How the bloody hell would an abundance of poison cards make the mechanic too good? It still depends on the quality of the cards themselves. Having many poison cards only increases the chance that there are more usable ones, and that together they make a more viable strategy. The power level of cards can always be balanced through cost, drawbacks and hosers.
Mostly true. But there are 2 problems here:
(1) Poison, no matter the drawback attached to it, would be extremely strong in Limited if it were printed in large quantities. The same would go for Block Constructed. The less available cards, the more potent any ability becomes, and one like poison is not one you want to flood a format with.
(2) This goes for ANY mechanic, no matter how good or bad: The more cards you print with it, the greater the chance thatsomething will slip through the cracks and break a format. While bannings are around for just such a reason, I would like to believe that WotC would rather just keep such things from happening. A good example of a basic mechanic perhaps stretched too far would be Onslaught's Cycling. There were so many cards with Cycling, it was inevitable that one would be broken. And lo, Eternal Dragon and Decree of Justice came to be. Anyone remember the top pre-Affinity ON-MR Standard deck? Yeah, U/W. With an abundance of the named cards. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having a couple high-power cards, but Cycling just draws a card, it doesn't get you closer to winning like Poison.
If they brought back poison, I would like to see more cards dependant on Poison counters, like Leeches. Except not crappy.
EDIT: If I'm not mistaken, this thread was started soon before that Arcana with Poison came up, right? And we already KNOW MaRo reads our forums (if you read that whole chat log, you'll see). Do you think they could be toying with us...?
(2) This goes for ANY mechanic, no matter how good or bad: The more cards you print with it, the greater the chance thatsomething will slip through the cracks and break a format. While bannings are around for just such a reason, I would like to believe that WotC would rather just keep such things from happening. A good example of a basic mechanic perhaps stretched too far would be Onslaught's Cycling. There were so many cards with Cycling, it was inevitable that one would be broken. And lo, Eternal Dragon and Decree of Justice came to be. Anyone remember the top pre-Affinity ON-MR Standard deck? Yeah, U/W. With an abundance of the named cards. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having a couple high-power cards, but Cycling just draws a card, it doesn't get you closer to winning like Poison.
Wizards has also gone on the record admitting that Astral Slide should have had an activation cost.
(1) Poison, no matter the drawback attached to it, would be extremely strong in Limited if it were printed in large quantities. The same would go for Block Constructed. The less available cards, the more potent any ability becomes, and one like poison is not one you want to flood a format with.
(2) This goes for ANY mechanic, no matter how good or bad: The more cards you print with it, the greater the chance thatsomething will slip through the cracks and break a format. While bannings are around for just such a reason, I would like to believe that WotC would rather just keep such things from happening. A good example of a basic mechanic perhaps stretched too far would be Onslaught's Cycling. There were so many cards with Cycling, it was inevitable that one would be broken. And lo, Eternal Dragon and Decree of Justice came to be. Anyone remember the top pre-Affinity ON-MR Standard deck? Yeah, U/W. With an abundance of the named cards. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having a couple high-power cards, but Cycling just draws a card, it doesn't get you closer to winning like Poison.
Let's not oversell poison. In the past, poison wound up on more than a few overcosted creatures that killed faster through damage than through the poison counters, just to give you one example of how even a set chock full of poison cards can keep the mechanic impotent.
Your argument that the number of cards increases the chance of something broken slipping through the cracks applies to ALL cards, not just cards with a specific mechanic. If that's a priority, then it's the number of cards in a set that should be decreased, not just ones with a particular mechanic. Of course, this is a concern easily tempered through careful playtesting, and keeping MaRo out of the design team. In fact, MaRo being the main poison pusher is the only factor in increasing the chances that poison will come back in a broken way.
But seriously, the way some of you people talk, you'd think poison was shadow! All poison is is an alternative life total, and one that counts up towards death instead of down. The equations between cost (mana and otherwise) and damage is something R&D is most familiar with, they can easily apply those lessons to the return of poison and keep players safe from the mechanic.
Given their parallels, it might be useful to compare poison vs. old fashioned damage:
Time it takes to kill player:
A creature that deals one poison counter with each unblocked attack and a vanilla creature of 2 power will kill a player in the same number of turns. There is no inherent advantage in this area for either.
