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Ravnica Allegiance Cards! (New Mechanics/keywords)
As we all know, the guilds that weren't in GRN will be in Ravnica Allegiance, but they don't have new abilities. So this challenge is all about new abilities for the guilds in Allegiance.
Rules:
1. Card must be pertaining to one of the following guilds:
Simic
Orzhov
Rakdos
Gruul
Azorius.
2. The card must be containing a new ability that the guild has, that you have made.
3. The card must have the watermark of it's guild.
4. There is no maximum to how many entries you may submit.
5. The card must be made only on mtgcardsmith.
Prizes:
1st Place: 6 faves of your choice and a follow.
2nd Place: 5 faves of your choice.
3rd Place: 4 faves of your choice.
Honorable Mentions: 3 faves of your choice.
Happy Smithing!
Rules:
1. Card must be pertaining to one of the following guilds:
Simic
Orzhov
Rakdos
Gruul
Azorius.
2. The card must be containing a new ability that the guild has, that you have made.
3. The card must have the watermark of it's guild.
4. There is no maximum to how many entries you may submit.
5. The card must be made only on mtgcardsmith.
Prizes:
1st Place: 6 faves of your choice and a follow.
2nd Place: 5 faves of your choice.
3rd Place: 4 faves of your choice.
Honorable Mentions: 3 faves of your choice.
Happy Smithing!
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Azorius
Solidarity (This creature gets +0/+1 for each other creature you control with solidarity.)
Rakdos
Furious (Whenever this creature attacks, it gets +1/+0 for each untapped creature defending player controls.)
Gruul
Animosity (This creature is dealt damage in the form of +1/-1 counters.)
Orzhov
Revenant -- When this creature dies,...
Simic
Biotheurgy (Each +1/+1 counter you remove from a creature you control while casting this spell pays for {1}.)
Narrative-wise, my assumption here is that the remaining guilds will end up on the side of Bolas in one form or another, so I tried to capture that, but I also wanted to include a built in climax...
Simic
For the Simic my mechanic is Mutate, which triggers whenever a creature transforms or flips face up. The expectation is that we'd include a bunch of transforming and morph creatures, as well as some Manifest effects.The Simic were perhaps the most challenging of Bolas's conquests on Ravnica. Their leadership hidden away behind Speaker Zegana, they could not be easily threatened or controlled by magical means. In the end he bought their loyalty with promises of power and insight only he could offer.
Orzhov
The Orzhov get a complimentary ability to their classic Extort mechanic, designed to play well on its own, hate a little on storm and similar concepts, and work in a very complimentary with with Extort itself in formats like commander.Teysa was the first to offer her guild's service to Bolas. The opportunity presented by his arrival was too great, and the risk of resistance far, far to high. As such, the syndicate's power has remained largely intact, and they now enjoy greater freedom than ever to operate their various schemes.
Revel, my new mechanic for Rakdos, is nice and simple and powerful in a reasonable way, creating creatures that gain momentum as they attack, which seems very Rakdos to me. There's plenty of room for interaction as well, as you'll see on the big guy himself.
The Rakdos Bolas simply led into chaos, in keeping with their natural tendencies. Whether Rakdos himself has grown madder with time or Bolas pushed him along is unclear, but the dragon clearly understood that it would be easier to bate the cult towards his enemies than to attempt to control them.
My Grul mechanic, Carnage, started off with the name and spun out readily from there. The basic idea is to do interesting stuff based on the number of creatures that die in combat when you attack, and there's loads of fun design space there.
Given their lack of formal structure, the Gruul clans posed a unique challenge to Bolas. Ultimately, his agents hatched a grand plot, slaying one of the clans' greatest heroes, raising him as Bolas' creature, fostering a messianic rise to power and a catastrophic martyrdom that turned them against the other guilds.
Given both the color themes and concept of the Azorious, color hating on people's ability to cast spells seems like a good fit, so that's what Regulate does. Requires some restraint on the ability to do it instantly, but that still leaves plenty of room.
The least likely of Bolas' allies, the senate - leaderless with the death of Isperia - were suborned by a combination of Orzhov bribery and extensive infiltration. As the dragon's dominion grew policies became more and more draconian, until a figure thought long lost appeared to precipitate Bolas's end...
Simic:
Biodiversity N (Whenever another creature enters the battlefield under your control, if it shares no creature types with other creatures you control, put N +1/+1 counters on this creature.)
https://mtgcardsmith.com/user/bnew07/sets/36091
Gruul:
Wild (Creatures with haste, creatures with trample, and instant and sorcery spells with no targets are wild.)
https://mtgcardsmith.com/user/bnew07/sets/35752
Orzhov:
Indebt N (Put N debt counters on target creature. It becomes indebted to you, gains "{1}: Remove a debt counter from this creature.", and "When this creature dies, you lose 1 life and each opponent gains 1 life for each debt counter on it.")
https://mtgcardsmith.com/user/bnew07/sets/35753
Azorius:
Enact N (Look at the top five cards of your library and reveal a Law card from among them. Put it into your hand or onto the battlefield if its converted mana cost is N or less. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.)
https://mtgcardsmith.com/user/bnew07/sets/35750?page=1
Absolutely. Any feedback you have would be great!
Love to have any feedback or suggestions on mine as well, of course.
For the record, I like all of these, so I'll focus on constructive suggestions instead of just making a list of them all and saying "this is cool" next to each of them.
