MTG Cardsmith Community Forums
Rezatta Set Design - Uncommons Part 2
This discussion has been closed.
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
I don't dislike that it's going in a more original direction with blink instead of tap, but it's probably a bit too tricky to play with when you start taking ETB abilities into account. The repeatable tap ability isn't particularly original in itself but it has a built-in simple form of efficiency that is hard to beat. Also, there are many ways we can interpret the basic concept:
I also have a few more suggestions;
--------------
Stone Oven Stall
2
Artifact
4, Tap: Remove target attacking or blocking creature from combat. Its controller may pay 2. If that player does, they gain 3 life
---------------
A goofy card based off of Maze of Skophos' effect and costing for a soft removal card that also has a silly life payoff. To be honest I've basically been thinking about how to shoehorn Food into a suggestion for a while in a way that doesn't introduce Food as an explicit mechanic.
---------------
Refractive Podium
3
Artifact
Masterwork
Tap: Add one mana of any color other than your masterwork's colors.
3, Tap: Target creature becomes your only masterwork.
----------------
I like the idea of a masterwork card using what your masterwork 'isn't'; this should work as a mana rock and as a useful card in the masterwork deck for repeatable Masterwork application, although I can understand if that's an effect you may want to shy away from, especially on an artifact.
----------------
Forbidden Doctrine
2
Artifact
4, Exile Forbidden Doctrine: Target player shuffles their graveyard into their library. Discover, discover.
----------------
A card with a similar effect as Cranial Archive, although using Discover as its payoff instead of just a card draw.
The Stone Oven Stall is interesting from a flavour perspective but I'm trying to keep life gain slots in the set for serran life because of as-fan issues. It would also enable renewal on the opponent's turn when used defensively, so I don't think this would be the set for this effect.
Refractive Podium is a really solid option, being able to change your masterwork at instant speed is actually a really good reward for the archetype and it would go well on a mana rock. I think the last ability is redundant with the first masterwork ability so I would keep only the last one. My main concern is that "target creature becomes your only masterwork" doesn't really have a meaning rules wise, this is reminder text slang that hides much complex rules. Ideally, we could write "2, T: Masterwork" but that would mean the ability works differently for permanents, nonpermanents AND activated abilities which starts to just be very un-realistic rules wise. Maybe "2, T: Target creature you control becomes your masterwork. (You can have only one masterwork.)" would be ok as the term masterwork itself if holding all the rules baggage in this case, like "you become the monarch".
Forbidden Doctrine looks a bit too effective at what it's doing, there might be a light mill theme in UB Art so I would favour a weaker effect that could fight against the mill deck while leaving the possibility of being overwhelmed.
TBA - 1G OR 2G
Sorcery
Choose one or both:
*Shuffle up to three target cards from graveyard into their owner's libraries.
*Choose target card in your graveyard. At the the beginning of your next end step, put that card from your graveyard on top of your library.
Alternatively:
TBA - 1R
Sorcery
Put any number of target instant or sorcery cards with different names from your graveyard on top of your library. An opponent may pay 3 life. If they do, you mill three cards.
Notes: An Anti-Mill card that encourages smart decisions for both you and your opponents, while synergizing with renewal and such. Alternatively, it could be colorshifted to blue if the alternate cost was "An opponent may have have you mill three cards. If they do, draw two / three cards."
I'm back from my little trip and I've been looking at the uncommons with a pair of fresh eyes, which made me realise a couple things:
1) We're going to need a small wrath effect (something that kills creatures with toughness 2 or less) either in Black or Red. Additionally, Black is going to need a repeatable removal card if it doesn't pick up the small wrath. Now, I would like to have this effect at rare:
This means that a "All creatures get -1/-1 (or -2/-2)" effect at uncommon would be redundant. Hence, I'd like black to be a repeatable removal (the WB card already does repeatable -3/-3, so I was thinking repeatable sacrifice for this one).
This leaves us with a "Deals 1 (or 2) damage to each creature" effect in red. I really liked the idea we had for this slot earlier with "can't attack or block unless you pay 3 life" but I think we can re-use it to replace a card we'll remove from uncommon during playtesting, or put it at a higher rarity.
2) The colour filtering colourless card aimed at masterwork is proving troublesome to design. I've tried many versions with the "can't attack or block unless CARDNAME is your masterwork" but since we already have a 3-mana rock at common, it pushes the uncommon one towards "1, T: Add one mana of any color" designs that are worth 1 or 2 mana, but this design would work better with a sizeable creature that would call for a 3- or 4- mana card. Additionally, it's weird to have a tap ability on a creature that's called to be your masterwork.
