Left Behind....

Changing it so that there's no maintenance with no monsters would be pretty nice. Flavorful too: why would you pour mana into your staff if it's not being used that turn?

Tally time:

Boost Damage: Unusual__me(13), King Bagbuss(13-14), sXeAndriex(13), bubbleman2(13), NOLDER(13), Vincent(13)
Total: 6
Cost Decrease: Xagar
Total: 1
Don't pay maintenance if no monsters in play: Leander, �ルノ(13 damage 2nd choice), Serith
Total: 3
Keep as is: Blue_Elite, Exile, Sol(fine with conditional maintenance)
Total: 3

The conditional maintenance idea was newly proposed and really could do with more discussion. Otherwise, there is strong support for a boost with the majority of that support aimed at a damage increase.

I agree with conditional maintenance and 13 damage.

Same here. Conditional maintenance makes sense and I'm fine with it. However, I'd prefer a straight damage increase to 13 damage.

Conditional maintenance sounds good. I'm iffy about raising it to 13 damage because it seems okay at the moment, it's a repeatable effect, and comparisons shouldn't only be made to 1 mana monsters. If Magic Staff was designed to be able to kill off 1-mana monsters in one shot, then I'd be fine. If it's incidental that 12 damage coincided with the life of the grey 1-manaers, then I'd say leave it.

I've upped the damage from 12 to 13.

Feel free to continue arguing about making the maintenance conditional or not, but for the purposes of keeping count, votes prior to now should probably be ignored.

I vote yes for making maintenance conditional.

edit for reasoning

Serith Wrote:Changing it so that there's no maintenance with no monsters would be pretty nice. Flavorful too: why would you pour mana into your staff if it's not being used that turn?

I abstain. Leaning in favor of conditional maint, but meh on it. I wouldn't have a problem with either side winning out.

Flavourful? Going by that flavour, why would the staff destroy itself if there were monsters on the field and you didn't have the mana? Surely you'd just "not pour mana into" it?

Or how about: Why would the staff stop taking the mana out of you if there aren't any immediate targets to kill. The staff might simply not give you that choice.

I don't think it needs conditional maintenance but I'm not strongly against it either.

On second thought, I'm against conditional maintenence.

This card is strong enough as-is, and I really don't think that I'd like facing a deck with this card in it if its maintence was conditional. At least with unconditional maintenance I'd be able to know that they don't have enough for I-shield and never will if they don't have gen and have less than 4. With conditional maintenance I'd have to play creatures into death in order to stall to make sure my higher-speed destruction can get through without fear of counters (that is, y'know, if I'm running higher-speed destruction).

Also keep the opponent from having something like 3-5 out at once.