The main problem with the 5-color hybrid guy is that it's pretty confusing to tell what you can actually pay to play him. I'm hoping there's a lot more stuff like the 2(R/W)G guy than just different combinations of hybrid, not because it's not cool, but just because it's confusing.
Doublecast does sound cool. Here's a shot at a formal wording:
Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card with converted mana cost less than (or equal to?) this card's converted mana cost. You may play that card without paying its mana cost.
Seems a bit wordy, might have shorter reminder text, but it's a fun concept. Sounds fairly limited in design space, though, I'd only expect it to be on a cycle or two.
I wanted to step in and say something, but I think I pretty much just agree with what's already been said. It's a shame for it to end, and I'd love for there to be some way to prevent this, but I do understand the reasoning.
The FCC has been responsible for the majority of my participation at MTGS, especially recently. There structure of it made it a relatively easy contest to be a part of: the stickies meant I didn't have to spend time hunting for the threads and could always depend on the new threads going up on a reasonable regular schedule, and the roughly one card a week time frame was about perfect for the amount of time I had. The judging system meant I could always get tangible, useful feedback for my designs, and the competition aspect made it more rewarding when I managed to make a really great design.
I'll be sad to see it go, and I'm not sure if anything without mod organization can really replace it, although I hope that I'm wrong and look forward to the MCC.
I have to say, the thing that I'm having the strongest reaction to here has nothing to do with the contents of the set. It's the fact that they're numbering the years ahead of time. The set's coming out in 2009, and it should be called Magic 2009. Cars and magazines claim to be from the future, but it's stupid when they do it, and I'm annoyed that now Magic's doing it too.
Besides that, this sounds good to me. New cards makes sense: core set plants have always been a weird concept, and it makes sense to just put cards like that straight into a core set without having to find room to print them in an expansion first. Between that and the fact that many cards that would normally be core set filler are going into expansions now instead (reprints of things like Unsummon and vanilla creatures), core sets should be a lot more exciting and popular.
I'm also hoping that printing new dual lands in the core set means they're going to be reducing the number of dual lands they print in expansions. It's not as bad now that most multicolor lands are uncommon so there's less of an economic issue, but I prefer it when making decks with more than two colors is more difficult. I liked it when most of the time the pain lands were the best we had to work with and Invasion's tap lands were a big deal for allowing standard decks to have eight two-color lands in them. I don't know if it's what they're going for, but having new duals in core sets would allow them to keep giving us new types of duals (instead of just recycling the pain lands constantly like they did before expansions regularly had new dual lands in them) without having to print a new cycle of dual lands in every block.
I'm also hoping that it means the new duals will be uncommon, something I've been wanting for a long time.
It makes sense. MaRo has repeatedly stated how much it annoyed him that "play" and "counter" had more than one meaning within the game. I wonder if they will change one of the "counter"s to something else?
It would be kind of funny if the battlefield thing was true and we end up with "play' not meaning anything at all.
I'm okay with play changing to cast. With changing the name of the Removed from the Game zone, I think it makes sense to give it a one-word name that accurately describes what it does, since the current name is both clunky and inaccurate.
It does need to be something that goes with a verb for putting it there. "Void" is a good name for the zone, but "Put target creature into the void" sounds bad and "Banish target creature to the void" would require introducing unnecessary terminology, which I don't think we want (that was why they got rid of bury in the first place: it was added another term people needed to know to the game, and they decided it wasn't worth it).
Exile's the suggestion that works best for this, since it can function as both a verb and a zone name, but I don't think it describes the zone very well. It makes sense for things like Path to Exile, but it's weird for things that are actually supposed to be destroying things like Unmake or Apocalypse, along with cards that affect anything that's not a creature (exiling an enchantment?), or things that use the zone for storage rather than removal (like suspend or hideaway).
Sure, I'll throw my two cents in here - WotC makes a lot of different kinds of cards for a lot of different kinds of players. Unless it is specified in the round description that you are designing a card for a particular player type or format, a judge should be open to where this card could fit in. Constructed (of all types), Multiplayer, Casual, Limited, even Flavor and Technical junkies are all valid audiences for card design. Within those groups there are any number of subsets (Contructed in a artifact heavy environment for example).
Since we are designing cards that are more or less in a vacum (outside of the paramaters of the assignment), its difficult to say exactly how they would fit into a hypothetical environment. A certin amount of leeway should be given when determining how often a situation where the card would be useful would come up.
There is something to be said however for cards that have a broader scope and hit more audiences. The trick is to find a balance. Make it's too broad and it boring, too narrow and it will never get used.
