Trap mechanic: underwhelming

Morphis

Recently I got what I thought could be a good card: shadow of the past
Trap 2 black your opponent loses 4 life and you gain 4 life...
I was soooo wrong. Trap need to be activated by your opponent so there are really basically 3 scenarios
- your opponent do not like black and will naturally avoid matching it. No use then
- your opponent likes black and will avoid it. In this case he will avoid but next turn since you like black you want to match it removing the trap. In this case you get a very little advantage.
- the opponent activates is by mistake through cascades or match 4-5. Useful but rare.

The card itself costs 15. Absolutely useless for the cost.
I think the trap mechanic altogether should be reworked.
Or at the very least make the opponent unable to see trap location(not sure if this maybe is already the case but I can assure the ai acts like he knows where the traps are).

Unknown

Your opponent doesn't know where your traps are. Only you can see the little "teeth" around them.

When your opponent casts a trap, you only see is a big question mark for a second every time there are new traps set.

I don't think they will ever buff shadow of the path by activating more traps ore add them to random colors. Self-Healing is just kind of the opposite of how black works and therefore it's rare and inefficient.

Morphis

Nerimos wrote:

Your opponent doesn't know where your traps are. Only you can see the little "teeth" around them.

When your opponent casts a trap, you only see is a big question mark for a second every time there are new traps set.

I don't think they will ever buff shadow of the path by activating more traps ore add them to random colors. Self-Healing is just kind of the opposite of how black works and therefore it's rare and inefficient.

Ok it does make sense then but still I highly suspect that the ai does its moves knowing where traps are.
Black in magic the gayhering is not built toward simple healing but damage + healing(siphoning life) is a recurring theme in black cards so this support is perfectly in line.
Also if opponent cannot see the traps priest of the blood rite drawback is severely reduced in effectiveness(that card is still a beast even with full drawback).
To me it just looks like the trap mechanic should be reworked(and then rebalanced) totally.
One way could be making trap invisible for both players and if the player that placed it consumes the gem trapped the trap will be replaced at random.
This way traps will be more consistent in effect but will keep the randomness.
Also all traps(to my knowledge) are linked to support or creature. So you can still remove the sulport or creature(and for blood rite managing to kill your own priest) to clear all traps.