 2 activations to have 32 mana ready for next turn. Or in combo with Turnabout, Reset or High Tide, you could probably combo them out straight away. I think it is easier to make this grow slowly rather than try to balance the activations.

Green seems to be getting these sort of effects recently but somehow this feels more Red to me.

[Ephraim]

The cost on this would have to be really high. 1. This grows way beyond Mana Flare or Heartbeat of Spring. 2. This affects only you. 3. The way this grows, at present, isn't even a little bit fair.

To address the third issue in particular, I don't think you can use a mana payment for the growing for all of the reasons mentioned before. I don't think it would be at all unreasonable to demand a sacrifice of land to cause this to grow and even that might not be adequate. I would also like some clarification on what you're trying to convey with the wording you're using right now. Is (color) a specific colour or is it a mana of any colour?

[dandan]

The mana payments can be modified fairly easily. Simply adding 'if you do' can prevent multiple cheap activations by only adding a counter if the activation meets the conditions on resolution. My point was that it would be very hard to achieve a balanced activation from mana, it would either cost too much or too little since it would either be breakable or not.

In any case, I think we have consensus that this should grow in a way unrelated to mana payment. I prefer timed growth as it is simple and the time delay means it is unlikely to be unbalanced (at least initially which is the only relevant time as far as being broken goes)

[Liam-K]

Yeah, I meant for (colour) to be substituted out for a mana symbol, but didn't put one there since I wasn't sure what colour it would end up.  Red is probably correct, so (colour) = red.

I don't know if making it grow over time is any different from what it already does: like I said, if you cost it at say 2RRR, you use up a whole turn jsut to put it down, then get no benefit at all the next turn, then get a benefit.  If we tweak it to cost XXX or something to add a counter, that can reduce the rate of growth, but I don't want it to be an upkeep effect.  That feels lame to me.  Like Dandan said, if you spend an absurd amount of time and mana to set it up, and have a card that lets you cash in on that investment, that's not really unfair.

Edit: I changed it so you don't get the original mana to avoid confusing wording and also to make it have no initial effect without giving you a free activation.

[Ephraim]

Hrrm... I didn't realize you intended for this to affect only a single colour. I guess that slightly tempers the fact that only you get the benefit. At least you don't get to generate sick amounts of mana of every colour. This is definitely not red, though. Red gets an instantaneous benefit, often at the cost of long term development. This card either prevents long-turn development by winning right now or it is best used for establishing a powerful long-term plan. There's nothing reckless or instantaneous about this card. This has green stamped all over it. Nonetheless, I still think that this card is abusively powerful and should not be created as such. Multiplying mana has always proven to be extremely strong, even when you were only adding one additional mana. Creating a card that lets you makes your lands arbitrarily awesome just doesn't seen sensible to me.

[dandan]

As worded, this card has absoltely nothing to do with long term development, either you win immediately or you win next turn (assuming this card is in a deck designed to have this card in it).
Note that this would be very interesting as a Green card where anyone can activate it (Multiplayer loves Mana Flare). As it is it feels Red to me as it is like putting a stopper in a volcanic geyser to get a big bang, technically planning but somehow rather a Red thing.

Note that if ever this has no counters on it, it gives you infinite mana with just 1 Mountain. There is almost certainly a clever way of doing that.

I stand by my initial reaction. Either such a mana multiplier would be costed so that it is useless or it could be broken with very little room for a balanced card in between. I couldn't see this costing less than 5 mana and at 5 mana it is usually terrible.

[JAG]

Lame though it might be, this absolutely cannot be considered anywhere close to balanced if you can add counters as an activated ability.  i think the reasoning for this has been explained by others.

Interestingly, cumulative upkeep is a cool way to make this thing grow, particularly since it helps fuel it's own upkeep while it does so assuming the cumulative upkeep is a mana requirement.  you simply reference Age counters instead of reverberation counters (btw, if you're going to put such a cumbersome name as "reverberation" on a card's counters, you should put a name to the card to help us understand why on earth they are reverberation counters and not simply Charge counters or something).

To me, it seems similar enough to Vernal bloom that it could be costed at 4 if it had the cumulative upkeep, although I admit that perhaps letting it fuel its own cumulative upkeep may be too good and it would have to be some other cumulative upkeep cost.

-JM

[Liam-K]

I seriously don't want this to be an upkeep or timed effect.  I want growing it to feel active and participatory.  I do not want players to wait around for it to get big, I want them to MAKE it big.

And yes, there will have to be wording that prevents stacking the ability a billion times and being a complete tool with it.  I liked the play as a sorcery idea best.

This is an idea I wouldn't hate, just throwing it out as food for thought:
If you would add to your mana pool, instead add to your mana pool, then add to your mana pool for every 2 reverbration counters on ~this~ (round down).
Templating nightmare again though.