I just want to say that I basically agree with everything said here. I've always been annoyed when a judge barely looks at anything besides the current standard and limited.
Cards are made for many different audiences and purposes, and it seems silly to restrict ourselves to only designing cards that would be popular in tournaments in the current metagame. Just because you don't fully understand a format/audience group doesn't mean you should pretend it doesn't exist or that cards designed for it are worthless.
I believe in one of MaRo's mailbag articles he was asked "If I want to see a particular card made, should I post it on XYZSite and hope that you see it?" And Maro responded with "I actually don't peruse those sites because if I see a particular idea then I'm not allowed to "make" it into a card due to intellectual property issues, so I don't even look." That doesn't, of course, mean that he really doesn't.
I'm pretty sure if it weren't for the legal issues (and possibly limited time), MaRo would love to browse custom card forums, not just for ideas, but just out of curiosity to see what people make. It seems like the kind of thing he would be very interested in.
But yeah, even if the possibility of someone successfully sueing Wizards claiming that they stole their idea for a card is slim, it's still technically a legal possibility, so they're officially not allowed to look at custom cards.
Really, it's kind of a shame that legal matters stop Wizards from doing this, as it would be kind of awesome if MaRo commented on custom cards and I imagine he'd probably like to be able to do it too, and I could even see them getting some employees that way (after all, one of the 5th Dawn designers was a guy who got MaRo to convince the WotC lawyers to let him see the guy's custom set at a tournament).
This change was purely a simplification since the card already had so much information on it (3 abilities and the flavor quote). This felt much cleaner.
That makes sense, although you could have always used the Pride of the Clouds wording. I think it's an unspoken rule of */* creatures that they should have at least 1 toughness no matter what so you can always play them. It's not always followed, but this card is conditional enough that I personally would say it would be worth the messier templating to create a card that would play better.
I might need to stop reserving 'Wow' points. It seems to just cause confusion.
I think all you have to do is just mention the "wow" point in your judging. When there's no issues but someone doesn't get the wow point, say "No issues, but you didn't get the wow point." The confusion isn't caused by the existence of the wow point, it's caused by the fact that you're taking off points while saying that there's nothing wrong.
I didn't have time to read your entire post, but I the idea of poison being a dangerous resource, rather than purely an offensive win condition, has always seemed to me to be the most interesting way to use it. The main issue I can see with it is that the behavior of a "poison yourself" deck would change so dramatically depending on whether you were playing against a deck that tries to win through poison or a normal deck that it would be incredibly difficult to balance.
I thought your card was cool, but I really think it would be better if was still a 0/1 or 1/1 when you have no poison counters (I know an earlier version did this). It fits into my whole discussion earlier about the issue with the linearity and insolarity of poison. Right now, your card is 100% useless unless you are playing with a deck that poisons itself or against a deck that poisons its opponent, which makes it very, very narrow. Sure, it's still horrible underpowered if you're depending entirely on its ability to increase its toughness, but at least it's not useless. It's nice for newer casual players who just like to throw cards in their deck without as much of a plan (especially since it's mythic, so they'll be very inclined to want to build a deck featuring it), and also for games featuring poison decks where one player just happens to have a bad draw. Sure, if you're playing a with a poison yourselfor against a poison your opponent deck and don't have any counters by turn 5, the game's probably decided anyway, but it's still nice to at least be able to play it.
My scores for February Round 2 are up. A tie at the top of the standings, but since I had to pick 2 to move on, not a problem.
BTW, Whispered Thunder, I agree with you that Danceofmany's card is 25 worthy. Wow.
Actually, there are two meditators in the art (one really close to the right, and one more in the background). Not that it matters (I'm mad at myself for not gatherering "monk" before making the creature type), but it's there.
You did miss the main idea behind my card, which was that it was a poison hoser that wasn't useless if your opponent wasn't playing poison, so that it didn't have to be a sideboard card and could still be relevent in formats where poison wasn't incredibly prominent (especially casual) (see discussion below), although since the round told us to assume there was enough poison in the block to make poison cards relevent, it's reasonable to not care about this.
I think the cards this round actually did a really good job showcasing both poison's greatest strength as a mechanic and its biggest weakness.
I'd say the cards definitely showed that poison has a lot of design space. There were a lot of cool and interesting things done with it that show that it has the potential to be more than just a secondary life total.
They also, however, made very clear just how linear and insular a mechanic it is. Look at the cards this round. How many of them do anything if you're not playing a poison deck? Even worse, how may of them do anything if your opponent isn't playing a poison deck? I know that the round specifically told us to assume a poison heavy environment, so I suppose these are the cards that it makes sense to create in that context, but I don't like it.
The problem is that even in a poison heavy block, you don't want to make cards that are completely dependent on poison, for two reasons: the block is going to contain things other than poison, and, more importantly, it will interact terribly with other blocks. A card with an effect that scales based on the number of poison counters you have and does nothing if you don't would play very interestingly against poison decks (or maybe in control decks where you poison yourself), but that's it. Most of the time, it's just an extremely narrow and specific sideboard card.
Look at cards from other blocks that dealt exclusively with the block theme. Mirrodin has a lot of cards that only are relevant if people are playing artifacts, but artifacts are in just about every set. Lorwyn and Onslaught have cards that do nothing unles you're playing a certain tribe, but they deliberately chose tribes that exists in many blocks and printed a bunch of cards in the Lorwyn tribes in Time Spiral to increase the relevance. The only major block theme I can think of that really had almost no interaction outside of its block was all of the spirit and arcane stuff in Kamigawa block, and I think the linearity of those mechanics is one of the main reasons Kamigawa block is one of the least liked blocks in the past years.
And this is just cards that interact with those strategies in general. Cards that specifically hose block mechanics are much rarer. Outside of maybe Mirrodin, since artifact destruction relatively useful in a normal block too, how many cards are there per block that specifically hose its main mechanic? Probably only a handful. Now, how many cards were there this round that specifically hosed poison? A lot.
I'm not saying this was a bad round, but it seems to me that even when we're assuming that there's enough poison in the block for cards that interact with it to be relevant, we we wouldn't want that many poison hosers.
When I made my card, I specifically set out to design one that would still do something when no one was playing poison. It hoses poison if your opponent's playing if, but if they're not, then it's still a one-sided Howling Mine. I think my favorite cards of the round were the ones that scaled with the number of poison counters you had, but also were able to generate poison counters for you, so that if your opponent wasn't playing poson, you could give yourself poison counters to enhance the effect without less risk, but if they were, they would fuel its ability for you, even if it was also more dangerous.
I think Dumb Luck's Card actually best summed up this round for me. It's a really cool and interesting design conceptually, but it's incredibly narrow, and would probably be incredibly unpopular. Even in a block where poison is a major theme, I doubt there would be more than 30 or so creatures with poisonous per set, and likely less. And there probably wouldn't be any creatures with poisonous outside of the block in standard.
While I think that Psuedofate's color analysis makes sense, I would caution people against defining the theoretical block's take on poison across the color pie in this thread. Maybe a consensus will emerge, but if one of my players uses entirely different flavor, but it makes sense then they'll do just as well. Along the same lines, design notes aren't aloud, but flavor text should be used to great advantage.
I think this is something people worried about the color point should keep in mind. The challenge is not to come up with every single color's interaction with poison is for the block. The challenge is to make a single card that fits into a color other than green or black that deals with poison. The card doesn't have to represent its color's entire interaction with poison. It just has to be one card dealing with poison that makes sense in that color.
and also, no B/G bonus point is awful. I can't even fathom how a U or R card fits poison into its color philosophies, and all white has to do with the matter is hosing it.
That's where the challenge of the round comes in. Since poison's only been a very minor mechanic appearing on a few cards, it hasn't been explored much, and it's only appeared in two colors because it makes flavorful sense in those colors. If there were a block with poison as the main theme, however, every card would have to interact with poison in some way. Because there's no precedent for poison in other colors beyond Leeches and the design space for poison in general has been explored so little, that's what this challenge is for.
Also, it's just a bonus point. You can skip it if you want, if you think your best B/G idea will score more than a point higher than your best non-B/G idea. Bonus points are much more interesting when they provide a challenge and force you to decide whether to take them or not instead of just being gimme points. Besides, the other point's easy enough.
Personally, I think this is a really cool round, because it provides two interesting challenges. Poison's always an interesting mechanic to work with because so many people like or dislike it so strongly. It's also a mechanic that's barely been explored and has some very interesting and tricky design considerations that are only emphasized by an entire block with it as a theme (I'll probably discuss this more). Furthermore, the challenge of trying to find a way to get other colors to interact with a mechanic that has traditionally only existed in two colors is very cool and requires thinking about the color pie on a much deeper level than normal.
