Energizing Angel is fun, but there is the "tap ability on big flier" problem. I think it's probably okay, but most people will want to swing with their big angel.
That's why I gave him Vigilance...doesn't that solve that problem?
I don't like the prisoner mechanic at all. It lowers variability in games way too much. Imagine a limited deck that had five prisoners in it; every game, you'd see all of them. This is not a good design, in my opinion. Plus, it has the ally problem: there will never be more prisoners, so prisoner decks will never get new cards after your block. I am not a fan.
Do they consider that a problem? Perhaps I need to do more reading on the topic, but weren't Allies considered a design success (expect for the not-throwing-them-a-bone-in-RoTE problem)?
That said, I'm not totally happy with the mechanic myself, though I think being able to purchase consistency at the cost of raw power is an interesting decision.
@Pachuco: Ah, well, if it replaces Resonate, makes sense to me.
Last concern, you are taking your block from CMC matters to Spells matter, which is fine. But with this new Harmony incarnation, how will multicolor decks be able to cope without the ability to reliably trigger Harmony.
Well, there has to be a restriction somewhere, right?
But no, I mean, if I consider the process of developing this block for limited, I list the archetypal structures and qualities that will define a player's flow through the packs. In the first set, primary emphasis is the catch-all that "Spells Matter", with Melody and Resonate each being represented in every color with slightly different distribution, and two creature-based mechanics that exist in separate arcs, linked by white which possesses the least representation in Melody and Resonate. This is a fairly open playing field mechanically.
In a format with heavy monocolor representation and minimal availability of colorless spells (meaning, more ZZW than Scars), the player is going to ideally strive for a two-color deck at most. With the advent of recent alterations to pack order, introducing Harmony in a later set enables the player to make the important color decisions before they're provided with the opportunity to pick the bulk of their fixing. Which I would think should help push players to choose to only draft Harmony cards of their main color, assuaging concerns about not being able to activate Harmony when you want to.
Of course, variance is an important quality of the game. So nothing is always going to go how you want it to.
Pachuco Cadaver: Rebound only uses exile because it casts the spell once from exile. As it stands none of the suggested wordings make sense rules-wise.
You're operating under the assumption that being exiled is different from the graveyard for this ability. It's not as far as the rules are concerned. (But exile does make it easier to understand.)
If you need to copy the spell until end of turn, I'd use this: "Harmony (Until end of turn, whenever you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may copy this from your graveyard.)"
Or if the exile to grave part of the mechanic is important to you, "Harmony (Exile this spell as it resolves. When you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may cast it without paying its mana cost. At the beginning of the end step, if this card is exiled, put it into its owner's graveyard.)"
Private Mod Note
():
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I'll bet you wish you had a non-unglued/unhinged card that shared your first name.
Pachuco Cadaver: Rebound only uses exile because it casts the spell once from exile. As it stands none of the suggested wordings make sense rules-wise.
You're operating under the assumption that being exiled is different from the graveyard for this ability. It's not as far as the rules are concerned. (But exile does make it easier to understand.)
If you need to copy the spell until end of turn, I'd use this: "Harmony (Until end of turn, whenever you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may copy this from your graveyard.)"
Or if the exile to grave part of the mechanic is important to you, "Harmony (Exile this spell as it resolves. When you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may cast it without paying its mana cost. At the beginning of the end step, if this card is exiled, put it into its owner's graveyard.)"
I'm not operating under any assumption other than the fact that the exile zone is more functional as a temporary location for purposes of conveying a duration during which the ability is able to trigger.
If the Harmony card went to the graveyard and thus triggered from the graveyard, there would be an unnecessary difficulty of keeping track of Harmony cards that were never triggered, especially since graveyard order is no longer a viable tool.
The question is: by using a copy mechanism, am I not circumventing the Harmony effect? (i.e. Can a spell copy be exiled?)
EDIT - 706.9a If a copy of a spell is in a zone other than the stack, it ceases to exist. If a copy of a card is in
any zone other than the stack or the battlefield, it ceases to exist. These are state-based actions.
