Deny Gems

sarimace
sarimace Posts: 16 Just Dropped In
in MtGPQ General Discussion

Am I the only one who feels like something needs to be done about this? The only reason this mechanic is not completely breaking the game is that not many people have enough of PMA for it to be that common; but it still is completely busted and miserable to come up against in an event where you cannot just take the loss and move on.
My reasons for why I think the cards and PMA Teferi should be nerfed:
1) There is no counter-play to it. Once the supports are on the board, you cannot really do anything. All your cards get discarded, all your creatures get killed by ambiguity (which conveniently dodges all the creature protection you could muster (prevent damage, hexproof, large size...)), and all your cascade-matches get stolen (again, ambiguity; it converts gems, causes another match and all subsequent cascades get attributed to Greg). And even if by some miracle you manage to resolve a spell that could destroy supports, it will almost certainly hit one of the time-baubles and not an actual support you care about destroying. Once the stuff is on the board, your only option is having a PW with a direct damage/mass support hate written on it.
2) It is miserable to play against.
3) It is way too powerful.

I like the PMA cards in general, a lot of them are interesting and add something new; good enough to feel worth it to strive for. What I like also about the rest of PMA (except black a little) is that all the improved gem effects are symmetric. Blue (and black a little) is the only color that is not. I feel like (re)balancing the improved gems could be a huge benefit for the whole game. Green (post fix) and red are cool, white could be a little more powerful (add +1/+1 to a creature maybe? but that would probably require re-balancing of Ajani as well), but blue needs to be nerfed at least, or ideally reworked all together. (An (I think) interesting idea for blue I had was to make it do something like this: "whenever a player matches this gem, the opponent gets -1 to their highest mana-bonus (up to -2) until the end of their next turn." When I match it, you get less mana, when you match, I get less mana. Or maybe make it just drain mana from hand. Or even keep the time baubles, but make it that the player who matches the denied gem gets the time bauble, and so that they do not drain all the mana at once.) Or, at the very least, nerf PMA Teferi somehow, and make ambiguity cost more mana that card should be at least 15, more like 20. Certainly not 9.

(What made me write this post was a half hour game against Teferi, who got ambiguity on turn one. I got a few things down before the time baubles flooded the board, but everything got blown up by the ambiguity. I could not concede, since it was in a game with rewards on the line and there was a chance he would die to his own mana crypt.)

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