Had a chance to play a few games with Jesse, a fellow artifact enthusiast and enjoyer of grindy, solitairey games.

Some thoughts we both had:

• Chrome Mox should probably come out. The asfan for coloured cards is so low that Chrome Mox feels pretty bad almost every time. It also makes Breya look like a juicy colour source rather than an exciting card to play.
• The Borderpost cycle could be a really cool addition. Gives the possibility of retrieving lands from play to replay as artifacts. This does make the decision of which card to play as lands is potentially less important. Would probably cycle out the Ikoria Crystals in place of these.
• Cards like Disciple of the Vault and Reckless Fireweaver put in a lot of work, pressuring players to think about how far they can extend themselves.
• Bag of Holding did a lot of work too, keeping things out of the yard and offering up an entirely new hand when we'd run out of gas.

We didn't get a lot of thopter action happening, most games were decided with direct damage, so more games are necessary. Overall, first impressions are that it's a satisfying process, playing Black Lotus and Moxen is very fun and thinking through lines to maximise value is very cool.

I have pared down to 100 cards, because aesthetics...

In reality, dragon shields come in packs of 100 with only a couple of spares and I'd prefer to only have to buy one pack. I also want the whole thing to be able to live in a dragon shield case, the same as the one Jhoira is in, the Silver.

I feel this draft of the tower is nice, it has a good amount of recursion as well as several cards that seek to fill the yard. I also have a bunch of symmetrical effects that will affect both players in various ways.

I definitely want to goldfish this some more. A few runs through (easiest to test on Moxfield) have felt fun and solitaire-y which is what I was after. The theory is that I can even play this as a solitaire game with difficulty being factors added such as a turn limit, a starting life limit, a clock card like Smoldering Tar.

Also, it probably goes without saying but I will be proxying the entire thing due to the cost of various cards such as the RL cards.

So some feedback came in off the reddit post. Notes as follows:

• Fixing felt dire. Think about that. Perhaps more Prophetic Prism style cards and 3 mana golden rocks.
• Card draw often felt a bit lacking. If you got the engine together, no worries but running out of gas was still a thing. Consider more mutual card draw.
• More graveyard recursion. Thinking some expensive artifacts for it as well as some coloured spells, ideally in several colours.

Going to have a think about ratios. Categories:

• Fixing
• Card draw
• Colourless artifacts
• Coloured spells
• Interaction pieces
• Recursion pieces
• "Engine" pieces eg. Aetherflux Reservoir
• Creatures... more means players less likely to attack with key pieces?

The first few goldfishes felt quite good, just unfinished, not polished yet.

Also agonizing over the size of the tower. I think I want it to be 100 card for a lot of reasons, fits in a boulder, only have to buy one box of shields, aesthetics brah... but 100 feels very small with SO many potential artifacts to use. Could possibly go to 150 but it's starting to get unwieldy at that point too, like, hard to shuffle.