Comments from the series thread:
Ant - I feel lockdown here with mitosis.
Standalone useage: On par but close to Deja Vu.
Clog Hand use: Mitosis + Insinuate makes this a reliable strategy. If you can deny the opponent Time quanta (perhaps too easy) then it makes a perfect lockdown with a built in win condition. That is a powerful enough synergy to warrant a more expensive cost to enforce.
Clog Field use: Playing one is superior to discarding one. Hence a field lockdown can be created if the opponent has 
.
Overall Mechanically:
Not as good as Flame. Might be worthwhile if improved.
Possible improvements might include:
Different discard effect [poison instead of neurotoxin?]
Different entry point [would adding to the hand be more or less balanced/balanceable?]
More expensive [with better stats]
Different theme to match changes.
Other critiques:
Very difficult to balance.
It is a suggestion with 2 effects. In this case they are more like two half effects so it is justified IMO.
[/list]I totally overlooked the mitosis lock. It appears that it has the same kind of issue with fractal. It is indeed a problem.
Neurotoxin discourages the opponent from playing the Sand Ant if they ever discarded one. Also Neurotoxin is a special poison. Perhaps it would work better with regular poison so it is not competing with Dune Scorpion.
It is not competing with dune scorpion because the inoculation pathway is completely different. It enhance different duos. Dune scorpion goes with Entropy (Chaos Power), Light (Blessing) and Gravity (Unstoppable) whereas Sand ant pares with Darkness (nightmare), Aether (Mindgate, Fractal) and Life (Mitosis). None of the two can be used in mono (and both are strictly less good than déjà-vu if you disregard the special abilities ...).
Neurotoxin allows a weak creature which cannot swarm to still give a killing blow. What is the point of going through the trouble of filling your opponent's hand with ants for a single classical poison? Moreover, the neurotoxin is time special poison. Time does not have poisoning ability outside it. The draw/play control is the theme link. IMO, if we remove that we loose flavour.
Different entry point [would adding to the hand be more or less balanced/balanceable?]
I think our solution might well be here. The ant could enter in position 1 (or last) of the hand. The question is what happens if the hand is full (already eight cards in - e.g. after a nightmare)? Does the ant go in the hand and pushes the 8th card on the topdeck or does the ant directly go on the topdeck instead? The question is not superfluous if you use nightmare on a different creature (e.g. GotP, devourer or even black grasshopper (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,23365.0.html)). Should it do something else in this special case - like destroy the ant?
I eventually thought of sending the ant in the second-topdeck position. This however does not solve the lock-down issue. It makes it rather more tricky to handle and slows it down by one turn but it is still possible. Sadly we cannot test the card before we send it to crucible. I'd like to have your opinins befaore I try to reword the whole thing.
Thanks.
