Color-based Keywords

[MaximumCDawg]

In my spare time I am tinkering with a custom set that I’ll eventually proxy up for cube goodness.  I am working with a new custom mechanic for each color.  I’m not entering THE GREAT DESIGNER COMMERCIAL or anything, so I’m not concerned about the storyline or feeling of the mechanics, just that they’re fun from a game standpoint: intuitive, and fun.  I also want them to really “fit” into the color’s philosophy.  So here’s what I’ve come up with, and I’m looking for feedback:

(1) Black Keyword: Harvest

Format: “Harvest X (You may exile X cards in your graveyard that share a type with this one instead of paying the casting cost of this card.)” 

Purpose: Is it Delve?  Sure, but it’s powered-down by requiring you to have cards of the same type to use it.  This is intended to do the same thing as requiring strong mana commitments in casting cost: give the player power in exchange for playing decks with narrow focus.  “Harvesting” your graveyard as a cost is a very black feeling thing to do.

Intended Use: In practice, the concept is to have Harvest versions of black staple effects - killing nonblack creatures, discard, etc - a few efficient creatures, a big fattie that can be cheated into play off the bodies of its fallen friends.

(2) White Keyword: Reward Faith

Format: “Reward Faith: <<do something>> (This ability triggers whenever damage is prevented or redirected.)” 

Purpose: White likes to protect, and this mechanic encourages protection.  I note that this goes infinite pretty easily with the en Kor creatures.  Still, I think the mechanic is interesting if properly managed.  The trick is that a deck designed to prevent a lot of damage requires you to run a lot of cards that don’t necessarily do much on their own, like Healing Salve.

Intended Use: On-color white effects that do not get crazy-abusive if you go infinite, such as giving creatures protection from a color, making non-evasive, non-hexproof creatures bigger, preventing a creature from untapping, etc.  Perhaps a few effects that potentially combo if you add three or more cards to the mix, like a white creature with “Reward Faith: Untap.”  Nothing that ends the game itself when it goes infinite, so no “Reward Faith: gain 1 life” or whatever.

(3) Blue Keyword: Snynchronize

Format: “Synchronize: <<do something>> (At the beginning of your upkeep, reveal the top card of your library.  This ability triggers if the revealed card has the same converted casting cost as this permanent.)”

Purpose: Blue likes to organize and control itself, including the order of cards in its library.  This rewards you for doing so.  Add more cards like SDT to the mix and you can reliably Synch every turn.  Unlike Reward Faith, though, controlling your draw is way better than playing with a bunch of healing salves.  The effects you get off a Synch should therefore be minimal at cards with low casting costs.  For larger casting cost cards, the probability of naturally Synching are pretty low so the effect can be more powerful.  The effects can also be additive, since you can’t go infinite with Synch like you could with Reward.

Intended Use: Lower casting cost Synch could do blue-common effects, like switching PT, granting flying, tapping things, etc.  As you creep up in casting cost, bounce and card draw open up, but probably not till at least 4cc cards. 

(4) Red Keyword: Surge

Format: “Surge: <<do something>> (This ability triggers when you cast a spell sharing a color with this permanent.)”

Purpose: Red is now the “all-in” color and this mechanic encourages the Red player to do just that.  Barf that hand! Since it makes every spell you cast during the game better based on every other spell you’ve cast, this has the potential to give a RDW powerful midgame too.  Again, the mechanic can be balanced based on the effect it generates.  Drawing cards or generating mana as an addition to each of your spells is probably not a safe idea.

Intended Use: At common, Surge can have non-cumulative effects like granting Haste or setting PT.  At other levels, Surge can be additive - dealing 1 damage, giving +1/+1, etc.  Perhaps have a few quirky rares that do situational things, like countering a blue spell, as a Surge effect.  (What? Every red spell in my deck is a REB? Sounds good)

(5) Green Keyword: Calling

Format: “Calling X (When this dies, you may pay X.  If you do, search your library for a creature that shares a creature type with this one and put it into your hand.)”

Purpose: Green likes creatures, and this helps you keep them at a steady flow.  While it does also have a tutoring element, careful selection of creature type can stop crazy shenanigans.  I think the calling cost, typically 2 or more, will also prevent the mechanic from being too powerful.  It might be a problem that it leads to difficult choices - do I cast another dude or do I hold back mana to Call.

