Thanks for the input. The intention for this minion is help reducing the high mana cost of spells and minions in Lyonar, that seen less play. If it helps the acceleration of Titan deck, I think its a bonus
Anyway, this is a final version of the card.
Sunstone Barrister
Lyonar Legendary
6 Mana 3/6
Celerity
Whenever this attacks or counterattacks, all cards on your action bar cost 1 less.
@phoinexflame I see where you’re going with this idea, but I can’t help but feel a balancing issue. If this is paired with Iris Barrier, that means all your artifacts become more or less unbreakable without Rust Crawler, Matter Shaper, EMP, Artifact Defiler, Rasha’s Curse, or Droplift, unless they only have 1 bar of durability left. A permanent Iris Barrier effect with a +1 Attack buff, as well as a permanent third artifact, sounds very strong, especially when further combined with Auroras Tears and NoSE.
this is my entry for the design contest (I’m still thinking about the effect), but I’m not sure about the wording of the initial condition (i’m not a native english speaker and I want it to be coherent with other duelyst cards).
Should it be:
-“When this minion takes a counterattack”
-“When an enemy minion counterattacks this minion”
or simply -“when this minion take damages from another minion”
?
I don’t recommend the third option, as it lessens the card’s correlation to the counterattack theme. As for the first and second options, I think the second one is slightly better in a sense where it’s less vague than the first one.
I think it would be harder to remove than a regular artifact but it wouldn’t be that hard to do so even without effects that directly remove artifacts. Ranged, Blast, Thunderhorn’s ability, Frenzy, Faie’s BBS, Songhai shenangins and the many pings in the game can all damage the artifact without triggering its effect.
Although you do have a point that Aurora’s Tears and, to a lesser extant, Notion of the Starless Eternity will make this card rather unbalanced. Perhaps I should raise the cost to 5 and the attack boost to 2? That way it will be around the power level of Dawn’s Eye. Or do you think I should leave the attack untouched and simply bump the cost to 4?
Personally, I would rather it be 4 mana as printing expensive Vetruvian artifacts can be dangerous because of Autarch’s Gifts, but I suppose either option is fine. On a side note, you should really give it a cooler name! The effect is really nice, but the name kind of falls flat in comparison.
I will probably change the cost to 4 mana then. I’m not that good at thinking up names but would something like Tyvian Khopesh sound better? According to the Lore Tyvia is home to the finest weaponsmiths and a Khopesh is an ancient egyptian sword.
Balancing is fine, but the wording is really weird. First and foremost, I can’t wrap my head around how dealing damage to Attack instead of Health will work. Such a mechanic does not exist within Duelyst, and would most likely create too many awkward interactions. Also, while casting Equality Constraint on the enemy is a nice idea, all of this is very pointless when you realize it’s much simpler to word your card like this:
Whenever this minion attacks an enemy minion, reduce its Attack equal to the damage dealt.
Thank you for looking it over! Considering that there is nothing like this in Duelyst, it was hard to tell if it was balanced or not. I will answer each of your very good points in turn, with my logic behind this card:
I am assuming that in this contest we can make cards with all kinds of crazy abilities, because none of the cards are actually going to get into the game, and there is no “easy to code” requirement. Also, I really don’t think the interactions will be awkward. Duelyst already has Forcefield, and this is basically the same thing. When a minion with Forcefield is damaged, the damage is set to 0; when a minion is damaged while Aeon is in play, the damage will be set to 0 and the attack will just lose that amount instead.
Here you are absolutely right. I even considered wording the card like this, but I did not for three reasons. The first is that the card is much more flavorful with the spell casting (his name is the Great Equalizer, after all), and this would get the cool blue and orange arrow effect to appear as well (at least, I think that happens with the spell…). The second is that I wanted damage from other sources, like Bloodtear Alchemist and Boneswarm, to lower attack so the card synergizes better with Ciphyron. And the final reason is the most practical – the competition has to do with counterattacking, not attacking.