This month will about about creating cards with synergy and exploring what that means.
Challenge
Design a card using a keyword ability or ability word from an existing set of MTG. Then, design a second card with a keyword ability or ability word of your own creation. The keyword abilities/ability words MUST synergize.
A combo is a type of synergy that results in either a) the game loss of an opponent typically starting with 20 life, b) the game win of a player, or c) a series of repeated actions, often infinite but not limited to being infinite, regardless of whether those actions are optional or not. Combos are banned.
Your keyword/ability word mechanic must synergize with the returning keyword/ability word mechanic. The other abilities synergizing don't count towards the challenge
PLEASE NOTE: This month will continue the use of the "Mandatory Top 3 Rule." For this month, you must submit a Top 3 during a round's critique period in order to receive any points for the round. Submitting critiques as well will be worth 2 bonus points in the round.
Your submissions are due Friday, May 18th, 23:59 EST.
Your judgments are due Monday, May 21st, 23:59 EST.
Schedule
• Preliminary Round 1 — Open to everyone (May 1st-5th)
• Preliminary Round 2 — Open to everyone (May 6th-10th)
• Preliminary Critiques — Open to everyone (Due May 14th)
• Top 8 — Open to top 8 finishers (May 15th-18th)
• Top 8 Critiques (Due May 21st)
• Top 4 — Open to top 4 finishers from last round (May 22nd-25th)
• Top 4 Critiques (Due May 28th)
• Final (End of month, winner determined by public poll)
Scavengers' Feast1BG
Sorcery (U)
Sacrifice a creature, then populate X times, where X is the sacrificed creature's toughness.
Call of Growth5GG
Sorcery (M)
Incarnate 7GG (Pay 7GG and exile this card: Create an X/X colorless Incarnation creature token, where X is this card's converted mana cost. It has "Whenever this creature attacks, <text below>.")
Look at the top five cards of your library. You may put a creature card and a land card from among them onto the battlefield. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
Miasmic Beetle2B
Creature - Insect (C)
Whenever Miasmic Beetle deals combat damage to a creature, put a corruption counter on that creature. (Permanents with corruption counters on them have "At the beginning of your upkeep, you lose 1 life for each corruption counter on this permanent.")
2/1
Plaguespreader Witch3B
Creature - Human Shaman (R)
Deathtouch
Whenever a creature dies or a card is discarded, you may exile it.
Put three cards exiled with Plaguespreader Witch into their owner's graveyards: Proliferate.
2/5
Venomous Serpopard1GG
Creature - Cat Snake (U)
Deathrouch Feral - Other creatures you control with base power and toughness 2/2 have deathtouch.
2/2
Mistarmor Knight3U
Creature - Human Knight (U)
When Mistarmor Knight enters the battlefield or is turned face up, manifest the top card of your library. (Put it onto the battlefield face down as a 2/2 creature. Turn it face up any time for its mana cost if it's a creature card.)
2/2
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
—Eli Shiffrin, Rules Manager, on a design stacking lifelink instances
Mechanic-creating weeks have always been my downfall =/
Engulf in ShadowXB
Instant {U}
Target creature gets -X/-X until end of turn.
Flashback--1B, Pay X life. (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)
Thoughtpryer Witch1BB
Creature - Vampire Shaman {U}
Flying Runecraft--Whenever you cast a spell, if it wasn't cast from your hand, target opponent discards a card. If that player can't, you draw a card.
2/2
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A mere ten days after the Mending, a young knight of Valeron and a young ranger of Eos made a discovery that would change Alara forever.
Distant Neighs1W
Instant - Arcane (r) Sweep - Return any number of Plains you control to their owner's hand: Create a white 1/1 Pegasus creature token with flying for each Plains returned this way.
Rustling Vigor2G
Creature - Elemental Spirit (u)
Phenomenon (You may play any card from your hand as a copy of this permanent)
When Rustling Vigor enters the battlefield, put two +1/+1 counters on target creature.
1/1
I think you showed this mechanic another time in the last couple of months. It's not terrible, but it would be hard to work in any of the normal + or - counters as well, and you would want either counter manipulation or ways to get rid of your own creatures to interact, which doesn't sound like the funnest environment ever. Good common execution though.
The witch has a lot of weird things going on but seems like a pretty cool way to fuel proliferate for black and doesn't feel like the mechanic as we have seen it before. It's sort of odd to have a proliferate engine that doesn't make any counters of its own, but I guess the contest restriction held you back there.