Intended Use: Used on vanilla creatures with a currently underused tribal type. (Ape? Insect?) Moreso than other keywords, this one probably has a lot of “support” cards that do not have the keyword directly but enhance it, such as more Panglacial Wurm effects or stuff that accumulates counters as more tribal creatures enter the battlefield.

[Norm4eva]

Is there a more fundamental game action of White's that could take the place of damage prevention?  All too often White's attempts to be crafty during combat end up being less relevant than other, more straightforward approaches.  Maybe like "whenever a white creature attacks" or "creature that shares a color with -this-" or something similar.

Also if the theme is for things to trigger when you do 'on-color' things, the Black one doesn't really follow the pattern.  That seems sort of intentional, but I wonder if it wouldn't fit a little better with the theme if it were an ability that triggered if you remove X cards from a graveyard.

I like the idea of rewarding colors for doing what they're "supposed" to do

[Delha]

Agreed with the above on both counts. I like the premise, and I'd like to see something cooler come from white.

Maybe instead of triggering on prevent/redirect, trigger on lifegain? You stick with the same principle that on the whole, lifegain tends to be a very weak strat, but with neat enough triggers, maybe it would be viable. I'd also suggest building the ability to trigger of certain threshholds.

Off the top of my head...

Reward Faith 1: Prevent the next 1 damage that would be dealt to target creature or player this turn.
Reward Faith 2: Tap target creature.
Reward Faith 3: Target creature gains doublestrike.
Reward Faith 4: Alll creatures you control gain +1/+1 until end of turn.
Reward Faith 5: Gain 4 life.

[MaximumCDawg]

I really like the concept of switching the white keyword to trigger on a player gaining life.  That eliminates the concerning interaction with the en Kors while accomplishing basically the same thing.  I guess the next question would be: should it trigger once for each life gained, kind of like "Lifestorm?"  Or just once when any life is gained?

Oh, but your fifth Reward Faith example is pretty busted, since as written it would trigger itself!

[Norm4eva]

I really like the concept of switching the white keyword to trigger on a player gaining life.  That eliminates the concerning interaction with the en Kors while accomplishing basically the same thing.  I guess the next question would be: should it trigger once for each life gained, kind of like "Lifestorm?"  Or just once when any life is gained?

Oh, but your fifth Reward Faith example is pretty busted, since as written it would trigger itself!

I think what he's getting at there is that, you could have one dude like this:

Dude One  1WW
Creature - Dude Bro

First strike
Reward Faith 4 - Whenever you gain 4 life, all creatures you control gain +1/+1 UEOT.
2/2

...and then you get this dude

Dude Two WW
Creature - Bro Dude

Vigilance
Reward Faith 3 - Whenever you gain 3 life, target creature gains doublestrike.
2/2

In this way the abilities sort of hit different 'tiers' where some dudes trigger off a little lifegain, and others trigger in that 4+ range.  The other abilities could be remoded to work similarly - Harvest X (where X = 1 to 5), Calling X, etc etc.  I think in a situation like that it probably demands clarification exactly when these things would trigger - let's say you do gain 3 life, does that set off Reward Faith 1 through 3?  Or does the word "exactly" need to be in the reminder text (whenever you gain exactly 3 life...)?

[MaximumCDawg]

I really like the concept of switching the white keyword to trigger on a player gaining life.  That eliminates the concerning interaction with the en Kors while accomplishing basically the same thing.  I guess the next question would be: should it trigger once for each life gained, kind of like "Lifestorm?"  Or just once when any life is gained?

Oh, but your fifth Reward Faith example is pretty busted, since as written it would trigger itself!

I think what he's getting at there is that, you could have one dude like this:

Dude One  1WW
Creature - Dude Bro

First strike
Reward Faith 4 - Whenever you gain 4 life, all creatures you control gain +1/+1 UEOT.
2/2

...and then you get this dude

Dude Two WW
Creature - Bro Dude

Vigilance
Reward Faith 3 - Whenever you gain 3 life, target creature gains doublestrike.
2/2

In this way the abilities sort of hit different 'tiers' where some dudes trigger off a little lifegain, and others trigger in that 4+ range.  The other abilities could be remoded to work similarly - Harvest X (where X = 1 to 5), Calling X, etc etc.  I think in a situation like that it probably demands clarification exactly when these things would trigger - let's say you do gain 3 life, does that set off Reward Faith 1 through 3?  Or does the word "exactly" need to be in the reminder text (whenever you gain exactly 3 life...)?

Oh... that's actually really interesting.  An incentive to gain more life, not just one life each turn.  Very interesting.