The other main lead I had was a cheap utility artefact that filters your colours and allows you to change your masterwork. But changing your masterwork calls for really ugly templating. Technically, we could do "T: Masterwork (Choose a creature you control. It becomes your only masterwork) but it means this ability would have three different variations for permanents, nonpermanent spells, and abilities — it's just not very realistic as the rules tend to hate that. Similarly, it makes giving masterwork to other spells super tricky just because of the permanent/nonpermanent spells difference already existing. (As a reminder, permanents trigger on entering the battlefield and not resolving because of recursion synergies with the Art archetype).
Here are a bunch of variations I tried, each with their own problems:
I tried to be slightly less in-your-face with the masterwork theme and came down to this:
I think it's just slightly too strong but there might be something there. I think it could be an interesting 2-mana design, if we just added a little something to it but Im not sure what. Any suggestion?
I don't want to make you overuse serran life if you think there's already enough cards with it, but it's just an idea.
My main problem with this design is that it's not self-sufficient (it doesn't produce mana if you don't have serran life), but there's also the concern that this slot is meant to encourage a five-colour masterwork deck and this design is more aimed at the serran life archetype.
In a vaccum, I do think "Doesn't untap during your untap step unless you pay N life" is a cool ability that would fit really well with the black/red archetype. I also like the idea of reducing the rate of serran life mana production to 1 serran life = 1 mana but I was keeping that for a green Mythic or something.
FourEyesIsAFish
Pay 1 life: Untap CARDNAME would let you turn each of your life point into one mana. This means you would have access to basically 20 mana on turn 2, which is probably not a good idea x)
__
On the masks I was talking about earlier, I'm not sure we want to dedicate two of our five remaining colorless slots to a couple of equipments unless they are extremely synergistic (and the concept calls from a more top-down design, which tends to be more loose). However, we currently have a blue and a red coloured artifact at uncommon. We could make the masks black and one of its enemy colours so we have a full cycle of coloured artifacts. An equipment would also fit the repeatable sacrifice slot I was talking earlier for Black pretty easily.
Something like this maybe?
And for the masks, I know that you said that there is a blue-red artifact at uncommon, but wouldn't you want to keep your colorless cards as colorless? Don't get me wrong, the design looks nice, but I feel like you would just be taking your colorless slots, and replacing them with colored slots (Which I don't know if that's what you would want to do).
Yeap, so a little above I did a quick review of the most recent MTG sets and how many colourless cards they had at uncommon. I realised I was a little biased when I made the first version of the skeleton because I started to work on Rezatta during Kaladesh standard so there was a lot of colourless cards in every set at that time; Hence, I planned for 10 colourless uncommon cards. But all the recent sets only had 5, so we decided to replace 5 of the colourless slots by monocoloured cards to stick more to recent MTG set skeletons. That's why, with only 5 colourless slots, I feel like the two masks would take too much space (we still need a handful of staples in there like colourless hate cards etc.). But it would be easier to make the masks work as coloured artifacts if we wanted to, because we can just pinpoint what effects would be needed in each colour and twitch them to go on an equipment.
I like the Masterwork Mana rock, but 2-mana "Add one mana of any color" is a little too generous compared to existing mana rocks. To fix it, we would either need to make it produce colourless mana (but then it's not promoting the 5-colours archetype) or make it 3-mana (but then it's too close to the common mana rock). That's actually how I ended up with the Pricy Gem design above. I simply put "attacks alone" instead of "your masterwork attacks" so it feels less parasitic, but the masterwork deck is specialised in attacking with just one creature so it's really aiming at it. The problem is 1-mana feels more like a potential rare design. I think your idea of adding blocking into the mix might be the solution though, it's a little bonus that would potentially make it worth 2-mana at uncommon compared to my previous design!
The flavor of the card would be that an artist loses their most recent creation, which they have worked on for years. They then have a mental breakdown and go mad trying to find it.
Also, it says that there are 12 multicolored uncommon cards, but I only counted 10. I don't know if there is only 10 and there is a typo, or if I can only see 10, and two cards are missing.
I like the idea of having an edict effect that you can cast from your graveyard, this is totally the kind of effects that Black could use in that spot. However, black is not a colour that will care directly about the masterwork mechanic in the set. While it will get cards with masterwork, the pay-offs effects that care about it are centred on blue and green (with a tolerance for red). The last ability would need to trigger on something not masterwork-related and more synergistic with the black synergies (primarily art, secondarily angels/cleric, renewal and losing life, tertiarily serran life.)
Yeap, that's totally a typo, there are only 10 uncommon cards like in most recent sets outside of multicoloured-focused sets (one per bicolour combination).