Glassblood Meditators 2WU
Creature - Human Cleric (Rare)
At the beginning of your upkeep, if you have no poison counters, draw a card. Otherwise, you lose a poison counter. “Cleanse the body, enlighten the mind.” —Glassblood Mantra
2/3
Overall I was actually surprised at how much I liked so many of the cards. I think Manifest is a great ability and has tons of room to do cool things, which I guessed helped, but I was really happy to see so many good ideas come out of it. It made it really hard to pick winners, though, as only two cards earned less than 19 points, which is a pretty strong score on my scale. I look forward to viewing the cards from outside my bracket.
As you may or may not know, I used this keyword for a recent project I've worked on so I've had a great deal of time to think about Manifest, how it should be designed, and what kind of environment it plays well in.
The non-manifest cost of the card should be aggressive enough to make you want to hardcast it, but the manifest cost needs to be efficient enough that you'd want to play the card in Limited at a minimum. Without that tension, it becomes a 'no brainer' on how to play it. Too weak as just an aura or too agressively costed to manifest and no one will want to do anything but manifest it. Too weak when manifested and it becomes unplayable jank in Limited, which will kill the mechanic at common and uncommon.
A set/block with Manifest (and lots of auras) desperately needs to be weak on efficient removal, especially at instant-speed. The thing that makes Manifest the most fun is it gives you the opportunity to just play a creature when you need to, or pile auras on one creature to make an absurd and hilarious creature on the table (sort of like packing a deck full of Exalted effects). If removal is too good, it pushes you towards just playing it as a creature and kills the fun of duking it out with, big nasty piles of abilities. It majorly sucks to play a cool aura just to have the target die in response.
Manifest is a wordy ability, and what's worse is that it requires an entire line of nothing but "Enchant foo" in the text box. That makes it very difficult to find effects that fit on a card and are still interesting and cool. That was sort of a hidden part of the diffculty of this round, making it much more challenging that it appeared at first glance.
I'd be interested to know what other judges and designers thought/reacted to the design of Manifest in general.
I have to say, I really enjoyed this round. The two different requirements of the round, using Manifest and designing for an enchantment block, were both interesting and unusual requirements that required a slightly different approach than normal for the FCC, and they interacted in cool ways.
I think the considerations of an enchantment block are very interesting. We're so used to designing cards with the current standard in mind, and I really liked being able to focus less on that and make a card that was clearly designed for a different environment. It was kind of neat trying to balance my card having to consider the fact that creating a bunch of enchantment tokens would probably be a lot more powerful and having a lot of enchantments would be a lot more common than in most formats, but so would enchantment removal. It makes it a lot trickier to figure things out, since we don't really know how these things would balance out, and each person will have different interpretations of what features of an enchantment block we can take for granted (I hadn't even considered the idea of weakened spot removal to promote auras), but it was still a very interesting round.
I also think manifest is an amazing mechanic. It creates good gameplay, both because it requires skill to use well and because it helps smooth out limited a lot. It has a huge amount of design space, as evidenced by the submissions this round. For this round it tied very well into a hypothetical block theme. And it's cool conceptually and has great flavor, to the point where cards it's on barely need to explain it flavor-wise because it essentially speaks for itself (which is good, since it doesn't leave much room for flavor text). I think these are probably the main purposes of mechanics, and a lot of mechanics ony manage to achieve one or two of them. A mechanic that does all of these things is a really great mechanic.
I also want to add that making the creature tokens enchantments was a brilliant idea. In this case, it ties in very nicely with the block theme, which is always a good thing for a mechanic to do. Even outside of an enchantment block, though, it still makes a lot of sense from a flavor and gmeplay perspective. If the manifested token is supposed to be the physical embodiment of the aura, then it should be possible to destroy it with encantment destruction. You're essentially playing the aura as a creature, so it makes sense that enchantment removal can remove the entire thing, and not just destroy the aura and leave the creature there to be taken out by some other method.
To me, mythics seem to have a lot more flavor behind them and probably allow more color bleeding because of this. I mean, mechanically there's nothing green or blue about Rafiq of the Many. But he's oozing with Bant flavor. So I can see how that would be justified.
Well, I would say Rafiq is actually a different case. He's mythic because he's legendary. He's three colors because he's the Bant legend, and each shard got a legend in all three of it's colors. His abilities are all while because coming up with a single ability that incorporates three colors is really hard, and Shards has a lot of 3 color cards and not all of them can be Chinese menu cards (multicolor cards with one ability from each color). Shards has lots of 3-color cards that could have been printed in just their central color, but the extra colors helps promote the set's theme of 3-color play and allows them to cost the card more agressively than they could in monocolor.
I do think mythics are a bit more okay with flavor-inspired color-bleeding than rares, just like how rares are more okay with it than uncommons and commons almost never have it. On the other hand, any time where you start to talk about flavor-based color bleeding being more permissible leads to issues with people bending the color pie a bit too easilly.
