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Rezatta, the Renaissance plane — World Building Part 2
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I know this is world building, but can I make some cards for Eco (Eko? Ecko?) and see which you like so that everyone can get a feel for how she works?
Sure! It's always useful to get a flavour sense of a character. Besides, if you propose cool ideas we might end up using it as inspirations for real cards in the set ^^
Here is Ecko! Hope this fits in!
It's, uh, very powerful. Very.
The card doesn't really work as you need to specify when the Elated ability triggers and, yes, as Lujikul mentioned paying 1 mana to get two psylian life is really overpowered
Anyways, at this stage we don't know enough about the set mechanical texture to put in rare already (when you make a set, you build your way up from common to rare/mythic) so when we make Rare cards and such, what we're really looking for is less functional cards and more unique concepts that specifically fit into this set. In other words, at this stage, it's less about if Eko should cost 3 mana or have Elated etc. and more about how you would depict a mute character for the first time in MTG through gameplay for instance ^^ Maybe she prevents players from naming cards? Maybe she's showing cards from your hand to communicate through her music instead of her voice? This kind of stuff
If there is a story to this plane's rebirth, I would argue it should start there. A large, fiery being threatening to trounce the plane lets knights and dragons show off. A cabal of wizards politically maneuvering let's noir types, detectives and criminals show off.
What lets artists, philosophers, and inventors show off?
Recursiveness, sloth, a lack of motivation and determination. A focus on the past. Planes tend to stay relatively the same for long periods of time, which isn't usually true of the real world, and wasn't true of the renaissance, which came in waves. What keeps this plane at such a high energy level? How experimental and wild do artists have to get to keep growing after thousands of years of inspiration? What might happen if, say, people stopped being able to think of new stories, or new art looked just like old art. If it stopped coming to life.
I like the idea of the muses, and adding emotion is a fun way to go (especially focusing on the friction between rationalism and a plane of heightened emotion) but the muses aren't spirits of emotion but of inspiration. Without muses, people feel just as powerfully, but every time they try to say something profound, or something new, it comes out stale, it sounds like regurgitation.
Destruction, pain, and death are not enemies to art or progress. Having art stolen or destroyed is arguably one of the best things that can happen to an artist to stop them from focusing on the past. The enemies of an artist are pretense, convention, and stagnation. So if the muses are dying, it's not because someone is killing them. It's because they've been the same too long. The antagonist to your story could well be time and a lack of ideas, and the solution could be the destruction of the very thing that has kept the plane in balance.
Self sacrifice may be a fine end to this story, but I would swing it around the values of safety/excitement, pretense/truth, and tradition/vision instead.
Thanks for the read, I know it was long, and all opinion.
For that reason, a character who starts out questioning themselves and worshiping tradition could flip the script by the end by questioning tradition and worshiping themselves very powerfully in any scale of story.
That's pretty good, I think you're touching on a fitting feel about where the story can go ^^ Because we have only one set of non-chronological cards to convey the story, we cannot show that they're is a lack of ideas that push the world to change though, we need to choose one point in time to show primarily, so the idea of time as an antagonist wouldn't really work through this medium.
What if our main villain is a thief of ideas and thoughts, similar to how Davriel Cane's abilities are depicted in WAR? I don't necessarily mean Davriel himself, but perhaps a different mental thief looking to further their lot in life by using the creative ideas of others, himself unable to have an original thought?
Ooh I like it, it does fit with the themes of innovation and geniuses while also playing well within the same "mind" level as the emotion theme. Frankly, we could go for straight-up Davriel if we can find some fitting artworks. With his mask on he kinda looks like a death-eater from Harry Potter or Corvo from the video game Dishonored.
Admittedly though, it was much harder to than I expected to find good fanarts of death eaters and Corvo when I did a quick search on Deviantart
Another issue is that Davriel really is Blue/Black, and we need to keep the Blue for Da Vinci. That would mean making another mono-black Davriel which would be a bit disappointing.
In that same vein, Dark Jace or Ashiok could be options, but they both have the blue problem. I can't see how we can make a Da Vinci without Blue, and we can't really afford to have two blue planeswalkers.
Yes, I guess you're right ^^ It just sounded a lot like Davriel, it would have been cool to have him as an official planeswalker.
not enough white villains anyway.
If we have a good idea for a White villain, we could try it ^^ It's usually about pushing White's traits to the extreme (so basically going for fascism etc.)
My instinct in that direction would be a small scale story about a theater troupe trying having to defend their act in some sort of court, kangaroo or otherwise, but that would probably work better as a compliment to something larger.
Maybe the story is told sort of as an account of what already happened, after a disaster is blamed on the heightened emotional state caused by a theater act, and the troupe defends their actions while telling the story of how they saved the day, then after they are acquitted, they realize that the cause of the problems are still out there.
the narrative tension hangs on "If they are convicted, who will stop (insert threat here).