MTG Cardsmith Community Forums
Planeswalker's Playground (Contest)
While it may be a slightly unoriginal contest concept, I definitely feel it deserves to be revisited in a new light because of the incredible new ideas that people think of. Put simply, your job is to create the most intricate and out-of-this-world card you could think of.
Inspired by a new custom set I've recently created, I realized how detailed and bizarre some card effects can get. Whether it be a huge, complicated sorcery or a creature with an original and interesting game mechanic, I love to see the game get turned upside down by a strategy that completely blows everyone away. So your task is this: I've done my brainstorming, now I want to inspire the community and see what it can create with this prompt. You have to create a card with an effect that provides a new, interesting mechanic or effect that hasn't been seen before.
I will be judging the submissions by the following criteria:
-Balance
-Creativity (obviously incredibly important)
-The overall influence and feel of the submitted card's effect
Rules and regulations:
-The card must be realistic. No unhinged or joke cards will be accepted, We're looking for original and creative submissions
-You may submit any number of cards
-Give credit to the artist
-While the art doesn't have to be ideal, it does have a certain influence over the card's general feel
-The card may be any rarity
-The card my be of any type
-The card may be any color
-The contest will be closing on the last Sunday of the month (8/21), and the winners should be chosen shortly after
Keep in mind, i'm not looking for cards with a huge effect and a fitting mana cost, like "Deal 20 damage" for 7 colorless and 3 red. I'm looking more for the cards with large blocks of text with sometimes confusing or game-twisting effects, e.g. a card that caused certain cards to exile and then allowed certain effects to happen based off exiled cards. Bottom line is, I don't care if there's a large block of text (in fact I encourage it), I just want to see something creative and game-changing.
Most importantly, this contest is relaxed. It is meant to get all the card smiths out there to delve deeper into the possibilities card effects can have, and produce some new inspiring work for the whole community. While it is for fun, I do plan on giving out Favorites and Follows to the winners (after all, the winner will be the one to have "wow"ed me the most). With that being said, I'm looking forward to what you all have to offer. Good luck, planeswalkers... and let the most creative one win!
(Sorry for the large introduction... kind of fitting though, right?)
Current submissions:
@Gateways7 with Wish Me Luck
@Mysterious_Gangsta with Exorgoyf/ Faerie Interloper/ Halve
@ARSEN1C with Malkav, Eclipse Desciple
@Beeswax with Crisis of Faith
@kltmtg29 with Fiery Vortex
@ZonkoTheGreat with Defiant Mercenary
@Luigifan with Concussive Club/ Veil of Secrecy/ Miracle Matter/ Bowser, Star Eater/ Lindsay Dawn
Inspired by a new custom set I've recently created, I realized how detailed and bizarre some card effects can get. Whether it be a huge, complicated sorcery or a creature with an original and interesting game mechanic, I love to see the game get turned upside down by a strategy that completely blows everyone away. So your task is this: I've done my brainstorming, now I want to inspire the community and see what it can create with this prompt. You have to create a card with an effect that provides a new, interesting mechanic or effect that hasn't been seen before.
I will be judging the submissions by the following criteria:
-Balance
-Creativity (obviously incredibly important)
-The overall influence and feel of the submitted card's effect
Rules and regulations:
-The card must be realistic. No unhinged or joke cards will be accepted, We're looking for original and creative submissions
-You may submit any number of cards
-Give credit to the artist
-While the art doesn't have to be ideal, it does have a certain influence over the card's general feel
-The card may be any rarity
-The card my be of any type
-The card may be any color
-The contest will be closing on the last Sunday of the month (8/21), and the winners should be chosen shortly after
Keep in mind, i'm not looking for cards with a huge effect and a fitting mana cost, like "Deal 20 damage" for 7 colorless and 3 red. I'm looking more for the cards with large blocks of text with sometimes confusing or game-twisting effects, e.g. a card that caused certain cards to exile and then allowed certain effects to happen based off exiled cards. Bottom line is, I don't care if there's a large block of text (in fact I encourage it), I just want to see something creative and game-changing.
Most importantly, this contest is relaxed. It is meant to get all the card smiths out there to delve deeper into the possibilities card effects can have, and produce some new inspiring work for the whole community. While it is for fun, I do plan on giving out Favorites and Follows to the winners (after all, the winner will be the one to have "wow"ed me the most). With that being said, I'm looking forward to what you all have to offer. Good luck, planeswalkers... and let the most creative one win!
(Sorry for the large introduction... kind of fitting though, right?)
Current submissions:
@Gateways7 with Wish Me Luck
@Mysterious_Gangsta with Exorgoyf/ Faerie Interloper/ Halve
@ARSEN1C with Malkav, Eclipse Desciple
@Beeswax with Crisis of Faith
@kltmtg29 with Fiery Vortex
@ZonkoTheGreat with Defiant Mercenary
@Luigifan with Concussive Club/ Veil of Secrecy/ Miracle Matter/ Bowser, Star Eater/ Lindsay Dawn
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
This is not meant to be a joke card - the art is meant to simulate a board state of craziness and somewhat halluciantion.
