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Pro Team Contest - (Cardsmith Compliation) - #2
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@Ningyounk is already helping a lot, so I guess his results are the final results.
@DashDo101
@Mordecai
@Littledemon
Team B:
@DankSoulsRager
@UndeadZombie22
@KLTMTG
Team C:
@Feyamius
@KrampisZman
@Flatfish
Team
@Butters
@TurkeyAsylum
@Yururu
Team E:
@AlphaDelta
@Beeswax
@CXWarrior
Team F:
@TrippleBoggey3
@DingusXeon
@TheFriendlyGeek
Team G:
@Lujikul
@Gamerpg04
@TheEverspikesWarlord
Team H:
@OneBigBlueSky
@Latinas
@JAM
Team J:
@VinylVantasy
@Monty
@Faiths_Guide
And all other people.
Looks like voting will start! Each person may vote for any set they did not make.
Team A: Dropout.
Team B: http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/UndeadZombie22/sets/14316?page=3
Team C: http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/Faiths_Guide/sets/14688
Team
Team E: http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/Beeswax/sets/14331
Team F: http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/DingusXeon/sets/14322?page=1#
Team G: Dropout
Team H: Dropout
Team I: KIA
Team J: http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/Faiths_Guide/sets/14353
Well done (team) E!
Team C's mechanic is Unite- (This permanent enters the battlefield with a devotion counter on it for each color this permanent shares with each other permanent you control.) NOTICE: Unite is NOT devotion and it is NOT sunburst. While it may feel simmilar, it is COMPLETELY Different. Unite was designed by @Flatfish and @Feyamius, and edited to the wording they desired by me.
I'm going to be showing you 2 cards designed by each of us, which are the gems of the set. I'm going to be starting with Moldslime ooze.
Moldslime is super cool because he gets bigger as long as he has more devotion counters on him, but you can sacrifice his size and turn it into raw mana.
Next up, Koloro Crab
Koloro Crab is awesome because he helps you fix your mana in the early game, and has a fairly decent body in the late game. Also, he is the only monocolor unite creature.
Next up, @Feyamius' cards, starting with Marsh Waterfalls.
This card is awesome because it uses your devotion to untap itself, while still providing fixing. It's a Killer combo with Koloro Crab
Next up, Angelic Strengthening:
Angelic Strengthening can save your creature and make it bigger, all at the cost of a couple devotion counters. It's also good on Moldslime and great on the Crab.
Finally, @Flatfish's cards. First up Sekanugoyf.
Our Very own Tarmagoyf. I'm just going to let the fact that this card can be, in the words of it's creator "a 32/32 if you are really lucky"
Finally, probably one of the coolest cards in the set, Library of wonders.
This card wins the game. Literally. Bring your doubling seasons for this one, cause were gonna be makin' some counters tonight!
Sorry for a delay in posting this, I had real life obligations AND my team for the next round to worry about.
EDIT: I have thought long and hard about it, and I have decided that some of the elemental dragons were over powered. Team F wins!
My vote: Team F
I think instruct is the better developed mechanic, but I really think using gold tokens more is kinda cool. Would it have been the first set in this challenge doing this, I'd give my vote to @Beeswax, what would be set E. But the sky pirates on round one already did this with some cards, so the originality has a small crack.
Just small enough to let the seesaw nod towards team J a little.
Thus, long story short: I'm voting for Team J.
My Vote: Team E
@DankSoulsRager
@UndeadZombie22
@KLTMTG
What I really like about this set is the diversity and the balance of its design skeleton. There are cards for every colours without having a strong shift towards Red which is the classic colour or dragons, and you even managed to design five lands, an instant and two planeswalkers in a set that was about Dragon Elemental. Seeing non-elemental dragons and even non-dragon creatures was surprising considering the theme, but it's quite refreshing overall as well
Unfortunately, this hardly compensates, on my opinion, for the lack of mechanical diversity through the set. Simply seeing non-red dragons could have been enough a few years ago, but now the set suffers a bit from the comparison with Tarkir because the effects you used are very tame (mostly staple effects on enters-the-battlefield or attacks/blocks triggers). While some french vanillas and virtual vanillas are fine, I think this set has too many unexciting designs like Sunlith Behemoth or Poisonous Darkwing, and fails to deliver on some obvious slots like a cycle of mythic Dragon Elemental for instance.
