Small internet problems have lead to a post 1 day late. Sorry! But here we go with post 14 on this adventure!
My design direction for this week is fairly clear: Push towards constructed-playable Poison cards that really help enable Cassiopeia to level up. So, let's get to it!
This one is the first obvious one, and it's simple. 1 mana to Poison a unit at burst speed is very efficient, ensuring that you can easily get your Poison synergies online.
There were some thoughts on whether Poison should be at Burst speed or just Fast Speed. In the end, I thought it worked as a debuff similar to Frostbite, however Poison doesn't have any immediate effect on the board. As such, I saw little reason to not push it, given it was a fairly week effect, and make it Burst speed.
Back a while ago when Lux and the Spellseakers got buffed, one thing was fairly clear - a big help towards that whole deck archetype was the units that got buffed thanks to casting spells that cost 6 or more. I wanted to go a similar direction with Poison.
Poison, again, has no direct effect on the board, and not much meaningful effect until a couple rounds have passed. As such, adding some cards that present a strong board presence will go a long way in helping the Poison deck survive. I wanted the card, however, to be able to find a home outside of Poison decks if players decided to experiment with a Poison "package" within a deck like in an Ezreal deck for example. So, I allowed it to be buffed fairly easily.
Next, I wanted to branch the Poison deck with other effects a bit more. So, I decided to branch it towards damage-based spells to branch it more towards other classes.
On the face, this is a card super similar to Funsmith (above). However, I was fine pushing it further for several reasons. One, it's in a class without a plethora of readily available damage spells. Two, Funsmith isn't played really at all in a competitive sense, so having a similar effect on a more pushed card is fine. And three, Poison isn't as strong as just dealing more damage usually and can't Poison an enemies Nexus. All this allows for the allowance of a stronger "version" of Funsmith that also helps push for a stronger Poison enabler.
And that's all for this week at least! Sorry about the short and slightly late post! Look forward to next week, though, where I talk a bit about current design philosophy and how that is going to effect some of the top-end of Shurima as I design it!