We've got a new batch of Bandle City cards arriving in the Beyond the Bandlewood expansion later this month that have been revealed.
Prank, lets you take a peek at two of your opponent's cards and apply a random negative effect to one of them.
Here are all the new cards that were revealed today.
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Today's standout reveal is Prank. On first impression, it looks very powerful; all decks will care if you mess up their mana curve by increasing the mana cost of a card by 2, for instance. Just showing you a couple of cards in your opponent's hand has value.
On the other hand, maybe your opponent just plays their other cards instead, and the mana you spent on Prank just messes with a card that doesn't get played for a long time anyway. Maybe on turn 1 you get to mess with a key defensive card in Eye of the Dragon, but you get offered a useless prank like -2 attack or -1 attack and can't block. An Avarosan Sentry with -1 Attack and Can't Block sounds pretty useless, but if you're offered -2 attack or -1 attack and vulnerable, it's the Prank that sounds useless. Pranking a spell for +2 mana cost sounds useful but spell mana makes the prank less impactful.
One final, significant example I want to cover is: imagine it's turn 7, your opponent has 2 cards in hand, and you Prank him. You get offered two options: Increase the mana cost of Noxian Fervor by 2, or increase the mana cost of The Leviathan by 2. Smirking, you choose the latter. But it turns out one of your opponent's 2 cards in hand was a champion (immune to Prank), and you just pranked a card in your opponent's deck that he'll never even draw. Or if your opponent has only 1 card in hand and you Prank him, maybe you can't tell which option allows you to mess with his hand, and which one is comparatively useless by messing with his deck.
As a mechanic, Prank seems more suited for control and midrange decks than for aggro. Its utility seems widely applicable, which is key and why I think it's a strong mechanic overall. It's also a good fit to level up Fizz.
I think it seems like a really fun mechanic. But the fact that you commit the mana before your opponent, as opposed to debuffs that target creatures on-board and negate mana the opponent has already spent, will make Prank weaker than it looks at first.
I am a little worried that Riot could overdo the handdisruption theme with Bandle City and cause a very unpleasant play experience this way.
Like decreasing the attack of strike ability-units to 0 permanently or increase the cost by 2 is enough to make certain cards worthless.
It is however less toxic than the MTG interation where you can just say: I pay 2 mana I remove the best card from your hand - enjoy.
Still the hand disruption theme usually can be quite unfun and I doubt it's that fun to use
Your concerns are understandable, I remember the first time Y-Gi-Oh started experimenting with hand disruption in set called Dark Beginning (The name turned out to be very prophetic) All the hand disruption cards end up being oppressive and had to be banned :
https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Delinquent_Duo
https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/The_Forceful_Sentry
https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Confiscation
https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Trap_Dustshoot
Lets say that MTG and YGO are very different from LOR in perspective. I very think that the true problem of Prank (as the spell) is his Focus speed, it may be Fast and people will be less concerned. Prank (As a mechanic) seems fun and a little opressive, but the champions being prank-inmune and spells only being pranked at it costs, in LOR where you have 3 extra resources for spells makes it less opressive. Coming back to the speed, i see myself deny-ing Pranks if my hand needs it, idk.
Ok - and "Prank"????????
On the header text:
Yeah, but we still don't know what the options are for the negative effects.
Side note - All of these are pretty clearly themed for Fizz. So, it's looking like the four dual-region champions are counting as the first four champions for Bandle City, given that they are putting out supporting card packages for all of them.
Design Lead Alexz Lee shared a lot of answers on the topic on Twitter, here are the important points (reformatted):
They did show two options on their twitter account: