MTG Salvation

Evaluating four-color designs is tough. The only four-color cards in existence are the quintet from Guildpact, and those cards were printed so long ago that they probably shouldn't be used as a reliable measure for what four-color cards look like. The Nephilim were treated pretty much the same way five-color cards were. Their abilities could have ended up on cards with fewer colors, but making them four-color helped exemplify their novelty. Until Wizards spoils material in the upcoming Commander product this November, we won't really know what four-color cards should look like. Intuition leads me to believe that four-color designs will likely personify the absence of a particular color rather than an amalgam of four. We'll just have to wait and see though.

Quote from Anachronity »

Whim-Feast Nephilim WBRG
Legendary Creature — Nephilim
1, Discard a card: Put a +1/+1 counter on Whim-Feast Nephilim. It gains your choice of first strike, deathtouch, trample, or indestructible until end of turn.
It will not rest until its hunger is sated.
3/3

There's no other way to put this: Whim-Feast Nephilim sucks. It is not powerful, and it is not interesting. Imagine using this card as a commander. How would someone build a deck around this card? The activated ability cost is steep, and the benefit players receive for using it is paltry. Generally speaking, discarding cards as an activated ability cost is miserable. Players never want to discard cards from their hand to pay for things because those cards are typically things they want to just be playing instead. Whim-Feast Nephilim is just a Hill Giant that's difficult to cast and is occasionally indestructible. Corner cases aside, why would anyone even want to give this card first strike when they could just make it indestructible anyway?

My advice would be to scrap this design completely.

Quote from Anachronity »

Prism-Fleece Nephilim WURG
Legendary Creature — Nephilim
Protection from black
2: Change the text of each spell and each permanent by replacing all instances of one color word with another until end of turn.
It will not rest, for it has banished the night.
4/4

Prism-Fleece Nephilim, on the other hand, is an absolutely phenomenal design. As far as I'm aware, Sleight of Mind effects have always been limited to blue, but I believe extending the ability to a four-colored Nephilim is a great design choice since players are naturally going to want to pair it with cards of other colors that use color words. I also love how you used protection on this card because it does two things. The first is that Prism-Fleece Nephilim teaches players one of the things they can do with it; they can change what colors cards are protected from. Teaching players this lesson is wonderful because the Swirl the Mists ability is something that's not immediately easy to understand why it's useful. Players will feel clever for realizing this. The second thing protection does for the Prism-Fleece is give players something to use its ability on. There isn't always going to naturally be something in play that uses a color word, let alone something that's useful to change. Prism-Fleece Nephilim offers players a way to profitably use its second ability regardless of what else is in play.

I don't think I can improve upon this card's design. The only thing I would look into is seeing which of the four non-blue colors references color words the least. I would make Prism-Fleece Nephilim's cost exclude that color. You might also consider boosting this card up to a 5/5. For a card with such a demanding casting cost, it could likely afford an aggressively costed stat line.

I'll get around to the other three Nephilim later.

Quote from Anachronity »

I threw down some nephilim (nephili?) earlier, but no one seemed to notice

I'll happily offer up my design insights to you, but I've been a bit busy with work since I first posted. You'll be the next person I get to when I have the time to write up something thorough.

A long, long time ago I tried collaborating with local players in order to design and develop custom commander decks. It never worked out. Perhaps I was too ambitious, but the interest was never there either way. It would be really cool to do it all over again with a group that's so passionate about Commander though. I used to regularly frequent the card design subforum on Wizards of the Coast's official board and design cards there. That was a long time ago, and I miss those times. I briefly stepped into the card design subforum here at MTGS a while back, but I have to admit, I did not care for the atmosphere there. I agree with you that the audience here on the Commander side may be a preferable place for this thread. Anyway, if you're looking for some criticism, I'd be happy to offer up.

Eraya feels like a great starting point, but I have some qualms with the card. The first is that this card is just Rites of Flourishing: Commander Edition with a cantrip stapled onto it. That's fine, but if you were purposefully intending to design a Simic Commander, it isn't conveyed well here because Rites of Flourishing and Elvish Visionary are both mono green cards. You could make the argument that the Howling Mine part of the card is blue, but this justification mostly just seems to make Eraya multicolor for multicolor's sake.

For reasons unknown to me, you stapled "ETB, draw a card" onto Eraya as well. This doesn't belong here. My first inclination is that you chose to add this unnecessary effect because you wanted to make the card more powerful. Remember, Rites of Flourishing is a card that already exists. It's a fairly popular one too, and while turning it into a legendary creature isn't exactly making it strictly better, attaching a 1/4 body for "free" is already gravy. The Elvish Visionary effect is only pushing the card further for the sake of being more powerful.


This iteration is literally just Rites of Flourishing on a creature. Fine, but not particularly innovative design. Note that Howling Mine effects tend to trigger on each player's draw step rather than on the upkeep.

My second inclination regarding your original design is that you chose to add the cantripping line on Eraya because you wanted to ensure that the caster got value out of it before their opponents did. While this is already somewhat true due to the Exploration part of the card, the card could easily be redesigned to accommodate this.


Drawing cards at the beginning of the end step would ensure that the caster would be the first person to draw cards off of Eraya, but this design loses points for possibly putting a fresh land into the player's hand where they might have been able to put it onto the battlefield due to Eraya's Exploration ability.


This particular iteration is Horn of Greed + Exploration. As far as I'm aware, this design hasn't been done by Wizards before and is actually rather interesting. I'd even consider it low hanging fruit, ripe for picking. I imagine it would only be a matter of time before Wizards prints something like this eventually. I'm not too sure on the mana cost of this card though. It definitely still feels mono green, but is it still three mana? My guess is it's probably fine. It's nice how the Exploration part of the card plays well with the Horn of Greed part.


This interpretation is a Coiling Oracle commander. I wrote the triggered ability so that each player would get their cards at the same time rather than one at a time. When players get to use Eraya's ability one at a time, whichever opponent is the active player is encouraged to kill Eraya so that their other opponents don't get a chance to use her after their turn. When each player gets the effect simultaneously, players are more likely to leave Eraya alone. Since the card triggers on your upkeep though, if you happen to get a land off of Eraya, you will be the first player to get to use the extra mana.

I shaved a colorless mana off of Eraya in this iteration because she reminded me a lot of Kami of the Crescent Moon. I think this particular version is my favorite.

Wall of Shards comes to mind.

Quote from ProfessorWhen »

So when are you guys going to get WotC to print gold border reserved list cards that "we totally won't use as real cards but really will in commander?"

Aren't players already doing this with proxies?

There are some fake Magic cards I've seen that are so convincing that I genuinely cannot distinguish them from the real articles. I'm actually unwilling to buy old, expensive cards like ABU duals because of this. Wizards might be unwilling to reprint reserved list cards, but that won't stop counterfeiters from doing so.

I don't particularly care if it found its way into a Commander deck or not, but I would eventually like a Tajuru Preserver-esque permanent that prevented my opponents' spells and abilities from returning permanents I own on the battlefield back to my hand.

Take that Cyclonic Rift!

Quote from Elminster »

Cyclonic Rift. It's such a lazy card and very difficult to interact with if you're not playing blue.

I don't think there are any cards that I hate to play against, but I have to agree here. Cyclonic Rift is sort of this lazy, ubiquitous, blue card that I seldom enjoy seeing cast.

There's really very few ways to interact with the card. Barring a few exceptions like Pyroblast, only one in five colors can typically counter it. Everyone else is stuck with picking up all of their cards. There aren't exactly any cards in Magic that prevent players from returning cards back to their hand either, and there aren't many ways to play around a possible Rift. What are you going to do, not cast your spells into a possible Rift? That's ridiculous. If those cards would end up back in your hand anyway players might as well cast into a possible Rift and hope it doesn't happen.

Quote from cryogen »

Quote from arrogantAxolotl »

Are you able to see something I'm not seeing? When I click to view the results in that particular poll my poll reads that 52.6% of users (at this current point in time) voted to nix Iona.

Also, how is it that only roughly 70% of users have voted to keep cards like Time Walk, Time Vault, and Ancestral Recall banned?

Ugh, yeah my math was wrong. It looks like at most we had 97 users voting on the polls (in the second poll). Like you, I was baffled that cards like Black Lotus were not closer to 100% so I was using that as a base line. Still, the fact that Iona has received more support than 16 cards on the list is remarkable.

I mentioned it in the poll's thread already, but I'd wager that it's likely due to the way the poll was written. Some users may only be voting to ban/unban cards that they are 100% positively interested in banning or unbanning. They probably don't understand that in many instances their omissions are messing with the polls and are causing the poll to not accurately reflect the general population's beliefs. Voting for these powerful cards may just not be on their agenda, so they don't do it.

Quote from cryogen »

And perhaps most surprising is Iona, which has an approximately 75% "we want this banned" vote.

Are you able to see something I'm not seeing? When I click to view the results in that particular poll my poll reads that 52.6% of users (at this current point in time) voted to nix Iona.

Also, how is it that only roughly 70% of users have voted to keep cards like Time Walk, Time Vault, and Ancestral Recall banned?

On the topic of necroposting, I happen to see A LOT of it. Maybe not a necropost every day, but maybe once every two or three? And I only look at a handful of the forums here at MTGS. I'm not sure exactly how it happens, but my best guess is that non-community members just do a Google search for whatever it is they're interested in, and some ancient thread ends up being one of the top search results. That person then clicks into it and feels compelled enough to make an account just to post in the thread while never bothering to check how old it is.

If you want to prevent this behavior, why not just have all threads within certain portions of the forum automatically lock themselves after a long period of inactivity, perhaps six months? If you don't want threads within a certain part of the forums to automatically lock, then put some kind of mask on those sections so that they don't do so. If you want to prevent a specific thread within an auto-locking part of the boards from auto-locking, allow moderators to apply some kind of feature to that thread so that it doesn't auto-lock. You could even have an auto-locking bot post a reply in threads (a reply that doesn't bump the thread) stating why the thread was locked (inactivity) and that anyone that comes across it should just create a new thread instead.

Implementing all of those changes would reduce the amount of activity moderators would have to perform, right? Aren't the number of threads that get necroposted going to exceed the number of threads which get erroneously auto-locked and needed moderator unlocking?

EDIT: Also, if I happen to come across any recently necroposted threads, would moderators prefer that I report the post which necroposted the thread or just leave it be?

I am not sad to see Erayo banned, but I believe it is undeserving.

I've learned quite a lot about the banned list since I first began participating at MTGS, but I believe that one of the most valuable things I've learned about the banned list is that it cannot encapsulate every single card in Magic that plays poorly in Commander. Magic is chalk full of problematic cards like Erayo, Winter Orb, and Armageddon. There are just so many different cards that play poorly in Commander that it would be impossible to eliminate all of them. As such, the banned list should not be about eliminating these undesirables. That path leads to an unmanageable banned list. If Commander happened to be its own card game separate from Magic, we could trust its developers to not print such cards in the first place, but this isn't the case. We do not live in that world and as such, every card printed in Magic consequently also exists in Commander. We must instead cope with this consequence. Annoying and unfun cards must exist in Commander, and they are here to stay. What is worth arguing is to what degree are such cards worth banning?

I do not believe Erayo is a special snowflake. She is just one of many other problematic cards and happens to be a legendary creature. As ISBPathfinder already mentioned, nobody is accidentally making Erayo. The card has little casual appeal, and it takes a great deal of effort in order to flip it.

Ugh.

So, a few days ago I began filling out the polls. I had planned to post in great detail exactly what I had voted for and why, but something happened. I was bouncing back and forth, filling out the polls and writing down the explanations for my choices as I went when about half way through I submitted my vote to one of the polls I had completed. The forum decided that submitting a post should refresh the page and gobble up my post. Now I'm salty about the whole ordeal and cannot be bothered to do it again.

The short version is that I voted to ban Iona and unban Gifts Ungiven, Painter's Servant, and Protean Hulk. In all other instances I voted for the status quo.

I'm not particularly fond of the way these polls are set up. Rather than a binary yes/no vote for each card in the polls, I wish every single card was given its own poll. Yes, I understand that the poll is daunting enough as is, but with a binary split there is no "I don't know" or "abstain" option to choose. There were a great number of cards on the banned list that I voted to keep banned not because I felt they deserved it, but because I didn't know whether or not I believed they deserved it. Because voting for such an option does not exist I had to compromise and just decided to vote in line with the status quo. I imagine I'm not the only one who voted in such a way.

EDIT: After reading ISBPathfinder's thread on Erayo, Soratami Ascendant I opted to unban that card as well.

Quote from CalvinSchwa »

Out of curiousity, may I ask what it combos with?

Aside from Scroll Rack and Unwinding Clock, Pyxis of Pandemonium doesn't combo with anything per se. It's the cards that I stick underneath it that make the combo. I wish I had a decklist uploaded on MTGS to link you, but I haven't finished writing up the thread yet. It's really something special. My goal is to have it completed once the new 4 color legends are revealed.

Quote from MRdown2urth »

Why do you guys like the fast lands? Terrible draws late game!

They might be all right exclusively in two color decks. I haven't built one in a long time, but I remember there being a dearth of excellent two color lands that entered the battlefield untapped.

I'm a tad shocked that nobody ever seems to talk about Panoptic Mirror around here. Is there something I'm missing? Is Panoptic Mirror ignored because everybody already understands why it's banned and why it should stay that way (like Limited Resources), or is it ignored because nobody cares enough about the card to take the time to talk about it? I suspect the latter to be true, but if the former happens to be true I'm prepared to make a pretty big fool of myself because I don't understand why this card is a problem. I made an effort to track down why Panoptic Mirror was banned, but I wasn't able to turn up anything. My hunch is that Panoptic Mirror comes from the era of Kokusho and Worldgorger bans long ago, and probably deserves some scrutiny. If anybody could find such information, I would be appreciative.

So, where do I begin? I happen to think that Panoptic Mirror is actually a really lousy Magic card. Why? Because of how much work it takes to get Panoptic Mirror off the ground. In order to reap the promise of a free spell every turn a player must first invest five mana and a card into something which initially does nothing. Pay five mana. Cast Mirror. Nothing happens. After that, the player must spend even more mana imprinting a spell onto the Mirror instead of just choosing to cast the spell outright. If a player elects to do both of those things AND happens to survive multiple opponents without the Mirror getting blown up, then they get one free spell during their next upkeep.

Now, I understand that Panoptic Mirror is unlikely to get destroyed with an imprinted card on it if Panoptic Mirror's controller hasn't already gotten at least one trigger off of it. Panoptic Mirror's ability can be activated at instant speed, and the most likely time players will choose to imprint an instant or sorcery onto it is at the end of their rightmost opponent's turn (presuming turns are occurring clockwise). In doing so, a player sort of secures that the imprinted card will be cast at least once before the Mirror happens to leave play. This isn't a guarantee mind you. End of turn Shatter can still happen. It's just less likely. So, whatever card imprinted on Panoptic Mirror is most likely going to pay for itself provided that Panoptic Mirror's controller even gets an opportunity to imprint something onto it before it takes a bullet. The more players in one game the worse Panoptic Mirror gets since it's more likely to be destroyed before it can do much.

After Panoptic Mirror has copied the imprinted card for the first time it must take another safe trip around the table before it may cast a second copy. If it happens to succeed in doing so, the Mirror has sort of "paid" for itself but not very well. If Panoptic Mirror's first copy paid for the imprinted card, Panoptic Mirror's second copy is kind of like a Fork, an expensive, delayed Fork that costs five mana and doesn't copy the spell you want until your next turn IF you're lucky. Only once a player has copied the imprinted card three times are they riding the gravy train, and I think that's a lot to ask for.

So, if this card sucks, why is it a problem?

My best guess is that the Rules Committee banned this card a long time ago due to its interaction with cards like Time Warp. Panoptic Mirror plus Time Warp is a two card combo that ends the game. That may have been a serious issue many moons ago, but today two card combos like those are par for the course. In fact, Panoptic Mirror Time Warp is likely one of the more fair two card combos out there because it allows everyone at the table a chance to deal with Panoptic Mirror at sorcery speed if they wish to do so. Combos like Kiki-Jiki Pestermite just threaten to win the game that turn unless someone happens to have an instant speed response. One could argue that since Panoptic Mirror can imprint a card at instant speed that opponents may not choose to destroy it because they do not perceive it to be a threat until it's too late, but the same case could be made for cards like Kiki-Jiki. To further exacerbate the issue, if a player doesn't have enough mana to imprint the card they want on the Mirror the same turn that they played it then they have to make it all the way around the board two times before Panoptic Mirror could combo off. If they had enough mana to both cast Panoptic Mirror and imprint something onto it then that player could have just chosen to end the game with a one card combo like Tooth and Nail instead.

There are numerous fair applications for Panoptic Mirror as well. Cards like Clone Legion come to mind. I imagine that most players would choose to use the Mirror simply to copy expensive cards each turn. If not that, players may just hope to get some kind of recurring value out of Panoptic Mirror by creating copies of something like Krosan Grip or Swords to Plowshares each turn. Yes, Panoptic Mirror can be obnoxious if someone wants it to be. Wrath of God every turn or worse — Armageddon — is going to be frustrating, but Magic is full of other frustrating cards and combos that don't always require such an extensive setup.

Does the Rules Committee believe that Panoptic Mirror creates undesirable games of Magic regardless of whatever is put on it? If that happens to be true than perhaps Panoptic Mirror is better left banned. I happen to believe that this isn't the case though, so tell me what you believe. Is Panoptic Mirror the same problem it's always been or have things changed?