[Norm4eva]

I actually wonder, now that I think about it, if such a template is something the rules of the game properly recognize.  Like, I seem to remember somewhere about dealing with replacement effects, that things like Ancestral Recall show up as game events in this format: "Draw a card.  Draw a card.  Draw a card."  Which is important to understand since the Dredge mechanic allows one to replace any or all of those single actions with a Dredge effect.  I think gaining life works the same way (the game understands "gain 3 life" as "gain 1 life.  gain 1 life.  gain 1 life"), so I don't actually know if making an ability like this works, unless you use some strange wording.

I suppose it matters under a circumstance where, say, you control like multiple Soul Wardens or things with a similar effect, and maybe you control a few guys with Reward Faith 1 thru 3.  If three Soul Warden triggers resolve in one turn and you have three guys with varying Reward Faith abilities, will they all trigger once?  Or will the one with RF 1 go off three times?

[Delha]

I actually wonder, now that I think about it, if such a template is something the rules of the game properly recognize.  Like, I seem to remember somewhere about dealing with replacement effects, that things like Ancestral Recall show up as game events in this format: "Draw a card.  Draw a card.  Draw a card."  Which is important to understand since the Dredge mechanic allows one to replace any or all of those single actions with a Dredge effect.  I think gaining life works the same way (the game understands "gain 3 life" as "gain 1 life.  gain 1 life.  gain 1 life"), so I don't actually know if making an ability like this works, unless you use some strange wording.

I think that lifegain counts as a single consolidated event, but would have to recheck. Either way though, I believe the game doesn't have a problem with recognition of a total (eg. Ageless Entity).

I suppose it matters under a circumstance where, say, you control like multiple Soul Wardens or things with a similar effect, and maybe you control a few guys with Reward Faith 1 thru 3.  If three Soul Warden triggers resolve in one turn and you have three guys with varying Reward Faith abilities, will they all trigger once?  Or will the one with RF 1 go off three times?

My suggestion was intended to trigger any time the number listed was reached or surpassed in a single event. Use my sample abilities listed, gaining 5 life triggers all the suggested cards, RF1 through RF5 (and then the RF5 ability triggers RF1 to RF4 a second time). For three Soul Warden triggers (each 1 life, obv), you would get three RF1 triggers, and none for RF2+.

[MaximumCDawg]

In designing a few cards, I've tried a few different templates.  The one I like the best conceptually is:

Reward Faith X: Do something (This ability triggers once for each X life you gain during a turn.)

Conceptually this is not a problem to keep track of, since gaining life is a linear process.  Nor do I think there's a mechanical problem here, since it feels akin to Storm in having you keep track of something you normally would not.  I like this better than just triggering once per turn once a threshhold of life is reached because it opens the possibility of doing cool things with large lifegain, without making cards whose Reward Faith trigger is really never even used.

The problem, though, is that white likes weenies, and when you start having three or more weenies with Reward Faith, keeping track of things becomes taxing.  "Okay, every 2 life I gain this guy taps a permanent... every 3 life I draw a card" etc.  In the case of Storm, you just check the number at the time you cast the spell and forget about it.  I dunno, what do you think?

[Delha]

In designing a few cards, I've tried a few different templates.  The one I like the best conceptually is:

Reward Faith X: Do something (This ability triggers once for each X life you gain during a turn.)

Conceptually this is not a problem to keep track of, since gaining life is a linear process.  Nor do I think there's a mechanical problem here, since it feels akin to Storm in having you keep track of something you normally would not.  I like this better than just triggering once per turn once a threshhold of life is reached because it opens the possibility of doing cool things with large lifegain, without making cards whose Reward Faith trigger is really never even used.

The problem, though, is that white likes weenies, and when you start having three or more weenies with Reward Faith, keeping track of things becomes taxing.  "Okay, every 2 life I gain this guy taps a permanent... every 3 life I draw a card" etc.  In the case of Storm, you just check the number at the time you cast the spell and forget about it.  I dunno, what do you think?

I think making people track that way is a bad idea, for the reasons you've already come up with yourself.

Is there a particular reason that you'd rather not treat each instance of lifegain separately? I think the mechanic is much cleaner that way.

[Norm4eva]

I feel like maybe we should ask the rules forum how life gain, card removal from the yard, etc... is handled by the game, that would make the templating easier and would settle a few of the issues surrounding these mechanics.  Which is nice, as least in theory, because this is the sort of thing that actual card designers have to do sometimes - they come up with some weird thing and throw the ball to the rules gurus and see if the wording works, or if it's even a reasonable feat.  Then we would know for sure what the template should say.