In the end, I think you started on good basis with the intention of designing in areas that were left untouched by Tarkir (common and low-mana dragons) and the addition of the Elemental concept was a great idea on order to give the set its own identity. I don't know what happened during design, but the fact that Elementals ended up as nothing more than a creature type with zero mechanical significance really came as a disappointment and made the set too close to Tarkir for its own good. The rules was 20 cards and you designed 32, I think you really should have removed 12 cards so the set had less filling cards and felt more dense in surprises and flashy cards
@Feyamius
@KrampisZman
@Flatfish
Your mechanic Unite does a really good job at pushing players to play with multicoloured permanents. But what is important is that it does so in a way that feels mechanically different from Sunburst and Converge, and you completely nailed it. Cherry on the top, it still synergizes very well with Sunburst/Converge decks, and retrocompatibility is always a pleasant upside =D You managed to find a design space that was all yours, and dug for the most interesting concepts in that space. I especially like Library of Wonders as an unexpected use of the Devotion Counters, and Burning Visions as an alternative way of refilling your Devotion counters.
On the downsides, I have three main critics. First, your mechanic is quite confusing. Calling the counters "Devotion" was really a bad call on my opinion, as Devotion already is a mechanic and pushes you in the exact opposite direction (monocoloured decks). And I'm still not sure how much counters I get on my WUB Unite creature if I already control two WUB permanents: 2, 3, or 6? Second, the cards consume A LOT of Devotion counters (Starborn Archer uses 3 counters for 1 damage) even though it's a finite ressource. I think you should have considered doing an energy-like mechanic instead (also that would have helped Unite feel more different from Sunburst). Third, you pushed towards tricoloured and even tetracoloured cards but didn't take the time to assign a strong and recognizable archetype to each combination, which makes the set looks like a big soup of mana with no colour pie
In a nutshell, I like the concept of the mechanic and I think you did a good job at exploring it, but, on my opinion, you engaged too soon in this mechanic and fell right into some of its traps. Namely its unhealthy resemblance with Devotion and Sunburst that you could have easily avoided, and its economy that is super swingy and therefore would probably be quite frustrating.
@AlphaDelta
@Beeswax
@CXWarrior
This set is so packed with incredibly clever designs! At first, I was a bit scared when I saw the theme of the set because it's a very narrow design space and, if Gold Dragons were actually a thing, you would not see that many cards playing with this archetype in one set. But seeing the final result, you dug super deep for surprises and original concepts so the set never feels redundant
My only concerns would be on the way you've handled the Gold economy on some cards. Gold is powerful by itself and can completely ruin the colour balance and the pace of the game in large quantities. So I think some cards like Alamaya, the Ransom Queen are just too Gold intensive. Also, the parasitism level of Gold on some cards is too high. Cards getting better with Gold are cool, but I don't think you should have done cards like Greed's Reward that don't do anything if you don't have Gold, or even cards that care about Gold your opponents have (Beckoner of Autumn).
So, long story short, even if I have some minor disagreements (namely on Gold economy and parasiticism), the set is clever, original, diverse, and full of surprises. You clearly were in control of the feel of your set as a whole, which shows you understood what you were doing and pushed it in the right direction to make it the most interesting it could get =D
@TrippleBoggey3
@DingusXeon
@TheFriendlyGeek
The feel of the set is really cool, it's fresh, coherent, and just amazing to look at. I think it's visually my favourite set out of all the entries
I'm less inspired by the mechanical choices you made though
In the end, your set feels more like a nostalgic tribute to banding, with an elf flavour. It's beautiful, and it's soothing to go through each card, but it's just elves with the Banding ability which is nowhere as interesting or exciting as it could have been with more mechanical surprises here and there.
