ART: | Zanzarino
| IDEA: | willng3
| NOTES: | Renamed to fit better thematically.
So in case that's unclear, basically this shard randomly picks a creature on your side of the field and then adds a copy of it to your hand or 2 copies if the creature chosen is of the Life element. This effect occurs at the end of its user's turn. Ideally this effect would repeat for every copy of the shard that is on the field, effectively giving the player up to 6 different creatures each turn, but I'd be fine with the shard giving the player 6 (or potentially 12) copies of the same creature as well, since they'd be in the same permanent stack. Note that "a copy" refers to the creature in its original form; it will not copy over stat buffs or effects such as Adrenaline, Momentum or Liquid Shadow.
The functions of this card are effectively two fold. Firstly, it essentially does exactly what I think that "Mitosis" should have done from the beginning, which is to duplicate creatures without giving Life yet another reason why it, as a whole, is weak to creature control. It can be very difficult for Life to make use of Mitosis simply because its creatures have a hard time sticking around long enough for Mitosis to have any real game-changing effect when it, in my opinion, should essentially provide Life with the same kind of wall-breaking force that Fractal does for Aether. As a bonus, this card actually helps mitigate CC since it should usually be easy to simply replace the creature that was just killed, minus the buffs that had been applied. It is a tool for swarming, which Life really, really needs more of than Mitosis at this point. Secondly, it removes what I consider to be an unneeded source of healing from the element. This is not to say that SoG in its current form is completely useless, but I simply have never found it to be of anywhere near the same magnitude of usefulness as, say, Sanctuary. I believe that Life as a whole at this point has enough healing effects to work with and doesn't need a card like SoG and instead needs assets to make better use of the healing it already has. Specifically, I'm referring to Empathic/Feral Bond since currently both of those cards remain harder to use due to Life's weakness to CC as alluded to previously. Adding this card as another permanent control target is yet another benefit in this scenario.
Now, for balancing. To start with, I took Mitosis's cost and reapplied them to both forms of this shard. Ignoring the fact that shards seem to typically be priced as less costly than what I believe they should be balance-wise, I deducted one cost from both copies as personally I believe that Mitosis is also deserving of the same cost decrease in its current form. The Life bonus, while quite a bit more efficient in comparison to its usage with respect to non-Life creatures, is fair for 3 main reasons. Firstly, the user has no control of which creature is copied other than making sure that only one type of creature is on the field at a time. Secondly, replicating more Life creatures specifically may not be all that helpful considering that it doesn't really solve Life's problems when dealing with certain shields (looking at you, Dimensional Shield). Thirdly, as much of a benefit as two additional copies of cheap creatures may be, against decks that are heavy in quanta control, this tactic can backfire against the player massively. If the user is put into a situation where they are drawing to the point that their hand is full before the start of the next turn, then this means that they can effectively draw-lock themselves for the remainder of the game if they are not careful with how their cards are played. This type of tactic obviously helps versus Nightmare and Reverse Time/Eternity but becomes a huge liability when those cards drawn each turn don't help the situation at all.
Because this card can serve essentially the same role as Mitosis, it would be easy enough to simply make a deck and replace Mitosis with copies of this shard. But I'm going to be a bit more creative than that (pretend that SoG in this case is Shard of Creation):
Hover over cards for details, click for permalink 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7am 7am 7am 7am 7ba 7ba 7ba 7ba 7dm 7dm 7dm 7dm 8po
Now, it's still easy enough to say that this is just a standard Life rush with some healing and Explosion splash, but let's focus on where this would differ from a currently similar deck that would utilize Mitosis. I actually use a Mono-Life deck that is fundamentally similar to this that instead opts for Cockatrice, Mitosis, and Thorn Carapace over Giant Frog, SoC and Explosion. This deck addresses the weaknesses that that deck encounters by firstly ignoring most of the Giant Frogs' weakness to CC, which is the main reason why Elite Cockatrice would be used in a deck like this. Thorn Carapace mainly offers a way of dealing with opposing decks that block off most or all of your Cockatrice's damage while still chipping away at your HP with creatures that may become a serious threat if left alone. Explosion remedies that problem by giving the player a way of tearing down shields as needed, excluding Hope; I typically do not run Explosion in the current deck because it really needs all of the Life quanta that it can get. Explosion also serves as a fail-safe in the event that the player is put at risk of "draw-locking" themselves in a manner similar to what was described earlier. Feral Bond continues to serve the same purpose of keeping the player alive versus similarly fast decks while also ensuring that the player can stall out decks that don't rely on a great deal of damage and instead attempt to mitigate the player's damage. Lastly, SoC not only removes most of the Giant Frogs' weakness to CC, but also lets the player draw out some forms of permanent control that would otherwise be used to remove potentially lifesaving Feral Bonds from the field. It also generates creatures at a rate fast enough to where Feral Bond starts healing the player at an actual acceptable rate. Overall: faster setup, faster damage, faster healing, and more utility, but naturally these come with some drawbacks in exchange.
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