[Delha]

I feel like maybe we should ask the rules forum how life gain, card removal from the yard, etc... is handled by the game, that would make the templating easier and would settle a few of the issues surrounding these mechanics.  Which is nice, as least in theory, because this is the sort of thing that actual card designers have to do sometimes - they come up with some weird thing and throw the ball to the rules gurus and see if the wording works, or if it's even a reasonable feat.  Then we would know for sure what the template should say.

Works for me. I'm fairly confident in my previous statement that lifegain tracks as a single event, but there certainly no harm in Clariax confirming it.

[MaximumCDawg]

And so he did.  Except for drawing cards, every effect that causes you do to X things is a single event.   Problem is, there is no card currently extant that triggers upon a certain amount of life being gained; only when you gain life.  I still don't think there's a problem from the mechanics side to have a card that triggers upon gaining a certain amount of life in a turn.  Nor do I think it is a problem to use "This ability triggers once for each X life you gain during a turn;" it just means the ability will go on the stack 3 times after your healing salve resolves.

[Delha]

Nor do I think it is a problem to use "This ability triggers once for each X life you gain during a turn;" it just means the ability will go on the stack 3 times after your healing salve resolves.

There IS a problem, and it's that players now have to track one more thing across the entire duration of each game. One can argue that the storm mechanic causes the same issue, but realistically, you only count storm once or twice in a game (when you Desire or when you combo them out). If you're building a deck with RF at all, the deck is probably going to have a good number of lifegain effects (probably repeatable). It's not at all unreasonable to expect such a deck to gain life every turn (and because you're gaining lots of life, your games are also inherently likely to run long).

Then let's take a look at the actual tracking itself. The "for each life gained during a turn" method would demand that you remember exactly how much life you'd gained on a per creature basis, since each one was summoned. Realistically, you have to take notes for every single one. Here's an example.

• You cast an RF2 creature, then Healing Salve.
• It triggers at 2 life, then has a leftover point towards it's next trigger.
• Now you cast another RF2 creature, then Healing Salve again.
• The first creature sees that you've gained 6 life total, and triggers at 4 and 6.
• The second creature only sees that you've gained 3 life, so triggers at 2, then has a leftover point.

That's kind of a pain to track, and we're only looking at two creatures so far. Anything past that and you start snowballing into a ridiculous amount of bookkeeping. Top was less of a timesink and got banned for it, and this arguably worse than Shahrahzad who is still banned.

The alternative interpretation is that creatures retroactively trigger. If you've gained 10 life, cast a creature with RF1, then Healing Salve, it triggers 13 times. That's incredibly prone to abuse unless all your RF triggers suck, and you still doesn't get rid of all the bookkeeping (you still have to track how many times each creature has triggered thus far in a turn).

[Norm4eva]

Well, since the game doesn't parse things out in the same way card drawing is parsed by the game's 'logic', I guess it's entirely fair for us to determine exactly the way these keyword abilities interact with the mechanics at hand.

Although I do see the problem Delha's expounding on.  In fact any of the X abilities could be seen as causing some game actions which would have previously only come up under certain circumstances.  Take Harvest X for example; you've got a Withered Wretch, some dude with Harvest X, and an opponent's graveyard which is miraculously full of cards.  Your line of play is to go -

Remove 4 cards from your yard - if it resolves, put Harvest 4 on the stack.  If it resolves, do stuff.
Remove another 4 cards from your yard.  If that resolves, put Harvest 4 on the stack.  If it resolves, do more stuff.
Remove another 4 cards from your yard.  If that resolves, ..... etc.

Obviously without a bunch of cards counting on you doing this over and over, you probably just Crypt them or eat the yard with the preferred yard nibbler of the day.  This definitely leads to some slow plays that aren't considered Slow Play or Stalling, definitely bears comparison to SDT/fetchlands/Rebels/any reusable tutoring or shuffling effect.  Those are usually considered heavy-handed and Less Fun than straight-forward abilities.  I don't think it's subgame.dec bad, but I'm sure it's an aspect of gameplay that should be kept to a minimum.

Without making the rules behind the keywords fierce and/or unintuitive (Madness, you tricky setter-upper of multiple abilities even though your execution is actually quite clean), maybe it's better to try and streamline things away from 'tiered' triggered abilities and just keep things as simple triggers.  It's not impossible to make them work the other way, but you run into the 'bookkeeping' issue Delha brings up.

