Card Idea: Staying the Hidden Hand

Name: Staying the Hidden Hand
Cardtype:
Inconnu
You must control at least one other Inconnu event card.
Master cards played by a Methuselah are not replaced until their discard phase. If a Methuselah controls three or more Inconnu cards he may burn 3 pool to cancel a Master card as it is played. Burn this card if you control any Gehenna events.

Game development:
- Expands the Inconnu's as yet still nascent role in the game.
- Aims to punish decks who lean heavily on master cards, robbing them of hand-size and thus, momentum.

Balance:
- Requires some setup in the form of a previous Inconnu Event card.
- Affects all of the players.

Flavor:
- The Inconnu are all about non-compromise and dampening the Jyhad as well as the efforts of its intervenients.

Competitiveness:
- Moderate. This card is designed to be a specialized/metagame play, requiring a particular deck type to capitalize on what it restricts.

This card occurred to me while thinking about non-specific hosers and how incidental hosing was usually considered more acceptable than direct adressing of problem cards through other cards, something considered... inelegant?

After having read a fair amount about multiple-master flogging, I came to this design. It worries me that having everyone bound with no-replacement clausules might be too beneficial for the Wall archtype but it fits with the Inconnu, at least in my perspective. Still, on account of that, I added the last clause to bar the player from having both Staying the Hidden Hand and other Gehennas in play simultaneously, so as to keep the card's effect in check.

I've toyed with the thought of making the card only affect non-trifle masters but I'm of the mind that the game could use a new archtype: the master-light deck. Some time ago, while glancing at Walks-with-Might, I thought about the oddity of there being decks with 60+ master cards and how the game constantly rewarded the ability to play more masters while the opposite was rarely true. An important design venue left unexplored.


Drain

Drain wrote:

Master cards played by a Methuselah are not replaced until their discard phase.

I'm unsure about the master card cancelling bit, but I quite like this as a "screw master cards without actually killing the deck outright" mechanism. It seems to be a decent happy medium between "instant death" and "too weak to care".