As for Conflux being mythic, it's a pretty huge effect with a pretty huge flavor. It has the same name as the set, which implies that it's very important. The flavor revolves around basically the plot of the whole set. Furthermore, it's an eight mana five-color card (5 color cards that cost more than 5 mana are very rare, and this is tied for the second most expensive, behind Progenitus), which is pretty huge, and it's got a massive, game winning effect. It's a Johnnyish massive game-winning effect, which means it isn't quite as flashy as some other massive effects, but it's still huge. If you find it incredibly borng and unexciting, that probably means that you're just not the type of person it's meant for.
Forgive me if I sound whiny (and I'm really not trying to be whiny), but is it really soon enough to start deducting points for cards "not feeling enough like mythic rares"?
I think it makes sense to be a bit lenient here, considering we've only seen 25 of them. On the other hand, while Conflux's mythics seem a bit less clear-cut than Shards of Alara's, there are still some patterns we can see. Even the cards that are probably the most dubious mythics, Thornling and Mirror-Sigil Sergeant, still definitely have qualities that, to a certain degree, justify it (Thornling has tons of abilities and is iconic, the sergeant can copy itself exponentially). I don't think we can say for sure what doesn't feel like a mythic in general, but I think there are definitely cards that are pretty clearly not mythic. Things that are rare purely due to complexity or that are bordeline uncommon (the Conflux Scepters), for example.
Better for collector, the competitive, the casual. But man, is it a punch to the nuts for card designers.
Seriously, a lot of the mythic rares Wizards make don't seem like mythic rares. Godsire is adorable and all, but it's a huge clunky dude that makes more huge clunky dudes. Not really something we wouldn't have seen on a rare before. In fact, the only thing Mythic Rares really do is generally be Planeswalkers. Otherwise, uh, they're rares. That (fortunately) you don't have to see as much of.
Mythic rares were never meant to be a design tool, and I don't see how they really hurt amateur card designers in any way (also, it's not like we're a group that Wizards puts much effort into helping).
Mythic rares are supposed to be cards that casual players or collectors get excited about. When a casual player opens a Godsire, he gets very excited, and wants to show if of to his friends. Of course Godsire's nothing especially new and could have easilly been printed at a rare in an earlier set. But since mythic rares now exist, it makes sense as a mythic. Mythics weren't created to allow new cards to be made that couldn't have been made before, they were designed to add excitement to opening a pack.
Enchantress' Blessing 2G
Enchantment - Aura (U)
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature gets +1/+1 for each enchantment you control. 2G: Return Enchantress' Blessing to its owner's hand.
Manifest 3GG(You may play this for it’s manifest cost without a target. If you do, it comes into play attached to a 2/2 colorless Spirit enchantment creature token.)
Doublecast does sound cool. Here's a shot at a formal wording:
Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card with converted mana cost less than (or equal to?) this card's converted mana cost. You may play that card without paying its mana cost.
Seems a bit wordy, might have shorter reminder text, but it's a fun concept. Sounds fairly limited in design space, though, I'd only expect it to be on a cycle or two.
The FCC has been responsible for the majority of my participation at MTGS, especially recently. There structure of it made it a relatively easy contest to be a part of: the stickies meant I didn't have to spend time hunting for the threads and could always depend on the new threads going up on a reasonable regular schedule, and the roughly one card a week time frame was about perfect for the amount of time I had. The judging system meant I could always get tangible, useful feedback for my designs, and the competition aspect made it more rewarding when I managed to make a really great design.
I'll be sad to see it go, and I'm not sure if anything without mod organization can really replace it, although I hope that I'm wrong and look forward to the MCC.
Besides that, this sounds good to me. New cards makes sense: core set plants have always been a weird concept, and it makes sense to just put cards like that straight into a core set without having to find room to print them in an expansion first. Between that and the fact that many cards that would normally be core set filler are going into expansions now instead (reprints of things like Unsummon and vanilla creatures), core sets should be a lot more exciting and popular.
I'm also hoping that printing new dual lands in the core set means they're going to be reducing the number of dual lands they print in expansions. It's not as bad now that most multicolor lands are uncommon so there's less of an economic issue, but I prefer it when making decks with more than two colors is more difficult. I liked it when most of the time the pain lands were the best we had to work with and Invasion's tap lands were a big deal for allowing standard decks to have eight two-color lands in them. I don't know if it's what they're going for, but having new duals in core sets would allow them to keep giving us new types of duals (instead of just recycling the pain lands constantly like they did before expansions regularly had new dual lands in them) without having to print a new cycle of dual lands in every block.