About colour, I don't know, I still agree with Dandan in that it feels red.  It's not particularly reckless except with tempo, it's certainly not instantanious, but it has (or will when it's done) the flavor of creating a massive, uncontrollable mana vortex that is very powerful but that you'd have to be half mad to ever attempt.  On that note, maybe some self-inflicted damage is in order, perhaps related to the number of counters on it.

[Ephraim]

Especially if you plan on keeping some sort of mana payment as part of the cost, sorcery-speed is probably a good idea anyhow to prevent filthy shenanigans with Seedborne Muse.

[Matt]

If you want to make it participatory, make the "growing" ability require a discarded card at random instead of mana. That should keep it down!

[dandan]

This could be 'balanced' by making it CIP without any counters. This makes mountains tap for 0 which could be considered a severe drawback. However no counter means that the first activation would cost 0+0 which is too cheap. Changing the activation cost to 1XX solves this plus it has that nice Mana Flare cost when jumping from 1 to 2 mana per Mountain. It also means that any activation may well cause mana burn, a nice touch to this chaotic card.

Whenever you would add R to your mana pool, instead add R for each reverbration counter on ~this~
1XX: add a reverbration counter to ~this~.  X is equal to the number of reverbration counters on ~this~.

Near the end, all you could see was the lightning.

As the effective cost of has increased by 1 (first activation costs 1 mana) I see this as a 2RR Enchantment

At that cost plus 1XX to activate, plus CIP without counters it is probably happily sitting on the fence between bad and broken, waiting for someone to give it a chance. As far as power level goes, Gauntlet of Might and Mana Flare would get into my Red decks a long, long time before this. It is however a banquet of joy for Timmy.

[Liam-K]

That slows it down about a turn unless you start with some way of producing 8 mana.  Seems slow enough that by that time even limited formats are winning the game.

On a side note, I just realized putting it in green would be very unfortunate, since green has so many ways to put absurd amounts of land into play.  At least if you want to build a deck like that around it now your colours are chosen for you and none of them are blue.

[dandan]

That is true but any less than 4 +1XX gives you the following -

CC to 3
Turn 3 play this
Turn 4 activate this and respond 3 times (pretty tricky as you need red multilands or Ravnica lands for maximum effect)
Turn 5 20 Mana from 5 mountains

That is probably undesirable (although fairly unlikely as you can't get any mana from basic Mountains until you put a counter on it)

RG decks could also put quite a few Mountains into play.

If you cut the activation cost, you are forced to make the activation cost Sorcery speed only to avoid multiple activations.

As I said before, this one will tend to be either too expensive to use or too cheap to be safe, it's very hard to give it a balance cost.

I think it should also affect all Mountains as this fits in well with the Chaos of Red (it also makes it a Red hoser, at least initially)

[Liam-K]

Wording updated.  I don't like starting it with no counters though.  I'm gonna try it at 2RR and see how much flak I catch.

Still looking for help with the name, and thoughts on a pain factor.  Since you all seem to love upkeep effects, I was thinking ping yourself for every counter during your upkeep.  Then again that risks making the whole thing very wordy without a lot of benefit.

[dandan]

OK, lets look at this in a mono-Red deck (RG may well be better but needs more construction than monoRed with X spells

Turn 4 this
Turn 5 Tap 3 lands, add a counter
Turn 6 - I get a Mana Flare - yippee

Not really a problem.

Lets think about RG using multilands (plus R/G Ravnica land when they print it)

Taiga, Bird
Mountain, Kodama's Reach, Mountain
Mountain, Kodama's Reach, Mountain, Bird or Elf or Tinder Wall
Mountain, this using 3 mana from Bird/Elf/Wall and 1 mana, still only enough mana for 1 activation
Mountain, Fireball for 16 or so

Even in that case, which is a reasonably strong Elfball opening, this Enchantment is hardly broken. The 1XX activation cost does a good job of preventing multiple activations, especially on the turn this hits play. Obviously it is ultra-strong if you have lots of lands out but so what?

I'm OK with this at 2RR and 1XX.

I think it should affect all players though. Why should Red give a damn if Chaos abounds?

[Liam-K]

Just to be clear, the obvious combos with mana fixers and other silly things aren't a major problem, right?  Two cards and you still have to activate this 1-2 times before they work.

[dandan]

The only real problem is if someone has a bunch of lands then this can be cast and activated a number of times, with huge mana ready for next turn. Then again a Fireball is pretty good if you have a bunch of lands or Dakkon or any number of fun cards that aren't played competitively.

I just like the idea of this affecting all players as:
1. It ties in with Gauntlets of Might
2. In casual games, some smart arse might remove the counters, causing the monored players a problem
3. Keeping Mana Flare effects to yourself sounds more like cheaty Blue. Not that Red is for sharing, more a complete disregard for safety, happily splashing oil around to help the fire grow.

[Jacob Orlove]

Why is this red at all? Green is the color of mana flare effects, and has been for years.