[Delha]

I'm not sure what you're getting at with Harvest example. It's just an alternate cost. You can't chain cast a card with harvest just like you can't use a single FoW to exile every blue card in your hand. There shouldn't be any notable slowdown based on this ability.

The whole point I getting at was that Reward Faith triggering off the combined lifegain from multiple events is a bad idea. Just treat each event separately and execution of the mechanic stays simple and clean.

[Norm4eva]

Oh, derf, I confused Harvest with something entirely different.  RTFP I guess.

If Reward Faith just tracks it one 'game action' at a time, and not trying to add stuff up over the course of a turn, then it's probably fine.

[MaximumCDawg]

Fine, but boring.  I guess we're stuck with the wording on Ageless Entity; triggers once per lifegain, but some cards might care about how much life was just gained.  Alright, I'll have some prototypes shortly.

[Delha]

Fine, but boring.  I guess we're stuck with the wording on Ageless Entity; triggers once per lifegain, but some cards might care about how much life was just gained.  Alright, I'll have some prototypes shortly.

I fail to see how it's boring, unless your definition of boring is "anything that isn't pointlessly complicated".

If you can't come up with an interesting effect to have the trigger generate, that's your lack of creativity, not a failure of the mechanic.

[MaximumCDawg]

Fine, but boring.  I guess we're stuck with the wording on Ageless Entity; triggers once per lifegain, but some cards might care about how much life was just gained.  Alright, I'll have some prototypes shortly.

I fail to see how it's boring, unless your definition of boring is "anything that isn't pointlessly complicated".

If you can't come up with an interesting effect to have the trigger generate, that's your lack of creativity, not a failure of the mechanic.

I got a better idea.

Reward Faith: Whenever you gain life, put that many Faith counters on this.

Then, each card with Reward Faith can do something with the counters; they give +1/+1, can be removed for effects, etc.  This cleans up the problem of when each card triggers and accomplishes the same thing I was trying to do.

[Delha]

Why are you stuck on the idea that there's a problem with triggering? It's not hard figuring out whether Dragon Breath triggers or not. Whenever X happens, you stop for less than half a second to see if it crosses the threshhold in question. If it did, Y happens. When you cast a precombat Pyroclasm, is there a huge problem with figuring what dies or not? Of course not.

Unless you give those counters the +1/+1 (broken), How is that "more interesting" than before? You're just adding adding largely pointless steps to the process. It's like deciding that whenever you want to buy something, you have to put the money in a bucket then have the cashier take the cash out of the bucket instead of just handing it over directly.

If you felt the mechanic was too weak, or needed more control over timing, that would be different. That's not what you said though. All you seem to be doing here is (once again) making changes as if complication was an end unto itself. The execution I'm pushing is already simpler and cleaner than any version you've proposed.

[Norm4eva]

Actually I kind of like the idea of counters.  The idea that a certain kind of game action 'charges' your creatures/permanents up in such a way that they can activate their own abilities (cast their own spells, in flavor) is a neat idea.  Like each creature can be a 'mini-Jitte'.

[Delha]

Actually I kind of like the idea of counters.  The idea that a certain kind of game action 'charges' your creatures/permanents up in such a way that they can activate their own abilities (cast their own spells, in flavor) is a neat idea.  Like each creature can be a 'mini-Jitte'.

Depending on what abilities are granted, that level of control is going to be largely unnecessary. Since we're talking about white here, it makes sense to be dealing with martially oriented abilities (first strike, pump, tapping creatures, etc).

If we were countering spells or bouncing stuff, timing would be much more important. In this case though, the increase in utility is minimal. Also, the vast majority of lifegain is already instant. Waiting for blockers to be declared then casting healing salve isn't very different from waiting for blocks then removing counters.

Counters are great for when you want fine control on a permanent, like Serrated Arrows, or Pentavus or the like. For abilities like those mentioned thus far, it really comes across to me as a wasted step.

[MaximumCDawg]

The critical thing about using counters is that the amount of life gained matters.  If the amount doesn't matter, you'll just see people running cheap 1 life effects.  But once you care about the amount, now you have an incentive to gain lots of life.  You can also get there one of two ways: big one-shot life gain effects or alot of little ones.  More flexibility for the players.   

I don’t think that +1/+1 counters would be broken, actually.  Remember, lifegain is not a powerful play in and of itself except against very specific decks, like burn.  You really want to run 4x Healing Salve?  Alright, good job when you don’t have a powerful Reward Faith effect out there.

