Akuten, the Pyre Sculptor 1UBR
Legendary Creature - Human Wizard M T: Deal 1 damage to target creature.
Whenever a creature dealt damage by Akuten is put into a graveyard, you may create a token that is a copy of that card.
2/4
Bargains from the Pit 2BB
Enchantment R
At the beginning of your upkeep, the player with the most amount of life creates a 5/5 black Demon creature token with Flying and "at the beginning of your upkeep you lose 3 life".
Burning Wilderness
Land - Forest (T: Add G.)
Burning Wilderness enters the battlefield tapped.
Whenever Burning Wilderness becomes tapped place a fire counter on Burning Wilderness, Burning Wilderness deals damage to you equal to the amount of fire counters on it, then if Burning Wilderness has three or more fire counters on it sacrifice it and add RRR to your mana pool.
Bottled Charms X
Artifact R
Bottled Charms enters the battlefield with X charge counters on it. 2: Remove a charge counter from Bottled Charms: Choose one:
Scry 3.
You Gain 3 Life.
Exile up to 3 target cards from a graveyard.
Clemency of Flames XR
Instant R
Clemency of Flames deals X damage to any target.
You can't win the game this turn and your opponents can't lose the game this turn. Damage that would reduce an opponent's life total to less than 1 this turn reduces it to 1 instead.
Chromatic Variance U
Sorcery R
Draw three cards and reveal them. Discard each card that shares a color with another card that was revealed this way, then discard each land card revealed this way.
Akuten, the Pyre Sculptor, I question if you want to exile the original creature. It's by no means necessary but it makes the card play better and slightly stronger. A three-color Soul Collector that can ping seems reasonable but you should copy the wording, "Whenever a creature dealt damage by ~ this turn dies, create a token that is a copy of that card."
Bargains from the Pit, a very demony card. The wording should be "At the beginning of your upkeep, the player with the highest life total creates..."
Burning Wilderness, this is an interesting card. I don't know if its broken but its cool. The only problem is player comprehension. Assuming that it entering tapped puts a counter on it will be a common misconception. It's not a significant problem but when putting it in a set one must be aware that it is complicated and confusing so don't do too much of it.
Bottled Charms, these effects are fairly disproportionate in strength and power. Scry 3 is by far the strongest, it's nearly the same worth as drawing a card. Exile 3 is the next, it's worth 1 mana the same as the Scry 3 but its actual value ranges between game-breaking and worthless in just one use. The weakest is gain 3 life. At 1 mana you expect to gain upwards of 5 life and still, no one would play the card. Though breaking the symmetry isn't worth changing the abilities so the 3 life puts in work when needed which overall makes for a neat design.
Chromatic Variance, good old Ancestral Recall except. Unfortunately, this card is completely and utterly broken. Only being less broken than actual ancestral recall. In any artifact deck, this is nearly ancestral recall. With anything that replaces draws with something else, this is sorcery ancestral recall. Even in a simple multi-color deck this is can reasonably be draw two quite often, the downside of occasionally being mill 3 is an insignificant downside.
If I changed Chromatic Variance to "Draw three cards and reveal them. Discard each card that shares a color with another card that was revealed this way, then discard each colorless card revealed this way." would that fix it? It is still roughly a draw 2 for 1 mana but requires a very carefully built deck of about 20/20/20 Lands/Blue/Color 2, if sticking to 2 colors. Also, if I raise the cost to 1U, would that make the card useless? 1U for draw 2 (with deck building hoops, doesn't sound terrible?
If I changed Chromatic Variance to "Draw three cards and reveal them. Discard each card that shares a color with another card that was revealed this way, then discard each colorless card revealed this way." would that fix it? It is still roughly a draw 2 for 1 mana but requires a very carefully built deck of about 20/20/20 Lands/Blue/Color 2, if sticking to 2 colors. Also, if I raise the cost to 1U, would that make the card useless? 1U for draw 2 (with deck building hoops, doesn't sound terrible?