Verdict: Tie
Ability to kill other creatures:
This is the area where poison takes the biggest hurt. Poison, as we have it today, does zippo to other creatures. This makes creatures with poison in lieu of power less fearful in combat. It makes any spell that gives poison counters less versatile than damage spells. This is a big reason why poison has never been big in the past. Poison creatures are considerably less useful than their non-poisoned counterparts, all things being equal.
Verdict: Damage
The availability of defense against the victory method:
There is, as it stands now, vastly more cards that prevent and redirect damage. Life gain also makes up for damage. As for poison counters, the only way to ameliorate it right now is the Leeches .
Verdict: Poison
Could the last factor be why some people are fearful of poison? Well, the situation exists right now, and there has never been a tournament viable poison deck. If poison comes back in a big way, I'm sure WOTC will cough up some protection against it. Even without that, poison has a big ol' weak spot in the fact that it's limited to hurting players.
Gargh, I'm amazed I spent this much virtual ink reassuring people about poison. Well, at least I'm not defending banding against charges of being overpowered.
Wasn't there some talk of bringing back poison but making it almost like a drawback like this:
Poison McPosion-ey 2GG
Creature - Snake with poison
Whenever ~this~ deals combat damage to a player, prevent that damage and that player gains a poison counter. Players with 10 posion counters lose the game.
5/5
Thoughts?
Poison McPoison-ey
Creature - Snake
Whenever this would deal combat damage to a player, prevent that damage. That player gets a poison counter. (A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.)
5/5
[/nitpick]
The rules for 10 poison counters are in the Comp Rules. All the old poison cards have been Oracled to have that in their reminder text. (Sorry, I'm extremely rules-nitpicky; nothing personal or anything!)
Anyways... I think it's 50/50 that poison comes back in Ravnica. It would be a great candidate for the B/G guild, and I think that if they push Guilds far enough (which they will, I think, as they've been pushing all their non-keyword-mechanic themes pretty far lately), there could be enough cards with poison to make it good. I think the above card is a great preliminary example of how to do poison right. Or even:
Poison McPoison-ey
Creature - Snake
Whenever this would deal combat damage to a player, prevent that damage. That player gets two poison counters.
Whenever this deals combat damage to a creature, you get a poison counter.(A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.)
5/5
Private Mod Note
():
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DCI Certified Level 1 Judge
Remember, kids: Never fight with Flashback, 'cause Flashback always wins.
Poison McPoison-ey
Creature - Snake
Whenever this would deal combat damage to a player, prevent that damage. That player gets a poison counter. (A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.)
5/5
[/nitpick]
The rules for 10 poison counters are in the Comp Rules. All the old poison cards have been Oracled to have that in their reminder text. (Sorry, I'm extremely rules-nitpicky; nothing personal or anything!)
Anyways... I think it's 50/50 that poison comes back in Ravnica. It would be a great candidate for the B/G guild, and I think that if they push Guilds far enough (which they will, I think, as they've been pushing all their non-keyword-mechanic themes pretty far lately), there could be enough cards with poison to make it good. I think the above card is a great preliminary example of how to do poison right. Or even:
Poison McPoison-ey
Creature - Snake
Whenever this would deal combat damage to a player, prevent that damage. That player gets two poison counters.
Whenever this deals combat damage to a creature, you get a poison counter.(A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.)
5/5
That would certainally solve the fearful in combat problem while giving a pretty good ammount of poison to the opponent.
Private Mod Note
():
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People are products of their own ingenuity; they are who they choose to be.
They'll probably get poison counters to return when Wizards don't have any more mechanics to come up with. It would be nostalgic in some sort...
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Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
all they need to do to make poison not bad is by making the counters do stuff (i think i said this already.) as once you get a poison counter, it just sits there until either the player loses, or removes it with leeches. if they made a cycle of spells that had an effect due to the amount of poison counters that a player had, it might make it more interesting. for example:
Inflame Venom 1RR
Inflame Venom deals X damage to target player, where X is the number of poison counters that player has.
Mind Venom 1BB
Target player discards X cards, where X is the number of poison counters that player has.
Venom Boon 1WW
Gain X life, where X is the number of poison counters target player has.
Poisoned thoughts 1UU
Draw X cards, where X is the number of poison counters target player has, then discard 3 cards.
