MTG Salvation

oh, to be honest, I never realized an existing defined mechanic should have been chosen. Actually, the first card I thought of when reading the challenge was Abolish.

Good to know I'm not DQ'd!

"I PM'd both Algernone25 and IcariiFA after their initial submissions because their cards would have caused them to be DQ'd."
Thanks for extending that same courtesy equally--I'd hate to think player favoritism existed in this competition.

Quote from BlackWaltz3 »

I'm really glad this is shutting down.

Quote from BlackWaltz3 »

What you did was insulting and just provided more affirmation of my preexisting feelings towards this competition.

Well then, you can take over for void_nothing when they leave for MTG Nexus and run the CCC&G here yourself. Then you can happily preside over all the submissions missing crucial text to make their cards function that shouldn't be DQ'd and instead get a participation trophy.

Quote from BlackWaltz3 »

"I PM'd both Algernone25 and IcariiFA after their initial submissions because their cards would have caused them to be DQ'd."
Thanks for extending that same courtesy equally--I'd hate to think player favoritism existed in this competition.

I didn't read the cards in Round 1 prior to judging. I saw everyone submitted a split card with Fuse and moved on. The cards met the challenge. I didn't have the time then to proofread everyone's submission. That's supposed to be done by the players before the deadline.

In Round 2, I saw two different entries that had a mechanic that didn't meet the main challenge and informed the designers to the deadline. I don't do favoritism. Members of this community I've known get treated exactly the same way as everyone else in the CCC&G. I should have just followed Moss's example and stated no discussion on judgments.

Unfortunately real life is going to delay my round 2 brackets; my judgments should be done tomorrow, apologies all.

Thanks to Eventide Sojourner for the well-done judgment. A few comments.

Quote from Eventide Sojourner »

It's a little wordy (well, a lot, actually - MSE has ten small font lines, including the reminder text)

I know. I already knew before submitting the card. I always work in MSE to design my cards. This is why I didn't put flavor text on the card. I willingly tried to use name and mechanics to convey flavor, because I knew I was already at the limit of microtext, even though ten small lines plus two breaks is still allowed in the M15 frame (see Animate Dead from EMA). I consider that the limit, both as a player and as a judge.

...and Mythic. I'd bring it down to Rare, as it doesn't have the 'grandeur' that one would expect for that rarity, nor the power level.

Just wanted to point out that I put this at mythic because of the multiple ways to cast it for free (its own ability, cascading into it, etc...). Being able to avoid the safety valve that is mana cost in Magic is a big thing.

With the wording chosen, you need at least three creatures on the board before you can cast this (no cheating with Civic Wayfinder).

I'm very glad you noticed this, because it was totally intentional. I wanted three different creatures to be needed to cast this for free. My inspiration for this wording was the Herald cycle from Alara.

but the Prowl is a better payoff as the damage is one-sided in that instance.

Also totally intentional. I wanted the prowl effect to be better to encourage you to use prowl and pay the five mana.

Earwig Squad, and I still have promo copies I couldn't pay people to take off my hands.

Now that you make me think of it, I think I have some promo copies too somewhere...

Lorwyn Elves hunting people. Ah, memories.

Does it show that Lorwyn (and specifically Lorwyn, not Shadowmoor) is probably my favorite plane in the whole history of Magic?

The inclusion of the prowl mechanic not only ties back to Lorwyn block, but it works with the card name and effect as well.

As I've said before, also intentional. I used name and mechanics as best I could to convey flavor.

My question is what makes this a Druid, as there's no mana production or land interaction.

Nothing mechanically. I wanted to use two classes to make the free casting harder, and I went on Gatherer to check which two classes were the most common for Elves. Druid and Warrior is the answer, with Shaman being the third. This card was originally an Elf Shaman Warrior, but I changed it to Druid when I saw that Druid was more common than Shaman.

There is a comma missing from the reminder text after 'Druid'.

True. Went missing in the copy and paste of the reminder text for prowl. Still surprised that my detail-oriented eyes haven't caught this.

"When Elvish Predation Pack enters the battlefield, it fights up to one target creature you don’t control." There needs to be a 'may' or 'up to one' clause in case there are no legal targets when it enters...