I actually tried for a while to work with manifest as well, it deserves another run. The Knight is a fine execution for a manifest-heavy environment, but is confusing at first glance (how do I get it face down?). I'm not sure if the flavor or mechanics really work for me on the Feral card - why lots of people are 2/2 as well, why do they become feral? I think "power 2 or less" might have been the right way to go there, and perhaps a different flavor.
Flashback card seems like a great execution, no problems there. I would kind of expect Runecraft to be an enchantment-related thing from the name. Rebound is another interaction that comes to mind, or cascade. It's an awfully weak trigger in a vacuum though. I like the discard or draw.
Distant Neighs is a hilarious name. Kind of feels like a one-shot Pegasus Refuge which is neat. I suppose this rate is fine.
Phenomenon is pretty crazy and you came up with a very interesting card to spotlight it. I kind of want it to cast them face down? I guess we could have Phenomenon masking tokens like the morph one to help a little bit.
Your Sweep card seems awfully strong, especially at instant speed.
Suddenly putting out like 5 power flying can easily end the game. The cost is high though. Maybe it's just a fair token generator a lot of times.
I like the 3 mana design you have there. Very solid. What I'm having trouble with is the Phenomenon mechanic. It will require an insurmountable amount of tracking.
It will quickly become very hard to tell which card is which. I don't think this is something that can be done.
Obviously, returning lands and then replaying them as copies of a creature has quite the appeal.
Engulf in Shadow is an extremely potent limited card. Even very strong for constructed. Maybe it would sit right in one of those vintage-only supplemental sets. Life is hardly ever an appropriate cost.
A 2/2 Flying for 3 is obviously fine. Rewarding spell-casting from anywhere other than the hand seems like it'd make for a bad mechanic. Sure, on one or two cards it's very interesting. But there's no way you'll get enough support for this into a set to actually make it work as an entire mechanic. There's very few ways to actually accomplish this way of casting and flashback is a nice synergy, but that can only make up so much of your limited deck. I doubt this could work.
I like how you circumvented the case where discarding wouldn't work anymore.
Keep in mind that with a mechanic that puts special counters on creatures you deny your set +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters. That's a huge downside, but doesn't mean the mechanic can't work.
This feels a lot like poison and you flavored it accordingly. I find it worrying that you want to engage in combat with that mechanic, but also want to avoid killing anything. This will lead to some very problematic gameplay, because after all, combat in Magic is about killing off creatures or risking to lose the board.
Proliferate works nicely with this, as it might help bringing the game to an end quickly.
I like the resource-minigame you set up with your witch. That's super cool. Feels a bit like the ingest/whatever Eldrazi mechanic, but a lot more natural.
Scavenger's Feast reads very scary, depending on what kind of tokens you have in your set. Korozda Guildmage is a nice comparison for this. It was a repeatable effect here, but only created 1/1s and I remembered it to be rather strong, even if it was only activated once. If you don't get 3/3 tokens too easily however I don't see an issue with this card.
That means it has quite some synergy with your second card, but you don't have to put those into the same set obviously.
I imagine this was supposed to exile the card from your hand. Makes the most sense to me.
7 mana seems okay for this. Obviously, this becomes OP the moment it gets abused with Emrakul and the likes, but I see that as an issue of those creatures and not this card.
I don't quite see why this is putting a land into play at 7 mana, but maybe that's actually a nice addition, when you can spend 9 mana on upsides like your mechanic.
The mechanic seems VERY fun and is rather cool for a mana-sink mechanic, but I dislike the convoluted execution. It requires tokens and tracking and weird wording and possibly rules that aren't there yet with the partial text-copy thing.
However it triggered my own creativity and there's easy solutions for this. As a lead-designer I'd keep this and change it a bit.
The best way to do this would probably just be Evoke. Have this be a 7GG 7/7 with Evoke 5GG. The effect would say "Whenever you cast this for it's evoke cost or when this attacks, do ..."
And suddenly the card plays super good with itself, because it can actually fetch itself. Obviously this would ruin the synergy, so I feel like you went out of your way to create synergy and made a mechanic that was needlessly complex.
That being said, I really like those two cards. Solid designs all around.