What is the goal of the card? Is it to be the objectively broken U: Draw 2? If so its objectively broken and shouldn't be made. If its to make a nifty value card with strict deckbuilding requirements that is better accomplished by something like Thirst for Knowledge it's just too high a bar to expect to accomplish at 1 mana. If you bump it to two then the chance that its just mill 3 becomes a very real downside and its unlikely to make the cut. Winged Words is a great example of this at 2 mana. It is flat out draw 2 for 2 if you have a flyer. But to cast on turn 2 you need a 1 mana flyer which is a high bar. But late game a simple divination isn't bad while your card still has the potential to be mill 3 in the late game which is why it would be cut.
Trying to get a design that could be U:Draw 3 with some kind of significant but mitigatable downside.
Chromatic Vision U
Sorcery
Draw 3 cards then reveal your hand. For each color choose a card in your hand and discard the rest.
To get more restrictive
Chromatic Vision U
Sorcery
Draw 3 cards then reveal your hand. Then choose a nonblack blue card, a nonblue white card, a nonwhite green card, a nongreen red card, then a nonred black card. Discard the rest.
Clemency of Flames needs to have the order of its two lines of text switched because instants and sorceries resolve their effects sequentially from the top down. As written, you could Blaze your opponent to zero life, then apply the reverse Angel's Grace, which would of course just cause the player to lose as soon as the turn ends.
Fair enough - I don't think I have any particular goals when designing cards other than to make them fun, interesting, and printable under modern magic design (i.e. playable, non-broken, etc).
Akuten, the Pyre Sculptor: This concept has great potential, but I think you undershot the design. The Egyptian theme has great potential with the gravity that its lore carries from mythology. This demands great respects. Expectations are high—and what they did with it was really poor. Zombies aren't white for example—they should have retained their color—or they should have blended over into the black. Doesn't matter what influence they thought for it to have—or what their ideals were—it goes against established reality; and is certainly taken as a discredible joke.
This design wants to be something like a Necromaster. It has the diversity of colors that expresses vast study and exotic power (beyond the black). Dealing just 1 damage is incredibly underwhelming for a Legendary though, especially one of this magnitude (a pharaoh?). Surely it's more powerful than Prodigal Sorcerer—and even somewhere beyond the likes of Grim Lavamancer. 1 damage can be very graceful however—so I would first suggest something like a spread. Akuten deals 1 damage to up to three target creatures. You could throw planeswalkers in there too—it would probably be just fine (as scary as it wants to be). Don't make it so that it prevents regeneration though, because that impedes too heavily on interaction, and detracts from the necessity of such third-party utilities—that you should want to preserve the sanctity of—to increase interactivity even greater. I think the second ability could stay exactly like it is, except it also wants to be able to steal tokens. Even with these adaptations, the cost is just fine for a legendary, but the power and toughness combination isn't as aggressive as you'd want it to be, to express the nature of such a dark entity. You might be thinking some timid dark practitioner, although they might exist; what you have here would not be dainty, but ruthlessly aggressive. The hot-headed nature has its vulnerabilities, so I think the essence would be perfectly reflected as a 4/3.
Bargains from the Pit: This here might be desire being a throwback to the likes of Breeding Pit meets Lord of the Pit meets Form of the Dragon—but it does the one thing you don't want a design to do most of all—and that's downward spiral the game into a quick end. This does exactly that. It's going to landslide crash the game in the course of a few turns (not fun). If you wanted to keep it this way, but prolong the functionality, consider the Demons lose interest and leave when a new one comes in to replace it. Quite a dark train it becomes. And it doesn't exactly fix the downward spiral. The obvious solution to this is to reduce the life loss to 1 each turn—along the same lines as Juzám Djinn. At that point, you probably don't need to cycle them. It all depends on the perspective flavor you're looking to capture. I think them losing interest is very demon-like. Reminds me of the way they painted Shinigami in Death Note.