HOW DID I NOT NOTICE THIS???

So, round is over, right? I want to make sure before I make comments.

Quote from Mr. Rithaniel »

So, round is over, right? I want to make sure before I make comments.

I already had my scores from both my judges, that's why I felt safe commenting on the judgments. Also, I see all judgments are in by now, so I think you should be safe too if you want to comment.

Well, assuming the judgments are finished, that puts me at the bottom of my bracket, so I've been eliminated. No hard feelings on that, you guys delivered what you believed to be the best, most fair judgments you could and I appreciate the time and effort that you put into them. I don't want it to seem like I don't appreciate the work, because I very much do. You guys are awesome. I still want to share my thoughts, though.

Quote from The_Hittite »

(1/3) Appeal: Tammy is interested. Johnny and Spike don't see a good enough payoff.

Quote from void_nothing »

(1/3) Appeal: Mostly a Txmmy thing for the unkillable Flying Monkeys. Jxnny doesn't want to be told how to get the max effect out of a spell and Spike doesn't want to spend three mana of different colors on a miracle.

I think Spike would love this thing. He'd never want to cast it for it's miracle cost, but keep in mind that it does not actually cost 2WW. It costs two installments of 1W. Major difference. That means it can come down on turn three with only two lands on the battlefield. White weenies would love this card. Compare it against Midnight Haunting or Timely Reinforcements. Though, the best comparison I can think of is Mogg War Marshal, in which case there is a lot of stuff to talk about.

Meanwhile Johnny I would totally concede might not like this card. If anything, it would be an engine to him: something to trigger ETB effects or to synergize with his Knight deck. I can agree that he wouldn't be drawn to the card for the card's sake, though.

Quote from The_Hittite »

(1.5/3) Elegance: With reminder text for Miracle, this is sitting pretty at 10 lines of text, and remember every Miracle card to date has reminder text. It's also not entirely clear how long the flying and indestructible lasts for. Is it permanent? That sounds difficult to track without a counter of some sort, especially if you cast multiple copies with the different effects.

So, you know how suspend is something of a complex mechanic? In fact, the last time I read the comprehensive rules of the game, suspend was a special action, like playing a land. It didn't use the stack and you couldn't respond to the act of exiling the card from a hand. Not having that text explaining what suspend did would potentially confuse a player. However, there are many cards in Time Spiral alone which forewent the reminder text to avoid having too many lines of text. Time Spiral, where the mechanic first appeared and where it would be the most potentially confusing to a new player.

So, to avoid having microtext on this card, what we do is: not print the reminder text for miracle on the physical form of this card. We are allowed to do that, and if we do, we get a card with 8 lines of text. Alternatively, we could leave out the reminder text for reserve, in which case we still get a card with eight lines of text.

To get a sense of it, look at the original hybrid cards. The reminder text was there because people wouldn't necessarily know how the mechanic worked. They could have continued printing that reminder text on hybrid cards. However they chose not to, because they assumed people would know how it works.

Quote from void_nothing »

(2/3) Uniqueness: While token generation is pretty prosaic, there are definitely some unique features like a new "installment plan" mechanic.

Honestly, I was thinking, this round, since one of the challenges would be to have your card have no mana cost at all, each and every card that checked that box would get 3/3 points on uniqueness unless it specifically copied another card which lacked a mana cost.

Quote from void_nothing »

(2/3) Flavor: 1/1 Knights just feels way off. 1/1 white tokens have been Soldiers for as long as I can remember, and 2/2s have been Knights. Sure there was Errand of Duty but please don't use that as precedent. I'm also not getting the flying and indestructible granting from the overall flavor.

Quote from The_Hittite »

(2.5/3) Flavor: The name seems a little clunky for a Magic card, but I've seen worse get printed. Honestly my biggest complaint is that Knight tokens almost always are 2/2s.

Point taken, Knights should tend to be 2/2. I should have made it "Arrival of the Vanguard" or something and made them 1/1 Soldiers instead.

