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Renaissance Set — Creative Design
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Wouldn't the difference between the little Muses from the Grand Muses be like the difference between Heliod and the Eidolons of Theros?
The representation of the color white and a being that channels/represents a sliver of it.
@ningyounk
You trying to avoid the white planeswalker being the leader/the characters having the opposite genders stifles interesting ways characters can be taken like how wizards made Koth and Tibalt two Red male planeswalkers their differences being in other characteristics (One enjoys torturing people to insanity the other so stubborn that even though he can escape he is willing to die on his world.) or Ral Zarek (Insane inventor having to lie to his boss.) and Dack Fayden (The literally red handed thief.) etc
And about what you said about wanting the negative emotions, on the Theros it was the belief in the Gods that empowered them so you could have the plot being that the Muses are created by the emotions of the people, the villainous plot could be since the plane is a generally positive the negative muses are weakened without people feeling their emotion they could try and steal their counterparts role/emotion to regain their power.
Positive:Passion/Negative:Rage
If you do this there could be a shadow that lurks on the plane (TangentTime! The original Ravnica had this the Dimir were just a rumor that ended people who stumbled onto the truth a great contrast to the nine relatively good Guilds that had no secret plots against Ravnica everything wrong with Ravnica sprang from the secret tenth guild.)
this would also solve the problem with the bad guys being a secret organization the darker muses and their servants/lackeys just need to make people lose faith in the positive muses/steal their position.
By the way can you clearly list all the mechanics including Psylian?(sweet mechanic).
Great to be back.
For Joy, Sadness, Desire, Love, Passion and Spite, I find Desire/Love/Passion to be a little close. I really like spite which can be seen as a mix of contempt, disgust and maybe even anger all at once. But it also makes me want to have a specific muse for anger.
For the little muses, yes you're dealing with one of the important interrogations: How do we make them different. My opinion is that they shouldn't be called "Muse of X" or represent a specific emotion by themselves unlike the Grand Muses, they should mostly appear in the background of other cards, and they should definitely not be legendary. Personally, I'm still not entirely convinced the little muses are relevant enough to the set to justify the restrictions they bring (they have a huge weight on illustration choice and they make the nature of the Grand Muses more blurry.)
For the Muse design, there are multiple ways of doing them obviously, but they will be an iconic cycle for the set, like the Gods cycle, so they should be useful in different decks of their colours. That means whatever we do, they can't be a parasitic design. So I'm ok with experimenting with the Muses giving you psylian life, but requiring the players to have psylian life to cast them should be a very very strong no-go, in my opinion.
For the 0/0 indestructible muse, it can be funny but I see two problems:
1) They will look a lot like Gods because of Indestructible. We basically have two options with big important cycles like this: giving them some sort of protection (like the Gods cycle or the Eldrazi Titans cycle) or making them impact the board when you cast them (like the Gearhulks cycle or the Elemental Titans cycle.) A priori, since we need to make them as different from the Gods as possible, I'd rather have them with a specific kind of protection, or use the second option.
2) Indestructible doesn't prevent a creature with 0 toughness from dying, so they would need to enter the battlefield with +1/+1 counters on them.
On Virtuoso, we have different options. We could go back to the first version that triggered when the spell resolves. This has the advantage of making the mechanic simpler to play. But it has the disadvantage of removing a lot of fun design space and make the reminder text longer. Second option, we could find a verb for the name. It has the advantage to be clean, though we already have a verb mechanic (discover), but it's not a terrible downside. Third option, we keep using Virtuoso as-is but I'm not sure there is any precedent in Magic using a noun like this, so it's probably not a very good option.
@HenryTheHatter We're trying to make the Muses feel different from the Gods so having the Muses being created by the people's emotions would really conflict with that goal. The idea was more the opposite: they bring the emotion to the people, or at least dial them up ^^ But they're not Gods, that's for sure!
On the white character, sure there's plenty of interesting and different characters that could have a strong leadership in White. We just have a goal of avoiding the Gatewatch comparison so starting with the white character not being a leader is just the simpler option to avoid further problems. But if you have an awesome idea for a White character that really needs him/her to be a strong leader, we can always do it and stay vigilant on how "Gideon-y" he/she is, it just have to be worth the trouble of doing it ^^
I'll be gone for a few days, so I guess I can shirk and see what you all come up with for Virtuoso XD
@HenryTheHatter, allow me to direct you to page one.
Compose sounds like a good compromise ^^
Courage and Fear
Trust and Doubt
Pride and Shame
Love and Hate
Joy and Sadness
With a concept card that both impact the game the turn you play it AND have some sort of weird protection (there's a death trigger you really don't want to see hapenning.)
I had an idea, so I created this. Maybe this is a good creature mechanic?
This thread is starting to slow down which means we're reaching the end of it, I think it's definitely time to start the design phase. That could help us resolve some dillemas based on good design ideas! For instance, we can mention that people may try both the Virtuoso version (always trigger once on resolving) or Compose Version (triggers can vary on each card.) Also, we just mention there are five Grand Muses and a Corrupted Muse and let people design for any emotion to see what looks best?
Is everyone on board to start the actual design now ?
DESIGN PHASE THREAD HERE:
http://forums.mtgcardsmith.com/discussion/3031/renaissance-set-design-phase
You can propose cool design ideas in the thread above, which will help settle our diffiulties in creative =D
Alternatively, you can also give us your opinion on dilemmas we still have to settle here in creative. Here's a non-exhaustive list:
- Who are the five planeswalkers, and more particularly who are the two returning ones and what do they do in the story?
- What are the emotions tied to the five Grand Muses?
- Should Virtuoso be called Compose? Should the plane be called Rezatta? Should psylian life get another name?
- What creature types should we put in our creature grids?
- How can we refine some story ideas like the depiction and role of the little muses, or the nature of the evil organization that wants to steal a Grand Muse?