Killer Bees!

[Lanidrak]

With a thread having the word 'bee' in it so many times... My page is littered with AdSense ads for 'pure organic honey', 'got a bee infestation?, 'interested in starting a bee hive', 'bee-handling protective gear'...

Anyways, it is a good idea, my only problem is that will people use it? The alternative is firefly queen (an albeit much more simplified version of what's going on here).

I am confused. If you have 1 Honeycomb in play. x Drones and y Soldiers with z Autarchs and 1 Queen. That honeycomb gets destroyed. All your x Drones heal you, all your y Soldiers become twice as powerful, all your Autarchs give you more Larvae and whats more, your Queen will give you a new Honeycomb?

1) Do your soldiers get 2x Attack Power everytime a honeycomb is destroyed?
2) What happens if the Honeycomb is stolen?
3) So once a Queen is in play, the only way to remove the Honeycomb is to kill the queen first and then the Honeycomb?

My main concern will be the speed at which this card manifests itself. 5 Life Quanta from an un-upgraded Honeycomb... That's maybe what, presuming Mark of Life and un-upgraded pillars, turn 2 or 3 when you play a Honeycomb. Then there is another turn waiting to use the Honeycombs ability to 'refresh'. So now presuming you have no other cards/quanta you want to take advantage of, you'll have the 5 + 2 Life Quanta and the Permanent in play to make your first Larva. Around about turn 4 to 5. And only then does your Larva have to wait an additional 2 turns while it is doing it's metamorphosis. For what, a 1% chance of becoming a Queen, 5% chance Autarch, 10% chance Solider and 'failing all these' a drone. So that's a 2/2 creature. Even if you did get luck and manage a Soldier or an Autarch, their offense is only 3.

Picture this against the current Firefly Queen set up. Turn 1: 2 Life Pillars, 1 Air Pillar /mark of Air. Turn 3 or 4 Firefly Queen. Turn 5 spawn firefly. So already by turn 5 this FFQ deck will be doing 6 damage to you, when (see above) only at turn 7 will you have - most likely - 2 damage out. In the pure damage race side of things, the FFQ will win every time. And since the FFQ AI has no means of permanent control all of your 'swarm to' abilities will be useless, unless you have the means of destroying them yourself in your deck.

So I've given this some thought. Please forgive my earlier criticism about the 11/10 idea and 3/10 for practicality. I'm not trying to bash/flame your idea further, just trying to move it along, help it 'evolve' a little! Like I said before, I love this idea.

[vrt]

icybraker, please, don't use Google. Both those images are copyrighted, and could never be used in the game. Technically, due to lack of credit/permission, it's already an intellectual copyright breach to post them here (though I'm fairly sure you won't be looking at any jailtime yet :p).

[Piter De Vries]

It's an amazing idea. Some remarks here,
1) if we keep it as life base (+ air quanta needed), we need such good comboes for other elements as well .
2) we could really re-do this idea as a new Machine element (machines creating machines). This idea is strong enough to be the base of a new element. We could even develop it and have 10  - 15 cards (with spells, more permanents, etc... if you want i can propose my ideas on it later).
3) Lanidrak shows us that it's a bit slow with those values to play "only" that as creatures - if no good defense with it. So, i think it's ok as life creatures, but if transferring them to a new element, needs lower costs / shorter evolving time.

A question too: beside the fact that you're better "controlling" your creatures with it (and i like it), what's the use of devolving?

Keep up good work, Essence!

[Terroking]

Best way to remove the bad wait time= Adrenaline, which is conveniently life element and will hopefully carry over to the evolved larvae, if zanz fixes the graboid-fireshield problem. The larva will evolve and attack twice as whatever it turns into. even if it is a drone, then it'll deal 12 damage (you counted the damage from your FF as 4, so we should assume both decks are upped), while putting it on the fly will deal 9 damage (granted its 12 on the queen). So the damage output there is much more even regardless of later on, when the FFQ will likely take over when it gets more queens out.

Upped FFQ decks can carry explosion to deal with permanents (-2 damage shields are nasty to it). But who in their right mind would destroy a honeycomb once their opponent gets a few soldiers out?

[Essence]

Fireshield's not an issue, as Larva have a 0 attack and thus don't ever hit the shield. 

And yes,  the entire point of the deck is to set a timer on cutting the roots out -- once you get a few Soldiers out, it might even be a good idea for a Bee deck to nuke it's own Honeycombs.