@VinylVantasy
@Monty
@Faiths_Guide
Instruct is probably the deepest mechanic proposed in this competition. While staying easy to understand for beginners, it provides interesting gameplay for everyone with a lot of strategic choices for the more experienced players. For instance, should you skip attacking to let your creature untapped and available for a last-minute lesson on Hexproof from Warding Teacher? But what really makes the set shine, for me, is that you managed to make a handful of support card that aren't instructors but makes the archetype so much more interesting like Studious Wingrider or Inward Eye Trainee. Finally, I want to bring the spotlight on how brilliant your use of piggybacking is. You went super hard on the teacher/student references in the names and flavour text, and it really makes the set feeling very intuitive ^^
I still think the mechanic has two inherent flaws, though, that should have been adressed (on my opinion). First, the fact that any instructor can tap any number of creatures. As Instruct reads "get a bonus for each creature you tap", I think it really should have been Instruct N (Tap N creatures, they become instructed) so it feels less swingy. Second, the fact that you instruct creatures that have been instructed by other creatures during the turn is super confusing I think, and also feels a bit overpowered with the unlimited intruction problem. Finaly, I have a critic on the design choices you made for your instuctors, namely the sheer number of effects that gives combat-relevant boosts to creatures you just tapped. You designed 3 cards whith an Instruct ability that matters any time (for instance, Warden Teacher), 4 cards that only works defensively if you block first THEN instruct the blocking creature which is too complex for beginners I think (for instance, Hidden-Glade Sage), and 3 cards that only works if you can untap the instructed creature (Uplifting Counsellor or Mentor of the Wild for instance). While one or two cards in the last two categories is fine, I think the fact that they represent 7/10 Instruct cards really send the wrong message.
I understand what I just mentioned was deliberate choices, and it certainly helps the mechanic feels original and deep with its own gameplay, which is clearly its strongest asset, along with the really clever support cards. But (and here I strongly highlight it is a personal subjective opinion) I think this combination of choices was a mistake as it makes the mechanic feels slightly more complex and unbalanced than it should have been.
#1: Team E - Gold Dragons
http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/Beeswax/sets/14331
#2: Team J - Instruct
http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/Faiths_Guide/sets/14353
#3: Team C - Unite
http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/Faiths_Guide/sets/14688
#4: Team B - Dragon Elementals
http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/UndeadZombie22/sets/14316
#5: Team F - A Band of Elves
http://mtgcardsmith.com/user/DingusXeon/sets/14322
- We used the term devotion counters because it is a kind of devotion, but for many colors. It's good to have devotion to a color. It's just better to have devotion to more colors. And it's best if you have devotion to as many colors as possible at the same time.
- If you let a WUB creature enter the battlefield and you've already got two WUB permanents out, the new one gets six counters. One for each color it shares with each permanent already there. Check first color: white. How many permanents have it? Two. So two counters. Check next color: blue. How many ... and so on. We fought with the wording a little bit, too, but I think it's understandable this way (and it's not the first ability in the Magic universe that gets more understandable with some exemples to show how it works). But we thought it would be worth the small confusion due to what we think would be a lot of fun in play ("So I cast this one and I get ... *count* twelve frickin' counters, yo!").
- That's why some of the abilities need quite a lot devotion counters to activate: you can have a whole amount of them in some cases, especially if you'd build around this mechanic. Usually you'd get, let's say, three counters on the archer. That would mean you can shoot 1 damage at any time. That's basically the red puzzleknot on top of a creature. But you would rarely use it this way. You build upon it, get in play, catch nine+ devotion counters and have a free Arc Lightning at any time.
- You might want to flicker some of the permanents later, because when you play them the first time with no other permanents on the BF, they don't get many counters, that's right. Maybe there should be a guy who can flicker stuff with devotion counters.
- What seems to not be made clear enough by our team is that we really do have an order in our cards and thought about the color pie. Almost every card we made in this set concerns the UBRG "megashard", so everything except white. In this faction, the Wirrix, chaos and unregulation are the main characteristics, so we have some coin flips and other randomization processes going on our cards. But what not seems to be clear either is that we almost exclusively ust show the Wirrix megashard, while in a potential world with these megashards, there would be four more factions. Where here a lack of white-ish-ness is the thing with the Wirrix, the non-blue faction would be very emotional (with red and black) and less knowledge-y, maybe a bit selfish (with survival-of-the-fittest green and black), but not too much because white, and potentially anti-technology (green and blue-hate). But in the 20 card sample, we wanted to limit it to one megashard to better show the potential. We have one or two cards with white to give a sneak peak that white is still a thing and we didn't just totally forget about one color. Seems to not have worked out that way like we thought it would.
- Last but not least: We didn't have a mechanic similar to energy counters in mind, but I wouldn't have wanted it anyway. Because it would be a) boring to mimic this new thing from Kaladesh and b) it focuses on permanents so the counters should be on the permanents, too. And this way, we can do stuff with these counters on permanents like doubling them with a spell on a single target or make stuff that say something like "[do something with] any permanent with a devotion counter on it".
#1: Team E
#2: Team J
#3: Team C
#4: Team F
#5: Team B