counter target spell
then drink a can of beer. If not, lose the game.
Sorry Chill, this came up to me when you said "magic the gathering" and "drinking game".
I'll read whats going on and think of something constructive when I get home.
EDIT: actually
instead of deleting/spending experience points blah blah blah, keep it.
So here is the idea:
Instead of losing all experience to level up, you keep it. The moment you hit 10 experience, you level up. However, to get to the next level, you need to achieve 30 experience.
Lv1 hero:
-0 experience
blah blah blah
as the game progress:
lv1 hero
-4 experience.
Sweet you defeated some monsters that yielded some experience. Still getting there, and eventually:
lv2 hero
-11 experience.
you manage to get more experience than needed to hit the next level. Your original idea sounded like you needed to spend experience to level up. In this case, you just stack up the points. Now as you slay more monsters and cast more spells...
lv2 hero
-17 experience
And several more turns later:
lv3
-30 experience
Congrats! Lv3 finally!
and so on. The idea is simple: Have an experience tree.
The other part design part is whether or not to make the experience tree universal or specific.
If you take the universal approach, every hero will level up if they achieve a specific amount of experience.
If you take the specific approach, you get to design the cards in more detail since each hero have their own experience tree. You can make some heroes a bit weak but in response, less experience needed to level up, etc.
heres a mockup of a typical mtg card or something. The number of experience required for each hero is on the left side. You get the idea.
I don't know, this is the idea that hit me first.