I'm also hoping that it means the new duals will be uncommon, something I've been wanting for a long time.
It would be kind of funny if the battlefield thing was true and we end up with "play' not meaning anything at all.
I'm okay with play changing to cast. With changing the name of the Removed from the Game zone, I think it makes sense to give it a one-word name that accurately describes what it does, since the current name is both clunky and inaccurate.
It does need to be something that goes with a verb for putting it there. "Void" is a good name for the zone, but "Put target creature into the void" sounds bad and "Banish target creature to the void" would require introducing unnecessary terminology, which I don't think we want (that was why they got rid of bury in the first place: it was added another term people needed to know to the game, and they decided it wasn't worth it).
Exile's the suggestion that works best for this, since it can function as both a verb and a zone name, but I don't think it describes the zone very well. It makes sense for things like Path to Exile, but it's weird for things that are actually supposed to be destroying things like Unmake or Apocalypse, along with cards that affect anything that's not a creature (exiling an enchantment?), or things that use the zone for storage rather than removal (like suspend or hideaway).
I just want to say that I basically agree with everything said here. I've always been annoyed when a judge barely looks at anything besides the current standard and limited.
Cards are made for many different audiences and purposes, and it seems silly to restrict ourselves to only designing cards that would be popular in tournaments in the current metagame. Just because you don't fully understand a format/audience group doesn't mean you should pretend it doesn't exist or that cards designed for it are worthless.
I'm pretty sure if it weren't for the legal issues (and possibly limited time), MaRo would love to browse custom card forums, not just for ideas, but just out of curiosity to see what people make. It seems like the kind of thing he would be very interested in.
But yeah, even if the possibility of someone successfully sueing Wizards claiming that they stole their idea for a card is slim, it's still technically a legal possibility, so they're officially not allowed to look at custom cards.
Really, it's kind of a shame that legal matters stop Wizards from doing this, as it would be kind of awesome if MaRo commented on custom cards and I imagine he'd probably like to be able to do it too, and I could even see them getting some employees that way (after all, one of the 5th Dawn designers was a guy who got MaRo to convince the WotC lawyers to let him see the guy's custom set at a tournament).
That makes sense, although you could have always used the Pride of the Clouds wording. I think it's an unspoken rule of */* creatures that they should have at least 1 toughness no matter what so you can always play them. It's not always followed, but this card is conditional enough that I personally would say it would be worth the messier templating to create a card that would play better.
I think all you have to do is just mention the "wow" point in your judging. When there's no issues but someone doesn't get the wow point, say "No issues, but you didn't get the wow point." The confusion isn't caused by the existence of the wow point, it's caused by the fact that you're taking off points while saying that there's nothing wrong.
I didn't have time to read your entire post, but I the idea of poison being a dangerous resource, rather than purely an offensive win condition, has always seemed to me to be the most interesting way to use it. The main issue I can see with it is that the behavior of a "poison yourself" deck would change so dramatically depending on whether you were playing against a deck that tries to win through poison or a normal deck that it would be incredibly difficult to balance.
I thought your card was cool, but I really think it would be better if was still a 0/1 or 1/1 when you have no poison counters (I know an earlier version did this). It fits into my whole discussion earlier about the issue with the linearity and insolarity of poison. Right now, your card is 100% useless unless you are playing with a deck that poisons itself or against a deck that poisons its opponent, which makes it very, very narrow. Sure, it's still horrible underpowered if you're depending entirely on its ability to increase its toughness, but at least it's not useless. It's nice for newer casual players who just like to throw cards in their deck without as much of a plan (especially since it's mythic, so they'll be very inclined to want to build a deck featuring it), and also for games featuring poison decks where one player just happens to have a bad draw. Sure, if you're playing a with a poison yourselfor against a poison your opponent deck and don't have any counters by turn 5, the game's probably decided anyway, but it's still nice to at least be able to play it.
Actually, there are two meditators in the art (one really close to the right, and one more in the background). Not that it matters (I'm mad at myself for not gatherering "monk" before making the creature type), but it's there.
You did miss the main idea behind my card, which was that it was a poison hoser that wasn't useless if your opponent wasn't playing poison, so that it didn't have to be a sideboard card and could still be relevent in formats where poison wasn't incredibly prominent (especially casual) (see discussion below), although since the round told us to assume there was enough poison in the block to make poison cards relevent, it's reasonable to not care about this.