So shouldn't this be ok:
Harmony - Exile this spell as it resolves. If you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may copy this spell without paying its mana cost, then put this spell into your graveyard. At the beginning of the end step, if this spell is exiled, put it into your graveyard.
Does "when..." provide a drastically different rules-interaction?
The copy rules indicate that you don't cast a copy, so I can just say "you may copy this spell", right? Do I need to mention that you put it onto the stack?
Is the exiled spell a "card" or a "spell"? Are the terms interchangeable in this case as the copy is always a "copy"?
I'm pretty sure a copied instant or sorcery spell is removed upon resolution like a token vanishes when leaving the battlefield.
So, exile zone to graveyard while still copying, but the effect must end when it goes to the grave as well. (Exile this spell as it resolves. Until end of turn, whenever you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may copy this. At the beginning of the end step, if this card is exiled, put it into its owner's graveyard.)
Also, my second wording in my last post was missing a "If you cast this from your hand" clause.
Private Mod Note
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I'll bet you wish you had a non-unglued/unhinged card that shared your first name.
If you wrote a simple paragraph why you chose each of the 8, it would be immensely helpful.
As requested, I have written up why I like each of my favorite submissions. There are seven that really stand out to me from the thirty-something that are posted here.
For each I read the fifteen word tagline and looked at the ten cards (I didn't read the essays). I judged based on some nebulous combination of individual card cleverness and how well the feel of the set was conveyed by the previews. Basically, it's the ones that I like. Bad design usually annoys me, so there might be some correlation between the ones I like and the ones that are good.
If I saw red flags early on in the cards -- excessive keywords, zone changes, or text... or flat out things that are not allowed by the rules -- I probably didn't even read the whole submission
I'm flattered to be included in that list, but I'm surprised you thought Guardians of Floris was so strong; I am not a fan. Greatest hits: a red creature with vigilance and Scion of the Wild stats? That card made sense in the color pie like 12 years ago. Indestructible Empyrial Archangel for six mana? Horrendously unfun. I see these as huge, disqualifying type mistakes.
I don't know. I think I've looked at so many of these submissions that I've started hating all of them. I need to take a break.
EDIT: But I didn't! Some random observations:
I think keyword tribal is a cool idea, though in execution it might be less fun than it looks, since having a million regenerators or deathtouchers could be trouble. Still, neat.
New most unfun thing: three mana, three loyalty planeswalker with "-1: target player can't play a land on their next turn." Jeeeeeeez. That submission also has a trillion things going on, many of them unfun, though, so I think its prospects are dim.
There are a lot of drawback mechanics. I don't know how this will play out.
I'm in the process of comiling a totally unscientific personal rating of all the submissions. It's depressing.
My guess on that is enchantments, though I could be wrong. The entries I've seen are rife with auras that can be creatures, enchantment creatures, and cards that fetch enchantments.
Quite possibly. There's probably more than one new mechanic used by at least 5 people. Keep in mind that he's only gone through half the entries at this point.
I'm also not sure if having used that mechanic is a good thing or a bad thing.
Quite possibly. There's probably more than one new mechanic used by at least 5 people. Keep in mind that he's only gone through half the entries at this point.
I'm also not sure if having used that mechanic is a good thing or a bad thing.
I really didn't like the implementation as originally conceived, but I liked the intent.
I'd think its bad unless your use of it is the best. They want the top 8 to be diverse, so if one of the finalists already has the same mechanic and they're debating on putting yours in the finals, the same mechanic done worse isn't going to help you there.
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I'll bet you wish you had a non-unglued/unhinged card that shared your first name.
Me too, especially enchantment creatures. I have a feeling that this may be partially due to the fact that Lucent Liminid is one of those dangled thoughts in the Time Spiral block that haven't gone anywhere yet. In fact I think it's one of the few things left that we haven't seen. And of those, several are Time Spiral mechanics and i've seen at least two different people use Gravestorm, and one that used Transfigure, and I only looked through about twelve people's entries fully.
