MTG Salvation

throwing around some more praymakers

thanks again for all the feedback OB, really helps out

You'll have to cut the flavor text though, as is the card is too long, even with the fix.

is it really too long? i mean you can still read the card and all. i don't really care if wotc would consider it too long, given i don't work for them

For NWO, are you directly ignoring it, or just allowing yourself to stick to it a bit less?

haven't really thought about it, i'm just not a fan of it and am trying to set expectations. my complexity limits are determined by my audience, who are all experienced players and generally pretty smart people. i don't know what the limit is there, but i'd rather overshoot and work backwards

I like the mechanic for Process, but not too big a fan of the name. It probably isn't a good idea to make it a repeatable effect either, it basically means this isn't an effect you can have at common.

yeah the name is starting to wear thin with me as well. it does a good job of conveying the flavour - which is meant to imply a disengagement with the whole "you are killing this creature" aspect of it (think like how people buy meat from the supermarket in droves but never kill an animal) - but there might be a better word for it. the effect isn't repeatable once it resolves, but you can stack it on itself multiple times. i'm guessing the answer here is to make it work like a sorcery?

The face-down land mechanics are really cool, and fits a recovering Otaria really well.

thank you! nice to know that when some people look past the rules issues they see the value in them, i still think they work really well in a flavour sense

Bloodshed seems like a very fixed version of Bloodthirst, definitely avoids the unreliability of the old mechanic.

thanks, it's a bit wordy but once you conceptualise it as "combat that impacts the board state" i think it's easy enough to internalise

Symbiotic, like pray, has a lot of opportunity for being unhealthily parasitic. I don't think it's bad, just something to keep an eye on.

symbiotic is the closest mechanic to the chopping block, it's been there since the beginning in some form and was originally in all 5 colours as a way to give everyone cards that care about counters. its importance has diminished over time, and i'm starting to wonder if i need it at all (activating abilities is a benefit in and of itself)

Blessing is weird, because if you're behind, things above blessing 1 can be a bit feelsbad as topdecks,, since it requires a board presence to really use, and it's a bit similar to cohort, which wasn't the best thing in the world. Then, this also isn't anywhere near as limited. Just another thing to be a bit more careful with.

you're right about that downside to blessing, but the same was true of convoke. it's in the token-generating colours, so i think it could be fine. but i'll keep an eye on this in testing. certainly you've now got me thinking extra-hard about any cards with a blessing cost of 3 or higher; convoke's variable nature meant i can't simply say "convoke worked so this will" in those cases

I'm a little disappointed that we're not seeing like, how all five colors play into recovery.

we talked about this in chat a bit, but it's worth bringing it in here as well. OTF is about rebirth, but it's about other things as well; ultimately it's a story of what happens to Otaria and its inhabitants in the centuries that follow The Mending, and everything that follows from that. it's only really Green that's interested in rewilding the continent: White wants to purify it from its previous sins, Red has regressed to barbaric ritualism, Blue is obsessed with making itself more powerful with no regard for what gets in its way, Black is undergoing increased ecological decay and Colourless hates those living on Otaria today, it wants them gone

this isn't a story of rebirth, it's a story of co-ordination problems. the druids in krosa want everyone to work together - that's why they can give essence counters to any creature and not just themselves - but instead they're going to watch as everyone rips everything apart. it's a sad story, much like the story we're living through now

Artwork is Rorate Caeli Desuper et Nubes Pluant Iustum by Anselm Kiefer http://www.hallartfoundation.org/exhibition/anselm-kiefer_1/artworks/slideshow#2

Flavour text is a lift from a wonderfully written article with horrible implications: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

In the late nineteen-eighties, Brian Atwater, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey, and a graduate student named David Yamaguchi found the answer, and another major clue in the Cascadia puzzle. Their discovery is best illustrated in a place called the ghost forest, a grove of western red cedars on the banks of the Copalis River, near the Washington coast. When I paddled out to it last summer, with Atwater and Yamaguchi, it was easy to see how it got its name. The cedars are spread out across a low salt marsh on a wide northern bend in the river, long dead but still standing. Leafless, branchless, barkless, they are reduced to their trunks and worn to a smooth silver-gray, as if they had always carried their own tombstones inside them.

this is a pretty significant flavour flagbearer, really want to convey the emptiness and lack of life present in Nothing. not sure if i have it yet

that should say activate instead of use, you get the idea

here's a better-worded version

rules text on this one is potentially too complicated, but this is an indication of what i think might be a good fix for pray at common. rather than having commons refer to their own prayer count, i'm thinking that i can have fixed-level threshold-type effects at common and variable-level effects at uncommon/rare

that's great to hear; glad you like it. the main concern i have is that it's so broad that defining the boundaries on its in-set usage is a bit tough, so if you have any thoughts on that they'd be well appreciated

first up, thanks a lot for putting so much thought into your reply; really appreciate it

One thing I've noticed in the multiverse files however, is that some cards check how many times "creatures you control" prayed and some card check how many times that specific creature prayed. This seems like it might get difficult to track. And you don't want your players to spend half of the game trying to remember all the things that happened sense your last upkeep and in what order. Imagine how hard that would be to track in a five player game. You could use dice (as a visual aid, not use counters as a mechanic) to track, but even that would be a lot for each creature.