Here are some of the cards I'm thinking of, to show you why I like the counter idea:

Little Dude
W
1/1
Reward Faith
Remove a Faith counter from this: This gains +1/+0 until end of turn.
(A good white weenie in a deck with lifegain.)

Better Ajani's Pridemate
2W
1/1
Reward Faith
This gets +1/+1 for each Faith counter on it.
(Is this overpowered?  Play a salve, get a 4/4 for 2WW and a card. Play that Scars 1W lifegain duder, get a 6/6 for 3WW. Doesn’t seem like it.)

Chalice Dude
1W
1/1
Reward Faith
Opponents cannot play spells equal to the number of Faith counters on this.
(I love this with an unhealthy passion.  It’s tense- you can lock out your opponent, but then the rest of your lifegain is dead.)

Blinky Dude
4WW
4/6
Vigilance, Reward Faith
T: Exile target non-land permanent.  If this has less than 5 Faith counters, return that permanent to the battlefield at the beginning of the next end step.
(High-end fattie with splashy effect.  Potentially tricky because you have to know about the end step trigger to exile something to allow Blinky to attack through it)

Archer Dude
1W
2/1
Reward Faith
Remove X Faith counters from this, T: This deals X damage to target attacking or blocking creature.   
(Typical white removal effect)

Mana Dude
WW
2/2   
Reward Faith
Remove a Faith counter from this: Add W to your mana pool.  Spend this mana only to cast White spells or pay the activation costs for White permanents.

Castle Dude
2WW
1/4
Reward Faith
Untapped creatures you control gain +0/+1 for each Faith counter on this.   

Faith to Plowshares
W
Enchantment
Reward Faith
When this enters the battlefield, exile target creature or planeswalker and you gain 1 life. During your upkeep, remove a Faith counter from this.  If you cannot, return the exiled creature to the battlefield.

Oblivion Faith
1W
Enchantment   
Reward Faith
When this enters the battlefield, exile target artifact or enchantment and you gain 1 life. During your upkeep, remove a Faith counter from this.  If you cannot, return the exiled creature to the battlefield.   

(A pair of fun on-color removal spells that require constant lifegain to work effectively)

Super Flanker
1WW
2/2
Reward Faith, Haste
Creatures blocking this lose -1/-1 until end of turn for each Faith counter on this.

Smart Dude
2WW
2/4
Reward Faith
Remove a Faith counter from this: Draw a card.
(Before you complain about this things power level, look at that Well of Souls artifact or whatever.  This is a minor improvement because it has legs.)

[Delha]

The critical thing about using counters is that the amount of life gained matters.  If the amount doesn't matter, you'll just see people running cheap 1 life effects.  But once you care about the amount, now you have an incentive to gain lots of life.

The amount of life gained by a single event matters MORE without counters. The use of counters allows people to use "cheap 1 life effects" and stockpile until they get bigger results. My suggestion does not. If you want big rewards, you need big lifegain, not a bunch of little ones. Go back and reread.

I don’t think that +1/+1 counters would be broken, actually.  Remember, lifegain is not a powerful play in and of itself except against very specific decks, like burn.  You really want to run 4x Healing Salve?  Alright, good job when you don’t have a powerful Reward Faith effect out there.

Look at Ageless Entity. He costs five mana, and has this as his ONLY ability. Look at it this way. T1: Play 1/1 dude. T2: Life Burst, swing for 5. T3: Life Burst, swing for 13 (18 total dmg). Replace the Life Burst with Heroes' Reunions and that becomes T2 swing for 8 and T3 swing for 15 (23 total dmg). You seriously don't see anything wrong with attacking on the second turn with 6/6 for or an 8/8 for ? And THEN you want to slap more abilities on top?

I'm not even going to really address your sample cards yet.

[MaximumCDawg]

Yea, look at Ageless Entity.  I might have missed it, since I was not playing at the time he was printed, but I don't recall him ever being a tournament level card.  

In your example,  you're playing a deck that is apparently packing tons of cards that do nothing but gain life.  That sounds pretty fair to me.  If you don't draw your 1/1 dork - or if you do and they plow it - then you've got a hand full of garbage.   Best case senario, you're swinging for 8/8 on t2 for GWW ... and two cards, one of which is "do nothing" by itself.

Compare the Little Dude above with Kiln Fiend, for example.  The Fiend costs 1 mana more, so he can't come out t1 usually.  Apart from that, he's worlds better than Little Dude because he potentially gets bigger faster and he triggers from cards that are actually good to play on their own.  Lightning bolt, for example.  