Biodiversity - The double-negative in the wording made it harder to parse than it needs to be. Also, I don't think "they" is the right term to use from a templating standpoint (they usually refers to players). I might reword the reminder text like so: "Whenever another nontoken creature enters the battlefield under your control, if it shares no creature types with [this creature] other than Mutant, put a +1/+1 counter on [this creature]."
Indebt - You could probably reduce the text a bit by removing "becomes indebted" from it. There are counters you can check for with other effects, and tracking which permanents were once indebted but have removed all of their counters seems like a lot of unnecessary book keeping. Might choose to re-word the pay-down ability to key off the counters for similar reasons - as written, the debtor retains that ability forever after, technically speaking.
Edit: I get the value of having things be indebted to a specific player, but that's pretty nightmarish in terms of tracking, and creates weird edge cases like creatures being indebted to multiple players, each of whom controls a Vuliev. For an effect like Vuliev's, maybe rework it to do something like "When a creature with debt counters dies, return it to the battlefield under your control."
Enact - Personally I'm not a big fan of mechanics that only work within their set or block. It squanders the opportunity for cool interactions in formats outside of standard and limited. I think I'd make this work on enchantments in general, and use the law type in other ways (maybe all law enchantments do something based on the number and/or types of laws in play, similar the Hondens but with more variety).
My new Gruul ability is called Battlecraft. It doesn't care who got hit, it just rewards you for being part of a bloody brawl. You get hit? Reward. You hit the opponent? Reward.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. I revised my Biodiversity ability based on your input. I agree with the tracking complexity of indebt, I still need to figure out a solution to that.
I agree that Enact is parasitic, I may think about making it more general as you suggested.
Here are my comments in your mechanics:
Mutate
This mechanic doesn’t hit the mark for me. Simic doesn’t mechanically care about either transform or morph so I don’t get why it would want to reward that. Additionally, you have created a mechanic that REQUIRES having two other complex mechanics at high levels in the same set, which is incredibly unlikely. Lastly, morph and transform both have their own flavor already, neither of which is necessarily mutation so assigning the mutation flavor to them doesn’t make much sense. I would go back to the drawing board on this one.
Racketeer
The flavor is spot on here so nice job! Neither black nor white get blanket cost reduction, particularly if it stacks so this isn’t really in color pie. The main issue is that this mechanic is broken in older formats. You just need a racketeer card on the battlefield and you can build your deck to win easily in the same or following turn by including a bunch of cantrip artifacts and a grapeshot (cast off of prophetic prism). I see what you weee trying to do here and I like it in principle but the mechanic as is is just broken and needs to be properly balanced.
Carnage
I like the skeleton of this ability. Caring about “for each creature that died this combat" fits in Gruul reasonably well and plays into the guild theme of attacking. I think to make this mechanic really shine you need to decouple the end of combat part and just make the ability a dedicated scaling ability with the aforementioned condition (like Undergrowth). This way your mechanic isn’t always tied to permanents and can go on spells. Nice job on this one.
Revel
This is a simple yet functional mechanic. My only concern is how snowbally it is, so be careful balancing the cards you make with it. Great flavor though!
Regulate
This mechanic doesn’t actually do anything fun. First off,”banning” is a white only ability so it doesn’t belong in blue. Second, the ability only stops the opponent from playing spells which is extremely useless on sorcery speed effects and extremely miserable on instant speed ones. I think this mechanic, while flavorful, isn’t worth keywording.
I actually wanna give some context to the inspiration for this card. In Ygopro we have clans and i was for a long time passively involved with this sorta pirates meets heroic figures sorta RP clan (my guess is red/white) but I had no interest in it and eventually branched out with the banning of Firewall Dragon which had long been complained about for its OTK potential and thought why not make a clan all about decks that break the game? But it doesn't come from a sense of needing to win, (that sorta self aggrandizing is Black) but moreso from a sorta absurdist "the game is stupid and imma show you how stupid it is and enjoy your misery cause I'm bored" thing. So I thought what if Gruul became more of a cult of trolls and goblins that worshipped Dragons that taught them how to lie and scheme and hence the named ability Firewall which is both a combat oriented ability like Bushido or Rampage and also a built in reverse Fear or Intimidate where it can only block it's colors. But considering clans are always two colors... You gonna be bamboozling someone. It's just a prank bro
I don't necessarily agree with some of it, but I'll definitely be making some adjustments.
As an relevant aside, I think one of the key reasons that so many mechanics we see in real sets feel stale and lame is that Wizards is afraid to stretch their definitions. Obviously, that means my designs here push at those borders - Mutate for example is designed to play off of cards becoming other cards explicitly because that expands the Simic design space and opens up a lot of options while remaining on narrative theme, and Regulate extends bans to blue because that's always felt like something that's broadly appropriate for the color of counter spells and color based bounce.
More over, I think their hesitance about synergy is the other key factor. The mechanics people remember and love are often those that interact in exciting ways both in their Standard environment and the broader set of formats, so I explicitly believe it's a good thing to do that. From that perspective, adding a few words to Mutate to extend it beyond whichever one of those mechanics it's paired with in this particular set is a good investment, and including abilities like Racketeer that can potentially combo off is just fair play, as long as the combos are sufficiently challenging to set off.
I know lots of people have a much more conservative mindset about the game and will disagree with me on those points, but I assert that this kind of thinking is what's needed to break out of the pattern of limp keyword design that's dominated for years now.