Poisoned Strength 1GG
Target Creature gets +X/+X until end of turn, where X is the number of poison counters target player has, then at the end of turn, destroy that creature.
thoughs? the reason why red and black don't have drawbacks are simple, they just take the poison a player has, and make it worse. White purifies the poison, and blue and green... i ran out of names for them, and didn't want to put blue poison effect spell.
another thing they could do is creatures that use the poison counters as abilities, such as:
Vile Laugher 2B
Creature - imp
When Vile Laugher comes into play, choose target player.
Vile Laugher gets +1/+1 for every poison counter that player has.
1/1
(the following card maybe streaching the flavor limit, but it could work...)
Poison Drinker 2BB
Creature - Human Necromancer
Poison 1 (errata text)
3B, TAP: All other creatures get -X/-X until end of turn, where X is the number of poison counters target player has. That player then removes 3 poison counters.
1/1
yeah, removing poison counters from other players might be streaching it, but if this card can be untapped in the same turn cheaply, then those with the mana to do it twice, and untap it once (or twice), can abuse it.
any thoughts on my ideas? sorry about the long post... my 2 cents on the matter.
The biggest problem with poison as said before the creatures have to attack and get through. By the time you get 10 counters they are already dead from combat damage. There needs to be a way to put poison counters on a player with out the need of attacking. Something like bounty hunter or maybe a drain life spell. Tap creature put a poison counter on target player or XGB spend only black mana put X poison counters on target player
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():
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first turn
Nick: I lay a swamp, tap, dark ritual...
Me: If you cast a hypnotic specter I'll punch you in the face
Nick:...ahh I take 3 points of mana burn
The reason I play black according to CrovaxtheCursed:
Boom another guild has posion too......maybe the U/B guild....assassins? who knows.
Mostly true. But there are 2 problems here:
(1) Poison, no matter the drawback attached to it, would be extremely strong in Limited if it were printed in large quantities. The same would go for Block Constructed. The less available cards, the more potent any ability becomes, and one like poison is not one you want to flood a format with.
(2) This goes for ANY mechanic, no matter how good or bad: The more cards you print with it, the greater the chance thatsomething will slip through the cracks and break a format. While bannings are around for just such a reason, I would like to believe that WotC would rather just keep such things from happening. A good example of a basic mechanic perhaps stretched too far would be Onslaught's Cycling. There were so many cards with Cycling, it was inevitable that one would be broken. And lo, Eternal Dragon and Decree of Justice came to be. Anyone remember the top pre-Affinity ON-MR Standard deck? Yeah, U/W. With an abundance of the named cards. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having a couple high-power cards, but Cycling just draws a card, it doesn't get you closer to winning like Poison.
If they brought back poison, I would like to see more cards dependant on Poison counters, like Leeches. Except not crappy.
EDIT: If I'm not mistaken, this thread was started soon before that Arcana with Poison came up, right? And we already KNOW MaRo reads our forums (if you read that whole chat log, you'll see). Do you think they could be toying with us...?
Wizards has also gone on the record admitting that Astral Slide should have had an activation cost.
Let's not oversell poison. In the past, poison wound up on more than a few overcosted creatures that killed faster through damage than through the poison counters, just to give you one example of how even a set chock full of poison cards can keep the mechanic impotent.
Your argument that the number of cards increases the chance of something broken slipping through the cracks applies to ALL cards, not just cards with a specific mechanic. If that's a priority, then it's the number of cards in a set that should be decreased, not just ones with a particular mechanic. Of course, this is a concern easily tempered through careful playtesting, and keeping MaRo out of the design team. In fact, MaRo being the main poison pusher is the only factor in increasing the chances that poison will come back in a broken way.
But seriously, the way some of you people talk, you'd think poison was shadow! All poison is is an alternative life total, and one that counts up towards death instead of down. The equations between cost (mana and otherwise) and damage is something R&D is most familiar with, they can easily apply those lessons to the return of poison and keep players safe from the mechanic.
Given their parallels, it might be useful to compare poison vs. old fashioned damage:
Time it takes to kill player:
A creature that deals one poison counter with each unblocked attack and a vanilla creature of 2 power will kill a player in the same number of turns. There is no inherent advantage in this area for either.