I think we're seeing just how big an impact the Time Spiral block had on the imaginations of card designers.
Speaking of Futureshifted cards....
Has anyone seen a submission which uses Contraptions?
That would have been my submission if I had made it to round 3. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could judge it like LSK was doing earlier. Thanks!
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T2:
UR Ascension
Mono-U Birthing Pod
This is great news. First the McRib now Time Spiral!
I know I'm not really part of the community proper here, but I was hoping I could get some of that wonderfully brutal feedback. I didn't get a lot of "big picture" feedback during the course of the challenge, so I'd love to get some opinions.
So yeah, basically "finalized" a "formal"* submission, for those who care (besides Kultcher, who <3ingly offered feedback). Will peek at others posted here.
* (This is to say, I didn't really go gung-ho looking for cards; I didn't really see many modal cards, iirc. Probably would have had to advertise on Twitter or somewhere. Either way, I created all ten, changed a couple based on feedback and other ideas.)
EDIT - @Kultcher - I wrote over a page response. Be afraid.
Enchantments is actually deceptively weak as a theme; it's not one that can't be done, but it's much, much harder than artifacts, which superficially it appears to be similar to. There's a reason that they continually revisit artifacts, and the only time Enchantments was ever done was when block themes were very minor - and then the block theme was totally overshadowed by other stuff. The primary reasons are these:
- If your set of 250 cards is 40% artifacts, no matter what color you're playing there's 100 artifacts in the block you have access to (minus a small number because they have colored activations or whatever.) If your set of 250 cards is 40% enchantments, then a monocolor deck has access to about 20 enchantments in block. This reason is very important.
- There are artifact creatures, so your deck's creatures (most decks want to play creatures, and decks that don't play creatures tend to be extreme forms of certain archetypes) can be artifacts and your creatures will interact with the theme. You can make enchantment creatures, but there's not a pool of existing ones to pull from when putting together decks.
- This is more touchy-feely, but artifacts allow for a greater variety of card concepts than enchantments do, and allow Magic to touch on things that other card types don't do. Most enchantments have concepts that are similar to something that could be a Sorcery or Instant's concept, and vice versa. I'd argue that artifacts are, in general, slightly more evocative than enchantments, and things that interact with them are a little more intuitive than things that interact with enchantments. What's a stronger concept, Kor Duelist or Fledgling Osprey? (Or sub in any cards with similar effects; "This dude is extra badass when he has a badass weapon because he's good at using weapons" is nearly always better than "This thing is extra badass when you cast a spell on it because, like, it's a guard dog. Or a spiky golem. Or a chick on a pegasus. That makes sense, right?") Pretty much any other effect that's been done with both artifacts and enchantments has a similar "evocativeness gap".
- Artifacts let Magic touch on themes and motifs such as robots, cybernetics, machinery, and similar things that it doesn't normally get to touch. Magic doesn't have robots, of course, but it has things that are deliberately evocative of them. This allows Magic to explore a wider variety of things than it otherwise does. Enchantments don't really do that. They're instants and sorceries that don't end at the end of the turn, and often have indistinguishable concepts. Almost every concept that's been used as a enchantment has been used as another card type.
Nevertheless, I bet tons of people did enchantments because it's superficially low-hanging fruit.
That's why I gave him Vigilance...doesn't that solve that problem?
Do they consider that a problem? Perhaps I need to do more reading on the topic, but weren't Allies considered a design success (expect for the not-throwing-them-a-bone-in-RoTE problem)?
That said, I'm not totally happy with the mechanic myself, though I think being able to purchase consistency at the cost of raw power is an interesting decision.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
EDIT: I don't know whether the judges will think it's a problem (the no-more-prisoners thing), but it depresses me regardless.
Well, there has to be a restriction somewhere, right?