Burning Wilderness: I feel like this is going to be a very challenging, controversial design to dispute. I would imagine there is a great deal of sentimentality in the aspect of the mana ramp ability. However, the aspect of damage is something that puts this over-the-top against its user. And it doesn't entirely make sense, seeing as how people can ignore wildfires and face no damage—or benefit off it even (carbon filtering). Back to the point, we're looking at 6 damage here that you can't afford to take. And all for just three mana and some color fixing. I do really enjoy the flavor and style in what it does. This is the fantasy aspect of interactivity. It's dynamic—and interactive to the sense of imagination. The concept shifts and changes—and stimulates the imagination to shift with it. Why not turn this concept into a "shift lands" cycle. They are lands that initially begin as one type, and after being tapped, shift into another type permanently. That's great, and dynamic, and doesn't even require them to enter the battlefield tapped potentially; because the mana fixing ability either isn't available on the first turn (to basically the same effect—only less restrictive); or is only available for a single instance (to an even greater restrictive effect).
In addition to this, how about making them produce an additional mana when there's two of the same name on the battlefield? This adds more dynamic flare, and preserves the mana ramp capabilities that I suspect there is a great amount of sentimentality for. To balance it, simply restrict the number of them that can be on the battlefield to two. This could be done a number of ways. One such being giving them a sub-type, and then writing into its errata that restriction. This is what they should have done with the Temple concept in the new Theros set. Temple should have been a special sub-type, and they should have boiled the scry effect into a special errata ruling for the sub-type. "Whenever a Temple enters the battlefield it's owner scrys 1." The first sub-type that comes to mind for this concept here is Disaster. The errata ruling would be, "A player may only have two Disasters on the battlefield at any given time.". Don't quote me on this though—there could easily be a better sub-type name than this. And of course, it's up for discretion if you want to keep the basic land type or do away with it. Obviously, keeping it makes it prime bait for fetch lands, which can effectively throw the whole concept out of balance.
If Burning Wilderness was tapped for mana this game, it produces instead of its normal type.
If you control another land named Burning Wilderness, it produces an additional when tapped for mana.
The first time Burning Wilderness is tapped for mana, put a fire counter on it. As long as Burning Wilderness has a fire counter on it, it produces R instead of its normal type. If you control another land named Burning Wilderness, it produces RR this way instead.
Bottled Charms: The costs are definitely too high on this one. As it stands, simply replacing the 2 cost with would make this great. A very light, thin boot—if I see what you might have done here.
Clemency of Flames: A toned down Blaze for no good reason. For whatever reason of balance or integral preservation you probably thought that this would cater to—it is not necessary. Might I suggest a short form Arc Lightning for creatures only with a CMC 4 or less; or do that with destroying artifacts with a converted mana cost 1 or less. The creature only damage could contrast a burn spell that can damage any target (to include planeswalkers)—which would make it a good sideboard item in its metagame.
Chromatic Variance: Quite a tricky name this one seems to have.
In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its mean. Informally, it measures how far a set of numbers are spread out from their average value.
In regards to Chromatic, you might have even meant time (if what we have here is an archaic abbreviation). That would be Chronomatic. Otherwise, I suppose you're speaking on the scale of notes (of ascending or descending pitch).
So—the variance of ascending or descending notes (cards drawn) from their average mean (gold standard of cards draw at this cost).
Maybe I'm thinking too hard.
I think you have to reveal them before you put them into your hand. For integral purposes, it's not typically well-received that someone has the opportunity to mischievously switch-out other cards in the hand for the ones actually drawn (in attempts to cheat the system—circumvent the drawback). It also definitely doesn't do enough—even for one mana. They have to be different, and monocolored. feelsbadman You're better off playing Index. Although Ponder /Omen would be the highest value gold standard—while Mental Note is the lowest end of this scale. Preordain is already the in-between of that. So this obviously wants to fall somewhere in-between on the low-end value of this scale. It does that—but realize you're essentially reprinting a less reliable Reach Through Mists. No deck wants to be this hard up for something this important (and also supposedly so core-essential to its power). You'd be crippling blue capabilities in your development if blue had to rely on this. It really wants to be a short-form Browse or Advice from the Fae. Probably 3 cards.
Akuten, the Pyre Sculptor 1UBR
Legendary Creature - Human Wizard M T: Deal 1 damage to target creature.
Whenever a creature dealt damage by Akuten is put into a graveyard, you may create a token that is a copy of that card.
2/4
As user_938036 said, this should read "Whenever a creature dealt damage by ~ this turn dies..."
