Along the lines of Holy Mage only, I think it makes a lot more sense thematically that they would be the only ones able to use it.

It would also give you a very good reason to pick them if you want to use it.

But really, I would like to see more cards that affect the board like Pillar and the other traps because they feel like a design space that has not been used that much in Mage Wars.

Solid write up!

I do think Pillar is an extremely powerful card and I would not be upset if it was changed but I also do not think it breaks the game or forces you to put it in every deck.

So, for the sake of discussion, I will dig into this a bit more to examine what makes Pillar appear so much better seeming than other options.

Pillar of Righteous Flame is first and foremost an EPIC card. This means you can only have 1 and in this respect if you look at most other cards with the epic trait, you'll see that they are far better than their non-epic counterparts, for good reason because you can only have 1 ever.

With that in mind, let's look at some easy to compare cards 1 epic and 1 not.

Heal - Quickcast - 9 mana - holy 2 - living creature - 8 dice
Lay Hands - Quickcast - 9 mana - holy 3 - Living non-mage creature - 12 dice and infinite condition removal for relevant cost

So the first major difference of course is that Lay Hands cannot target the mage, which is a reasonable downside because that is the most important creature there is and the one you'd likely want to heal most. However, quoting you in from your post:

But highly situational cards are not judged by their worst case, but by their best case.

"

Lets ignore that bit and focus on what it's good at, healing other creatures. Using that we can see that for the same mana it's 1.5X as effective as heal in dice alone and comes with the extra condition removal, if we measure that with another known spell (Cure) that gives you the ability to remove a single condition we can estimate that cost to at least 2 mana because while that spell also heals 2 attack dice, you can only remove a single condition. With this I would estimate an Epic card is roughly twice as powerful as a relevant non-epic card.

Taking this information let's go back to the spell that I agree is closest to Pillar in function, Thunderstorm. Let's see if we can backtrack and find out where Pillar is about twice as powerful based on the above. So if we first try to measure their comparable attacks we can take two extremely similar light and lightning attacks namely, Arc Lightning and Sunfire Burst.

They both have range of 0-1 / ethereal & unavoidable / arguably similar effects and cost 5 mana. However, notably the light attack has the +2 against nonliving (like Pillar) but interestingly, has 1 less attack die than arc lightning. By this I think we can agree that pillar has 2 extra attack dice when compared to Thunderstorm with arc lightning and sunfire burst as our models for comparing light and lightning attacks.

So, with this knowledge we could say just by the default attacks Pillar has at least ~1.5X the power of Thunderstorm just by the attack power alone because it has 1 extra dice in addition to the situational +2 vs nonliving.

However, as you noted, pillar attacks on entry which if you assume they both get the same number of attacks is either 2X as many attacks to 1.33X. This is determined by assuming worst and best case for casting the spell (only gets 1 attack from dissipates so adding another attack doubles the attacks, to gets all 3 where it only adds an extra attack out of 3. e.g. 1.33X). Taking into consideration that pillar costs 1.5X mana (3 extra) as Thunderstorm, we could potentially just chalk this extra attack part up to that difference.

But, there is still one more aspect to Pillar that Thunderstorm doesn't account for, which is the free attack on any enemy creature that enters the zone. This is similar to caltrops and bed of urchins as you mentioned, but those are permanent (and removable) vs a temporary barrier. Yet again, there is another significant difference that they cannot attack flying creatures which is impossible to measure with known cards since there is no other card with all these qualities. With this, it should easily put it up to the 2X power threshold of an epic spell if we value caltrops (5 mana) and bed of urchins (7 mana) very conservatively.

This is all without mentioning that there is one other significant benefit to Pillar which is that it only attacks enemy creatures. Caltrops, bed of urchins and even THUNDERSTORM will attack any creature in its zone because it does not make the enemy distinction.

So, overall, while Pillar is obviously a very strong card I don't know if I think it's as egregious or offensive enough to ruin the game. In fact, I wish there were more cards that change the dynamic of the battlefield like Pillar because it changes how you think and makes games that much more interesting in my opinion.

Thank you for the post Enti! I always enjoy reading your insights into the game.

Hey, just read the post and I believe the part about defenses is incorrect. I dug up an old forum post from Arcanus (The game creator) which stated that additional strikes are extremely good against defenses which would make swarms explicitly good against them because the defense only applies to the first attack (as Farkas noted about reverse attack but seemed to suggest defenses were a good counter?).

Here is the relevant portion of the quote for those curious:

The short answer is that Reverse Attack only bounces back the very first individual attack or strike.  It will not affect additional strikes or attacks. 

This is also realistic;  The Reverse Attack is a force bubble that bounces the first attack back.  After that attack is bounced, it is destroyed.  SO, successive attacks or strikes, after the first one, are not bounced back.  As much as possible, we try to make Mage Wars realistic and intuitive, unless it overly adds complication.

Creatures with doublestrike or triplestrike are very effective against Defenses, because only the first attack or strike is affected.  Block and Reverse Attack are also a Defense and work the same way, which keeps them consistent.

Now, here is the long explanation, in case anyone is interested!   

An attack action is a creature action (quick or full) used to make an attack. Sometimes the attack action will be an individual attack, or it might comprise multiple separate attacks (also referred to as "strikes").  Each individual attack in that action is called an attack sequence. 

For example, double strike, triplestrike, and sweeping are one attack action (always a full action), but have multiple attack sequences.  Some attacks do not follow all of the steps of the attack sequence.  For example, the second attack sequence of a Doublestrike attack action, skips the Declare Attack Step and only has 3 steps.

Defenses, like Block and Reverse Attack, only affect one attack sequence.

When an attacker (which we will call Creature A) attacks the creature enchanted with Reverse Attack (which we will call Creature B), Reverse Attack must be revealed during the Avoid Attack Step. If the Reverse Attack effect occurs, the remainder of Creature A's attack sequence is canceled, and instead Creature B must immediately make an identical attack sequence targeting Object A. This reversed attack sequence is then resolved as normal.

If Object A's original attack action consisted of multiple attack sequences (doublestrike triplestrike, sweeping, etc.), Object A picks up the series of attack sequences where it left off after reversing the first sequence.

Hey Coshade, thanks for setting up the tournament!

Quick clarification on the following:

If you receive a Bye it will be considered a win. In that case you must choose a mage to be marked as a played mage.

I do not see any other mentions on the rules for this and am not familiar with the ADMW format (having not participated/seen it before), can you expand on the mage being marked and played portion specifically?

Levitari :]

You know, I never thought about naming it, but I like the way that sounds.

You can count me in :]