I don't see how swinging for 8/8 on t2 for GWW (in magical Christmas land) is much different from things you can already do:

Swing for 6 on t2 for 2W, two cards (Kor Duelist + Bonesplitter)

Swing for lethal pos on t2, three cards (Glister Elf, Might of Old Krosa, Berzerk)

Swing for 8 on t3 for 1RR, two cards (Kiln Fiend + Assault Strobe)

Swing for 12 on t3 for 1U, two cards (Dreadnought+Stifle)

Swing for 20+ on t3 for WR, four cards (2cc double striker, blazing shoal, 9cc red card)

Swing for 20+ on t2 for 1GGG, three cards (mongrel, Might of Old Krosa, pitch 4 cards, Beserk)

And I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface.

I imagine one might have legitimate balance issues with the casting cost of cards based on a hypothetical limited environment, but I don’t see how your example is any worse that these others.

[Delha]

I don't recall what sort of manabases you're running, but if having on turn 1 and on turn 2 is "magical christmas land", they must be absolute garbage. By that logic, how do people ever consistently get up for Drain?

Regarding your examples: Temporary gains are obviously far weaker than permanent ones, so we'll eliminate Glister Elf, Kiln Fiend, Blazing Shoal, and Mongrel. When your combo sputters out after being chumped by a Llanowar, it's clearly not on the same level as having a true fatty. From there, we've only got Duelist and Dreadnought left.

1. Redundancy. The eternal problem of 2-card combos. Duelist and Dreadnought are both unique cards. In contrast, there would presumably be loads of guys with RF. Assuming you stick with what's typical for white, there should be at least 8 copies of a RF dude in the 1-2 range (as opposed to 4 Duelists/Dreadnoughts).

Then let's look at the second piece of the combo. Bonesplitter is unique. The closest substitutes (Bone Saw, Shuko, Leonin Scimitar) all result in 4 dmg instead of 6. Stifle is similarly unique. Trickbind gets the job done, but a turn later, since you have to cast it in the same turn as Dreadnought. In contrast, there are dozens of lifegain instants (which doesn't even begin to touch on repeatable effects).

2. Resultant Creature. Duelist is a glass cannon. He trades with Tundra Wolf, and dies to pretty much any removal ever printed, including crap like Singe or Sandstorm. Dreadnought and the RF dude generally die to similar things (since stuff Terminates, Swords, Jace, etc don't care about P/T). From there though, he also falls prey to the boatloads of artifact floating around (eg Claim, Steel Sabotage, Grudge).

3. Potential. For both Duelist/Dreadnought, you need a Bonesplitter/Stifle per creature. Four RF dudes, and just one lifegain spell? One RF dude and four lifegain spells? Not the best, but it's still better than seeing a 4/1 split with either of the other combos. Even with ideal distribution, one gains in a linear fashion while the other is multiplicative. Under the best of circumstances, you get 24 dmg from Duelists, 48 from Dreadnoughts, and 116 from RF 1/1 + Reunion.

From there, adding 4x Bone Saw gets you 8 more dmg, adding 4x Trickbinds gets you nothing extra, adding 4x Life Burst gets you 160 more dmg. Adding more Duelists or Dreadnoughts is impossible, but doubling your RF dudes increases your top damage proportionally.

4. Bonus abilities. Duelist and Dreadnough have none. You were talking about giving the RF guys additional utility on top of the raw gains from +1/+1 counters.

[MaximumCDawg]

I don't recall what sort of manabases you're running, but if having on turn 1 and on turn 2 is "magical christmas land", they must be absolute garbage. By that logic, how do people ever consistently get up for Drain?

Getting a 2-card combo out turn 2 requires a lot more than having the right color mana.  You also have to draw the right cards.  In this case, you need to have the 1cc creature in your hand and white mana on turn 1, which is probably about a 40% chance, and you have to draw the 2cc instant by turn 2, which might be a little better chance.  

That’s not a vanishingly small chance by any means, but it’s misleading to suggest it’s just about having on-color mana.

Regarding your examples: Temporary gains are obviously far weaker than permanent ones, so we'll eliminate Glister Elf, Kiln Fiend, Blazing Shoal, and Mongrel.