This card feels a bit counter-intuitive to me. The ping ability naturally wants to be used to kill small creatures and finish off weakened creatures in combat, but with the second, much more powerful effect, you're going to want to hit big creatures that you will often just be throwing a kill spell at so the ping does nothing. It's interesting in how you might use it differently but the abilities feel like they have odd tension. The card also seems a little too powerful to me.
Bargains from the Pit 2BB
Enchantment R
At the beginning of your upkeep, the player with the most amount of life creates a 5/5 black Demon creature token with Flying and "at the beginning of your upkeep you lose 3 life".
Interesting. I worry this is going to get out of hand very quickly though and just accelerate everyone toward zero. It looks a bit too chaotic and swingy for such an easily castable card that can't be easily removed by most decks.
Burning Wilderness
Land - Forest (T: Add G.)
Burning Wilderness enters the battlefield tapped.
Whenever Burning Wilderness becomes tapped place a fire counter on Burning Wilderness, Burning Wilderness deals damage to you equal to the amount of fire counters on it, then if Burning Wilderness has three or more fire counters on it sacrifice it and add RRR to your mana pool.
This seems like it might be a dangerous card that won't be very fun or powerful in fair decks but good in oppressive combo decks.
Bottled Charms X
Artifact R
Bottled Charms enters the battlefield with X charge counters on it. 2: Remove a charge counter from Bottled Charms: Choose one:
Scry 3.
You Gain 3 Life.
Exile up to 3 target cards from a graveyard.
That looks an interesting toolbox for artifact decks. Good design I think.
Clemency of Flames XR
Instant R
Clemency of Flames deals X damage to any target.
You can't win the game this turn and your opponents can't lose the game this turn. Damage that would reduce an opponent's life total to less than 1 this turn reduces it to 1 instead.
It's an interesting clause for a card for like this. I do worry though that it'll just amount to targeting creatures or planeswalkers most of the time and won't be that interesting in practice.
Chromatic Variance U
Sorcery R
Draw three cards and reveal them. Discard each card that shares a color with another card that was revealed this way, then discard each land card revealed this way.
As @ReapThaWhirlwind pointed out, this should reveal the cards before you draw them so there's no room for you to switch anything out. As in, "reveal the top three cards of your library (...) then put the rest into your hand".
Legendary Creature - Human Wizard M
T: Deal 1 damage to target creature.
Whenever a creature dealt damage by Akuten is put into a graveyard, you may create a token that is a copy of that card.
2/4
Bargains from the Pit 2BB
Enchantment R
At the beginning of your upkeep, the player with the most amount of life creates a 5/5 black Demon creature token with Flying and "at the beginning of your upkeep you lose 3 life".
Burning Wilderness
Land - Forest
(T: Add G.)
Burning Wilderness enters the battlefield tapped.
Whenever Burning Wilderness becomes tapped place a fire counter on Burning Wilderness, Burning Wilderness deals damage to you equal to the amount of fire counters on it, then if Burning Wilderness has three or more fire counters on it sacrifice it and add RRR to your mana pool.
Bottled Charms X
Artifact R
Bottled Charms enters the battlefield with X charge counters on it.
2: Remove a charge counter from Bottled Charms: Choose one:
Instant R
Clemency of Flames deals X damage to any target.
You can't win the game this turn and your opponents can't lose the game this turn. Damage that would reduce an opponent's life total to less than 1 this turn reduces it to 1 instead.
Chromatic Variance U
Sorcery R
Draw three cards and reveal them. Discard each card that shares a color with another card that was revealed this way, then discard each land card revealed this way.
Bargains from the Pit, a very demony card. The wording should be "At the beginning of your upkeep, the player with the highest life total creates..."
Burning Wilderness, this is an interesting card. I don't know if its broken but its cool. The only problem is player comprehension. Assuming that it entering tapped puts a counter on it will be a common misconception. It's not a significant problem but when putting it in a set one must be aware that it is complicated and confusing so don't do too much of it.
