Our next set, Murders at Karlov Manor, features a few new mechanics. As in any investigation, you must Collect Evidence:
Collect Evidence is a numbered evergreen with an activated effect. When asked to “Collect Evidence”, the player will have to exile a number of Simple Tokens they control on the board to activate the effect. “To collect evidence, exile the amount of simple tokens you control equivalent to this card’s collect evidence number. Simple tokens are Treasure, Gold, Blood, Map, Clue and Food tokens.”
Collect Evidence is a numbered evergreen with an activated effect. When asked to “Collect Evidence”, the player will have to exile a number of Simple Tokens they control on the board to activate the effect.
“To collect evidence, exile the amount of simple tokens you control equivalent to this card’s collect evidence number. Simple tokens are Treasure, Gold, Blood, Map, Clue and Food tokens.”
One important detail: these tokens will be exiled at random. You don't get to choose which ones will be exiled.
As you can see, we've also introduced a new way to refer to some pretty common tokens. Now some cards will refer to Simple tokens, which are Treasure, Gold, Blood, Map, Clue and Food. Other kinds of tokens may be added to this group in the future. Note that only tokens can be Simple, so Syr Ginger, for example, is NOT Simple even if she's Food.
Now... let's check a card featuring these mechanics?
Have you figured out how to break it? In what deck will you use it? Let us know in the comments below!
Old Gnawbone will carry this mechanic in Legacy on her back.
Since the tokens are exiled, "when destroyed" abilities don't trigger, right? No mana from Gold/Treasure tokens, no Explore from Maps, no ability triggers from creatures like Sweettooth Witch or PWs like Oko (Fae Treat).
This looks like a great card! Yes, they will be exiled but the payoff is better than destroying them. This is easily one of my favorite spoilers!
Legions to Ashes might work. There are a lot of cards that destroy en masse, and a lot that exile only one token at a time. This is the only one that I can think of that would do more than one at once in current standard.
Gotta tell ya, I really don't like the look of the Evidence mechanic. In order to create Evidence, you're going to have to play with cards in your deck which both a) create Simple tokens, and b) are good enough to to play with. That's actually a pretty small subset of cards.
In contrast, paper MTG's Evidence mechanic requires you to exile cards from your graveyard which have a mana cost. That is a really, really, big subset of cards... almost all of them, in fact. I don't see any reason this design could not have been more closely modified from paper.
The Evidence mechanic looks really limiting, and it could have been really expansive, but you chose to make it parasitic. Creating a long list of other tokens it's parasitic with is not a great solution... the subset of good cards the mechanic works with is still small, plus, we now have another layer of complexity added to supports, which are already subdivided into too many types.
@Janosik - it does look slow. Granted the MP above looks like it incorporates everything in one, but as is often the case a mechanic often requires mythics and MP to be fully usable.
Low rarity cards are often so pitiful when it comes to utilising a mechanic that it isn’t worth the hassle to include. I have countless times ignored a new mechanic until I had almost the whole set available before considering making a deck. The explore Dungeon mechanic to name an example was pitifully slow until you got the mythics that let any creature explore the dungeon on attack.
Regarding the slowness - In a game like MTGPQ where you want to minimise the chances of Greg getting a super-cascade, slow mechanics are often a huge liability. The longer you wait to set up the killing blow with a cool mechanic, the bigger the chance is for you to loose the match to randomness. So this kind of experimentation is best used in PVE event, where you already know what to expect from the opponents.
Of the flip-side if the mechanic is to fast/powerful - power creep is lurking just around the corner.
@Janosik If I were to judge the mechanic by the preview card alone, these card are partially self-sufficient: they first create a number of tokens based on a number of cards in the graveyard (creature cards in this example). That's the tie-in with the paper mechanic. So, "Follow the Bodies" doesn't need the other cards to create Simple tokens, it will have the full effect on its own as long as there are at least 3 creatures in both graveyards. But if there are not enough creatures in the graveyards, you can substitute the Clues that would have been created by the first effect of the card with other generic tokens.