MTG Salvation

It's a hard balance to want to find a mechanic where you would want to actually discard a creature spell to temporarily boost a Legendary creature you have on the board rather than just swing like mad with the creature and replace him when he dies, especially in a limited environment. On the other end, I think a reveal for a boost is a bit too repeatable even with a casting cost attached to it.

At the end of the day, I think discarding a Legendary for a vanilla token is okay at a common level. You're discarding a currently dead card for something for no mana cost. In the short term, you get a little for not much. In the long term it might not be the best play, but at least you have options.

I'm not a fan of the Honden being gone.

It also helps prevent board advantage by casting something that requires you to tap a number of permanents and then later activating a sac ability of something you tapped, essentially "double-dipping" if you will by using one card to do two different things.

I'm sure there are also some funny stack things you could do as well.

I'm really liking the Melody mechanic. Definitely some cool stuff here.

As far as despair is concerned, it's only a five-card cycle and is supposed to be a negative mechanic. Thematically it fits better as the plane around them is being destroyed.

As far as Epitaph goes, I know Advent is waiting to adjust costs until playtesting begins. The design choice to give lower epitaph costs is to make it limited playable as the sets will be cube drafted primarily.

After playtesting tonight with Aran, I do think he is a bit underwhelming. As soon as the rest of the set is designed, I think we'll be revisiting Aran to maybe pump him up a bit, if not a decent bit of redesign.

The fact that every other current blue planeswalker provides card advantage was something I recognized and I wanted to avoid giving him a card draw ability as well to differentiate him as less of a card advantage walker, but more of a control walker. Again, his original +1 ability was untap up to two target permanents. I'm still kind of pushing for that.

The low starting loyalty is because his ultimate is basically, "You win the game." I'm for upping it by one, but only one at most. I just don't get why there needs to be a way for your opponent to get around your ultimate. I realize there aren't any ways of interacting with emblems, but that was by design. I also see plenty of ways for him to go ultimate and still lose based on all the different games I've played in playtesting.

I'm fine with him feeling primitive. I don't need lines of text to make him feel like he's an actual planeswalker. I think by doing so it just feels convoluted and you're just adding text for the sake of adding text. The ultimate is what I wanted it to be in the beginning and I want that one to stay the same. If anything, the other two abilities will be the ones that change. However, I would like to hold off on redesign until playtesting begins.

As I designed him, I feel the need to go to bat for Aran the planeswalker.

First and foremost, when I had originally submitted him to Advent, the +1 ability was untap any two target permanents, not just non-lands. This was mostly to make myself happy as you now have two more lands to help protect him via counterspell or anything else as that is generally my style of play. So, you could cast him and get some sort of Rewind effect the first turn if you wanted to. That seemed a bit too strong, but the ability to untap any of your other permanents seemed to be cost appopriate.

Personally, I think design-wise, giving a planeswalker an ability to protect itself is a good way to go and encourages players to use them rather than not because they feel that as soon as they hit the battlefield they'll just be taken out, which really isn't fun.

As far as the 0 ability goes, I didn't want to give him another plus ability, but I did want to have him tap creatures and further protect himself. As far as the ability itself, tapping permanents and bouncing creatures seems to be the way blue is going; render your opponent's spells ineffective rather than countering them outright. Yes, it is from Tamiyo and was there mostly as filler at first, but I wound up really liking it in the end.

As for the costing of it, making it a minus ability was mostly out of the question due to the lack of actual strength of the ability. I didn't want to add another plus ability, but pricing it at zero seemed to be the way to go. Yes, you're doing a fairly good ability but you're not building up to his ultimate.

Lastly, I'm a firm believer that if an opponent isn't able to stop your planeswalker from going ultimate it should then read, "You're probably going to win the game." Not, "Do something fun," or "Do something kinda cool." Fulfilling an ultimate should be some form of a win condition, or at the very least get you fairly close to that goal. I'm not a fan of walkers whose ultimates don't do much. The only exception would be walkers that are 3 CMC. While this ultimate doesn't ensure that you will win the game, but it does get you fairly close. And as far as the ragequitting goes, if your opponent's planeswalker does go ultimate, you're generally responsible for not preventing it form doing so.

As far as flavor goes, it was more or less supposed to be my planeswalker and a way to get myself in the set. Since I've put quite a bit of time into this project, I figured why not. The fact that he's from Kamigawa is probably due to my enjoyment of L5R and want to add just a bit of that universe into this custom set. As far as being an agent of Bolas, that wasn't my decision and was kind of a surprise to me at first, as well. I'm fine with it now. As for who he is, he's just a ninja. His back story and other things are TBD and aren't really necessary for the storyline at hand as he really isn't the focus, but rather provided a way for Eldrazi and Bolas to get to the plane.