I think the cards this round actually did a really good job showcasing both poison's greatest strength as a mechanic and its biggest weakness.
I'd say the cards definitely showed that poison has a lot of design space. There were a lot of cool and interesting things done with it that show that it has the potential to be more than just a secondary life total.
They also, however, made very clear just how linear and insular a mechanic it is. Look at the cards this round. How many of them do anything if you're not playing a poison deck? Even worse, how may of them do anything if your opponent isn't playing a poison deck? I know that the round specifically told us to assume a poison heavy environment, so I suppose these are the cards that it makes sense to create in that context, but I don't like it.
The problem is that even in a poison heavy block, you don't want to make cards that are completely dependent on poison, for two reasons: the block is going to contain things other than poison, and, more importantly, it will interact terribly with other blocks. A card with an effect that scales based on the number of poison counters you have and does nothing if you don't would play very interestingly against poison decks (or maybe in control decks where you poison yourself), but that's it. Most of the time, it's just an extremely narrow and specific sideboard card.
Look at cards from other blocks that dealt exclusively with the block theme. Mirrodin has a lot of cards that only are relevant if people are playing artifacts, but artifacts are in just about every set. Lorwyn and Onslaught have cards that do nothing unles you're playing a certain tribe, but they deliberately chose tribes that exists in many blocks and printed a bunch of cards in the Lorwyn tribes in Time Spiral to increase the relevance. The only major block theme I can think of that really had almost no interaction outside of its block was all of the spirit and arcane stuff in Kamigawa block, and I think the linearity of those mechanics is one of the main reasons Kamigawa block is one of the least liked blocks in the past years.
And this is just cards that interact with those strategies in general. Cards that specifically hose block mechanics are much rarer. Outside of maybe Mirrodin, since artifact destruction relatively useful in a normal block too, how many cards are there per block that specifically hose its main mechanic? Probably only a handful. Now, how many cards were there this round that specifically hosed poison? A lot.
I'm not saying this was a bad round, but it seems to me that even when we're assuming that there's enough poison in the block for cards that interact with it to be relevant, we we wouldn't want that many poison hosers.
When I made my card, I specifically set out to design one that would still do something when no one was playing poison. It hoses poison if your opponent's playing if, but if they're not, then it's still a one-sided Howling Mine. I think my favorite cards of the round were the ones that scaled with the number of poison counters you had, but also were able to generate poison counters for you, so that if your opponent wasn't playing poson, you could give yourself poison counters to enhance the effect without less risk, but if they were, they would fuel its ability for you, even if it was also more dangerous.
I think Dumb Luck's Card actually best summed up this round for me. It's a really cool and interesting design conceptually, but it's incredibly narrow, and would probably be incredibly unpopular. Even in a block where poison is a major theme, I doubt there would be more than 30 or so creatures with poisonous per set, and likely less. And there probably wouldn't be any creatures with poisonous outside of the block in standard.
I think this is something people worried about the color point should keep in mind. The challenge is not to come up with every single color's interaction with poison is for the block. The challenge is to make a single card that fits into a color other than green or black that deals with poison. The card doesn't have to represent its color's entire interaction with poison. It just has to be one card dealing with poison that makes sense in that color.
That's where the challenge of the round comes in. Since poison's only been a very minor mechanic appearing on a few cards, it hasn't been explored much, and it's only appeared in two colors because it makes flavorful sense in those colors. If there were a block with poison as the main theme, however, every card would have to interact with poison in some way. Because there's no precedent for poison in other colors beyond Leeches and the design space for poison in general has been explored so little, that's what this challenge is for.
Also, it's just a bonus point. You can skip it if you want, if you think your best B/G idea will score more than a point higher than your best non-B/G idea. Bonus points are much more interesting when they provide a challenge and force you to decide whether to take them or not instead of just being gimme points. Besides, the other point's easy enough.
Personally, I think this is a really cool round, because it provides two interesting challenges. Poison's always an interesting mechanic to work with because so many people like or dislike it so strongly. It's also a mechanic that's barely been explored and has some very interesting and tricky design considerations that are only emphasized by an entire block with it as a theme (I'll probably discuss this more). Furthermore, the challenge of trying to find a way to get other colors to interact with a mechanic that has traditionally only existed in two colors is very cool and requires thinking about the color pie on a much deeper level than normal.
Creature - Human Cleric (Rare)
At the beginning of your upkeep, if you have no poison counters, draw a card. Otherwise, you lose a poison counter.
“Cleanse the body, enlighten the mind.”
