Hey there guys. I've been working on a little custom set for a new custom set (taking place on Muraganda)and have just finished designing my mechanics. Before I list them out, I should state that my ultimate goal with the set is to hit all of the notes that a normal set hits while allowing [u]every single card[/u] to have some potential use in limited settings. Considering that this card with have the normal gammut of vanilla creatures and junky instants/sorceries, this was pretty tricky.
The Mechanics
Mechanic 1: Primordial Primordial- Creatures you control without activated or triggered abilities-
Sample Cards:
Sabertooth Oresk
Creature- Cat [U]
Primordial- Creatures you control without activated or triggered abilities gain +1/+1.
1/1
Ancient Ancestors
Creature- Spirit [R]
Primordial- Creatures you control without activated or triggered abilities gain Lifelink.
4/4
Creates "slivers" without the use of a parasitic system.
This card allows vanilla (and french vanilla) creatures to find real use
Rewards the use of creature tokens (a sub-theme in the set)
Challenges canny players to look through their collections for decent creatures with passive abilities, alternative costs, and replacement effects.
Implementation: The set is planned include 16 cards with primordial, spread across all 5 colors (though blue and black gain only 2 apiece).
Mechanic 2: Lord
Lord- Each [creature type] or [creature type] that you control with a lower converted mana cost than [name] enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter.
Sample Cards:
Captain of Despair
Creature- Spirit Warrior [C]
Lord- Each Spirit or Warrior that you control with a lower converted mana cost than Talmoch's Hord enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter.
6/5
Battlecrazed Champion
Creature- Human Warrior [U]
Lord- Each human or Warrior that you control with a lower converted mana cost than Battlecrazed Champion enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter.
Battlecrazed Champion gets +1/+0 for each tapped creature you control.
3/3
Advantages:
Allows the french vanilla fatties of the set to have a mechanic that matters.
Rewards you for drawing cheaper creatures later in the game.
Name is immediately recognizable for veteran players.
Creates tribal synergies
Works with Primordial.
Works with creature tokens.
Implementation: There would be a high-cost cycle of common lords and a midrange cycle of uncommon lords in each color, plus a cycle of rare (and legendary) multicolor lords.
Mechanic 3: Animus Animus- X effect, where X is the number of basic lands you control.
Sample cards:
Primal Fire
Sorcery [R]
Animus- Deal X damage divided as you choose among any number of creatures and/or planeswalkers, where X is the number of basic lands you control.
Dire Oresk
Creature- Cat (U)
Haste
Animus- Creatures with power X or less can’t block, where X is the number of basic lands you control.
2/2
Advantages:
Mechanic allows for powerful effects in limited without harming constructed formats.
Rewards use of basic lands without overly pressuring monocolor decks.
In the few cases when it appears on creatures, it works with primordial.
Implementation: The set will have 20 cards with Animus, split among all colors.
Mechanic 4: Salvage Salvage X- Whenever the Xth card is put into your graveyard from anywhere each turn, [Effect]
Example Cards
Depth Seeker
Creature- Elemental Wizard [R]
Salvage 2- Whenever the 2nd card is put into your graveyard from anywhere each turn, draw a card.
3/1
Seasoned Scavenger
Creature- Human Scout [U]
Discard a card: Seasoned Scavenger gains haste until end of turn.
Salvage 2- Whenever the second card is put into your graveyard from anywhere each turn, scry 2.
1/2
Advantages:
Rounds out these passive mechanics with a single triggered mechanic.
Allows weak cantrips and 2-for-1 spells to fuel your effects in limited.
Versatile as it is triggered by discard effects, self mill, casting sorceries or instants, or loss of permanents.
Potentially powerful when put into dredge decks, though effects are designed with the assumption that they will be triggered each turn.
Implementation: The set would include 18 cards spread across all colors, though it is concentrated primarily in Blue and Black. Two artifacts and one land will have this mechanic as well.
Most of them seem reasonable. The Lord ability is sort of self defeating since it rewards you for playing cards off the mana curve. Stapling the Metallic Mimic ability onto a specific lord would be quite reasonable.
