Btw, Sekhma officially approves this weapon.
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Without some kind of tool to help you find cards with potential synergies, it’s a manual process. I’ve planned a tool like it for a while but rarely embark on my side projects.
I think Wizards has it “easier” in a sense that they’ve had decades to produce such tools, but also the problem for them is somewhat simplified. They release regular sets and rotate old sets out of Standard. That means their primary design space is only what, 4-6 sets at a time?
They also have to consider Modern and other eternal formats, but they can cheat. There are a few hundred decent meta decks, but given how long these formats have been around those decks probably constitute the universe of cards that matter. So any new powerful mechanic doesn’t have to actually consider decades of sets, but only maybe 100 decks worth of strategies. And if you want to break it down, dozens of those decks fall into similar enough categories you can consider many at once, or quickly discount tons. For example, a controlly card probably won’t do much to break Mono-red decks, Infect, etc.
It also doesn’t hurt to have decades of intuition. I had barely played for 4 years but could rattle off dozens of cards a new thing might interact with. (Basically I quit playing when I couldn’t focus on strategy THAT closely, I saw a clear drop in my ability.) It’s probably not much different from how pro players try to build new decks. Next-Level Deckbuilding had a set of questions to ask about every new set that was actually pretty useful for trying to figure out how the set would work. Things like, “What are the Common removal spells? How efficient are they? Are there tutors? What would they fetch?” etc.
But they still make mistakes. I haven’t played since whatever the hell it was with the Vehicles, but it’s very surprising Smuggler’s Copter passed their tests.
For gems, this is bewildering. It doesn’t have as narrow a focus on synergies. The meta only really has 2 or 3 top teams, with maybe a dozen or so also-rans beneath them, and everything else being “what you get by with while waiting on troops”. But any new mechanic could make something newly broken.
For GoW heuristics would probably work. For any new card, you can maybe do:
- How does this card affect Divines or the other couple of meta teams?
- How does this card perform on customary GW teams?
- If the card has a high mana cost, what cards can mitigate that?
- Does this card replace anything on teams that use that card?
- Can you build a new team with just this card and those mitigators?
- …
The last, toughest heuristic involves trying to list every mechanic the new card COULD effect, then testing every troop that uses one of those. It’s USUALLY not worth testing below legendary in this game, but exceptions like Mercy and Diviner exist.
It’s only hard right now because a tool to sort out troops by specific mechanic either doesn’t exist, or isn’t quite streamlined for this task. (gowdb has some rudimentary features, but I’m envisioning something a good bit more complex.)
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A simpler way to evaluate MtG cards, as an investiment, is:
- Does this card does something unique and “strange”?
- What it does have some impact in mechanics that could make a return?
- Is it (ridiculously) cheap right now?
If you can answer with “Yes” on all questions you can surely invest some money on it, foils if possible, and just wait a few years. That’s how i bought a card (Prismatic Omen) when it was U$ 0,50 each, some people even gave me the card, and some years later i sold each one of the 18 cards for U$ 30,00 (if i correctly recall) when a new terrain card was released (Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle) and it enabled a great deck, competitive to present day even.
Sometimes it fails, the card never see any play at all or the pieces of the combo weren’t released yet, but if it was cheap you just lost a few bucks anyway.
I’m happy to have it as well. it’s almost like “Magic-Mang” (While Earth’s Fury is “Team-Mang”). Casting it once is not that great, but second time onward are very powerful! Too bad it rely on casting spell, so you have to gather mana, unlike “Original-Mang”, which you can just repeatedly match skulls after casted.
So Trickster’s shot is build for more endurance, long match, which is sadly the opposite of late Raid/Invasion level, which require you to be fast. Still, it will be very great on Guild War/PvP, or troop that benefit from high magic count, like Sekhma that Venar mentioned.
Luckily, its ingot’s affix upgrade greatly help with long match and repeatedly casting, like getting enchanted after casting spell. So awesome!
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I really like the affixes on that weapon. I hope the other future weapons will avoid the backfire affixes.
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This is the most fun Invasion we have had. 
I really like the Oak Lord.
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Those are some really good effects on the trickster’s shot. Definitely better than create 1 red gem.
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Thanks @Tatz