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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8316527" data-attributes="member: 6779196">That isn’t what parasitic means. A parasitic mechanic is one that doesn’t function outside of a specific environment supporting it. Splice onto Arcane is the classic example, because the mechanic only works if your deck runs a lot of Arcane spells, which have hardly been printed outside of Kamigawa block. On the other hand, Energy Counters are commonly thought of as parasitic because they are designed to work best together, but aren’t actually parasitic because you don’t need other cards that interact with Energy counters to make them work - you can just throw a card with the mechanic into any deck and it’ll still work fine.Dungeons are parasitic because you need a certain critical mass of Venture cards for them to function. You can’t just put Gloom Stalker into any deck, because unless you’re running a bunch of cards that let you Venture into the Dungeon, you’ll never be able to Complete a Dungeon to get his double strike online. Yes, Dungeons do have synergy with other mechanics, but so does Splice onto Arcane. The reason they’re parasitic is because most of them are going to be useless outside of a dedicated Dungeon deck.All that said, I don’t think it’s a problem that Dungeons are parasitic. It’s a gimmick mechanic in a one-off set that’s specifically outside of normal MtG canon, which as this very thread demonstrates, a lot of people who aren’t normally magic fans are likely to buy to play on its own. If there was ever a good time and place for a parasitic mechanic, this is it. Parasitic mechanics also aren’t necessarily bad. They’re just somewhat limited in playability. This seems like a perfectly fine mechanic to be parasitic, because folks who are going to want to play with it are surely going to want to build around it heavily.</blockquote>

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