MTG Salvation

Quote from ReapThaWhirlwind »

Right, it can be modal, such Inferno Titan.

But you were all saying it's only modal.

I described how this works. How it was intended to work.

The same as-is described to discern the functionality difference between the two functions on any other card.

Can we stop acting like this functionality isn't proper, and/or wasn't properly explained?

Dude. You're wrong. You're just wrong.
You don't get to pick and choose how you want 'or' to work because it's been used in different contexts. The difference in the usage of 'or' there is entirely context, not some arbitrary choice. The way 'or' works in this context is not how you want it to work. So change it. End of story.
Don't be stubborn. No one cares that you made that mistake except for the fact that you continue to refuse to accept it.

I imagine there will be some vague hints at least as to what mechanical themes we might expect. Like Eldraine's cardless preview set up the Courts vs Wilds conflict which appears mechanically with knights and the adamant mechanic vs nonhuman theme with food.
Get ready for some speculating!

Quote from Jiyor »

WotC- We don’t want player shuffling to much. So we won’t reprint the fetches properly.

Not the only reason they don't want to reprint the fetches in standard.

Also WotC- Yeah we still put cards that involve shuffling in at every rarity.

Yes, the shuffling cards are really taking over the meta... (/s)
They print a lot of a lot of different kinds of effects. Most cards don't see much of any play outside limited. This would only be a problem if limited was filled them with or more of them were constructed playable. Land search effects, in particular, which are the most common shuffles at common, are given extra leeway on the shuffling front because of how useful they are for smoothing out manascrew/colourscrew.

[/quote]Also where still working on an entire mechanic that involves shuffling cards from outside your deck into your deck.[/quote]
Considering.
Considering a mechanic.
It's quite likely they would find ways to limit the shuffling if they ever made a version of this. The shuffling may well be one of the reasons we haven't seen this already.

F**k off WotC! You stupid hypocritical butt-turds.

Very nice.

Quote from WarMachinePrime »

Forget the punch outs. Its a lame attempt to sell bling bling punchouts to bleed money from the playerbase.

Punch-out cards are not expensive to buy by any means, are available when you buy regular boosters, and are easily replaceable with your dice/beads/whatever.
I don't see how they could possibly be a money-making scheme. They are a very bad one if so.
Punch-outs are just like them including token cards in booster packs or dice coming with boxes and such.

So, it's another of those mechanics. Not sure I'm going to bother rehashing the same arguments about the other ones you've posted, but you know where I stand.
I would say though that surely 'as you cast this spell or when it resolves or leaves the stack' is surely too many conditions to tack on? Surely? 90% of the time, at least, it won't matter at all. I never thought I would miss the days of 'As you cast this spell or when it's removed from the stack', but here we are. Doesn't resolving mean it 'leaves the stack' anyway? I am genuinely perplexed as how you make these wording decisions.

Ditto @user_938036's template suggestion for the name altering effect.

Compared to Mirror Gallery, this card actually seems too strong. The addition of coloured mana is not comparable as a cost to the additional benefit of reduced CMC, the name changing effect, and the 'Destiny Bond' keyword. I think this should cost 5 CMC.

I also think this is more of a blue effect than a black one. Name, colour, text and type changing effects are all strongly within blue's domain. Black mainly gets the occasional card that converts a creature into a specific black creature type, namely Zombie or Vampire, flavoured as a supernatural conversion. The sneaky manipulation flavour with this card is suitable for black but also at least as good a fit for blue IMO. Blue also has a 'tabula rasa' flavour too it that this fits nicely with. Could also be blue/black I suppose.

Quote from ReapThaWhirlwind »

Quote from DJK3654 »

Dude, what does that mean? You've got to stop doing this. Stop with the weird lingo and just say what you mean plainly so we can all just get on with it.
What context? What is replacement and alternative context here and what's the difference? What exactly does outpost here mean? What the hell is wording composure? And what does this all mean with regard to the wording changes I suggested? "Named card" doesn't even appear in your original wording either?

Just want to clarify that this is not how debate works.

If everything needs to be explained to you like this, then you are unqualified to debate.

Good debate is not predicated on posturing and lofty pretense, it's based on effective communication that allows you to effectively isolate key points of disagreement and consider the relevant facts, theories and logical conclusions to be found therein.
Using obscure and convoluted language and ideas doesn't make you smart, and explaining yourself in an accessible way doesn't make you dumb. What are you afraid of?
Lest I remind you, you came here looking for critique. Do you actually want that critique or not?

Quote from ReapThaWhirlwind »

Quote from DJK3654 »

This effect should be worded like Alhammarret, High Arbiter or Sorcerous Spyglass, with relevant adjustments. That is,
"Whenever Prophetic Banisher deals damage to an opponent, look at that player's hand and choose the name of a nonland card from it.
Until the end of your next turn, that player can't cast spells with the chosen name."

