A possible new legendary artifact: Hedron Cannon
Custom Cards forum
Posted on Nov. 22, 2020, 10:43 p.m. by heraldofkrenko
The Hedron cannon. A 5 mana legendary artifact. the first time during your turn you tap artifacts for mana you may deal damage equal to the amount of mana generated to target player. that player then gets mana equal to the damage they received in the colors the artifact tapped for.
i thought this would be a fun artifact to try out with custom cards. what are everyone's thoughts on this?
I imagine the card the OP describes would be something like
Hedron Cannon
Legendary Artifact
The first time you tap an artifact for mana during each of your turns, you may have Hedron Cannon deal X damage to target player, where X is the amount of mana generated. That player adds the same amount and type of mana as the tapped artifact generated.
This is not a very interesting design TBH - at least for its cost. It's a rather poor mana advantage tool as it only works on your turn and only for the first artifact you tap while costing . Neither does it work with artifacts that don't necessarily tap to generate mana - like Ashnod's Altar. It's also really poor in dealing damage. The drawback makes the mana generation bad, and the drawback cannot be used offensively in an effective manner either.
At best you use Nyx Lotus to generate a load of mana to use offensively to finish an opponent or use it on yourself to do something that closes out the game. But this is borderline magical Christmas land.
It reminds me the most of Overabundance but in a much worse sense.
What is it exactly you want this card to do? Is it mana generation with a damage drawback that could be used offensively? Or is it a damage tool with a mana generation drawback.
Pick your poison and try to design with that perspective.
November 23, 2020 8:11 a.m.
A couple of things come to mind as well:
How long do they get to keep that mana for when they take damage? end of phase, your end of turn, until the their next end of turn?
And the fact it provides direct damage at no mana cost to the Owner makes it probably too powerful. Even the free 2 pts of damage from tapping the omni-present Sol Ring or similar seems too powerful. What is the cost to the card's controller? And what if they have a deck proliferating counters onto stuff like an Everflowing Chalice. Once you got like 5 counters on it, then it's just oppressive and has no drawbacks or costs.
November 23, 2020 11:38 a.m.
MagicMarc You think a 5 CMC artifact that requires a mana tapping artifact to function, who deals 1-3 damage (ranging from Thought Vessel to Mana Vault) per controller's turn is too powerful?
I could understand if you said it would be outside the color pie or rather that colorless shouldn't have this effect (although Aetherflux Reservoir). But too powerful? That's unlikely to be the case.
Also no drawbacks or costs? It requires you play around with making mana artifacts that taps for large quantities to be dangerous... Scepter of Empires is a card, and it's even a meme card or jank card. Also this artifact provides mana to the target - so using it on the opponent, might just backfire if they can use the mana.
You mention Sol Ring, so I wager you're talking from a perspective of Commander. Tapping a Sol Ring to deal 2 damage to an opponent who then adds is not powerful nor oppressive in that format for .
If you have an Everflowing Chalice with 5 counters on it, play whatever X-spell or just dump half your hand on the board and win that way. Instead of dealing 5 damage to a player each of your turns. Even dropping a Lava Axe on your own face to get an extra is better value.
I don't think you thought this one through.
November 23, 2020 2:10 p.m.
similar to how tzeflick said it. do you want a politics card where you are giving people an advantage at a cost, or is this meant to be a damage card with the draw back in terms of ramp? because at the moment the most likely case for this is that you are giving people mana that they can't really use. the person getting the mana will lose it at the next step change unless the wording is amended to allow it to stick around longer. they could use it on some instants or some activated abilities but that requires that your colors are similar enough to theirs to be useful. case 2 is where you use it as a burn spell. lets assume you have Sol Ring, Mana Crypt or some other double mana producer which i think is a reasonable assumption. you are now paying 5 mana to deal 2 damage to 1 player on each of your turns. that seems like a really over costed Volcanic Fallout that only hits 1 player. we could talk about Nyx Lotusing someone for 10 a turn, but if you are spending several turns tapping nyx lotus for 10 and not already winning i'm not really sure what the game plan is. case 3, you use it as self ramp. as of the wording presented you can choose yourself, and it effectively becomes a copy of your best mana rock with some life loss. at 5 mana it would be a terrible Sculpting Steel.
