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Renaissance Set — Creative Design
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I'd just ignore the past commentI made as I can't keep up with how fast posts are made. It was mostly a useless rant.
Okay. So the main things we've been discussing in the last 22 comments (XD) are: losing pyslian life first, and ways to make psylian life matter.
On the former: I think that it's okay to lose psylian life first, as long as we count psylian life as more valuable than regular life, since you can burn it for mana. A gain-5-life spell is usually around 2 or 3 cmc (mostly generic mana), but a gain-5-psylian-life spell should probably be more like 3 with multiple colored mana symbols (maybe 1WW for example). Remember that you don't start with 20 psylian life; you have to get it from spells. We should add "Damage dealt to you reduces your psylian life total before your regular life total" or something like that to the reminder card.
On the latter: In addition to being able to burn it for mana, I think we should have a slew of cards that interact with psylian life; like some of the things Ningyounk proposed. We could even have psylian lifelink, or if we don't want to make it its own thing, just have some cards that have "Damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much psylian life."
Speaking of things that Ningyounk proposed.... okay, the pay one psylian life for +1/+0 or +0/+1 is really, REALLY overpowered. You have 4 or 5 psylian life, and you can give your Glistener Elf that much extra damage, and that's 5 or 6 poison counters right there, even without pump spells.
@Everyone
Now that we have three potential main mechanics (and that the conversation is about to reach page 10) I was thinking this may be the right time to start a second topic in parrallel for design (as opposed to creative design) where we start milking the different ideas on concept cards to test their potential?
Meanwhile, on the creative aspects, here's some things we still need:
- Ideas of flavours for this potential secondary life mechanic. (It could reprensent ideas? You get or steal psy life as you get or steal ideas?)
- More tropes! We have done a good job at defining some strong and original themes, now don't hesitate to bring the little flavourful details about Renaissance.
E.g: We definitely need a legendary creature representing Da Vinci^^^
- The archetypes. We should be able to start defining a bit the colour combinations now ^^
E.g: WU Sirens — Build huge defenses then force your enemies to crash into them. (Lots of defenders, target creature attack this turn if able, if you didn't lose life since your last turn, etc...)
I agree with @ningyounk in that we need to playtest psylian life. We all should try out a game or two, maybe by making life-gain spells give you psylian life instead. Test out the power level of losing psylian life first, and of the pay-2-psylian-life-get-1-mana. (Ningyounk wrote 3 psylian for 1 mana, but I think that was a typo).
So. We have our exploration mechanic (Discover), our art coming to life mechanic (Virtuoso), and our awe factor and maybe even the life-matters mechanic in itself (psylian life). I think this just by itself is enough, but we might need an emotion mechanic. What do you all think? Should we make an emotion mechanic, or just keep it as a theme, maybe with some similarities in the effects of emotion cards.
Actually, I believe we discussed making it 3 psy life=1 mana for balancing purposes. I think Outburst (either version 1, 2, or a new version) was the idea for our emotional mechanic, so I think we should keep that and refine what it does a bit.
We'll have to playtest psylian life (as was stated), and I think we could flavorfully fit in psy life as inspiration. When you bring in creatures or spells that give you psy life, you're getting inspired, and that inspiration can be spent (in the universal use) to create things using the mana it gives you.
@syntheticreign Outburst may be a mistake because it limits the way we can care about life changes. It's weird to have a card that says "Whenever you gain life" for instance, if you dedicated an ability word to "If you gained and/or lost 3 life this turn" in the set. If we use psy life, we may need an ability that gives you psy life though? Like poisonous/infect and poison counters.
@ningyounk, okay; we should test out psylian life with different amounts of life paid for mana.
Yeah I figured. I think it would work if you switched the ratio no matter what, so you either payed 3 Psy life for 1 mana or 3 mana for 1 Psy life, but that's too complicated. So as it stands currently, we have "Pay X (3 right now) Psylian life, add 1 mana of any color to your mana pool.", and we'll have other cards in the set that allow you to pay Psy life for other stuff. That seems good currently, but we'll obviously have to playtest it (as we've said, just recapping) and play with the numbers a bit. I'm really excited for this mechanic, so I really hope we can figure it out.
Awesome. Just keep in mind that we PROBABLY won't have cards that give you a ton of Psylian life, so I'd try to avoid any HUGE life-gaining cards, as well as lifelink, unless we make a mechanic called "Psylink" or something where you get Psy life instead of regular.
E.g: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/days-future-future-kaladesh-2016-10-28
I would advice not giving more than one psy life at a time to start with. But don't hesitate to change the rules of the cards during the game to see if it feels better!
Practically, you can test the cards at home using proxys or online (potentially with someone else) using this site where you can add your own custom cards: https://untap.in/.