I honestly think that adaptation was bad for coherence.

Not really looking to argue about it. Just wanted to state my perspective.

"Named card" should have remained as it was for the diversity of context. It was a unique, replacement/alternative context that provided a great outpost for wording composure, development, and aesthetic.

Dude, what does that mean? You've got to stop doing this. Stop with the weird lingo and just say what you mean plainly so we can all just get on with it.
What context? What is replacement and alternative context here and what's the difference? What exactly does outpost here mean? What the hell is wording composure? And what does this all mean with regard to the wording changes I suggested? "Named card" doesn't even appear in your original wording either?

This effect should be worded like Alhammarret, High Arbiter or Sorcerous Spyglass, with relevant adjustments. That is,
"Whenever Prophetic Banisher deals damage to an opponent, look at that player's hand and choose the name of a nonland card from it.
Until the end of your next turn, that player can't cast spells with the chosen name."
I also removed the unnecessary may clause (Hypnotic Specter doesn't even have one) and changed to the same 'until the end of your next turn' as rowanalpha recommended because it's simpler to track and more effective.

I would note that, as Alhammarret hints at, this is actually a blue effect, and not a white one. White actually doesn't have any cards that look at or reveal and opponent's hand (that is, not including multicolour cards that do, which all have blue or black in them—which are the colours that do get this effect). The closest thing is Planeswalker's Mirth. Which not only is the only example I could find, but it only reveals a single random card at a time and it's also rather old and not a reliable indicator of modern colour pie.
This card should be blue or white-blue.

Feign (latest version) seems like a lot of searching and shuffling for what you're getting out of it. The cost there is also pretty small in practice, as your opponent will lose a lot of value repeatedly trying to kill creatures to bleed you off feign cards and may therefore often not bother, so these cards are going to be quite powerful. And that may make it a little hard to balance, and may be frustrating to play against.
I would suggest changing the cost from searching for feign cards to mill to discarding any creature card. This makes them more flexible and less parasitic, removes the fiddle time of searching and shuffling, and means you get more out of trying to kill a feign creature so you're encouraged to do it more often and feel less bad about it when you have to do it.
This version would have more interactivity with potential problem combos by being more open-ended, but the limitation to destroy and not interacting with sacrifice should already do most of the work keeping things fair I think.

The problem with defensive mechanics like Indomitable is not just whether they encouraged stalled board states, it's that they are not proactive and don't encourage interaction in the game. When you are encouraged to attack, you and your opponent who's on the defence are both forced into making interactive decisions. Things happen. When you are encouraged to hold up blockers, your opponent is often going to be forced to hold back more as well and may not attack at all. Even if the overall board states with a mechanic don't become less interactive and more stalled, the mechanic itself wants to be at the center of the interaction in the game because that's the fun part. Mechanics that live in the less fun parts of the game, well, they're less fun. Indomitable is often going to serve to intimidate the opponent into making different attacks, maybe attacking with more creatures to force you to block with multiple or not attacking at all, in such a way that it isn't always going to actually trigger and often won't actually make any big trades. Especially with newer players who can often be intimidated by the prospect of losing their creatures when they attack. Exalted, on the other hand, is often going to trigger every turn, and actually directly affect the game with a big swing of damage going somewhere.

Restore gives me terrible flashbacks to dredge. That is not a good comparison for a mechanic to have. That said, the mechanic is actually too weak right now, in line with what Rowanalpha said. Not only are you losing card advantage, you're not even getting the card you wanted for multiple turns. Keeping the Restore card on the top or return it to hand would help, as Rowanalpha said, but I think the repetitive gameplay problems sinks the mechanic regardless. Companions only just got slapped with largely unprecedented functional errata for much the same reason of always having the card you want, compared to Restore's problem of being able to just keep playing the same card again and again.
Reversing the transfer with the mechanic would help. Regrow type effect cards aren't as problematic as cards that recur themselves. But I'm not sure how that would work with Restore. Closest thing that would make sense as a mechanic is a grave-cycling type mechanic where you regrow instead of drawing. I think that could work as a mechanic, but it's in no way a primarily blue effect unless you limited it to instants and groceries, only then I think the mechanic would probably be too narrow and more problematic to balance because of the one-shot nature of instants and sorceries making them more recurrable than permanents, bringing you back to the repetitive gameplay issue.
I don't think Restore is fixable. I would try something in a different direction.

