I'm iffy. The idea of online-only cards in and of itself is okay—there are paper-only cards already. That leaves us to the actual mechanics. "Conjure" just seems kind of unnecessary. "Seek" is ... basically fine, and wouldn't be reasonably possible on paper at all.

"Perpetual" stuff however I think is an enormous mistake. We've been playing for 20+ years in a world where any two cards with the same name in your library are equivalent. Or that once a thing changes zones, you can forget about everything that was done to it—it's just an ordinary copy of that card now, possibly tracked by something else. You can flicker things to reset them, etc.

"Perpetual" gives you a second model by which you have to track the entire game in your memory. You have to think about which changes are going to leave if you blink this creature and which will stay (because they're perpetual). You're going to have to think about whether there's any perpetual effects when you reanimate a creature from your graveyard or tutor from your library. I don't think that's worth it.

In a void, the mechanic is not offensive. Any computerised card game could choose to do that. But I don't think it should be brought into a game that has this particular established model already of how you should think about this game.

Maro's talked before about Constraints and Defaults: some rules are just a default and you can do it other ways, some rules are constraints you can't violate. "Blue doesn't get burn" is a constraint; the game gets worse if you give blue burn. "Cards don't have anything on the back" is a default; the game is fine if you put something on the back.

So the case could be made that perpetual's just challenging a default, and it's fine to do it this way around. But I think it's violating a constraint.

More specifically, I think the change from the default is so profoundly impactful on the work you have to do in order to think about the game that it wasn't worth it and shouldn't have been done.

Different topic—does anyone have an example of a post on this site that is using mana symbol images inline? (Not my old userscript, but individual images?)

I was trying to examine if something like that would be broken by the stack mobile layout. It is—but only in the old, deprecated mobile view. It centers all images on their own like. The new responsive view does no such thing.

Hi everyone!