Verdict: Tie
Ability to kill other creatures:
This is the area where poison takes the biggest hurt. Poison, as we have it today, does zippo to other creatures. This makes creatures with poison in lieu of power less fearful in combat. It makes any spell that gives poison counters less versatile than damage spells. This is a big reason why poison has never been big in the past. Poison creatures are considerably less useful than their non-poisoned counterparts, all things being equal.
Verdict: Damage
The availability of defense against the victory method:
There is, as it stands now, vastly more cards that prevent and redirect damage. Life gain also makes up for damage. As for poison counters, the only way to ameliorate it right now is the Leeches .
Verdict: Poison
Could the last factor be why some people are fearful of poison? Well, the situation exists right now, and there has never been a tournament viable poison deck. If poison comes back in a big way, I'm sure WOTC will cough up some protection against it. Even without that, poison has a big ol' weak spot in the fact that it's limited to hurting players.
Gargh, I'm amazed I spent this much virtual ink reassuring people about poison. Well, at least I'm not defending banding against charges of being overpowered.
Poison McPoison-ey
Creature - Snake
Whenever this would deal combat damage to a player, prevent that damage. That player gets a poison counter. (A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.)
5/5
[/nitpick]
The rules for 10 poison counters are in the Comp Rules. All the old poison cards have been Oracled to have that in their reminder text. (Sorry, I'm extremely rules-nitpicky; nothing personal or anything!)
Anyways... I think it's 50/50 that poison comes back in Ravnica. It would be a great candidate for the B/G guild, and I think that if they push Guilds far enough (which they will, I think, as they've been pushing all their non-keyword-mechanic themes pretty far lately), there could be enough cards with poison to make it good. I think the above card is a great preliminary example of how to do poison right. Or even:
Poison McPoison-ey
Creature - Snake
Whenever this would deal combat damage to a player, prevent that damage. That player gets two poison counters.
Whenever this deals combat damage to a creature, you get a poison counter.(A player with ten or more poison counters loses the game.)
5/5
Remember, kids: Never fight with Flashback, 'cause Flashback always wins.
That would certainally solve the fearful in combat problem while giving a pretty good ammount of poison to the opponent.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Inflame Venom 1RR
Inflame Venom deals X damage to target player, where X is the number of poison counters that player has.
Mind Venom 1BB
Target player discards X cards, where X is the number of poison counters that player has.
Venom Boon 1WW
Gain X life, where X is the number of poison counters target player has.
Poisoned thoughts 1UU
Draw X cards, where X is the number of poison counters target player has, then discard 3 cards.
Poisoned Strength 1GG
Target Creature gets +X/+X until end of turn, where X is the number of poison counters target player has, then at the end of turn, destroy that creature.
thoughs? the reason why red and black don't have drawbacks are simple, they just take the poison a player has, and make it worse. White purifies the poison, and blue and green... i ran out of names for them, and didn't want to put blue poison effect spell.
another thing they could do is creatures that use the poison counters as abilities, such as:
Vile Laugher 2B
Creature - imp
When Vile Laugher comes into play, choose target player.
Vile Laugher gets +1/+1 for every poison counter that player has.
1/1
(the following card maybe streaching the flavor limit, but it could work...)
Poison Drinker 2BB
Creature - Human Necromancer
Poison 1 (errata text)
3B, TAP: All other creatures get -X/-X until end of turn, where X is the number of poison counters target player has. That player then removes 3 poison counters.
1/1
yeah, removing poison counters from other players might be streaching it, but if this card can be untapped in the same turn cheaply, then those with the mana to do it twice, and untap it once (or twice), can abuse it.
any thoughts on my ideas? sorry about the long post... my 2 cents on the matter.
Nick: I lay a swamp, tap, dark ritual...
Me: If you cast a hypnotic specter I'll punch you in the face
Nick:...ahh I take 3 points of mana burn
The reason I play black according to CrovaxtheCursed:
City of Asps
Whenever City of Asps becomes tapped you gain one poison counter.
T: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.
Poisonous Djinn
2BB
During your upkeep you gain one poison counter.
5/5
On the one hand, these drawbacks would likely be less severe than damage. But, you wouldn't be able to offset them with lifegain or damage prevention.