Top 3:
1. Gerrard's Mom
2. rhohn1357
3. Hemlock
Seeing how Gerrard's Mom made the most applicable mechanic here, with just a few changes, I decided to give the first place to them, as Mechanic design is the difficult part about this round to me. rhohn1357 was an obvious second place for the same reason. Then I had a hard time to decide about the third place, as my critique to both was essentially the same. In the end Hemlock got it, because a synergy from bouncing lands and then replaying them as something else felt more clever than a synergy from one mechanic doing a thing and the other just (almost) exactly asking for a card to do that thing. They were great cards all around though.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
—Eli Shiffrin, Rules Manager, on a design stacking lifelink instances
I like Incarnate a lot, the <text below> technology is really cool and seems like it has a lot of design space. Scavenger's Feast seems way too strong, though, especially at uncommon. If you have a 4/4 and a 3/3 token, that's an additional 8 power and toughness for three mana, and that's not even the best case scenario.
While I think both of your cards are balanced and work fine mechanically, I have some issues with the underlying mechanics. I don't believe sweep was ever very successful, as it's too all in and doesn't work well in multiples. As for phenomenon, while an interesting idea, I think it leads to way, way too repetitive gameplay.
Engulf in Shadow is a fine, if perhaps overly strong, removal spell. Runecraft, on the other hand, seems far too narrow. I don't like that it doesn't do anything without support from other mechanics in the set.
I like Mistarmor knight a lot, since it both enables and is a payoff for manifesting cards. Venomous Serpopard is also pretty cool, though I'm not sure what being feral has to do with 2/2 creatures.
Gerrards Mom: While I can certainly see Kin tree invocation and Korozda guildmage here, seeing populate on a blackberry card seems quité off. I understanf that you wanted to maximize synergy between your cards and in that respect you did two that fit like hand un glove. Incarnate is an awesome ability, a great Twister on Rmbalm/Rebound.
Doomfish: I really like the design of the knight. A great and subtle support for manifest. About feral, well, I always liked the idea of doing something with specific p/t. What is not clear in the emchanic is wether it works for other P/T ratios (like Feral- 1/1 creatures have flying on a 1/1 flyer) or if it's specifically thought for 2/2s. I really like the first idea.
RaikouRider: While I do like the cards (strong removal, a discard that still sets you ahead in card advantage if the hand is empty), Runecraft doesn't do anything by itself. The synergies with cascade, rebound, chandrawing amnd suych are there, but I don't think a mechanic that's so dependadnt of others is the way to go.
Rkhon: I like the corruption ability. It reminds me of old cards such as wanderlust or cursed land. Proliferate works nice with this as it does with anything with counters involved, so I feel the choice of existing keyword to be a bit on the safe side.
Great idea for a take on Evoke to replace Incarnate, doomfish. I think in that case you just make them Evoke Titans (and develop accordingly): "Whenever this enters the battlefield or attacks, ~." I suppose Channel is also another possibility here if we flip the creature and spell, which I should have noticed since I chose Channel as my underused mechanic in the GDS essay.
For extra background nobody asked for, as I mentioned in my review I was looking at manifest also and was trying to work on a way to cast/play the noncreature cards that you might end up manifesting. First thought was like "return a creature as you cast this and reduce cost by that creature's power" but that was both janky and dangerous.
The ever-popular quest for "spellmorph" came to mind, and somehow I ended up deciding to make a token that represents a spell. A couple of knobs I considered were having it cast on dealing damage (probably to a player), but that favors evasion or haste. It could also make a fixed-size token but the flavor seemed weaker, and I was also thinking about "localized exile" like imprint or haunt to stick the spell on a token or even another creature, but it was too wordy to do easily.
The repetitive nature is probably the biggest strike against the mechanic as is, so I was envisioning it as just a splash cycle mechanic like epic or tempting offer or something.
I'll keep that in mind if I ever decide to elaborate on the mechanic or something.
Art by Terese Nielsen
Theme
This month will about about creating cards with synergy and exploring what that means.
Challenge
PLEASE NOTE: This month will continue the use of the "Mandatory Top 3 Rule." For this month, you must submit a Top 3 during a round's critique period in order to receive any points for the round. Submitting critiques as well will be worth 2 bonus points in the round.
Your judgments are due Monday, May 21st, 23:59 EST.
