Pegaweb's Magic: The Gathering Design Quiz

It's quite unlikely that there's an equipment in play.

It's never a good idea to design a card that converts a large amount of one resource into a large amount of another resource. The decks that play the card will be those that can ignore the loss of one resource, and gain massive benefit in some other resource. You can't have a player paying BG to get three 3/3's on turn two, even if each 3/3 costs 6 life. The best answer here is ten or more. This card should never be printed though.

Putting two saprolings into play feeds the Ultimate ability.

Having each player discard a card is usually going to make the ultimate ability weaker, when you use it.

No one would pay -2 for a 2/2 wolf, when they can pay one loyalty and get a saproling, and either one is going to be sacrificed anyway.

None of these mechanics are good.

"Rideable" (among other things) doesn't stop rideable creatures riding each other, attacking independently, being ridden by multiple creatures, or having riders that ride multiple creatures.

"Draft" cards have a mechanic that's useful only once ever, and create a whole host of obvious real-life problems.

There are so few creatures with trample that this ability barely warrants being put on a card. It's definitely not worth making a keyworded mechanic out of it.

"Warp" has memory issues. For each card with Warp, you have to remember that power and toughness you chose. Most cards use counters or some other mechanism instead of requiring you to remember things.

None of these lands are printable.

Land A makes you search and shuffle your deck every time you want a mana. This is an excessive amount of work to force a player to do. In most games, you'd be shuffling your deck every turn.

Land B taps for blue mana, or grants swampwalk. It's strictly better than a regular island, so you'd basically never play a regular island over this. Lands aren't allowed to be strictly better than basic lands. Any extra bonus they have must be matched by a drawback.

Land C is useless by the time you have a planeswalker on the table. It's also useless if you don't draw a planeswalker (or even have a planeswalker.) Even if you do get it into play, you're probably not going to want to turn your loyalty into mana.

Land D has flash. The rules say you can't play lands during another player's turn. Even if it was possible to do so, you'd just flash this card in during an opponent's turn for no reason other than to get land into play twice as fast. That's way too powerful.

The cost WBR is colour-heavy, has three different colours, and is opposite and allied-coloured. Unless the set is specifically set up to help a player pay such costs, a cost of WBR is very hefty indeed. "6" would also be a reasonable answer, if it were included here.

At 1/1 or 2/2, you'd almost always copy a creature. The card is basically identical to Clone. At 6/6 or 8/8, you'd almost always just keep the huge creature. 4/4 is the number that makes the ability the most interesting and relevant, because both options (copying, or keeping the 4/4) will often be viable. At any of the other power levels, you might as well just make Clone, or a big creature instead.

Three and five both make the card too powerful. As does seven. Even at its worst, it's likely going to destroy five of the opponent's lands and two of yours.

Twenty is not a terrible choice, but it will often sit in your hand all game.

A choice of "ten" makes the card useful, but reasonable. On turn five, you can Armageddon, or later on, you can swing it more and more in your favour.

There are two choices to balance here. The first is for the player whose spell is being countered/returned. Their choice is to pay for one, both, or neither of the costs of 2. They may not be able to pay at all, may only be able to pay one cost, or they may want to just leave their mana open for their own spells/abilities. Most of these choices are skewed heavily one way or the other. If they can only pay one cost, they will almost always choose the same one. Given the choice of having their spell countered, or having the opponent draw a card, they'll almost always choose to keep the spell (that they've paid for), and let you draw a card (which may be a land). Only two of these options have two choices that are reasonably balanced for the person on the receiving end of this spell.

The other choice is for the player playing this spell. If the rewards are too high, they'll only play it when the opponent is tapped out. You're not going to let your opponent pay 2 to stop you drawing two cards.

Only option D has two equal rewards small enough that you'd play it when the opponent could pay 2 (or 4).

Paying two life to save a 3/2 creature (that can have first strike) is a very obvious choice. Unless you're under five life, you'd pretty much always pay this cost. The same goes for the cost of "1". You'd make sure you always paid it. The benefit here is too great for you to not pay one of these trivial costs.

Removing two creature cards in your graveyard is an entirely reasonable cost.

Discarding an instant card makes this card much more interesting. You can bluff, and the opponent has to decide whether to take the risk of tangling with your creature. You also have to weigh up the value of your creature against the value of your instant, so even if you could play the ability, you wouldn't necessarily do so.