Read 'Em & Weep

[Rabbit Scribe]

Read 'Em & Weep
 
Sorcery

Draw a card.

If an opponent would mulligan, you may reveal Read 'Em & Weep from your hand.  If you do, opponent can't mulligan during this game.

Heh.

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Speaks for itself, really.  Is it undercosted? 

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Read 'Em & Weep

Sorcery

Draw a card.

If an opponent would mulligan, you may reveal Read 'Em & Weep from your hand.  If you do, opponent can't mulligan during this game.

Heh.

[Jacob Orlove]

Ugh. This is either a terrible card for you, or you get to randomly mise a lucky win off an opponent's terrible hand. The mulligan rules exist to make the game more fun and more interesting--shutting them down is just horrible, even if you only hit 40% of your opponent's mulligans.

[Ephraim]

Rabbit Scribe, I'd like to know why you're so fascinated with cards that do things before the game starts and/or affect mulligans.  I'm not asking to take a jab at you.  I'm seriously interested why you think that this is design space that needs to be explored.  In my opinion, the mulligan should, by and large, be a taboo in card design.  It has no flavour behind it and really just exists to enhance the game.  Cards must affect the game (obviously), but I think it's important that they also have flavour ties.  Cards that affect such an unflavourful event as the mulligan have a hard time doing that.  They just point too much at the fact that this is a card game and not a battle of mages.

[Norm4eva]

So you force a guy to play out 6swamp.hand?  I don't think 'counter target mulligan' is going to fly with anybody.
You've put out quite a few cards that deal with the mulligan phase.. pray tell, what's the nature of your fixation?

[Evenpence]

I agree with everyone else.  Forcing someone to keep their hand is just a bad idea.

Improving mulligans is fine for a card - case in point Serum Powder.  But Serum Powder doesn't see play because it's bad.  If someone made a useful serum powder card, it'd be played, and players would love to play it.

[dandan]

If someone made a useful Serum Powder card, it would be played and would be bad for the game. Such cards are either good enough to be played or not, since they are only useful at a fixed point in the game, with far fewer variables than most other cards. The chances of making a card that doesn't suck because it is too good or too bad really is very small indeed.

In any case, IF you feel the need to do this, it needs both a reason for existing and a non-game fixing effect. I'd prefer this to be Red and then denying an opponent a logical decision and/or plan makes sense. Forcing them to keep the hand sucks for reasons already mentioned. Seeing as you are investing a card, I guess you could cause it to make them double-mulligan (draw again but -2 cards). That would hurt but such a card is probably bad enough that it wouldn't see play anyway.

Read 'Em & Weep
RR1
Sorcery
Remove your hand from the game: Draw cards equal to the number of cards removed from the game with ~this~
plus one.
If an opponent would mulligan, you may discard Read 'Em & Weep from your hand.  If you do, instead double mulligans.
A failure to plan is a plan for failure.

Obviously the wording needs work, although I think the card needs strangling at birth.

[Matt]

If you want to mess with someone's starting hand, play Winds of Change!

[Rabbit Scribe]

Rabbit Scribe, I'd like to know why you're so fascinated with cards that do things before the game starts and/or affect mulligans.

Because I really suck at playing Magic, so any effect that randomizes the game significantly enhances my chances of winning!  Also, my deck designing skills are similarly lame, so I have a lot of experience with mulligans...

OK, OK, I dunno.  It's just something different, that's all.  I hadn't really thought about the issue raised above- "If serum powder was playable, would that be good for the game?"  Point taken, and anyway everybody seems to hate monkeying with mulligans, so I'll give it up.  Thanks for the input, all...