Mind Blight | Mind Rot

[Sackett]

NAME: Mind Blight ELEMENT: Darkness COST: 3 TYPE: Spell ATK|HP: TEXT: Discard your hand.  Up to an equal number of cards are discarded from your opponent's hand.	NAME: Mind Rot ELEMENT: Darkness COST: 2 TYPE: Spell ATK|HP: TEXT: Discard your hand.  Up to an equal number of cards are discarded from your opponent's hand.

ART: Original Algorithim Generated Art IDEA: Sackett NOTES: Q: Which cards get discarded from the opponent's hand?  Do I get to choose? A: No, the cards discarded from the opponent's hand are randomly selected. Q: What happens if I discard more cards then my opponent has in his hand? A: Then all the cards in your opponent's hand are discarded.  Since there are no more cards in your opponent's hand, no more cards are discarded.  Essentially the extra cards you discarded were wasted. Q: Why Darkness? A: I'm not too certain about Darkness being the right element for this card.  I feel that there are three elements that have a plausible claim to this card.  Darkness, where it would make a natural combination with Nightmare.  Time with Precognition.  Entropy, with it's general manipulation strategy.  I think Time and Darkness have the best thematic claim, but I'd like to know what the rest of the community thinks. Q: This seems like a combo card, what combos will this create? A: The most obvious is of course Ghost of the Past + Nightmare + Mind Rot.  Lesser combos include using Precognition to see the opponents deck.  Reverse Time, knowing that the opponent does not have enough quanta to play it next turn, allowing you to Mind Rot it on your following turn.  This may be an (weak) argument for including it under Time instead of Darkness, but you could even try to combo Ghost of the Past with Shard of Sacrifice.  No doubt as other discard effects are added this card will become more and more useful.  Most of these combos are Darkness and Time. Q: Suppose I have Ghost of the Past in my hand and I play this card, do I take damage? A: Yes, your discard takes place before the opponent's discard, so discard effects are applied to you first. SERIES:

If the combos are thought to be too strong in a Duo Deck an easy solution would be to move it to Entropy.  Although in that case I think we should reduce the cost to 2 and 1 quanta respectively.  I don't think the combo is too strong, so to me the main question is is this a Time card?  Or is it a Darkness card?

[Kamietsu]

I like this. it is evil yet not too over-powered. Just one thing, you might want to fix the title. You need a "|" instead of a "/".

[Opsinis]

Oh my... This makes me think. Ghostmare would get a ton stronger.
This would allow a new kind of OTK. And in some cases this is an instant OTK-killer
Of course Sanc would spit on this card.
Title makes me think aether.

[Kamietsu]

Oh my... This makes me think. Ghostmare would get a ton stronger.
This would allow a new kind of OTK. And in some cases this is an instant OTK-killer
Of course Sanc would spit on this card.
Title makes me think aether.

It's not that bad. it can really only be used once a turn(since you discard your hand) you would then need to draw at least two more cards, one of which is this card, for the opponent to discard again. And even then, you need to large hand to be able to discard a lot of the opponent's hand.

[Joseph7]

I feel this card is fairly balanced. You lose just as many, if not more, cards than your opponent. As you brought up, it would make the ghostmare a powerfully strong duo deck. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, but I think that you should change the mechanism slightly so that you discard cards but your opponent's cards are destroyed, not discarded, so that you would not be forcing your opponent to lose 10 hp for each Ghost of the Past in their hand.

[Rutarete]

Step 1: Draw with SoB, Mark of Fire.
Step 2: Mind Blight.

[Elbirn]

Too powerful in it's current form I think, mostly because of Ghostmare. I think a better effect would be to just discard the first opponent's card, or something.

[Psychoa]

I feel this card is fairly balanced. You lose just as many, if not more, cards than your opponent. As you brought up, it would make the ghostmare a powerfully strong duo deck. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, but I think that you should change the mechanism slightly so that you discard cards but your opponent's cards are destroyed, not discarded, so that you would not be forcing your opponent to lose 10 hp for each Ghost of the Past in their hand.

That would destroy the synergy it has with Ghost of the Past, which would probably be its main use. Besides, it can still be countered by Sanctuary, and as the other posts said, you would need a few of them for it to be effective and a good combo would take some time. Maybe the cost could be raised a bit, but I think the mechanic should stay the same. Anyway, nice card.

[Sackett]

Ghostmare decks are of course the most powerful combo to benefit.

Lets look at the ideal situation:  Your opponent has zero cards in his hand.  You have an upgraded Ghost of the Past on the board.  You have a hand of 8 cards, 1 nightmare, and 1 Mind Rot.

1 Nightmare = 16 damage
You play Mind Rot, so you discard 6 cards = your opponent discards 6 cards = 78 damage

Total damage = 94

Wow that's pretty powerful.  Except how likely is that to be the case?

For one thing, if your opponent knows you are playing Ghostmare (likely with the Ghost on the board), your opponent will probably be playing more carefully to keep extra cards in his hand.

For another, how likely are you to have 8 cards in your hand?  I suppose you could add Hourglasses to increase your draw rate.

Still, it's more likely that you will only get 4 to5 Ghost into the opponent's hand with a Nightmare, and you'll probably be discarding 5 cards at the high end, and even less if you are trying to play the Ghost on the same turn as the Nightmare and Mind Rot.

That does the following:

1 Nightmare for 5 Ghosts = 10 damage
Mind Rot discarding 5 cards => discard 5 random cards from your opponent's hand, so lets say 3 Ghosts + 2 other cards = 39 damage
Total of 49 damage

Counters include Sanctuary, Shard of Sacrifice, Nightmare (on the Ghost, so that your opponent will be discarding Ghosts), Reverse Time and other CC on the Ghosts, Fractal/Hourglass/Sundial/Precognition (to keep your deck full).
Plus, if you have any Ghosts of the Past in your hand that you discard you will also take damage for those cards (and that damage would be applied before the damage to your opponent).

Now that is still really powerful, but you do have to get a 3 card combo in specific situations.

Is that too powerful?  As I said that is one of my worries.  The easiest change would be to increase the cost of the card, the other possibility would be to place this card in a different element so that you have to play a Trio deck to use it with Ghostmare.  If this is too powerful in a Duo deck then I think I'd prefer the second solution and consider moving it to Entropy or something.  That would weaken the combo with Ghostmare, while not significantly hurting other possible combos.

[OdinVanguard]

Good analysis Sackett.

I think this should be fine, even with GoTP-mare in mind. While the upper threshold on damage is very high, setting that up will take a good deal of time and patience. This card does help open up the opponents hand for future nightmare attack, but making use of it in the same turn would take multiple hourglasses and a fair deal of luck... It would also tear through your deck quite rapidly. In the end, you would deal a lot of damage, but would very likely sacrifice many of you decks cards in the process, possibly crippling your own strategy if you get a bad draw streak (e.g. what happens if you draw most or all of your nightmares or Mind Rots?).

Aside from GoTP, the other interesting use for this would be with fractal and SoB:
Force draw with SoB,
Use fractal
Use this.
That would simultaneously allow you to control the power of the cards being discarded.
Mindgate could work well here as well, with similar cost relative to fractal.
In both cases, the idea is to allow you to avoid canibalising multiple copies of your own decks core cards while forcing the opponent to drop theirs.