Schedule
• Preliminary Round 1 — Open to everyone (May 1st-5th)
• Preliminary Round 2 — Open to everyone (May 6th-10th)
• Preliminary Critiques — Open to everyone (Due May 14th)
• Top 8 — Open to top 8 finishers (May 15th-18th)
• Top 8 Critiques (Due May 21st)
• Top 4 — Open to top 4 finishers from last round (May 22nd-25th)
• Top 4 Critiques (Due May 28th)
• Final (End of month, winner determined by public poll)
Sorcery (U)
Sacrifice a creature, then populate X times, where X is the sacrificed creature's toughness.
Call of Growth 5GG
Sorcery (M)
Incarnate 7GG (Pay 7GG and exile this card: Create an X/X colorless Incarnation creature token, where X is this card's converted mana cost. It has "Whenever this creature attacks, <text below>.")
Look at the top five cards of your library. You may put a creature card and a land card from among them onto the battlefield. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
Creature - Insect (C)
Whenever Miasmic Beetle deals combat damage to a creature, put a corruption counter on that creature. (Permanents with corruption counters on them have "At the beginning of your upkeep, you lose 1 life for each corruption counter on this permanent.")
2/1
Plaguespreader Witch 3B
Creature - Human Shaman (R)
Deathtouch
Whenever a creature dies or a card is discarded, you may exile it.
Put three cards exiled with Plaguespreader Witch into their owner's graveyards: Proliferate.
2/5
Creature - Cat Snake (U)
Deathrouch
Feral - Other creatures you control with base power and toughness 2/2 have deathtouch.
2/2
Mistarmor Knight 3U
Creature - Human Knight (U)
When Mistarmor Knight enters the battlefield or is turned face up, manifest the top card of your library. (Put it onto the battlefield face down as a 2/2 creature. Turn it face up any time for its mana cost if it's a creature card.)
2/2
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
—Eli Shiffrin, Rules Manager, on a design stacking lifelink instances
Engulf in Shadow XB
Instant {U}
Target creature gets -X/-X until end of turn.
Flashback--1B, Pay X life. (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)
Thoughtpryer Witch 1BB
Creature - Vampire Shaman {U}
Flying
Runecraft--Whenever you cast a spell, if it wasn't cast from your hand, target opponent discards a card. If that player can't, you draw a card.
2/2
Emille, Seven-Sting Dancer Shalin Nariya
Instant - Arcane (r)
Sweep - Return any number of Plains you control to their owner's hand: Create a white 1/1 Pegasus creature token with flying for each Plains returned this way.
Rustling Vigor 2G
Creature - Elemental Spirit (u)
Phenomenon (You may play any card from your hand as a copy of this permanent)
When Rustling Vigor enters the battlefield, put two +1/+1 counters on target creature.
1/1
The witch has a lot of weird things going on but seems like a pretty cool way to fuel proliferate for black and doesn't feel like the mechanic as we have seen it before. It's sort of odd to have a proliferate engine that doesn't make any counters of its own, but I guess the contest restriction held you back there.
Phenomenon is pretty crazy and you came up with a very interesting card to spotlight it. I kind of want it to cast them face down? I guess we could have Phenomenon masking tokens like the morph one to help a little bit.
2. rkohn1357
3. Raikou Rider
Suddenly putting out like 5 power flying can easily end the game. The cost is high though. Maybe it's just a fair token generator a lot of times.
I like the 3 mana design you have there. Very solid. What I'm having trouble with is the Phenomenon mechanic. It will require an insurmountable amount of tracking.
It will quickly become very hard to tell which card is which. I don't think this is something that can be done.
Obviously, returning lands and then replaying them as copies of a creature has quite the appeal.
A 2/2 Flying for 3 is obviously fine. Rewarding spell-casting from anywhere other than the hand seems like it'd make for a bad mechanic. Sure, on one or two cards it's very interesting. But there's no way you'll get enough support for this into a set to actually make it work as an entire mechanic. There's very few ways to actually accomplish this way of casting and flashback is a nice synergy, but that can only make up so much of your limited deck. I doubt this could work.
I like how you circumvented the case where discarding wouldn't work anymore.
This feels a lot like poison and you flavored it accordingly. I find it worrying that you want to engage in combat with that mechanic, but also want to avoid killing anything. This will lead to some very problematic gameplay, because after all, combat in Magic is about killing off creatures or risking to lose the board.
Proliferate works nicely with this, as it might help bringing the game to an end quickly.
