Expanding Your Range of Influence

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OneAndOnly
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Post by OneAndOnly » 3 years ago

Would these actually work under their respective rules?

Any cases where they break wide open?

Person of Significance -- 1UW
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant player
Enchanted player's range of influence is increased by one.

Experignificance -- 2UW
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant player
Your range of influence is increased by one for each experience counter you have.

Person of Great Significance -- 3UW
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant player
Enchanted player's range of influence includes all players.

Insignificance -- 3BB
Enchantment - Aura Curse
Enchant player
Enchanted player has no range of influence. (They can still target themselves.)

Signify Something -- 1UR
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant permanent
Activated and triggered abilities of enchanted permanent can target permanents regardless of range of influence.

Vermurian Fireslinger -- 2R
Creature - Human Wizard
: Vermurian Fireslinger deals one damage to any target.
Distance R You may pay R any number of times as you activate this creature's abilities. Each R you pay increases the range of influence of this ability by one.)

(Intended to be extensible to other creatures, effects, and costs.)

.
You're All My Peeps -- 3G
Enchantment
You may choose and target players with spells and abilities you control as though were players on your team.
.
I Hate Y'all -- 3B
Enchantment
You may choose and target players with spells and abilities you control as though they were your opponents.

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spacemonaut
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Post by spacemonaut » 3 years ago

Expanding a player's range of influence is technically sound in the rules, but would break the formats that actually use the Limited Range of Influence option.

Grand Melee involves limited range of influence alongside multiple simultaneous turns to make games of 10+ players manageable. Essentially there's multiple localised turn structures that move around the table, never overlapping specifically because of range of influence. One side of the table could be resolving multiple extra turns in the same span of time the other side of the table is still resolving combat. Despite the fact things are happening out of sync, each individual player always experiences very close to a normal turn-based structure they'd see in any other format.

If multiple players can expand their range of influence by just one, a single defending player could be in range of multiple different active players whose turns are happening asynchronously. Unlimited range of influence means multiple active players have overlapping asynchronous turns. The format doesn't really have an answer for how this works; it was using limited range of influence to avoid this scenario completely. Edit: whoops I'm a dum dum, of course Grand Melee has a way to handle this. Still, it's meant to constrain you just caring about what the people next to you are casting; the times you care about what's happening outside of that distance is pretty rare. Having priority in someone's actions 2-3 seats down or across the table is going to present a problem.


It also adds significant mental overhead: the point of grand melee is reducing a 10+ player game down to the mental overhead of 3-and-a-bit players.

Vermurian Fireslinger is the least format-breaking, but it's still going to play weird because of the asynchronous turns.

Emperor is structured with teams of (usually) one emperor and a general either side. Each player has range of influence that makes them able to attack an opposing team's generals, but not their emperor. The entire first phase of the game revolves around trying to take down just one general so that the opposing team's Emperor is in range of influence, making a win condition finally available.

Expanding an emperor's range of influence by just one lets them skip right to the end, directly target the opposing emperor, and win the game early. The only way the opposing emperor could fight back is for someone on their team to also has an expanded range of influence, so as to remove their range of influence aura—naturally this should also be their own emperor to minimise the chance of their expanded-range-of-influence aura being removed. As you can imagine, this makes the Significance cards format-warping, including Signify Something.

Vermurian Fireslinger won't break the format wide open, but it's still going to let you target your opposing Emperor early.

You have one card that shrinks a player's influence: Insignificance is a profoundly strong effect. It's definitely undercosted at 5. It would be undercosted at 9; I'm not sure what a fair cost would actually be! First off, it functionally says (among other things) "if enchanted player would win the game, instead nothing happens" due to Limited Range of Influence rule 801.14: "If an effect states that a player wins the game, all of that player's opponents within that player's range of influence lose the game instead." Second, it means they can't attack anyone, target anyone's things, or otherwise interact with any player at all except by blocking their attackers. It does "you're going to lose unless you answer this" better than either Overwhelming Splendor or Blazing Archon, which cost 6WW and 6WWW.

If this effect were to be fair, it should last for one turn at most. I could imagine a sorcery that says "Until the end of target player's next turn, that player has no range of influence. Exile this spell." but I'm not sure what it should cost. Note this will do a bunch of things like cause enchantments they have on other players' things to fall off.

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