"Gem Drought" as a spell effect?

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

Basically, the opposite effect of a Gem Storm. Would it work?

Whereas a Gem Storm causes a specific color (or in rare cases, two colors) to fall onto the board more often, a “Gem Drought” completely suppresses one color from dropping onto the board at all while it’s in effect.

  • Available in all six colors plus a Skull version.
  • The Drought type also suppresses all special variants of the affected color (e.g. a Skull Drought would include Doomskulls and Ubers).
  • Additionally, it reduces the “Mana Surge” RNG of the affected color to zero (similar to a Jinx Trap, but only for one affected color). Affected gems on the board can still be matched normally, and can still be created/converted by spell or trait.
  • It operates on the same system as Gem Storms, meaning it lasts 8 turns (4 per side), and only one Storm/Drought can be active at a time (replacing any previous effect).

Of course, there would also have to be a few design caveats…

  • It might make a decent recurring gimmick for Khetar kingdom (like Web Gems in Zhul’Kari and Bomb Gems in Adana).
  • No multicolor Droughts allowed.
  • No Troop can create a Drought of its own colors (unless the Drought is picked at random) due to that being obviously counterproductive
  • No traits (possibly except base Mythic Traits) should be able to start a Drought on each turn. Start of battle is fine, matching 4 Gems is fine.

For example, imagine a team based around The Great Wyrm, but also with the ability to create a Skull Drought, meaning the team gets free Skulls at the start of its turn but can additionally suppress Skulls dropping in after they’ve made a match (for which their opponent would normally be the first to use).

1 Like
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Interesting idea. I dunno how popular it would be, but it could definitely work.

This seems like a great addition. Assuming it also blocks storms, it could really allow a lot of control over the board.

I get what you’re doing here, but I’m not sure this is needed. It might be too much for a “storm” to both affect colours coming on to the board and also the chance of mana surges.

Ah, so you can’t have a storm in one colour and a drought in another. Makes sense, though it would be kinda cool to have both, I guess. Balance matters though, and having drought cancel any other storms would be better balanced.

Also makes sense. Too many colours being unable to fall would mess with balance, too.

Same, balance would be pretty messed up if it was that easy to keep a specific drought going for long.

Having a kingdom focused on it would make sense, and Khetar kinda fits, but reworking existing kingdoms is always a little iffy. If it can be done well, that’d be decent.

And now I’m wondering if we’ll get storm gems at some point (match it with a colour and get a storm of that colour), and whether a drought gem would work. Maybe, but probably better to focus on your idea and add droughts to the game, before thinking whether gems triggering them could be a thing. Either way, droughts could be a good identity for a kingdom, like Adana with bombs and armour.

I can see why it would make sense as a general rule, but having a troop block it’s own colour could be an interesting tactical move, if combined with something else (like a sacrificial troop that dies on spellcast and deals damage plus creates a drought of it’s own colour), so I’d suggest making this a general idea rather than guaranteed, and see what people come up with.

This actually sounds like a great counter to one of the biggest complaints I’ve seen in the game, around creating gems, which is that all too often you just set your enemy up to use stuff against you. Having troops create gems and droughts together, to make it harder for the enemy to use them, would make a ton of sense.

Seems like a cool concept, and it could work really well. Fingers crossed devs consider it.