The design has some weird interactions (the first ability particularly) and involves quite a lot of math but I like the concept overall, so I tried a slight variation where it's a bit less complex and doesn't have the expensive damage prevention ability, this way it can act as a hate card much earlier in the game:
This might be hating on serran life too much though as it decreases the amount of serran life you gain AND makes it so you have to pay 3 serran life to add one mana of any colour. I'm also not sure the second ability works rules wise. Alternatively, I also have something a bit different that can be used by life gain decks as a way to convert their excess life into library manipulation as well as hating on life gain strategies:
The reward or the last ability could be anything really, we just need to be able to leverage the counters in some way.
TBA - {3}
Artifact
T: Add one mana of any color.
{4}, T: Target creature you control can't be blocked until end of turn.
For the red board clear:
TBA - {R}
Sorcery
~ deals 1 damage to each player and each creature your opponents control.
Notes: I'd prefer for the Red board clear for this set to be one-sided, since weenies and suicide aggro don't want their creatures to suffer.
And an alternative design:
TBA - 3R
Creature - TBA
Menace
When ~ enters the battlefield, it deals 1 damage to target opponent and each creature that player controls.
2/2
As for the rest of the designs, I feel like soul cage could sacrifice to have you gain life equal to the number of soul counter on it.
I like Mask of Comedy and Tragedy as a B/G color pair, just need to make Tragedy create a 2/2 beast or something along those lines.
I would like to avoid "cannot be blocked" effects with Masterwork because it makes half the cards with masterwork irrelevant since they mostly offer some conditional evasion.
That's a good point, the red board clear should probably stay one-sided. Maybe we can still make it so it damages you as well though to synergise with the suicide aggro archetype. Being able to damage both players could be a way to enable renewal as well. However these "deals damage to each creature your opponents effects" tend to be limited to 1 damage and common so finding an appealing design at uncommon might be challenging as most of the appeal of the card will be in finding the right rider to go on it.
Otherwise, we could try a semi-one-sided "2 damage to everything" by finding the right exclusion clause, like Fiery Cannonade, etc.
A last option that might also work pretty well would be to have a "Deals damage divided as you choose" spell, which can act as a one-sided board wipe and can be found occasionally at uncommon:
For the green mask, it could make an Art token to synergise with the UBG Art theme then?
As for the masks, I've made a mock-up of what it could look like with a green/black duo where the green one makes tokens. With this concept, I don't want effects to repeat themselves between the masks and I'd like the second effect of each mask to be recognisably not from their own colour but the other's instead. I'm still dubious about this concept for now though, the trigger and the way they care about each other still don't feel right to me. I feel there is something more flavourful out there:
• Comedy arises from the unexpected --> Random effect
• Tragedy is a theatrical genre where they tell you it's going to end badly at the very beginning --> Forced effect
So what I made was a design where, upon attacking, you get to choose between two buffs, but the way you choose the buff depends on the mask. For Comedy it's random, for Tragedy your opponent chooses so it always ends badly. The bonus for controlling the two masks at the same time is that both effects fire off.
They still feel a bit forced in the skeleton but at least I'm starting to feel like they tell a story. Because this is so complex, maybe this is a concept better suited for a higher rarity actually? My main concern with this is that it makes it basically impossible to happen in Limited, but it could explore stuff like double strike and indestructible.
If used at uncommon, this design doesn't use repeatable sacrifice in Black so I was thinking of repurposing the colour-bending black blink uncommon spell into an edict you can recast from the graveyard like we had discussed before. Alternatively, here's an example of enchantment to reinforce the removal suite of the WB archetype:
... What year is it?
Never mind. Time for some ideas!
Soft(-ish) removal:
New Map to the Unknown {2}
Artifact
~ etbs tapped.
{2}, exile ~: Exile target creature. Return it to the battlefield under its owner's control tapped at the beginning of their next end step. If you own that card, you gain 2 life.
(costs and the minor effect at the end are subject to change)
Heavily inspired / plagiarised from the design by @OhWyrm. It's more of a Flickerwisp than any form of removal, but the story is kept. Flickering in general might be troublesome as ningyounk has stated, and a possible fix is to use phasing. Though that comes with its own heap of troubles.
---
Some Shady Contract {2}
Artifact
When ~ etbs, tap target creature. It doesn't untap (...) step.
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay {X}, where X is that creature's mana value. If you don't, sacrifice ~.
(can change cmc to power)
Worst case scenario, you tap and freeze that creature for 2 mana at sorcery speed -- which seems alright to me. This also acts as a mana sink potentially.
(My original idea involved something like cumulative upkeep but it was too wordy.
P.S. Flavorwise is this card okay?)
---
Serran life / Renewal hate:
Minor Hinderances {2}
Artifact
If a player would gain 3 or more life, they instead gain 1 life and draw a card.