my suggestion if you want to improve the card: have it tap to give someone treasure and deal damage to them. this allows them to use the mana whenever they want. you can also give it an X cost to allow them to charge the cannon with multiple artifacts or benefit things like Ashnod's Altar. or you could go with a flat cost like 4 and tap to give 2 treasures. these both allow for the card to be optional where as the card as presented is mandatory and very inefficient which means most people won't want to play it. the treasure to damage ratio is what will decide if this is a politics card or a burn card. x <= 1 means theres no real benefit to the user and it won't be played. 1 <= x <= 2 is probably safe for politics, 2 < x is when burn gets to be happy. the actual cost of the card will depend on which combination of decisions you make above.
November 23, 2020 2:15 p.m.
I actually think you did not think this card through. I had more in mind if this went into a custom deck shell that is built around abusing it.
The custom artifact has no cost besides the initial mana cost. You don't need to tap it, you don't need to spend any mana on it as part of it's trigger. It's not sacrificed upon use. It is repeatable with the only limit being once per turn unless you blink it during the same turn. It scales over the course of a game depending on what artifact you use as your first mana artifact activation. Not only is it dramatically more powerful than your scepter analogy, It does not even have a damage cap. Even without going the infinite mana route to abuse it for infinite damage.
November 23, 2020 5:47 p.m.
MagicMarc I guess where we differ is our assumption on what is a reasonable mana rock tap amount. My assumption is 1-2. Yours seems to go for 4+, which to me is magical Christmas land where I would much rather use said mana and a 5 CMC spell for something that brings me closer to victory. This artifact is too slow to be a viable win condition or even supplementary, IMO.
November 23, 2020 6:21 p.m.
heraldofkrenko says... #9
sorry for clarification i intended to have it so that each artifact that you tap will trigger it. im not sure what the best wording for that would be. so if you have a sol ring and a signet when you tap both it would deal 4 damage to the player. also i did think that it could be a good political tool but if that was not really a play groups style then it could be a mana doubler with a draw back
November 23, 2020 10:28 p.m.
That certainly changes the deal.
5 CMC is still a steep price, but I figure White would possibly want an effect like this to double their manarocks. Colorless certainly would.
What kinda worries me now, is the classic Basalt Monolith (and I suppose Grim Monolith as well) + this + a means to negate the damage (like Circle of Protection: Artifacts or Personal Sanctuary) is infinite mana and that leads to infinite damage at instant speed. But then again, there are quite a few combos with the monoliths, so that cat is probably out of the bag. And this is still a 5 CMC card, so it should be possible to do some powerful things in conjunction with other powerful cards.
Personally I would prefer a cheaper and more limited version that functions as mana ramp - kinda like an Overabundance but for mana rocks. Like:
Name
Legendary Artifact
Whenever you activate a mana ability of an artifact you control, add one mana of any type that permanent produced, X deals 1 damage to you.
Simply put it adds an additional mana to each of your mana generating artifacts by pinging your face. This is even easier to combo with Basalt Monolith so perhaps there should be a clause to only work the first time an artifact taps for mana each turn. It still requires other mana rocks to function at all, so I think the low CMC is acceptable because it is so narrow. Playtesting may prove a need for a CMC of 3.
But that is meant as a personal mana accelerator and not a damage tool. Since you named your card Hedron Cannon, I suppose the offensive side weighs more to you? And perhaps the political? I went away from that because it would create a trigger every time an opponent tapped a mana artifact, which could be tedious in gameplay - kinda like would you like to pay one?.
November 24, 2020 4:26 a.m.
heraldofkrenko says... #11
that is certainly a variation i would like to try as well Tzefick and i dont think that it would cause to much drag to be added to the game because it is only when you tap a mana rock not you or your opponents. my first version of this was that it could be on anyones turn as well but with the glut of untappers i was afraid that it would slow the game down with you always having to decide if you wanted to give the extra mana.
MollyMab says... #2
I would suggest actually making a card and working on your rules text to make it grokable. Is it an artifact singular or could you tap all your artifacts to one shot someome?
November 23, 2020 5:58 a.m.