But no, I mean, if I consider the process of developing this block for limited, I list the archetypal structures and qualities that will define a player's flow through the packs. In the first set, primary emphasis is the catch-all that "Spells Matter", with Melody and Resonate each being represented in every color with slightly different distribution, and two creature-based mechanics that exist in separate arcs, linked by white which possesses the least representation in Melody and Resonate. This is a fairly open playing field mechanically.
In a format with heavy monocolor representation and minimal availability of colorless spells (meaning, more ZZW than Scars), the player is going to ideally strive for a two-color deck at most. With the advent of recent alterations to pack order, introducing Harmony in a later set enables the player to make the important color decisions before they're provided with the opportunity to pick the bulk of their fixing. Which I would think should help push players to choose to only draft Harmony cards of their main color, assuaging concerns about not being able to activate Harmony when you want to.
Of course, variance is an important quality of the game. So nothing is always going to go how you want it to.
- 4/22/12, Knowledge from the Helvault (Part 1)
You're operating under the assumption that being exiled is different from the graveyard for this ability. It's not as far as the rules are concerned. (But exile does make it easier to understand.)
If you need to copy the spell until end of turn, I'd use this: "Harmony (Until end of turn, whenever you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may copy this from your graveyard.)"
Or if the exile to grave part of the mechanic is important to you, "Harmony (Exile this spell as it resolves. When you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may cast it without paying its mana cost. At the beginning of the end step, if this card is exiled, put it into its owner's graveyard.)"
I'm not operating under any assumption other than the fact that the exile zone is more functional as a temporary location for purposes of conveying a duration during which the ability is able to trigger.
If the Harmony card went to the graveyard and thus triggered from the graveyard, there would be an unnecessary difficulty of keeping track of Harmony cards that were never triggered, especially since graveyard order is no longer a viable tool.
The question is: by using a copy mechanism, am I not circumventing the Harmony effect? (i.e. Can a spell copy be exiled?)
EDIT - 706.9a If a copy of a spell is in a zone other than the stack, it ceases to exist. If a copy of a card is in
any zone other than the stack or the battlefield, it ceases to exist. These are state-based actions.
So shouldn't this be ok:
Harmony - Exile this spell as it resolves. If you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may copy this spell without paying its mana cost, then put this spell into your graveyard. At the beginning of the end step, if this spell is exiled, put it into your graveyard.
Does "when..." provide a drastically different rules-interaction?
The copy rules indicate that you don't cast a copy, so I can just say "you may copy this spell", right? Do I need to mention that you put it onto the stack?
Is the exiled spell a "card" or a "spell"? Are the terms interchangeable in this case as the copy is always a "copy"?
- 4/22/12, Knowledge from the Helvault (Part 1)
So, exile zone to graveyard while still copying, but the effect must end when it goes to the grave as well. (Exile this spell as it resolves. Until end of turn, whenever you cast a spell that shares a color with this card, you may copy this. At the beginning of the end step, if this card is exiled, put it into its owner's graveyard.)
Also, my second wording in my last post was missing a "If you cast this from your hand" clause.
As requested, I have written up why I like each of my favorite submissions. There are seven that really stand out to me from the thirty-something that are posted here.
For each I read the fifteen word tagline and looked at the ten cards (I didn't read the essays). I judged based on some nebulous combination of individual card cleverness and how well the feel of the set was conveyed by the previews. Basically, it's the ones that I like. Bad design usually annoys me, so there might be some correlation between the ones I like and the ones that are good.
If I saw red flags early on in the cards -- excessive keywords, zone changes, or text... or flat out things that are not allowed by the rules -- I probably didn't even read the whole submission
I don't know. I think I've looked at so many of these submissions that I've started hating all of them. I need to take a break.
EDIT: But I didn't! Some random observations:
I think keyword tribal is a cool idea, though in execution it might be less fun than it looks, since having a million regenerators or deathtouchers could be trouble. Still, neat.
New most unfun thing: three mana, three loyalty planeswalker with "-1: target player can't play a land on their next turn." Jeeeeeeez. That submission also has a trillion things going on, many of them unfun, though, so I think its prospects are dim.