The card takes any instant or sorcery or etb creature that is cast, and tacks their effect onto this one, then making it so that the next thing gets tacked on to this with random targets. It makes the game chaotic anytime anything is cast and makes the game longer with the coin flips, but it ensures the game state is never secured.
Don't know if this qualifies, but it sure is fun!
I know that neither of the effects are original, but on one card they'd make it fin in limited!
Thanks for feedback. The sacrifice thing is supposed to get around indestructible, and effects like that.
Malkav is unique in his ability to operate as two entirely separate cards, 'light Malkav' and 'dark Malkav', depending on whether you have more swamps or plains. 'Grey Malkav', which is to say, the point where you have an even number of both, takes the (generally) weaker version of both his primary abilities but gives his ultimate the power of both. This means that a player is rewarded for holding on to lands, and playing them appropriately to alter Malkav's abilities to the situation, and evening out into grey Malkav only when it's time to use his ultimate. It's quickly obvious that this card is designed for a black/white aggro-control deck, where light Malkav is better at aggro and dark Malkav is better at control. The reliance of Malkav's second ability on devotion makes Malkav much weaker in tricolor decks, since he's unable to protect himself from anything he can't chump-block with tokens without it. While the light second ability is only a temporary solution against creatures, compared to dark Malkav's more permanent removal, it's also the only protection he has against direct spell damage, and can also be used by grey Malkav. It should also be noted that Malkav himself provides 2 devotion to both black and white as long as he's on the board. The dark ultimate can be used even immediately upon entering play to deal with an enemy swarm deck. However, at CMC 5, it's a very expensive way to essentially cast a sorcery that does -3/-3 to all enemies. The ultimate is more designed, as most planeswalkers are, as a finisher, since it does always remove him from play (whether you use all loyalty counters or not, so you might as well), and heavily incentivizes you to change Malkav into grey Malkav only right when it's time to use his ultimate.
creatures with no controllers
spicy
It's in the comments. Creatures without controllers remain on the battlefield, but can't be declared as attackers or blockers. Abilities like lifelink that refer to a 'you' don't do anything, but abilities like Armor Sliver continue to work as normal. Abilities that trigger at a certain point in 'your' turn also stop working, since they don't have a turn to attach to.
This card is a logical conclusion to the disrupt/concuss mechanic I'm designing. However, it's not actually an example of the Disrupt ability word because it uses damage to fuel a counter ability, rather than linking a counter ability to an amount of damage taken. Because damage simply serves to charge up the Concussive Club's counter ability, I figured that in the end, it was more of an example of Blue's direct countermagic than Red's "beat the crap out of the enemy so they can't cast their spells properly" countermagic. Thus, the Concussive Club is a blue-red card (it's still red because it puts a lot of emphasis on dealing damage). Regardless, it's a potent countering tool that encourages you to adopt an aggressive strategy, which is not the kind of strategy one would expect from a countermagic-heavy deck. (I deliberately made the counter ability cost more blue mana and the equip ability cost more red mana to emphasize that blue brings the countering to the table while red brings the skull-cracking aggression.)
The idea here is a classic shell game, where you set up a whole bunch of illusionary copies of yourself to fool your opponent into wasting their attacks.
This is, well, Miracle Matter from Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. I tried to replicate Miracle Matter's gimmick of utilizing Kirby's own Copy Abilities in its attacks and only being vulnerable to the ability it's currently using, as well as making it randomly switch between forms so you can't really plan for what it'll do next or keep it in a form that your opponent's totally helpless to handle. ...As you can see, I overdid it. ...Help?
Bowser, Star Eater (based on Bowser's Super Mario Galaxy 2 incarnation) is designed to quickly accumulate loyalty counters by consuming enchantments and artifacts. From there, he can transform into his Galactic Behemoth form to bestow you with emblems that will help you demolish your opponent faster. Or you can cut out the emblem shenanigans and utterly cripple your opponent by firing off Star Eater's ultimate, which destroys all the opponent's lands and deals damage proportional to the number of lands destroyed. Just be warned that the ultimate costs a crapton of loyalty, so you have to use it with care!
Lindsay Dawn is the Heroes' League's spy, and also a demolitions fanatic. She loves to play pranks on bad guys. And by "pranks", I mean "egregious property damage". However, she strongly dislikes actually injuring people. You can't see it on the card, as I tried to cram way too much in (honestly, I designed the time-bomb mechanic really poorly), but Lindsay's primary gimmick is meant to be that she converts her combat damage into demolition of the opponent's hand and permanents. This is designed to work similarly to how Szadek, Lord of Secrets attacks your opponent's library instead of their life total. With that said... yeah, I'm going to have to completely redesign Lindsay one of these days. Emblems? Seriously? I can explain my thought process there - I didn't want the opponent to sacrifice the bombs in response to taking combat damage from Lindsay - but I seriously could have handled that better!
For more of my clever ideas, check out "Resolve Card-Writing Headaches", a thread I set up to refine card ideas that are too wordy, elaborate, or just plain confusing to print. Also check out "Calling all Artists" and "Calling All Artists Again", which I set up to try and get the artwork I need to print some ideas I've been held back from by lack of a suitable picture.