I’m not TOTALLY off my rocker.  If you look at the cards I was designing above, the 1cc weenie has “Remove a Faith Counter from this: This gains +1/+0 until end of turn.”  The whole point was to make it more like the other temporary pumps.  If your real complaint is just a balance issue, I get that, but I’m trying to account for it.  Recall that the two-card combo in question not only results in an 8/8 critter, but also GAINS you 7 life.  

The rest of your comments deal with the ability to run combo pieces.  Certainly you’d agree that Stifle or Bonesplitter are far more useful without the other combo piece than is a life gain effect?

[Delha]

Getting a 2-card combo out turn 2 requires a lot more than having the right color mana.  You also have to draw the right cards.  In this case, you need to have the 1cc creature in your hand and white mana on turn 1, which is probably about a 40% chance, and you have to draw the 2cc instant by turn 2, which might be a little better chance.  

That’s not a vanishingly small chance by any means, but it’s misleading to suggest it’s just about having on-color mana.

Are you seriously trying to claim that I'm the person being misleading here? My claim was never that you're going to swing with an 8/8 on the second turn of every game you ever play. My claim was that swinging with an 8/8 that becomes even bigger on T3 was pretty damn broken (and it is).

The problem of needing both halves of a combo is so basic that I took it as a given. Anyone with even a moderate grasp of game mechanics (not even Magic specifically) ought to understand it. If you wanted to highlight that in particular, you should have said so, instead of just adding a pithy side comment in parenthesis. Don't get on my case about addressing the wrong thing when you never presented it clearly in the first place. The fact that your following list included 3 and even 4 card combos supported this belief that we were ignoring difficulty of assembly.

Also, as pointed out in my last post, the problem is also far less relevant in this case because you can easily run a dozen copies of each half (though the extra RF guys may have a CMC of 2 or 3 instead of being 1 drops).

I’m not TOTALLY off my rocker.  If you look at the cards I was designing above, the 1cc weenie has “Remove a Faith Counter from this: This gains +1/+0 until end of turn.”  The whole point was to make it more like the other temporary pumps.  If your real complaint is just a balance issue, I get that, but I’m trying to account for it.  Recall that the two-card combo in question not only results in an 8/8 critter, but also GAINS you 7 life.

Look at what I quoted when I brought up Ageless Entity. I said that +1/+1 counters would be broken, and that stacking further abilities on top would be even worse. Your "Little Dude" card has nothing to do with this line of discussion. I specifically said that I wasn't addressing those cards at the time. If you want to admit that using +1/+1 counters was a bad idea, then I'll drop it and we can move on, but for now your recent suggestions are just a tangent.

The rest of your comments deal with the ability to run combo pieces.  Certainly you’d agree that Stifle or Bonesplitter are far more useful without the other combo piece than is a life gain effect?

The question is largely moot, since you can easily have 20+ cards that interact with lifegain (say 12 RF dudes, 4x Divinity of Pride, maybe Serra Ascendant, and a Sovereign Felidar or two). The only reason to building a deck full of purely lifegain cards is if you can pack it full of things that benefit accordingly. The increased uptime for for the lifegain cards probably far outweighs the fact that they're nigh useless alone. What would you prefer, a card that's great half the time and mediocre the other half, or a card that's great 90% of the time in return for being absolutely dead for the remaining 10%?

[Norm4eva]

I might be getting drawn into an argument that I don't wish to actually take part in here, heh - but isn't the card in contention here a 1/1 for 2W?  I realize that's not impossible to attain in an older format, but even if that's your combo or whatever, people with genuine combo decks will just walk the fuck right over you.  Unless you're planning some weird Time Walk + LIFEGAIN shenanigans, in which case, I pine for you.

I think we've got a good template here for doing some Cool Things, though.  Let's try and spread this out over the suggested mechanics.

(ability) - Whenever you (game action), put that many charge counters on -this-.  Remove N charge counters from -this-: Effect.

I would suggest this as a template for the rest of the abilities, for the fact that some of them are near misses of abilities already present - Harvest is remarkably close to Dredge, par example.  I also really like the idea of making a series of cards which reward you just for performing on-color game actions in some measurable way - especially if those game actions are 'primary' by definition but 'secondary' by nature of the game.  Life gain is a great example; it's widely regarded as barely playable unless in cascades, and even then it is useless in certain matchups (many combo decks do not care what your life total is, they will deck you or kill you for 2^64 damage anyway).  Make a deck which rewards *itself* for life gain, and suddenly that secondary effect of White becomes an engine for Good Stuff.  There's lots of effects like this throughout all the colors; Red's penchant for randomness, Blue's deck 'rearranging', we could go on...