Manaburst is interesting, but I think it has two issues. One is that the mana pool is on the high end of complexity for something you're going to want at low rarities in some number (it's a large part of why they removed reference to the mana pool from mana generation effects). This is especially so given the unconventional way this effect wants you to play with mana. The second is that this effect is almost always going to function exactly like Kicker when you just let the mana expire or like Surge when you play it with another effect. There's some merit in the mechanic being able to work both as a cost and as a bonus for playing multiple effects together. But I question how much that's actually worth. Flexibility and variance aren't always better than simplicity and constraint. And I'd say given the complexity, I'm inclined to say it's not worth it in this case. Playtesting could prove me wrong though. I'd give it a chance at least.

Hunt suffers from similar reactive problems to Indomitable. Set mechanics usually want to do something good for you, not hurt your opponent's things, because players don't like having their stuff hurt as much as they like getting good stuff, and because it's dependant on what your opponent is doing as to how useful it is. If your opponent is playing weenies, then hunt isn't going to be as rewarding when you're just hitting 1/1s and 2/2s, or if your opponent is playing a creature-light (or creatureless) control deck then hunt might do nothing much of the time. It's much harder to build a deck around them and they aren't as exciting to play with. You do get occasional mechanics like wither that do this, but wither is more of a workhorse mechanic that just plays very well rather than something exciting. Given that then, hunt probably also wants to be more functional rather than splashy, and the problem is it's fairly clunky. As rowanalpha said, you often might not actually want to use the hunt effect, making the mechanic a bit of a dud. And I also agree that if you changed it to remove the choice your opponent is usually going to end up blocking with whatever creature you mark with hunted, so the effect going to play like provoke rather than doing what it's meant to do which I imagine is going to be slightly frustrating and/or underwhelming a lot of the time.
Rowanalpha's monarch-esque suggestion looks better in that I imagine it would work more as intended, but I worry it wouldn't be that fun to play against. The problem is that the more conditions and cost you put behind the hunt effect, the less fun it is when you can't easily make use of it, but if you make it too easy to use it could become a bit of an oppressive board wiping mechanic when it's at the frequency of a set mechanic. I think this effect would probably work well as one or two individual card designs, but I'm not sure if it's actually workable at the scale of a set mechanic. It would need a good deal of playtesting and fiddling to get in the right spot.

I don't think this is worth the rules wackiness. Something similar you could do that might be more functional is 'Whenever you search your library, you may put ~ from your hand onto the battlefield'.

Putting quest counters on creatures in the same set as +1/+1 counters is a bit of a problem. Standard rule is that only one type of counters are put on creatures per set, to avoid confusion about what counters are of what kind. The exception is if the set has punch-out cards that make it easier for paper players to keep track of different counter types. Realistically, punch-out cards are used in sets with more than just two counter types (potentially including other status effects like Exert) to take advantage of and justify the use of punch-out cards. This being a custom set, that kind of logistics doesn't have to influence your decision, but if you do like emulating a real set design and following real design constraints, it's something to consider.

The mechanic itself is... a little bit basic imho. It's similar to level-up, transform cards, and to a lot of the energy cards. Feels like the design tech and logistics of the mechanic are quirkier than the essence of the mechanic itself, and it almost makes the mechanic feel a little underwhelming by comparison. I like the use of looking for a specific number with multiple of them, but it's kinda weird and potentially annoying that they can keep pilling on counters for nothing, but in a way that might matter ever now and again in certain cases so you have to keep track of it anyway. The use on Voice of Silence feels fairly +1/+1 count like by comparison in a way that's functional but doesn't do well to sell the unique design space of the mechanic.
I don't know. I would be interested in further exploring the space for this mechanic too what designs you can come up with that feel most unique and interesting. It's got some potential, but I'm not quite sold on it based on this.

I'm sorry, what on earth is the actual question here?

Quote from Mystic_X »

I also wonder...

Your long list of hypotheticals is not the most honest argument. It is in fact possible to draw lines. You can't slippery slope everything. The world is full of decisions and plenty of grey areas. Ignoring that with absolutism does not make a position better.
Nevertheless, I'm going to give you a bunch of serious answers. Because it is in fact possible to answer these questions. It's not a problem for the argument against Nielson, no matter how many random hypotheticals you've got up your sleave.

What are the criteria for dishonorably discharging an artist now?

Expression of views and behaviour that does not meet ethical standards of the business in question. And in particular, those views and behaviours that may result in harm to others.
Such as promoting fascists, a pretty unethical thing that definitely has the potential to harm others.

If Wizards is taking these individuals' personal views, opinions, and expressions into consideration, where are they going to draw the line?

Public statements and behaviour.
Not going to break into anyone's homes and read their private diaries, or scan people's thoughts anytime soon.

Will an artist who expresses that they're an anti-vaxer be let go next?

If they're insistent enough about it (as in, advocating for others not to), that might not be a bad idea.

What about one who is against blood transfusions (Jehova's witnesses)?

No. Usually a private decision here that doesn't have the ability to harm anyone else. And religious protections exist.

What about someone who expresses belief in conspiracy theories pertaining to extraterrestrials, the faked moon landing, or the JFK assassination?
Are those things which and artist can have an expressed opinion about without being vilified?

Probably. No real harm to others.

What if they never speak words to that effect but express their unorthodox viewpoints in their art?

If their intentions are unambiguous enough, absolutely.

What if they like old Kevin Spacey or Bill Murray movies where he typically acts very forthcoming and cavalier with many of the women he courts?

Liking a movie is usually too weak, because most movies are quite interpretable and may not focus on any particular message so much as simple entertainment. Now, if the movie they like is Birth of a Nation or Erbkrank, for instance...

What if they express that they voted for Trump (for whatever reason or none at all) who many consider a "bad man" if not the devil incarnate?
What if they express an intent to vote for him again?

Support for Trump is too open-ended. People don't always agree with much of what a candidate stands for when they vote for them, but may just prefer them to the alternative or believe a particular issue they support is just too critical.

What if they don't believe "there are in fact 72+ genders", think that claim is outrageous, or believe it panders to personal insecurities and identity disorders?

Then they belong alongside Nielsen. Gender discrimination is actually bad.

Is it so politically incorrect to express that opinion without being shamed for it, or any opinion which was innocently ignorantly shared by countless billions throughout history up until recently?

The long and deep history of prejudice throughout history is NOT one of innocent people who just didn't realise it was wrong until recently when the idea of equality was somehow discovered. And in the modern day, you don't even have that excuse. If you support incorrect and dangerous views, you deserve to be called out for it. That's how you learn not to do it.

What if they never attend religious services? By extension wouldn't that imply they're morally inferior?

?? ??

What if they burnt ants with a magnifying glass as a child?
What if they ran away from home in their youth and have an estranged relationship with one or both parents and this becomes public?
What if an artist posted nude photos or explicit video online in the past or future?

What if...what if...what if...
What if we made ethical decisions and actually drew lines in the sand and held people accountable for their actions?

Is that not their right?

No one's putting an implant in Nielson's brain to stop her from wrong-thinking. Or anything of the sort. Her rights are intact.

Should that cost them their job which is completely unrelated to other art which they may be producing?

Criminals often lose their jobs for being criminals, even if their crime was unrelated to their job, even if they've already served time/done service/paid fines.

Are any of those valid reason enough to justify dismissing an artist?

Yes.
Yes, some of them are.

Perhaps Wizards should only hire Social Democrats, Far left Liberal extremists, people who don't vote at all, and Libertarians moving forward.
I suppose I'm having a difficult time understanding what metric is being used, what the threshold for acceptable opinions or online activity of artists is.

See above. Right at the top.

What would happen if every artist on Wizards' payroll stood in spontaneous solidarity with the artists being turned into pariahs, and all posted sexually explicit photos of themselves online?! Would Wizards fire the whole lot of them?! Wipe the slate clean as it were and start over from scratch?!
Why? Because some consider the human body (or certain human bodies) to be obscene while others may be of the opinion that they we are all beautiful in our rawest form because it shows our true vulnerability once there's nothing left to hide what lies beneath?!

...what?

Art is, has, and will always be subjective.

Art is neither entirely subjective or entirely objective. Art involves many different possibilities of form, expression and context.
For instance, art that promotes fascism is objectively harmful.

Creating an inclusive community is about allowing people with different opinions and lifestyles to interact and learn from each other.
Silencing the voices of those whose politics you disagree with only punishes the rest of the chorus and the audience

And allowing fascists and fascist sympathisers to go unchecked is a serious threat to diversity.

I urge WoTC with every ounce of strength to please reconsider this terrible politically motivated decision

Not everything with political implications or elements is wildly partisan or biased, or for that matter avoidable.

and do what's best for the art, the game, and those who love how both of those things come together harmoniously in Magic. I ask this sincerely as both a long time consumer and a Jew (not even as an artist as my art is mainly musical now) who firmly knows with absolute certainty that the good created from artwork always supersedes the controversial opinions, negative viewpoints, and even antisemitic ignorance of the artists who create it. Please do not deny me or any of us more Magic card art by Terese Nielsen. I beg you.

But don't worry about denying us magic art from all the random artists they haven't hired for whatever number of other different reasons, of course.

Scarecrow tribal is an interesting thing to throw in as an option. Shifts things up a bit. I like that.

Like me some land synergy. Looks like a fun theme.