[dandan]

Red gets fast mana and this would make a bunch of mana when cast in the late game. However in order to make such an effect it needs to be done such that it can't be abused by combo early on, so that in the early-midgame it does function rather like Green's standard mana enhancers.

To me this somehow feels Red and in any case it is hardly a stretch to bleed Greens mana growth into Red's mana spurts. The cc and activation costs and also throwbacks to Red's past with Gauntlets of Might and Rock Hydra.

[Matt]

No, you misunderstand. Red doesn't get fast mana; it gets disposable mana. Red gets mana acceleration when it's about throwing away resources for a short-term gain. Green gets slower, long-term mana. Red gets Seething Song, green gets mana flare effects. Red gets Skirk Prospector, green gets Llanowar Elves.

[Jacob Orlove]

Gauntlet of Might and Rock Hydra are not valid arguments. Otherwise we could say, well Psionic Blast and Psychic Purge were blue, let's make more blue direct damage.

Permanent mana generation like this has been green for a loooong time, even from before the recent color pie shifts. Look at the following:
[card]Vernal Bloom[/card]
[card]Overabundance[/card] (unless you think manabarbs is the green half)
[card]Mirari's Wake[/card] (unless you think glorious anthem is the green half)
[card]Heartbeat of Spring[/card]

[Liam-K]

The real reason I (and probably Dandan judging by his previous posts) want to keep this red is the flavor feels red.  Is investing your mana in powering up your land green?  Yeah, pretty much.  Is a giant crackling helix that you insanely make larger and larger red?  Yes.  Unfortunately the effect and the flavor, while both pretty good, belong to different colours.

The solution is to save the flavor for another card and re-flavor this card as green, since we went to all the trouble making it fair and stuff.  Scrap the flavor text, 's become 's, and we give it lame tree-hugging name like Life Begets Life.

I'm going to ask one more time because I'm terrified of it, especially in green, if someone gets this to two counters and manages to get an effect in play that amounts to : add is that considered fair game?

[dandan]

As far as I can see, whatever you do, you still need mana from more than 2 lands to pump this up. This is a scary scary card if you have 8 lands. If you have 4, then 5, then 6, this takes up turns 4 and most of 5 and still only gives you 12 mana on turn 6!

My point before was exactly that this FEELS Red. It was also that just because an ability is Green, that doesn't exclude it from Red, especially if Red has a very similar ability. Although this is a 'growing' mana effect, believe me that the only way it would get used would be for a huge one-off game-ending effect. Call it a 'bleed'. I 'didn't and won't argue that this could or should be Green merely that this could also be Red as its flavour and initial intention suggest.

[Liam-K]

Allright, I've given this some time to sink in, and the verdict is we're going green.  The original flavor may appear again on another card.

I want to push the power level of the card a bit, so I've taken the 1 from the activation cost.  This doesn't bring it back to the power of the original card, as the original card caused you to generate extra mana immediately and used less taps to ramp.  As it looks now it will always cost 2 land taps to add a counter, so if you play this on turn 4 and tap all 4 on turn 5 to ramp it, turn 6 you have 12 mana assuming no further land drops.

We need new flavor text.


I slightly tinkered with the wording on the replacement effect, I did not intend to change what it did but clarity is good I hear.  Can I say it like that?

[dandan]

I want to push the power level of the card a bit, so I've taken the 1 from the activation cost.  This doesn't bring it back to the power of the original card, as the original card caused you to generate extra mana immediately and used less taps to ramp.  As it looks now it will always cost 2 land taps to add a counter, so if you play this on turn 4 and tap all 4 on turn 5 to ramp it, turn 6 you have 12 mana assuming no further land drops.

Actually, if you did that you'd have 18 mana assuming you manage to use your land drops (fairly likely given the fact that any deck that uses this card would want a lot of mana). In addition any acceleration (say Kodama's Reach on turn 3) allows this to pump 3 times on turn 5 and give 28 mana on turn 6, which is starting to get scary. Late game. this is also dangerous, casting with 8 Forests gives you 24 mana next turn, even without a further land drop. IMHO this is breakable with an activation cost of XX and safe (and a lot weaker) at XX1.

[Jacob Orlove]

Especially with combo cards, I'd much rather err on the side of "weak enough to be interesting in casual" rather than "dominates tournament play". I'd really rather see this at 3GG and XX1.

[dandan]

I'm fairly sure that 2GG and XX1 would be safe. There really is a significant difference between the activation cost at XX (two lands) and XX1 (2 lands plus 1 mana)

[Liam-K]

I guess XX is excessive for formats that actually cast cards other than bargain and desire for more than 4.  I don't think we need to bump it to 3GG though, because the first activation effectively costs XXX.  After that you can use left over mana to pay for the 1 in the cost, but the first activation in a turn, and the first ever, are expensive.

I guess I can clock this since the dust seems to have settled.

edit: finally added sorcery speed, which somehow got lost in the shuffle.