So, it may not be an overwhelming card, but I don't think it's underwhelming either. It's not an auto-include in every blue deck but definitely something to build around, which is what Advent (and to a lesser extent, I) has tried to do with the third set.

Any updates for this at all?

Just going through and posting thoughts here.

Spawncall - I like this better than what we originally designed. Cheaper tutor that puts it on top of your library is pretty nice.

Emrakul - The annihilator seems to be a bit low on him. I'd bump him up to at least an annihilator 3. The uncommon eldrazi has annihilator 2. I still like the redesign.

Telvan Waterdancer - I like the versatility of this card, but I think you have one too many choices. It's a lot of words, even for a rare, and I know I'll probably forget what I have the option of doing with this card without reading it every time I activate it. I'd probably go with the either draw a card or mill and ditch the starfish generation.

Spectre of Memory - Should probably be an illusion creature type given that it has the illusion targeting consequences rather than an elemental. At uncommon I could see it having a lower casting cost. I'd probably go with 2UU but I wouldn't be opposed to lowering it to 1UU or UUU for a 2/2 with the same abilities. I think I would probably be ok with it at 3 cmc for a 3/3 with the target-sac clause.

Mermaid's Last Curse - I know it's a strong mill card, but for a rare I would really think about upping the cmc to 2 and making this an instant. At sorcery speed, it really limits the usefulness of this card, and, I think, cheapening it to a combat trick where you have to sac a creature or hope your opponent is playing red.

Aran, Hand of Bolas - Whoever designed this card is boss.

Arathan Nightmaid - Arathan Nightmaide and other Vampire creatures you control... Vampire Nocturnus

Aran's Bloodmage - Any chance you could call them the bloodspeakers? It's an L5R thing but it would make me happy.

Primal Offering - If you're giving creatures +X/+X for the remainder of the game, you might want to change the wording to give your creatures X +1/+1 counters instead. I'm not 100%, but it seems that WotC gives things +X/+X until the end of turn and anything longer than that they'll use +1/+1 counters instead.

Might of the Fallen - The card reads awkwardly. Honestly, I don't know how to fix this at this time. Maybe take out the period right before the close quotes mark and make it a comma instead.

As we've seen, that two drop aggro slot is fairly weak in black. I'm still of the opinion that this creature is fine as is and if you take away either ability it feels a little too weak in comparison. However, if you think it's too strong I would take away the evasiveness rather than the haste. You could take away the flying and give it lifelink (even though a lot of other vampires in the set have it) to make it a useful Child of Night.

It's an interesting project to say the least. It's interesting to me because I did catch the YGO fever when it first came out, as I thought it was a solid game albeit quite a bit more simplistic than MTG. For some reason it still had that fun factor for me. If I weren't wrapped up in helping develop another custom set I'd be interested in giving a hand.

Though, I will echo what was already said in previous posts. If this is one of your first custom sets, I would suggest you take a little time and familiarize yourself with a bit more of the card base to get an idea of what's out there. More importantly, though, I would suggest you learn about the color pie and really learn what each color does and doesn't do (ie: double strike isn't generally in green and is more reserved for red and white).

Again, echoing what was said earlier, your power level is all over the place. I'll just take the first card on your list as:
This shouldn't be an uncommon. Probably should be a common and have it's power lowered by one or CMC upped by 1. You don't really want your uncommon and rare cards to be simple defenders. You want them to actually do something other than sit there and be walls. If you do want it to be a defender, make it do something useful (Wall of Omens). And, again, there are way too many defenders in your set. I'm fairly familiar with this set and I know there are a few monsters you're supposed to use as defenders in YGO, but just giving them the defender keyword probably isn't the best way to go. There's nothing wrong with having a creature with a high toughness and low power not have defender.

There's also big lack of any artifacts that aren't equipment. Lastly, you need to work on your formatting and syntax. Just for some fun, I'll put up a few suggestions, which are mostly for me. Use them if you want; don't if you don't want to.






Again, I think this is a fairly neat project as a former player. You've laid the groundwork but you just need to refine the cards you made. Keep it going.

Sounds good. I'll probably be out and about on Monday, though, I'll probably be home fairly early to spend some time with my family. We'll get together later on in the week or that following Sunday.

I go on vacation and this completely drops off the map. Any new updates since I've been gone?

Despite having helped quite a bit with development and all the playtesting, I'm happy to say that playing with the set is still fun. Aside from playing against white life gain.