Here are my findings from day one of playtesting. I played a mono-white Soldiers and Life-gain deck that I threw together in about ten minutes (XD) against a roughly cobbled mono-red Goblin aggro and a Simic Biodiversity deck that I built when I first started playing Magic and kept for sentimental value XD. Then, to test out the Standard metagame with Psylian life, I built a blue and white control-y life gain deck to play against a nerfed Temur Aetherworks deck with the cards I had in my bulk standard boxes. I played three games with each matchup. In the first game, I made most of the life-gain cards give psylian life, and played with 2psy = 1 mana. In the second game, I upped the mana cost of the psylian life-gain cards and found it more balanced. In the third game, I tried out 3psy = 1 mana, and I prefer the 2:1 ratio.
I also found that it's hard for an opponent to actually get to your regular life total since I was gaining psy life pretty consistently. On the flip side, my opponents were pretty much able to keep me from getting a bunch of mana from my psy life.
This afternoon, when I have more time, I'm going to spend a while building an actually powerful deck for standard with custom psylian life-gain cards to try out in a more realistic setting.
So preliminary tests favor a 2:1 ratio and more expensive psy life gain, cool. We'll definitely need cards that prevent your opponent from gaining psy life and spending psy life to gain mana, that way it's viable to play a deck in the set that isn't focused on psy life gain.
- It felt fun, I'm now more confident it would be worth the trouble.
- It's a bit hard to balance, I felt the funniest place to be was to have 2-3 psylian life but not more to get one turn ahead on your mana curve from time to time.
- It felt better with a lot of small psylian life gain each turn rather than a few bursts. We probably will need a creature mechanic that gains psylian life. Any idea for an original combat trigger maybe?
While I'm waiting to playtest a little further, here are some random concept cards for Virtuoso that I shared during the early creative design phase:
For a combat psylian life-gain mechanic, we have a few options: we could make "psylian lifelink;" not keyword it; or invent a new mechanic, which I don't think the set needs, since we're still trying to make an emotion mechanic.
On your cycle: I think it's a great idea, but Virtuoso was intended for instants and sorceries, so the wording is a little weird on creatures. Also, we need a better way to say "Virtuoso 1 three times" or "Virtuoso 1, Virtuoso 1, Virtuoso 1" like in the original version of Mistress of Shapes.
Dancer of the Lux is really powerful, by the way. I think we should change that to whatever wording we decide on for "Virtuoso 1, Virtuoso 1" because it's essentially a one mana 2/2, even though Dancer itself can be removed to end the threat.
The art on Stunning Soprano is awesome!!! Who is the artist?
@Everybody
Now, I think we should work on building Standard psylian life-gain deck to see how it fares in the current metagame. We'll have to make custom cards for the psylian life and the psylian life interactions, so we should try out different mana costs. Suddenly, Chaplain's Blessing (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=409748) seems almost...... decent! XD
Diva is far too strong.
On the emotion mechanic, maybe it could be the psylian life mechanic as well actually? It's probably possible to have the flavour and the gameplay align ^^
Yeah, those cards above are rough concepts of different ways to use Virtuoso so the numbers were given a bit at random and are probably *a bit* generous XD Please don't focus too much on the details (if you look too close you'll notice I forgot to give half of them a creature type...) They're more illustrated ideas saying "we can Virtuoso multiple times, have Art lords, make the tokens sacrifice fodders, use it as some sort of Dash, and do super big Virtuoso".
Yeah, I think it would be great to have a verb instead of "Virtuoso" for the name of that mechanic, so we can use all its design space while still making sense x)
@Faiths_Guide Really? To be fair, I think they're all more or less overpowered but I would have picked the red one as the most overpowered x) Considering this only triggers off of sacrificing, I thought it was more or less fine in the 3-4 mana range because of Grim Haruspex http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=394075 But yeah, I guess you're right because Grim Haruspex only triggers off of nontoken ^^
Diva is a 3 mana 2/3 with a permanent draw trigger. In addition to this, she automatically lets you attack for 2 and/or draw 2. That's the most powerful of the 5. The red one is also too strong.
Yes, I realized that ^^
https://sakimichan.deviantart.com/
http://chichapie.deviantart.com/
@everybody
We have two current things we need to address: playtesting psylian life, and finding a way to make Virtuoso work on creatures.
On the former: Like I said earlier, I think we should build a deck to go in Standard, using custom cards for gaining and interacting with psylian life. Upon further thought, I have come up with two different possible decks: a psylian life-gain control-y build (probably UW); and a psylian life ramp deck, possibly UG to interact with Rishkar and the Amonkhet UG ramp.
Speaking of Standard decks, wouldn't Virtuoso go incredibly with Temur Aetherworks?? You make a whole bunch of art tokens that leave the battlefield at the end of the turn and get you a slew of energy.