—Glassblood Mantra
2/3
I think the considerations of an enchantment block are very interesting. We're so used to designing cards with the current standard in mind, and I really liked being able to focus less on that and make a card that was clearly designed for a different environment. It was kind of neat trying to balance my card having to consider the fact that creating a bunch of enchantment tokens would probably be a lot more powerful and having a lot of enchantments would be a lot more common than in most formats, but so would enchantment removal. It makes it a lot trickier to figure things out, since we don't really know how these things would balance out, and each person will have different interpretations of what features of an enchantment block we can take for granted (I hadn't even considered the idea of weakened spot removal to promote auras), but it was still a very interesting round.
I also think manifest is an amazing mechanic. It creates good gameplay, both because it requires skill to use well and because it helps smooth out limited a lot. It has a huge amount of design space, as evidenced by the submissions this round. For this round it tied very well into a hypothetical block theme. And it's cool conceptually and has great flavor, to the point where cards it's on barely need to explain it flavor-wise because it essentially speaks for itself (which is good, since it doesn't leave much room for flavor text). I think these are probably the main purposes of mechanics, and a lot of mechanics ony manage to achieve one or two of them. A mechanic that does all of these things is a really great mechanic.
I also want to add that making the creature tokens enchantments was a brilliant idea. In this case, it ties in very nicely with the block theme, which is always a good thing for a mechanic to do. Even outside of an enchantment block, though, it still makes a lot of sense from a flavor and gmeplay perspective. If the manifested token is supposed to be the physical embodiment of the aura, then it should be possible to destroy it with encantment destruction. You're essentially playing the aura as a creature, so it makes sense that enchantment removal can remove the entire thing, and not just destroy the aura and leave the creature there to be taken out by some other method.
Well, I would say Rafiq is actually a different case. He's mythic because he's legendary. He's three colors because he's the Bant legend, and each shard got a legend in all three of it's colors. His abilities are all while because coming up with a single ability that incorporates three colors is really hard, and Shards has a lot of 3 color cards and not all of them can be Chinese menu cards (multicolor cards with one ability from each color). Shards has lots of 3-color cards that could have been printed in just their central color, but the extra colors helps promote the set's theme of 3-color play and allows them to cost the card more agressively than they could in monocolor.
I do think mythics are a bit more okay with flavor-inspired color-bleeding than rares, just like how rares are more okay with it than uncommons and commons almost never have it. On the other hand, any time where you start to talk about flavor-based color bleeding being more permissible leads to issues with people bending the color pie a bit too easilly.
As for Conflux being mythic, it's a pretty huge effect with a pretty huge flavor. It has the same name as the set, which implies that it's very important. The flavor revolves around basically the plot of the whole set. Furthermore, it's an eight mana five-color card (5 color cards that cost more than 5 mana are very rare, and this is tied for the second most expensive, behind Progenitus), which is pretty huge, and it's got a massive, game winning effect. It's a Johnnyish massive game-winning effect, which means it isn't quite as flashy as some other massive effects, but it's still huge. If you find it incredibly borng and unexciting, that probably means that you're just not the type of person it's meant for.
I think it makes sense to be a bit lenient here, considering we've only seen 25 of them. On the other hand, while Conflux's mythics seem a bit less clear-cut than Shards of Alara's, there are still some patterns we can see. Even the cards that are probably the most dubious mythics, Thornling and Mirror-Sigil Sergeant, still definitely have qualities that, to a certain degree, justify it (Thornling has tons of abilities and is iconic, the sergeant can copy itself exponentially). I don't think we can say for sure what doesn't feel like a mythic in general, but I think there are definitely cards that are pretty clearly not mythic. Things that are rare purely due to complexity or that are bordeline uncommon (the Conflux Scepters), for example.
Mythic rares were never meant to be a design tool, and I don't see how they really hurt amateur card designers in any way (also, it's not like we're a group that Wizards puts much effort into helping).
Mythic rares are supposed to be cards that casual players or collectors get excited about. When a casual player opens a Godsire, he gets very excited, and wants to show if of to his friends. Of course Godsire's nothing especially new and could have easilly been printed at a rare in an earlier set. But since mythic rares now exist, it makes sense as a mythic. Mythics weren't created to allow new cards to be made that couldn't have been made before, they were designed to add excitement to opening a pack.
Enchantress' Blessing 2G
Enchantment - Aura (U)
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature gets +1/+1 for each enchantment you control.
2G: Return Enchantress' Blessing to its owner's hand.
Manifest 3GG (You may play this for it’s manifest cost without a target. If you do, it comes into play attached to a 2/2 colorless Spirit enchantment creature token.)