Though, beyond that, I really liked the flavor I put into this card. The idea was that this card represents two ways that "the cavalry" showing up can have meaning in a battle. Perhaps a military strategist sends the mounted troops out to return later when they've flanked the enemy or holds them in "reserve" until an opportune moment.

Alternatively, the cavalry could arrive unexpectedly, an army of saviors to turn the tide of what would have been a lost battle. In that case, I liked the idea of them becoming almost angelic figures, flying in on winged steeds and being impervious to harm.

So the final three for June are:

bravelion83
Hemlock
IcariiFA

Time to end this game.

This has been posted by void_nothing in the DCC, but it's relevant here too (and for the CCL as well).

Quote from void_nothing »

UPDATE: July will continue here as usual due to me mixing up dates. August will begin DCC, CCL, and MCC on Nexus.

Does this mean there will be a July MCC here and that a host for it is needed since July 1st is tomorrow? If so, I am totally available and willing to do it. It's not the first time I did it at the last minute. And just so everybody knows, I would also do only three rounds like Eventide Sojourner did on June when we all were convinced this site would have closed on July 8th, for the same reasons that they did it this month.

Go for it, Leo!

Quote from void_nothing »

Go for it, Leo!

Thanks. First round and judge thread are up.

EDIT @void_nothing: With setting up July, I had forgotten I still was in the competition for June. Any news on that? The judging deadline has passed and only your own judgments are missing. I'm sorry for bringing this up. Only asking because I'm personally involved.

And with the last of the scores tallied, the winner of the June MCC is bravelion83. Congrats!

Your foil Alpha Volcanic Island is in the mail, and you should receive it no later than August 32nd.

Quote from Eventide Sojourner »

Your foil Alpha Volcanic Island is in the mail, and you should receive it no later than August 32nd.

Good that I do not play Legacy or Vintage and that I actually prefer non-foil cards then! (And I'm actually not joking about either of those.) Expecting it to arrive exactly on August 32nd!
On a serious note, thanks for the congratulations, and thanks to you as host and all the other judges and players. I almost wonder if hosting the last MCC here and winning the penultimate one makes me enter in the history of this site... No, no need to answer, I'm just dreaming. Thanks anyway to everybody. Updating my resume now.

For Round 1 of the July MCC, do Artifact Creatures meet the requirement? Based on the Clarifications, they don't seem to. Asking for a friend.

Quote from Clarifications »

The card can be a normal artifact without any subtype, an Equipment, a Vehicle, a Fortification, or have any other subtypes somehow. All of these are fine.

The letter of the challenge itself doesn't actually exclude artifact creatures at all. I don't think the clarification was meant to be exclusive: the cards "can be" any of those things (including "having any other subtypes somehow" by having another card type) but there's no "can't be" that prevents the cards from being other things.

EDIT: And I'm confident that if the Lion had meant noncreature artifacts, he would have said so explicitly.

Quote from Eventide Sojourner »

For Round 1 of the July MCC, do Artifact Creatures meet the requirement?

Yes, they do. A colored artifact creature passes the Main Challenge.

Based on the Clarifications, they don't seem to.

Why? There's nothing excluding other card types. Notice that I said subtypes in the clarifications:

Quote from Clarifications »

The card can be a normal artifact without any subtype, an Equipment, a Vehicle, a Fortification, or have any other subtypes somehow. All of these are fine.

They're both on the type line, but types, supertypes, and subtypes are different things.

Quote from void_nothing »

The letter of the challenge itself doesn't actually exclude artifact creatures at all. I don't think the clarification was meant to be exclusive: the cards "can be" any of those things (including "having any other subtypes somehow" by having another card type) but there's no "can't be" that prevents the cards from being other things.

This is all correct.

EDIT: And I'm confident that if the Lion had meant noncreature artifacts, he would have said so explicitly.

Indeed. I didn't specify, so artifact creatures are fine. If I didn't want them, I would have said it explicitly. Design all the artifact creatures that you want! I'm going to adjust that first point in the clarifications to better reflect this.

EDIT: I'm modified the clarification, so you might want to check it out. In short, as long as the card has the card type "artifact" and it's colored, it's fine.