I like the resource-minigame you set up with your witch. That's super cool. Feels a bit like the ingest/whatever Eldrazi mechanic, but a lot more natural.
That means it has quite some synergy with your second card, but you don't have to put those into the same set obviously.
I imagine this was supposed to exile the card from your hand. Makes the most sense to me.
7 mana seems okay for this. Obviously, this becomes OP the moment it gets abused with Emrakul and the likes, but I see that as an issue of those creatures and not this card.
I don't quite see why this is putting a land into play at 7 mana, but maybe that's actually a nice addition, when you can spend 9 mana on upsides like your mechanic.
The mechanic seems VERY fun and is rather cool for a mana-sink mechanic, but I dislike the convoluted execution. It requires tokens and tracking and weird wording and possibly rules that aren't there yet with the partial text-copy thing.
However it triggered my own creativity and there's easy solutions for this. As a lead-designer I'd keep this and change it a bit.
The best way to do this would probably just be Evoke. Have this be a 7GG 7/7 with Evoke 5GG. The effect would say "Whenever you cast this for it's evoke cost or when this attacks, do ..."
And suddenly the card plays super good with itself, because it can actually fetch itself. Obviously this would ruin the synergy, so I feel like you went out of your way to create synergy and made a mechanic that was needlessly complex.
That being said, I really like those two cards. Solid designs all around.
Top 3:
1. Gerrard's Mom
2. rhohn1357
3. Hemlock
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
Multiple instances of lifelink on the same creature are redundant.
—Eli Shiffrin, Rules Manager, on a design stacking lifelink instances
I like Incarnate a lot, the <text below> technology is really cool and seems like it has a lot of design space. Scavenger's Feast seems way too strong, though, especially at uncommon. If you have a 4/4 and a 3/3 token, that's an additional 8 power and toughness for three mana, and that's not even the best case scenario.
While I think both of your cards are balanced and work fine mechanically, I have some issues with the underlying mechanics. I don't believe sweep was ever very successful, as it's too all in and doesn't work well in multiples. As for phenomenon, while an interesting idea, I think it leads to way, way too repetitive gameplay.
Engulf in Shadow is a fine, if perhaps overly strong, removal spell. Runecraft, on the other hand, seems far too narrow. I don't like that it doesn't do anything without support from other mechanics in the set.
I like Mistarmor knight a lot, since it both enables and is a payoff for manifesting cards. Venomous Serpopard is also pretty cool, though I'm not sure what being feral has to do with 2/2 creatures.
1. Gerrard's Mom
2. Doomfish
3. Raikou Rider
Doomfish: I really like the design of the knight. A great and subtle support for manifest. About feral, well, I always liked the idea of doing something with specific p/t. What is not clear in the emchanic is wether it works for other P/T ratios (like Feral- 1/1 creatures have flying on a 1/1 flyer) or if it's specifically thought for 2/2s. I really like the first idea.
RaikouRider: While I do like the cards (strong removal, a discard that still sets you ahead in card advantage if the hand is empty), Runecraft doesn't do anything by itself. The synergies with cascade, rebound, chandrawing amnd suych are there, but I don't think a mechanic that's so dependadnt of others is the way to go.
Rkhon: I like the corruption ability. It reminds me of old cards such as wanderlust or cursed land. Proliferate works nice with this as it does with anything with counters involved, so I feel the choice of existing keyword to be a bit on the safe side.
T3
1. Gerrard's Mom
2. Dooomfish
3. Rkohn
For extra background nobody asked for, as I mentioned in my review I was looking at manifest also and was trying to work on a way to cast/play the noncreature cards that you might end up manifesting. First thought was like "return a creature as you cast this and reduce cost by that creature's power" but that was both janky and dangerous.
The ever-popular quest for "spellmorph" came to mind, and somehow I ended up deciding to make a token that represents a spell. A couple of knobs I considered were having it cast on dealing damage (probably to a player), but that favors evasion or haste. It could also make a fixed-size token but the flavor seemed weaker, and I was also thinking about "localized exile" like imprint or haunt to stick the spell on a token or even another creature, but it was too wordy to do easily.
The repetitive nature is probably the biggest strike against the mechanic as is, so I was envisioning it as just a splash cycle mechanic like epic or tempting offer or something.
I'll keep that in mind if I ever decide to elaborate on the mechanic or something.