Quote from: Alexander West on February 10, 2014, 10:37:05 PM

Wall of Thorns + Push doesn't become efficient until the 2nd push.  Otherwise it's worse than Fireball or Fireblast.  However, it does get very efficient from the 2nd push...  And they can run away from the wall.  It's interesting, but I think you need to be set up in just the right timing position to exploit it.  Still... good thought.

^^

But it has an extra effect... It create a 2 zones wide dead-zone where yout opponent wont go.

Of course, you also probably don't want to go there (most mages have some sort of push spell), so that is a bit of a wash, unless you have other ways to exploit this.

I remember making a spell with similar mechanics called The Book of Secrets:



It addressed some of the issues raised by requiring that the caster possessed the spells to be banned, by using copies of the bound spells to mark which spells were prohibited, by making the ban global rather than restricted to one mage, and by requiring upkeep for banned spells.

You might consider implementing some of these solutions; perhaps this Forget enchantment could bind a spell from your spellbook, for instance. Alternatively, it would be cool to have a spell that lets you obliterate opponents' uncast spells, though in practice you want to be careful how you implement this.

I am not suggesting that the Druid should base her strategy around meditating every turn; but due to her potential for an absurd action advantage, I often find that my druid has nothing particularly useful to do with her personal action, especially during times when my spawnpoints are using up all of my mana. This is also an excellent reason to run seedling pods (even without Samara tree). No need to waste a perfectly good action. Perhaps you will have a game where you are so pressured that there is no time to meditate, but for 2 spellpoints I see little reason for the druid to deny herself the option of doing so when she needs to.

What if you just allowed the player to regain 1 card, rather than all of them? That would preserve the incentive to have multiples of each card, and would still allow for attrition-type strategies. Also, you should probably not allow players to regain conjurations if creatures cannot be regained; otherwise there isn't much incentive to take the time to destroy them, except for territory reasons.

The cards don't have to be solely useful against psychic immune creatures, though. For instance, consider a global effect that gives all creatures without psychic immunity the elusive trait. It gives you an advantage over a mage with psychic-immune creatures because your creatures can guard  and theirs cannot, but it could also be used by a solo forcemaster who doesn't really care about having guards to protect her and wants a non-dispel-able source of elusiveness (presumably a cheap one, since it can benefit your opponent as well).

Or consider an 'altar of rage' that gives all non-psychic immune creatures bloodthirsty +1 and rage +1. You could use it to buff or hinder non-psychic immune creatures, depending on the circumstances.

The more I think about it, the more I think global buffs are the way to go. They key is to make sure that (unlike Mind Shield) the cards have uses other than purely against psychic immune creatures.

Everybody always talks about Corrosive Orchid's dissolve effect, but it is also a vine conjuration with an attack, which I consider to be the more important aspect of it (think about the power of Wizard's Tower or Temple of Light). When I cast it, I often don't bother with the dissolve effect at all. An extra conjuration-timed unavoidable attack with corrode can be extremely useful in many scenarios:

- Removing Voltaric Shield, Block, Forcefield tokens, and other mandatory defenses right before attacking with something else
- Attacking low-health flyers or creatures with defenses
- Comboing with push/pull effects like Thornlasher's snatch (or corroding armor right before a shove through a wall of thorns)
- Abusing creature suppression effects (conjurations are immune to the obelisk, idol of pestilence, and other such effects, allowing you to get around their limits). This is one reason my Druid deck runs Mordok's Obelisk - True, there aren't enough conjurations with attacks yet to have a pure "conjuration swarm", but between the orchid and the lotus you can supplement your creatures enough to have significantly more attack actions than your opponent.

On top of this, you have the one time dissolve effect - a nice bonus, but certainly not the main reason for running Corrosive Orchid.

Swarms can become ridiculous very quickly when you use cards that buff all your creatures at once. My current beastmaster deck is based on this concept - swarm with level 1 creatures and use global buffs like lifetree, the totems, and Call of the Wild to drastically increase their efficiency. Against control builds, my strategy is Mana Prism to compensate for temporary loss in tempo coupled with targeting the source of my woes and destroying it as soon as possible. Stack a few global Charge + 1 and Piercing + 1 and Orb/Obelisk will melt like butter before the combined might of a (primarily fox-based) swarm. Also contains corrosive orchids and dissolves to deal with pesky suppression cloaks and armor. With Altar of the Iron Guard, you can even quick summon bobcat guards during quickcast to protect your beastmaster that turn. This build has been effective for me in past games.

I would say that the beastmaster is pretty good. No other mage really has the same swarming capabilities from the start of the match - closest comparison is the necromancer and the druid, but they take a little while to build up. The beastmaster can not only swarm faster than any other mage from the beginning of the game, but (crucially) has more global buffs available cheaply for his creatures than any other mage. In addition to his excellent global animal buffs, he also has cheaper access to holy and war zonal buffs than the druid or necromancer - he can use both fortified position and sacred ground at only double-cost. Also, Rajan's Fury combos very nicely with zonal enchantment buffs because if they stay in the zone your creatures get the buff and if they leave the zone, your creatures charge. Overall, I would say that this ability to globally buff creatures is the beastmaster's greatest strength (along with the ability to pump them out quickly)