There are a lot of drawback mechanics. I don't know how this will play out.
I'm in the process of comiling a totally unscientific personal rating of all the submissions. It's depressing.
Hmmmm......
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
My guess is either "Enchantments Matter" or "Let's Play with Exile!"
- 4/22/12, Knowledge from the Helvault (Part 1)
Current post- Grand Prix KC Modern Postmortem (7/7/13)
This teasing is making the waiting worse. ;(
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
Current post- Grand Prix KC Modern Postmortem (7/7/13)
Current post- Grand Prix KC Modern Postmortem (7/7/13)
I'm also not sure if having used that mechanic is a good thing or a bad thing.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
I really didn't like the implementation as originally conceived, but I liked the intent.
Current post- Grand Prix KC Modern Postmortem (7/7/13)
Speaking of Futureshifted cards....
Has anyone seen a submission which uses Contraptions?
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
That would have been my submission if I had made it to round 3. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could judge it like LSK was doing earlier. Thanks!
UR Ascension
Mono-U Birthing Pod
I know I'm not really part of the community proper here, but I was hoping I could get some of that wonderfully brutal feedback. I didn't get a lot of "big picture" feedback during the course of the challenge, so I'd love to get some opinions.
Here's my submission.
EDIT: Holy what? I thought I only had like 5 posts on this board...
http://community.wizards.com/magicthegathering/wiki/Labs:Gds/gds2/solmancer/jolera/mockp3
* (This is to say, I didn't really go gung-ho looking for cards; I didn't really see many modal cards, iirc. Probably would have had to advertise on Twitter or somewhere. Either way, I created all ten, changed a couple based on feedback and other ideas.)
EDIT - @Kultcher - I wrote over a page response. Be afraid.
Past Ruminations
Links are broken, will fix in near future.
- Kaladesh
- Zendikar
- Rise of the Eldrazi
- Alara Reborn
- Innistrad <- Personal Favorite
- Dark Ascension
- Avacyn Restored
- Theros
- Return to Ravnica
- Tarkir
- If your set of 250 cards is 40% artifacts, no matter what color you're playing there's 100 artifacts in the block you have access to (minus a small number because they have colored activations or whatever.) If your set of 250 cards is 40% enchantments, then a monocolor deck has access to about 20 enchantments in block. This reason is very important.
- There are artifact creatures, so your deck's creatures (most decks want to play creatures, and decks that don't play creatures tend to be extreme forms of certain archetypes) can be artifacts and your creatures will interact with the theme. You can make enchantment creatures, but there's not a pool of existing ones to pull from when putting together decks.
- This is more touchy-feely, but artifacts allow for a greater variety of card concepts than enchantments do, and allow Magic to touch on things that other card types don't do. Most enchantments have concepts that are similar to something that could be a Sorcery or Instant's concept, and vice versa. I'd argue that artifacts are, in general, slightly more evocative than enchantments, and things that interact with them are a little more intuitive than things that interact with enchantments. What's a stronger concept, Kor Duelist or Fledgling Osprey? (Or sub in any cards with similar effects; "This dude is extra badass when he has a badass weapon because he's good at using weapons" is nearly always better than "This thing is extra badass when you cast a spell on it because, like, it's a guard dog. Or a spiky golem. Or a chick on a pegasus. That makes sense, right?") Pretty much any other effect that's been done with both artifacts and enchantments has a similar "evocativeness gap".
- Artifacts let Magic touch on themes and motifs such as robots, cybernetics, machinery, and similar things that it doesn't normally get to touch. Magic doesn't have robots, of course, but it has things that are deliberately evocative of them. This allows Magic to explore a wider variety of things than it otherwise does. Enchantments don't really do that. They're instants and sorceries that don't end at the end of the turn, and often have indistinguishable concepts. Almost every concept that's been used as a enchantment has been used as another card type.
Nevertheless, I bet tons of people did enchantments because it's superficially low-hanging fruit.
Current post- Grand Prix KC Modern Postmortem (7/7/13)