Bottled Charms, these effects are fairly disproportionate in strength and power. Scry 3 is by far the strongest, it's nearly the same worth as drawing a card. Exile 3 is the next, it's worth 1 mana the same as the Scry 3 but its actual value ranges between game-breaking and worthless in just one use. The weakest is gain 3 life. At 1 mana you expect to gain upwards of 5 life and still, no one would play the card. Though breaking the symmetry isn't worth changing the abilities so the 3 life puts in work when needed which overall makes for a neat design.
Chromatic Variance, good old Ancestral Recall except. Unfortunately, this card is completely and utterly broken. Only being less broken than actual ancestral recall. In any artifact deck, this is nearly ancestral recall. With anything that replaces draws with something else, this is sorcery ancestral recall. Even in a simple multi-color deck this is can reasonably be draw two quite often, the downside of occasionally being mill 3 is an insignificant downside.
Trying to get a design that could be U:Draw 3 with some kind of significant but mitigatable downside.
Chromatic Vision U
Sorcery
Draw 3 cards then reveal your hand. For each color choose a card in your hand and discard the rest.
To get more restrictive
Chromatic Vision U
Sorcery
Draw 3 cards then reveal your hand. Then choose a nonblack blue card, a nonblue white card, a nonwhite green card, a nongreen red card, then a nonred black card. Discard the rest.
This design wants to be something like a Necromaster. It has the diversity of colors that expresses vast study and exotic power (beyond the black). Dealing just 1 damage is incredibly underwhelming for a Legendary though, especially one of this magnitude (a pharaoh?). Surely it's more powerful than Prodigal Sorcerer—and even somewhere beyond the likes of Grim Lavamancer. 1 damage can be very graceful however—so I would first suggest something like a spread. Akuten deals 1 damage to up to three target creatures. You could throw planeswalkers in there too—it would probably be just fine (as scary as it wants to be). Don't make it so that it prevents regeneration though, because that impedes too heavily on interaction, and detracts from the necessity of such third-party utilities—that you should want to preserve the sanctity of—to increase interactivity even greater. I think the second ability could stay exactly like it is, except it also wants to be able to steal tokens. Even with these adaptations, the cost is just fine for a legendary, but the power and toughness combination isn't as aggressive as you'd want it to be, to express the nature of such a dark entity. You might be thinking some timid dark practitioner, although they might exist; what you have here would not be dainty, but ruthlessly aggressive. The hot-headed nature has its vulnerabilities, so I think the essence would be perfectly reflected as a 4/3.
Bargains from the Pit: This here might be desire being a throwback to the likes of Breeding Pit meets Lord of the Pit meets Form of the Dragon—but it does the one thing you don't want a design to do most of all—and that's downward spiral the game into a quick end. This does exactly that. It's going to landslide crash the game in the course of a few turns (not fun). If you wanted to keep it this way, but prolong the functionality, consider the Demons lose interest and leave when a new one comes in to replace it. Quite a dark train it becomes. And it doesn't exactly fix the downward spiral. The obvious solution to this is to reduce the life loss to 1 each turn—along the same lines as Juzám Djinn. At that point, you probably don't need to cycle them. It all depends on the perspective flavor you're looking to capture. I think them losing interest is very demon-like. Reminds me of the way they painted Shinigami in Death Note.
Burning Wilderness: I feel like this is going to be a very challenging, controversial design to dispute. I would imagine there is a great deal of sentimentality in the aspect of the mana ramp ability. However, the aspect of damage is something that puts this over-the-top against its user. And it doesn't entirely make sense, seeing as how people can ignore wildfires and face no damage—or benefit off it even (carbon filtering). Back to the point, we're looking at 6 damage here that you can't afford to take. And all for just three mana and some color fixing. I do really enjoy the flavor and style in what it does. This is the fantasy aspect of interactivity. It's dynamic—and interactive to the sense of imagination. The concept shifts and changes—and stimulates the imagination to shift with it. Why not turn this concept into a "shift lands" cycle. They are lands that initially begin as one type, and after being tapped, shift into another type permanently. That's great, and dynamic, and doesn't even require them to enter the battlefield tapped potentially; because the mana fixing ability either isn't available on the first turn (to basically the same effect—only less restrictive); or is only available for a single instance (to an even greater restrictive effect).