As a side note, I will very probably not be available from right now until tomorrow (European) night. You know, as a Magic player, I have that little periodic obligation that is called "prerelease"... And I have to prepare and rest for it. So see you all tomorrow night! And good luck for your own prerelease! May everybody have a lot of fun!

The phrase that had me questioning the potential restriction was "normal artifact", in combination with the subsequent wording used after that phrase that only listed examples of what one might expect with a noncreature artifact.

Thank you for the further clarification.

I'm back after my 2HG prerelease. Our record was 2-1. I and my friend got second place overall, our best result since we play 2HG together, so we're very happy!

Quote from Hemlock »

Standard-issue Blade

...
Equip white and red creature
...
Can't get the space to appear before hybrids...

You probably have to use mana tags and curly brackets for hybrid mana. For example:
gives:
with the space between the name and mana cost, while this:
gives:
again with the space between the ability and its mana cost. Hope this helps. (Noparse tags are a wonderful thing. I hope they stay on Nexus.)

A little more than 4 hours to the design deadline. Seeing that right after I originally wrote this post, the site suddenly went in read-only mode for exactly 4 hours, and also because of the low number of entries, I've decided to delay both deadlines by one day. So, as of this moment, there are actually a little less than 24 hours before the design deadline. Hoping the site doesn't go in read-only mode out of nowhere again.

With only 16 entries for now, I expect 3 judges to be enough, and Mr. Rithaniel should be able to play. We'll see if anything changes in these 4 24 hours.

The future home of the MCC is here, on MTGNexus.

One of my contestants produced a card with the mana cost BBGGUU. I had been about to mark off for the mana symbols being in the wrong order, but referring back to sultai colored cards that have been printed says that black-green-blue is the correct order for that mana color combination.

I have not deducted any points for the symbols out of order, but now I'm curious as to why it's right - I'd always been under the impression that mana symbols are always printed in WUBRG order, with the exception of white-green cards being inverted (where green is first) and so it should be UUBBGG.

Can anyone explain why it's different, or if there's some other oddity involved?

Mana sequence for cards with more than three colors fits into an odd category. It depends on the "first" color involved. For Teneb, the Harvester the sequence in BGW, not WBG as WUBRG order would suggest. For Mayael the Anima, the sequence is RGW. The primary design rule was initially about "shortest distance traveled" between colors, but that was discarded for Khans of Tarkir.

M20 uses the KTK sequencing method for Wedge cards (such as on Yarok, the Desecrated), which your contestant used. The older sequence would have been GUB, which Wizards has discontinued using, possibly to further differentiate shards and wedges.

For four color Legends, the missing color could be used to bookend the sequence. As near as I can guess, it seems as though the rule is if White can't be first, loop it to the back.

It isn't only g/w that's switched around, g/u and r/w are also. I believe the rule says that mana always goes clockwise around the mana color wheel the shortest distant possible. It's g/w because white is the next color after green clockwise on the mana wheel, so you only have to move 1 place on the mana wheel to get from green to white. If it was w/g instead, you would have to move three spaces on the mana wheel to get from white to green. This "shortest distance clockwise" rule applies regardless of the number or combination of colors. Does that make sense? This is harder to explain than I thought when I started writing this.

It's not an oddity, it's in fitting with how every other color combination is written. One way to explain it is by imagining the mana symbols not in a straight line but as a pentagon. The shortest, least interrupted, clockwise path (I hope I'm explaining this in the right words) between two symbols is how they're ordered.

Another way to explain it is that each color has an allied color that comes before it, an enemy color that comes before it, an allied color that comes after it, and an enemy color that comes after it. Orders of shards and wedges are determined by the central color; black goes before green when they're together, and blue goes after green, so when it's all three of them green goes in the center and it's BGU. Back in Apocalypse, the "center" color was placed first for some reason but there was a templating reform in Tarkir block to put wedges in conformity with how shards are ordered.

Basically it's this:

GW
WU
UB
BR
RG
RW
WB
BG
GU
UR
GWU
WUB
UBR
BRG
RGW
RWB
GUR
WBG
URW
BGU
UBRG
BRGW
RGWU
GWUB
WUBR