Salvage is interesting and particularly if you had it in a set with a number of self or mutual mill effects would be fun. Mulch/Grisly Salvage or something like a Narcomeba where if 4 cards are put into your GY return it to play.
Primordial is a reasonable adaptation of Muraganda Petroglyphs, but I worry that too many of them would just turn them into another pack of Slivers, but with the ability to share their abilities to other creature types.
Lord seems unnecessarily complicated given how narrow of an effect it ends up being, and given that it also needs to be fully written out, I don't think that an action word is an appropriate application here.
I think that Animus is very similar to Devotion as I see it. It encourages mono color constructed decks, as that would allow nonbasics to be cut out without screwing over the mana base. I do quite like the idea, it has a lot of potential.
I don't like Salvage. I think by necessity the effects would have to be fairly minor unless the salvage number was very high, it's quite easy to dump a bunch of cards into your graveyard after all. It seems both too complex and too easy to activate to be worth the trouble of making it a major mechanic worthy of an action word.
Primordial is going a long way to say "creatures without abilities" (AKA, Vanilla) because you're printing non-vanilla creatures. Just print Muraganda Petroglyphs-style effects on lands, artifacts, enchantments, etc. And print vanillas. It'll make drafting significantly faster.
It isn't quite the same as 'Creatures without abilities' because for one, it doesn't qualify keywords, such as trample, and two, effects that say "As long as you have X, get Y" don't disable it either.
Yes, it isn't quite the same. The problem is that Primordial fails to do what it wants to do.
It wants to reward you for playing vanilla and french vanilla creatures. Instead, it rewards you for playing tarmogoyf but not viridian shaman. Most players will see Primordial as being entirely confusing, as it asks them to look for colons or "When X, Y" - two different kinds of texts that rarely share things in common.
Rewarding vanillas feels weird - Muraganda Petroglyphs gives a +X/+X bonus, but it can't sensibly give "T: ~ deals 1 damage to target creature." If you wanted to, it could say Creatures with no abilities may be tapped as though they had "T: ~ deals 1 damage to target creature." - but that's bizarre templating.
Really, WOTC wants a term they can refer to both vanillas and french vanillas (but perhaps not french vanillas with block exclusive keywords) - this would be useful for white/artifact cards that intend to give your creature all keywords you have in play, but instead are forced to give all keywords evergreen at the moment and then never reprint this card again.
Muraganda Petroglyphs-style effects work. They're mildly fun and would create an interesting draft subtheme and push otherwise unplayable creatures (owing to their lack of other abilities especially evasion) into playability.
But printing "primordial" cards would be excessively frustrating, as new players are likely to miss it regularly and experienced players are likely to miss it occasionally. In contrast, a card that says one of the following is easy to understand and easy to draft with:
* Whenever a nontoken creature with no abilities you control dies, create a 1/1 green insect token.
* Whenever a creature with no abilities dies, search your library for a card with the same name and put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle.
* Creatures with no abilities you control cannot be blocked by creatures with abilities.
* Creatures with no abilities you control cannot be the target of spells or effects an opponent controls. (They do not have Hexproof!)
* [cost], Sacrifice a creature with no abilities: Effect.
* Whenever you play a creature card with no abilities, gain life equal to it's power.
Is the Muraganda block going to be interesting and fun to draft? It depends upon how many Leatherback Baloth-style aggressively costed (green?) creatures we get, and how aggressive the tribal elements that can afford to run grizzly bears or glory seeker are. Can it be done? Sure! In fact, arguably it would make for an exciting draft experience, as it would force players to run efficient spells, equipment, etc. rather than relying upon board presence. It would be a block of combat tricks and tribal synergies. abilityless creatures would just be "an odd tribe" - but one you could push in a variety of ways.
Of course, the biggest benefit Muraganda block creatures and spells have is that it would be dynamic to draft. You know what a 1U 1/4 is worth, you know what a 1G 2/3 is worth, and if they're merfolk and elves respectively, you can do things with them. Increased rarity would mean increased complexity, making draft very straight forward, flowing, and efficient. In contrast, a Primordial draft is one full of players - new and old - making serious mistakes because they misread their creature cards.
The challenge with a Muraganda block is that you have to design vanilla creatures and Muraganda-style spells to draft alongside them. It takes work. In contrast, Sabertooth Oresk is just muscle sliver for an odd subset of cards like grizzly bears and tarmogoyf. It's inelegant...
I do, however, like the idea of Grand Architect style templating, in which you could have a card that says "Tap an untapped creature you control with no abilities: Deal 1 damage to target creature or player."
Why does captain reference a card named Talmoch's Hord? And why is Hord spelled incorrectly (Horde)?
Captain of Despair 5 mana black mana
Creature- Spirit Warrior [C]
Lord- Each Spirit or Warrior that you control with a lower converted mana cost than Talmoch's Hord enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter.
6/5
This thread is for competitive decks only. Your deck is not Grixis Control, as you said yourself. A serious decklist with shroud and counterspells belongs here, not a for fun/casual decklist with bad discard. Sorry, but your princess is in another castle.
The Muraganda Petroglyphs effect is severely hurt by the desire to compress abilities into keywords.
"Creatures you control with no abilities have menace." Doesn't make sense, as the ability disqualifies the recipients from being eligible for itself.
"Creatures you control with no abilities can't be blocked except by two or more creatures." Works perfectly fine, as no text is being added to the recipient creatures.
If you want to encourage the use of vanillas by giving them buffs, I think the cleanest way to do it is to unpack the keywords into rules statements. This would cause a lot of trouble for the old classic keywords like Flying and Trample, but would be fine with the newer keywords like Hexproof that were compressed from much simpler rules text.
"Creatures you control with no abilities have menace." Doesn't make sense, as the ability disqualifies the recipients from being eligible for itself.
So, I think this class of effects is gauche and unlikely to play well, but it does function within the rules.
There's no loop in the layers system, so when Layer 6 comes around to add or change abilities, it sees the abilities that are printed on the card and goes from there. It doesn't go back and look at the result and say, "Oops, paradox!" It just assigns menace to your Kraken Hatchling and then evaluates Layer 7.
"Creatures you control with no abilities have menace." Doesn't make sense, as the ability disqualifies the recipients from being eligible for itself.
So, I think this class of effects is gauche and unlikely to play well, but it does function within the rules.
There's no loop in the layers system, so when Layer 6 comes around to add or change abilities, it sees the abilities that are printed on the card and goes from there. It doesn't go back and look at the result and say, "Oops, paradox!" It just assigns menace to your Kraken Hatchling and then evaluates Layer 7.
The rules may allow it, but it doesn't make logical sense from an observer's perspective, especially if there are multiple such effects in play. It would cause confusion among the less rules-savvy, and break the interaction with other "vanilla boosting" effects such as the suggested "Tap an untapped creature you control with no abilities: Effect"
Making the granted effects external statements rather than abilities layered into the text of the vanilla creatures would eliminate both of these concerns, with the slight cost of having to unpack keyword text, which as noted is mostly only an issue for the old, wordy keywords.
"Creatures you control with no abilities have menace." Doesn't make sense, as the ability disqualifies the recipients from being eligible for itself.
So, I think this class of effects is gauche and unlikely to play well, but it does function within the rules.
There's no loop in the layers system, so when Layer 6 comes around to add or change abilities, it sees the abilities that are printed on the card and goes from there. It doesn't go back and look at the result and say, "Oops, paradox!" It just assigns menace to your Kraken Hatchling and then evaluates Layer 7.
The problem isn't the card itself, though it can be confusing to some. The problem is such a card and other cards. With the enchantment out that reads "Creatures you control with no abilities have menace." you have now turned off Muraganda Petroglyphs and any other card with "Creatures you control with no abilities have [insert ability]."
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Mechanic 1: Primordial
Primordial- Creatures you control without activated or triggered abilities-
Sample Cards:
Sabertooth Oresk
Creature- Cat [U]
Primordial- Creatures you control without activated or triggered abilities gain +1/+1.
1/1
Ancient Ancestors
Creature- Spirit [R]
Primordial- Creatures you control without activated or triggered abilities gain Lifelink.
4/4
Advantages:
Implementation: The set is planned include 16 cards with primordial, spread across all 5 colors (though blue and black gain only 2 apiece).
Mechanic 2: Lord
Lord- Each [creature type] or [creature type] that you control with a lower converted mana cost than [name] enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter.
Sample Cards:
Captain of Despair
Creature- Spirit Warrior [C]
Lord- Each Spirit or Warrior that you control with a lower converted mana cost than Talmoch's Hord enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter.
6/5
Battlecrazed Champion
Creature- Human Warrior [U]
Lord- Each human or Warrior that you control with a lower converted mana cost than Battlecrazed Champion enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter.
Battlecrazed Champion gets +1/+0 for each tapped creature you control.
3/3
Advantages:
Implementation: There would be a high-cost cycle of common lords and a midrange cycle of uncommon lords in each color, plus a cycle of rare (and legendary) multicolor lords.
Mechanic 3: Animus
Animus- X effect, where X is the number of basic lands you control.
Sample cards:
Primal Fire
Sorcery [R]
Animus- Deal X damage divided as you choose among any number of creatures and/or planeswalkers, where X is the number of basic lands you control.
Dire Oresk
Creature- Cat (U)
Haste
Animus- Creatures with power X or less can’t block, where X is the number of basic lands you control.
2/2
Advantages:
Mechanic allows for powerful effects in limited without harming constructed formats.
Rewards use of basic lands without overly pressuring monocolor decks.
In the few cases when it appears on creatures, it works with primordial.
Implementation: The set will have 20 cards with Animus, split among all colors.
Mechanic 4: Salvage
Salvage X- Whenever the Xth card is put into your graveyard from anywhere each turn, [Effect]
Example Cards
Depth Seeker
Creature- Elemental Wizard [R]
Salvage 2- Whenever the 2nd card is put into your graveyard from anywhere each turn, draw a card.
3/1
Seasoned Scavenger
Creature- Human Scout [U]
Discard a card: Seasoned Scavenger gains haste until end of turn.
Salvage 2- Whenever the second card is put into your graveyard from anywhere each turn, scry 2.
1/2
Advantages:
Implementation: The set would include 18 cards spread across all colors, though it is concentrated primarily in Blue and Black. Two artifacts and one land will have this mechanic as well.
Salvage is interesting and particularly if you had it in a set with a number of self or mutual mill effects would be fun. Mulch/Grisly Salvage or something like a Narcomeba where if 4 cards are put into your GY return it to play.
Lord seems unnecessarily complicated given how narrow of an effect it ends up being, and given that it also needs to be fully written out, I don't think that an action word is an appropriate application here.
I think that Animus is very similar to Devotion as I see it. It encourages mono color constructed decks, as that would allow nonbasics to be cut out without screwing over the mana base. I do quite like the idea, it has a lot of potential.
I don't like Salvage. I think by necessity the effects would have to be fairly minor unless the salvage number was very high, it's quite easy to dump a bunch of cards into your graveyard after all. It seems both too complex and too easy to activate to be worth the trouble of making it a major mechanic worthy of an action word.
Standard:
GMono-Green CountersG
Modern:
URStormUR
XMyr OverflowX
BWBlack-White TokensBW
EDH:
WUGrand Arbiter Augustine's Spell DenialWU
WGRhys's TokensWG
RKrenko's CommandR
It wants to reward you for playing vanilla and french vanilla creatures. Instead, it rewards you for playing tarmogoyf but not viridian shaman. Most players will see Primordial as being entirely confusing, as it asks them to look for colons or "When X, Y" - two different kinds of texts that rarely share things in common.
Rewarding vanillas feels weird - Muraganda Petroglyphs gives a +X/+X bonus, but it can't sensibly give "T: ~ deals 1 damage to target creature." If you wanted to, it could say Creatures with no abilities may be tapped as though they had "T: ~ deals 1 damage to target creature." - but that's bizarre templating.
Really, WOTC wants a term they can refer to both vanillas and french vanillas (but perhaps not french vanillas with block exclusive keywords) - this would be useful for white/artifact cards that intend to give your creature all keywords you have in play, but instead are forced to give all keywords evergreen at the moment and then never reprint this card again.
Muraganda Petroglyphs-style effects work. They're mildly fun and would create an interesting draft subtheme and push otherwise unplayable creatures (owing to their lack of other abilities especially evasion) into playability.
But printing "primordial" cards would be excessively frustrating, as new players are likely to miss it regularly and experienced players are likely to miss it occasionally. In contrast, a card that says one of the following is easy to understand and easy to draft with:
* Whenever a nontoken creature with no abilities you control dies, create a 1/1 green insect token.
* Whenever a creature with no abilities dies, search your library for a card with the same name and put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle.
* Creatures with no abilities you control cannot be blocked by creatures with abilities.
* Creatures with no abilities you control cannot be the target of spells or effects an opponent controls. (They do not have Hexproof!)
* [cost], Sacrifice a creature with no abilities: Effect.
* Whenever you play a creature card with no abilities, gain life equal to it's power.
Is the Muraganda block going to be interesting and fun to draft? It depends upon how many Leatherback Baloth-style aggressively costed (green?) creatures we get, and how aggressive the tribal elements that can afford to run grizzly bears or glory seeker are. Can it be done? Sure! In fact, arguably it would make for an exciting draft experience, as it would force players to run efficient spells, equipment, etc. rather than relying upon board presence. It would be a block of combat tricks and tribal synergies. abilityless creatures would just be "an odd tribe" - but one you could push in a variety of ways.
Of course, the biggest benefit Muraganda block creatures and spells have is that it would be dynamic to draft. You know what a 1U 1/4 is worth, you know what a 1G 2/3 is worth, and if they're merfolk and elves respectively, you can do things with them. Increased rarity would mean increased complexity, making draft very straight forward, flowing, and efficient. In contrast, a Primordial draft is one full of players - new and old - making serious mistakes because they misread their creature cards.
The challenge with a Muraganda block is that you have to design vanilla creatures and Muraganda-style spells to draft alongside them. It takes work. In contrast, Sabertooth Oresk is just muscle sliver for an odd subset of cards like grizzly bears and tarmogoyf. It's inelegant...
Standard:
GMono-Green CountersG
Modern:
URStormUR
XMyr OverflowX
BWBlack-White TokensBW
EDH:
WUGrand Arbiter Augustine's Spell DenialWU
WGRhys's TokensWG
RKrenko's CommandR
My Alter portfolio
"Creatures you control with no abilities have menace." Doesn't make sense, as the ability disqualifies the recipients from being eligible for itself.
"Creatures you control with no abilities can't be blocked except by two or more creatures." Works perfectly fine, as no text is being added to the recipient creatures.
If you want to encourage the use of vanillas by giving them buffs, I think the cleanest way to do it is to unpack the keywords into rules statements. This would cause a lot of trouble for the old classic keywords like Flying and Trample, but would be fine with the newer keywords like Hexproof that were compressed from much simpler rules text.
There's no loop in the layers system, so when Layer 6 comes around to add or change abilities, it sees the abilities that are printed on the card and goes from there. It doesn't go back and look at the result and say, "Oops, paradox!" It just assigns menace to your Kraken Hatchling and then evaluates Layer 7.
The rules may allow it, but it doesn't make logical sense from an observer's perspective, especially if there are multiple such effects in play. It would cause confusion among the less rules-savvy, and break the interaction with other "vanilla boosting" effects such as the suggested "Tap an untapped creature you control with no abilities: Effect"
Making the granted effects external statements rather than abilities layered into the text of the vanilla creatures would eliminate both of these concerns, with the slight cost of having to unpack keyword text, which as noted is mostly only an issue for the old, wordy keywords.