Avatar TLA set! just for fun.

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  • edited June 2020
    Overall set

    Avatar: The Last Airbender has two central themes:

    Bending the elements: 
    This will be translated into a land subtheme, I'll fill 10 of the common slots with the entire gainland cycle. https://www.mtglands.com/main-lifegainduals.html Refuge cycle not included. This helped both in core set 2020 and Ikoria to super-fix the mana.

    Bending, more so in waterbending and earthbending will be represented by abilities that return your lands to your hand. Something like

    _______________________
    Waterbender         1U
    _______________________
    Creature -Human Bender
    _______________________
    TAP, Return a land you
    control to it's owner's
    hand: tap up to two target
    creatures. Those creatures
    don't untap during their
    controller's next untap
    step.

    As you might notice, by returning a gainland to your hand, you may trigger the lifegain again if you need it, otherwise this enables a landfall archetype (Probably the UG), and a land discard archetype (UR perhaps)


    Physical and spirit world: The races of the Avatar universe fall into three main categories:

    • Humans, can be or not be benders. Appear in every color, predominantly in red (Fire nation), blue (Water tribes) and green (Earth Kingdom). (The air nomads are basically nonexistent except for Aang, so they could be represented  in White).

    • Animals, mostly combinations of two animals. eg Lion Turtle. Appear in every color, predominantly in green.

    • Spirits, appear only in black and white.

    Spirit tribal might be the Orzhov archetype as opposed to the traditional Azorious. I'm considering adding the Flashback mechanic to include Lingering Souls in the signpost uncommon slot.
  • Mechanics:

    As the first post suggests, Converge is already in the set because it is easy to achive thanks to the gainland cycle. It is also a reference Harmonic Convergence, wich appears in the legend of Korra.

    Flashback 
    is under consideration since the series includes a fair amount of flashbacks to Aangs previous lives, plus I want to include Lingering Souls.
  • I assume landfall will be making a reappearance... Also, I think that making a new sub-type is unneeded. You could just do monk, elemental, and/or wizard. Additionally, I think that cards might have the ability to make the lands into elementals (<-- example provided)?

    Though I have never seen Avatar, I would very much like to contribute to the set.
  • The 2 minutes I saw of this show made a bad impression.
  • Lol @KorandAngels I don't even watch the show but you have to give something more than 2 minutes of your time before forming an opinion on it. As a non-fan I can tell you that it has legions of fans and is pretty critically acclaimed, so while you might not end up liking it, I'd recommend giving it a shot. I've seen a few episodes and there's some pretty cool stuff in it.
  • @The-DM I intend landfall to appear but not mention it, just like ferocious and heroic in the recent Ravnica-War of the Spark sets. triggering with a land has become a fairly common thing for green. 

    As for the Bender subtype, I don't know, it does't hurt at all to include it, Warlocks, Peasants and Nobles were added to Eldraine because of flavor alone.

    I'm considering Awaken and Elemental-related things as well, I'm just no sure elementals are actually a thing in ATLA, but it's a set made for fun so, who cares.


  • I see.
  • @The-DM i was wondering if something like this would ever pop up! Avatar is one of my favorite shows and I’ve been watching for as long as I can remember.

    I like the bouncing lands, it’s really flavorful to what it’s representing.

    A few ideas:
    -What if waterbending revolved around tapping/un-tapping your own creatures? It could be a good way to represent the flowy and dance esq movements in the show.
    -For fire bending how about a power matters theme revolving around fire breathing. It could represent the powerful but quick form of fire bending.
  • One issue I see is the colors, of which there are five, and the elements, of which there are four (essentially).

    This seems to be the obvious correlation:
    Water -- Blue
    Air -- White
    Earth -- Green
    Fire -- Red
    Black...?

    This is the best solution I can come up with:
    Water (Primary Blue, Secondary White)
    Air (Primary White, Secondary Black)
    Earth (Primary Green, Secondary Red)
    Fire (Primary Red, Secondary Black)
    If we count each primary color as 1 and secondary color as 0.5, we get:
    Blue - 1
    White - 1.5
    Black - 1
    Green - 1
    Red - 1.5

    This is obviously more balanced, but it isn't quite there yet. To even it out we'd have to focus the miscellanous cards more on blue, black and green than white or red to even it out.

    Another issue that I just thought of is the low number of airbender cards. Given that they're not as present as the other nations.

    I dunno. It's just that it's important to divide your colors somewhat into factions, and that seems a little difficult here.
  • @SteampunkDragon I ran into the same problem, that's why I decided to exploit the fact that airbenders are underrepresented and black has no clear element, so I decided spirits should be black and white this time (I plan reinforcing this idea with the black and white koi fish for the north pole, wich are the spirits of the ocean and the moon). 

    My division still has the problem that green is crowded bc animals are usually green in magic so I don't know in wich colors to put them. 

    The color-faction division shouldn´t be as relevant anyways, Ikoria had humans mainly in Mardu but we got a few blue and green humans as well. 

    The REAL important color division is about limited archetypes. Taking Ikoria as an example again:

    Ikoria had a two-color archetype for each ally pair, wich each had a rare, an uncommon hybrid and a mentor supporting an specific keyword:

    WU: Flying (Signposts: Jubilant skybonder, Skycat Sovereign)
    GW: Vigilance(: Alert Heedbonder, Frondland Felidar)
    RB: Menace (: Sonorous Howlbonder, Labyrinth Raptor)... ETC

    We also got a two-color archetype for each enemy pair, wich each had two uncommons and a mutate card that could go into the non-human archetype for RW and BW, they also has support at common and monocolor at uncommon:

    RW: Cycling (Savai Thundermane, Zenith Flare)
    GB: Reanimator (Back for more, Skull Prophet) ... ETC

    It was also possible to go into a wedge (a three color combination where there are two enemy color pairs and one ally) with all the support for it. Each Wedge theme was a common ground between the two enemy color combinations, for example;

    The Mardu Wedge had enough humans that the BW Human subtheme could be integrated, but it had both cycling and sacrifice payoffs, you had to look for early game token generators such as Valiant Rescuer wich coincidentally triggers with any cycling.
  • Archetypes! I need to create a signpost uncommon for each two-color archetype, so far, I have the golgari, izzet and gruul signposts:
       
    Anyways,here are my options for each archetype, still up for changes:

    Golgari Mill: (Look for cards that mill yourself and return things form your graveyard while drafting)
    Izzet Discard: (Look for benders, card draw, and discard payoffs while drafting)
    Gruul lands leaving: (Look for benders and land destruction while drafting)
    Azorious ???: (Undecided, easy choice would be flying tribal)
    Rakdos ???: (Easy choice would sacrifice)
    Selesnya Lifegain: (Look lifegain payoffs and lifegain lands while drafting)
    Orzhov Spirits go-wide: (Look for spirit pay offs, token generators and things that scale with the number of creatures)
    Boros On-hit: (Look for things that trigger when a creature hits an opponent, double strike and evasive creatures while drafting)
    Simic Landfall: (Look for benders while drafting)
    Dimir instant speed: (Look for instants and stuff with flash while drafting)
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