In addition to this, how about making them produce an additional mana when there's two of the same name on the battlefield? This adds more dynamic flare, and preserves the mana ramp capabilities that I suspect there is a great amount of sentimentality for. To balance it, simply restrict the number of them that can be on the battlefield to two. This could be done a number of ways. One such being giving them a sub-type, and then writing into its errata that restriction. This is what they should have done with the Temple concept in the new Theros set. Temple should have been a special sub-type, and they should have boiled the scry effect into a special errata ruling for the sub-type. "Whenever a Temple enters the battlefield it's owner scrys 1." The first sub-type that comes to mind for this concept here is Disaster. The errata ruling would be, "A player may only have two Disasters on the battlefield at any given time.". Don't quote me on this though—there could easily be a better sub-type name than this. And of course, it's up for discretion if you want to keep the basic land type or do away with it. Obviously, keeping it makes it prime bait for fetch lands, which can effectively throw the whole concept out of balance.
If you control another land named Burning Wilderness, it produces an additional when tapped for mana.
The first time Burning Wilderness is tapped for mana, put a fire counter on it. As long as Burning Wilderness has a fire counter on it, it produces R instead of its normal type. If you control another land named Burning Wilderness, it produces RR this way instead.
Bottled Charms: The costs are definitely too high on this one. As it stands, simply replacing the 2 cost with would make this great. A very light, thin boot—if I see what you might have done here.
Clemency of Flames: A toned down Blaze for no good reason. For whatever reason of balance or integral preservation you probably thought that this would cater to—it is not necessary. Might I suggest a short form Arc Lightning for creatures only with a CMC 4 or less; or do that with destroying artifacts with a converted mana cost 1 or less. The creature only damage could contrast a burn spell that can damage any target (to include planeswalkers)—which would make it a good sideboard item in its metagame.
Chromatic Variance: Quite a tricky name this one seems to have.
In regards to Chromatic, you might have even meant time (if what we have here is an archaic abbreviation). That would be Chronomatic. Otherwise, I suppose you're speaking on the scale of notes (of ascending or descending pitch).
So—the variance of ascending or descending notes (cards drawn) from their average mean (gold standard of cards draw at this cost).
Maybe I'm thinking too hard.
I think you have to reveal them before you put them into your hand. For integral purposes, it's not typically well-received that someone has the opportunity to mischievously switch-out other cards in the hand for the ones actually drawn (in attempts to cheat the system—circumvent the drawback). It also definitely doesn't do enough—even for one mana. They have to be different, and monocolored. feelsbadman You're better off playing Index. Although Ponder /Omen would be the highest value gold standard—while Mental Note is the lowest end of this scale. Preordain is already the in-between of that. So this obviously wants to fall somewhere in-between on the low-end value of this scale. It does that—but realize you're essentially reprinting a less reliable Reach Through Mists. No deck wants to be this hard up for something this important (and also supposedly so core-essential to its power). You'd be crippling blue capabilities in your development if blue had to rely on this. It really wants to be a short-form Browse or Advice from the Fae. Probably 3 cards.
As user_938036 said, this should read "Whenever a creature dealt damage by ~ this turn dies..."
This card feels a bit counter-intuitive to me. The ping ability naturally wants to be used to kill small creatures and finish off weakened creatures in combat, but with the second, much more powerful effect, you're going to want to hit big creatures that you will often just be throwing a kill spell at so the ping does nothing. It's interesting in how you might use it differently but the abilities feel like they have odd tension. The card also seems a little too powerful to me.
Interesting. I worry this is going to get out of hand very quickly though and just accelerate everyone toward zero. It looks a bit too chaotic and swingy for such an easily castable card that can't be easily removed by most decks.
This seems like it might be a dangerous card that won't be very fun or powerful in fair decks but good in oppressive combo decks.
That looks an interesting toolbox for artifact decks. Good design I think.
It's an interesting clause for a card for like this. I do worry though that it'll just amount to targeting creatures or planeswalkers most of the time and won't be that interesting in practice.
As @ReapThaWhirlwind pointed out, this should reveal the cards before you draw them so there's no room for you to switch anything out. As in, "reveal the top three cards of your library (...) then put the rest into your hand".
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice