MTG Salvation

Quote from user_938036 »

It seems you have significantly misunderstood the card presented. Its floor is literally cancel. With it's high being 0 mana counter spell. It's a novel design that is very confusing but in the right supplemental product could be a good include.

I was talking about the first design. Yes, functionally, the second one is just Cancel, but the number of situations in which that card isn't just Cancel-but-with-pointlessly-confusing-wording is so small, that there is literally no point in making the card.

Look, I get that there are a handful of situations in which this card goes from incredibly confusing to "wow, free counterspell!" but that is just bad game design. But whatever. Do you.

The problem is that a card should not require you to have a very specific, infrequent, rare effect in play just to be able to play it. A sorcery that counters a spell is just confusing and bad. Heck, even if you did jump through the hoops required to make the card playable, you're still spending more resources to play the card than you normally would for that effect. 1WU and a card for Teferi, and then another card for the spell, all spaced out likely over multiple turns and phases and such. I'd rather just hold up 1UU for Cancel and be done with it.

What I'm saying is that, even disregarding the counterintuitiveness of your design, the floor of the card is "literally unplayable" and the ceiling is "really, really bad Cancel."

So we have all card images for all planeswalkers in WAR, right? Set cards, Planeswalker Deck cards, Mythic Edition cards, BAB promo, and... that's it, right?

I don't think I've missed anything, but let me know if I have. I just don't think we've gotten cards for two of the mysterious planeswalker arts used in the poster from a while back (Liliana and Karn). Were there any others? do we think this could mean more unique promos coming?

What a waste of a great card name.

Uh... get good?

Seriously though, wrong forum.

Two mythic cycles? Gee Bill...

If any of us ever posted anything like this card in CCC, we'd get shot down for it being too good and heinously undercosted. I mean, Merlin's pants! They didn't push this card, they spartan kicked it off a cliff!

Empower N (This creature enters the battlefield with N -1/-1 counters on it. Remove one whenever it attacks.)

Following up on a series of threads I made a while ago. I'm working on an enemy-pair faction set. Each faction has its own mechanic and a few goals:

1. Use simple but deep mechanics.
2. Be synergistic with adjacent color pairs. (BG should play well with WB and GU, but not the others.)
3. Have distinct mechanical identities to previous factions of the same colors. This BG faction should avoid playing too much like Golgari.

This mechanic is my current contender for the BG mechanic. I wanted to avoid anything to do with the graveyard when thinking about this faction's identity, as Golgari pretty much has a monopoly on it. Mechanically, I was coming up dry, so I decided to approach it from the flavor instead.

What I came up with is a faction who's all about self-empowerment. Green is the color of acceptance and growth. Black is the color of self-service and ambition. Together, they form a philosophy of recognizing one's hidden potential and striving to achieve it.

Looking at Amonkhet, I found a good way to mechanically represent that concept: creatures which enter with -1/-1 counters (which represent weakness or obstacles), and then losing those counters over time (which represents growth and empowerment). I decided not to use +1/+1 counters because I liked the idea of having an eventual cap, allowing me to cost it a bit more aggressively. It also allows me to explore -1/-1 counter design space throughout the rest of the cards in the set.

My original version of this mechanic looked more like this:

Empower N — M (This creature enters the battlefield with N -1/-1 counters on it. M: Remove a -1/-1 counter from this creature.)

That version was a bit wordy and had some messy rules quirks. I wanted to use it because I liked the idea of getting bonuses "whenever you empower this creature," but found it to be too ugly. Even the simpler bonuses caused some awkward questions to come up. "What happens when I empower this creature when it has no counters?" was chief among them.

I transitioned to a version that removed a counter on attacks and blocks, which was less versatile in gameplay, but more engaging. I then dropped the block trigger to lean more into the aggro plan and make balancing a bit easier.

I like this version because it's simple, concise, and has enough knobs that balancing should be fairly easy.

I mentioned that I want to use this opportunity to explore -1/-1 counter space even outside this faction, but this faction will still be the core color pair for it.

Anyway, here are some designs I came up with. I found that this mechanic lends itself to a very aggressive playstyle, so that's where most of the power will be.

Siphoner of Weakness BG
Creature - Warrior U
5/5
Empower 3
Whenever ~'s power increases, you may put a -1/-1 counter on another target creature.

This is the first example of one of the more interesting subthemes of the faction: "Whenever this creature's power increases..." I just love the way it rolls off the tongue, and it fits so very well within BG. It's also really open-ended, triggering off of things like combat tricks, empower, etc., which opens up some interesting deck-building opportunities.

Side-note, I do realize that this mechanic and these subthemes could work really well outside of BG, but I'm not concerned with that right now. For the purposes of this set, I'm only concerned with filling out one faction at a time. It's worth noting that, while aggro strategies tend to work best in color pairs centered in red and white as well as black, I plan on looking at less conventional identities for those color pairs, which means I'll be steering them away from aggro.

Anyway, next:

Sweat Seer 1G
Creature - Druid
3/2
Empower 1
Whenever ~'s power increases, draw a card.

Struggling Disciple B
Creature - Rogue
2/2
Empower 1
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay 2 life. If you don't, put a -1/-1 counter on ~.

And here are some designs that just mess around with -1/-1 counters:

Reality Check 1BB
Sorcery
Put two -1/-1 counters on each creature.

Break Barriers G
Instant
Choose one -
-Remove up to three -1/-1 counters from target creature.
-Target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn.

Surge of Confidence 1B
Instant
Remove all counters from target permanent. That permanent's controller gains 1 life for each of those counters.

For context, the only mechanic I have down so far that's adjacent to this one is GU's mechanic:

Duplicate M (When this creature enters the battlefield, if you cast it for its duplicate cost, create a token that's a copy of it.)

On the surface, the only point of synergy is that they're both creature-centric mechanics that contribute to the total power you have on-board. Individual card designs will make up the difference.

I do not currently have an idea for the WB mechanic.

So what do you guys think?

Quote from ForgottenPlaneswalker »

Hey just was wondering, is this an out of season April Fool's joke?

As someone who has 6 years and thousands of dollars invested in Commander, I can assure you that I'm not joking in the slightest when I say that this card is absolute trash in commander. Sure, Commander is a casual format which encompasses many different playgroups with many different play styles and skill levels and such, and I'm sure that plenty of people will try very hard to make this card work. I'm also just as sure that very many of them will end up being very disappointed when it gets repeatedly countered and removed, at which point they realize that casting this card is roughly equivalent to Time Walking themselves. In a multiplayer format in which a turn cycle can easily take half an hour on average in the late game, that's gonna turn quite a lot of people off to this card.

So, no. Saying this card is unplayable in Commander is not a joke.

Quote from krishnath »

People who play commander, not every card is for standard.

Friendly reminder! Not every card that costs a million mana is playable in commander! Commander is not the designated trash bin of Magic!

I personally reinstated "bury" in exactly the same spot as the OP uses "destroy" to mean mill. It's been well-received so far and is consistent with the meaning the word had according to the comprehensive rules.

---

Here is a little homework for anyone pitching "mill" as keyword action. Translate it to the languages Magic is released in and check how much sense it still makes in an internationally released card game.

Quote from Tim_T »

Quote from cisgenderedtrash »

Quote from Tim_T »

I did. However having the same keyword for two different actions really doesn't make sense IMO.
What if they just changed the keyword to "mill", since that's what everyone calls it now anyway.
It would also create less confusion with cards such as narcomeaba as you said

Because of all of the real-world definitions of the word "mill," not a single one means anything that could even loosely be translated in-game to "put the top N cards of a library into its owner's graveyard." That's the whole reason it hasn't been keyworded yet. And, again, it would force new players to have to learn extra vocabulary, not to mention every card with the keyword "mill" would need reminder text for it anyway, so it actually fails at its original intended purpose of saving space.

Again, I go over all of this in the OP.

Yes but it's not destroying creatures. It's putting them into gy before even getting cast. I just don't understand your reasoning behind renaming it destroy.
It really doesn't make sense intuitively either. When people discard stuff, should it be called destroy because it goes to the yard?
Should counters read "destroy target spell on the stack". Idk that's just my two cents

CGT's reasoning is well explained and I feel like there's some good logic to it. New keywords for milling have been discussed pretty extensively in this forum, but reusing an current keyword is a novel idea (or least one I have not seen before).

It would make sense for "discard" to stay the same. I think for most people (even nongamers) discard is a familiar term that implies "discard from your hand". Also, like "sacrifice", it's something that you are doing yourself ("Discard a card.") or something that you are forcing a player to do ("Target player discards a card.") and not something that you are doing to a player (such as "Discard a card from target player's hand.") and thus maintaining it as a separate keyword would be consistent to how sacrifice is used ("Target player sacrifices a creature." and not "Target player destroys a creature he or she controls.")

Counterspells could read "Destroy target spell.", which I like the sound of and which would also clear up the counter vs. counter issue. (Spells only exist on the stack so you don't need to mention that part.)

Overall, I think this idea has a lot of good potential.

Rishkar, Peema Renegade, Gilder Bairn, Training Grounds

Quote from AliasBot »

Apparently Yahenni is Leonidas.

...if that's Yahenni, anyway. One would think they'd just drain a person if they were going to kill them anyway.

I am wondering why someone would drain a man before throwing him off the ledge.

I'd be curious to see if people would make actual replicas of the weapons (perhaps as part of a cosplay costume) and bring them to games and/or tournaments, and then whip them out when equipping the cards!

Or maybe that's just something I would do.

The weapon idea is amazing and so is subjugate!

I like the "take dominion" idea a lot. Not sure if an extra land play is much of a bonus, though. It usually wouldn't matter after the first few turns. I was thinking something like reducing the cost of your spells by 1, or maybe your creatures get +1/+1? That might be too powerful, but I'd like it to be something your opponent would covet.

The weapon idea is neat, too. I think it's easy enough for players to get the gist of it, and being able to grab a sword for yourself and charge into battle is too cool. Flavor is kinda weird since so many artifacts already represent weapons, but I guess the same was true for vehicles.

Mossbridge Trolley7
Artifact - Vehicle
If Mossbridge Trolley would be destroyed, regenerate it.
Crew 10
25/25

Quote from Antiantiserum »

Quote from pope-punk »

there wasnt a thread to discuss it

Yes.

thriving turtle deserves his own thread

Quote from ThyLordQ »

Turn 4: Panharmonicon
Turn 5: Land, this.

Why does every card seem better with that darn thing.

Because it makes everything better

Turn 4: Panharmonicon
Turn 5: Land, lime



Turn 4: Panharmonicon
Turn 5: Land, cat



Turn 4: Panharmonicon
Turn 5: Land, hot dog