Have you ever played a competitive storm deck. Sometimes players will use dice to track the storm count when the try to combo off. I can see pray being user-friendly if you could track everything on just one dice. In order to do this, I'd have everything count the number of times all creatures prayed since your last upkeep.

this is an interesting point. originally the idea was that commons reference their own prayer counts while uncommon & rare open up the space to prayer counts of all your creatures; typical escalation of scope as you move up the rarity tree. but i agree with you that this might be adding a bit too much overhead in terms of prayer management, and there's already a lot to manage in the set outside of it. i'm a little bit hesitant because it might cause power level issues, but i should be able to resolve those in time anyway. i'll have a crack at tweaking the set with this in mind, i've been mulling this over this morning and i think you're right.

The other thing I'd suggest is always pushing the idea that the creature is praying, not the player. So Parish Congregation shouldn't say "Tap two untapped Humans you control: Pray, then pray." it should read "Tap two untapped Humans you control: Parish Congregation prays twice." Or better yet "Tap two untapped Humans you control: Those creatures pray."

yeah that's just poor templating on my part, it's meant to be the creatures who are the ones praying (planeswalkers are god-like enough in and of themselves, we don't need no prayers). i need to go back over the existing cards and edit them now that i'm a bit more sure of the rules text.

I also love the flavour that prayer does nothing by it's self. It's magics answer to the old saying "God helps those who help themselves."

the original flavour idea was just that prayers take time to be answered, but i like this aspect of it that you've identified as well. always nice when people find new flavour manifestations in your ideas

One last thing, I'd have a really good think how you want this to actually play. I think this mechanic has great potential if you embraced the idea that the "prayer count" will vary from turn to turn. Like a tide swelling, some turns lot's will happen. Other turns, not much prayer. I'd remove a lot of automatic praying, like every upkeep and make it more situational. I'd design all of the cards in the set around this principle. This would create great gameplay as both players monitor the game.

this is what i've been trying to do with the mechanic, although it's a new inclusion since my last playtest so i'm not yet sure what's working and what isn't. are there some specific cards you've seen in the card file that are either doing/not doing this well?

i like the creature idea you've laid out, although i don't think i've yet made a card that cares about prayer count without being able to increase it itself; worried about parasitism concerns. what do you think?

oh sure; i'm doing the same thing. but we're not the ones who are going to be playing with the cards a lot, so we're probably not as important as the people who are

if you'd be equally happy with either, go with the one your audience likes more

(your audience is presumably your playtesters? either way it certainly isn't a bunch of strangers on the internet)

yeah sorry, when i said gold token i mean the existing ones that sacrifice for one mana of any colour

still not sure how to template pray properly, here's another version

agreed with the general feedback regarding hoard in this thread (although as always testing is king and none of us have done any of it). making the artifacts reusable really restricts what you can do with them, and if every spell with hoard on it is 4+ CMC then it's going to be hard to dial up the as-fan

the idea of making them gold tokens that creatures can do other stuff with seems like a good potential fix to me, although it makes hoard itself pretty marginal in terms of value. at the same time, something like

R
Creature - Human Warrior
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, hoard.
R: +1/+0 UEOT
1/1

seems like a pretty sweet card. but tacking this version of hoard onto spells wouldn't really add much. depends what you want to do with it

also i say all this without really having looked at all of your cards so i could be way off-base here

also i've realised a potential issue with the way i've set up colourless in the pie

colourless cards represent Nothing, the lifeless expanse at the heart of Otaria. as a result, colourless spells are framed around destruction of things. but at the same time, the colours that play the best with colourless - RB, who both have ecocide as a main mechanic - are also very good at destroying things; they don't need hollow gale to back them up in this area. WUG could really use a hand with it though, and the whole 7 to cast/one with nothing approach doesn't really work for them

not entirely sure what the answer is here, the colour identities are pretty well-established at this point and for good reason. providing mechanical balance here would likely have to go hand in hand with some significant re-tooling of the world

added the mechanics to the first post along with example cards for everything except symbiotic. the more i think about it the less happy i am with it, so there's a good chance it'll need to change