Players can't pay more than 2 life to cast spells or activate abilities.
It doesn't stop players from gaining and paying Serran life for mana, but it does stop players from achieving renewal in a single shot.
---
Someone's Diary {4}
Artifact
At the beginning of each end step, if an opponent gained 3 or more life this turn, put a counter on ~.
At the beginning of each end step, if an opponent paid life this turn, put a counter on ~.
At the beginning of your upkeep, if there are 3 or more counters on ~, remove all counters on ~, draw a card, then put a card from your hand on the bottom of your library.
(the effect at the end can be swapped for other card advantages / scrying / looking at opponent's hand)
Instead of directly stopping / slowing down your opponent at their attempt of turning on renewal, it rewards you for them doing so. This (a) doesn't stop your opponent but merely discourages them, and (b) the effect needs to be balanced more delicately.
Another idea is for make the diary a rare by tracking both players and giving out a bigger reward.
---
Heretical Accusations {3}
Artifact
~ etbs under an opponent's control.
You can't gain life.
You can't pay life to cast spells or activate abilities. (This includes Serran life.)
{6}, discard a card: Destroy ~. You gain 2 serran life and draw a card. Activate this abiility only any time you can cast a sorcery.
(the effect from destroying ~ can be -- look this one is a bit tricky)
Outright Serran life hate! Mechanics-wise, it is probably well into rare territory. Stopping a player from gaining or paying life is quite restrictive in this set, and we don't want this to pop up in limited regularly. I would suggest adding a rider for the opponent to destroy this.
Flavorwise, this probably works better as a white/black curse at rare.
---
Also, do we have something in red that stops life gain temporarily? (Never mind -- Set Ablaze does this already.)
And do we want something in a specific color (e.g. white/blue/green) that prevents players from paying life temporarily?
P.S. The masks look great! Would the comedy mask also work as red due to its random effect?
1) Soft colourless removal
I just realised something important about this slot: It's probably going to be super problematic because of Masterwork. Repeatable tap abilities are the bane of Masterwork ^^" I think we need to switch gears on this slot and go for the other type of staple colourless removal: the catch-all removal.
I think an Art Meteor Golem would do just fine because of the Art recursion synergies (Meteor Golem is very "Core Set-y" so I tried something a bit more spicy, as 7 mana is quite expensive):
We already have one of those at common, so the common has to change to something that's soft and not repeatable like this kind of cards:
I'm thinking something like that for the common: (old/new)
Hating on life payment is going to be complicated in general as it can be a part of the cost for casting some spells and I don't want them to actually make these spells impossible to cast (making them slightly more expensive would be fine though).
Minor Hinderances seem very niche, hating on life strategies is already something niche in itself so if that hate misses a large chunk of those strategies, I don't think it would be worth it.
Someone's Diary: I think it's a bit too niche to justify the wordiness. We're in this delicate situation where we're hating on something quite niche (which would usually be done with a very definitive effect like Grafdigger's Cage) but we want to be a bit soft because it's important for the set. I think the solution might be to put it on a creature, so it has a bit of value outside of its hate effects. Here's an example:
I'm fine if we don't have hate against life payment strategies since that comes with a built-in limitation.
3) The masks
The mask could totally be red from a flavour and mechanical point of view, it's just that we don't have room in red for it and, while randomness is more attached to red, other colours are still allowed to make use of it from time to time so I don't think this is against the colour pie, it's just an oddity brought by a flavour restriction.
{X}{X}{R}
Sorcery or Instant
~ costs {1} less for each creature you control.
~ deals X damage divided as you choose among any number of targets.
The only other design I could think of for masterwork and mana rock synergy is as follows:
Lotus Plate - {1}
Artifact - Equipment
Equipped creature has "{T}: Add one mana of any color."
Sacrifice ~: Equipped creature gains hexproof until end of turn.
Equip {1}
I feel like the non-choose one design of the Masks is better - overcomplexity is never something that's ideal.
For catch-all removal, I also have an idea:
TBA - {7}
Creature - Art TBA
When ~ enters the battlefield, choose up to three nonland permanents an opponent controls. That player chooses one of them, then sacrifices the rest.
5/5
Collector of Faith looks cool, because it is. Good design there.
Overall, the uncommons are coming along fine. I feel like we're almost getting to an end with the uncommons, which should be exciting.
1) XXR distribute damage spell:
I've run some numbers and I have a few issues with this design. The first one is that it is very math-y. You need to do a lot of small operations to know how much damage you can deal, and how playing other spells and/or changing the number of creatures you control factor into this. My other issue is that the rate isn't very appealing. I think we can realistically expect the caster to control two to five creatures in an average game where everything went ok. I'd say the amount of damage the spell needs to deal be interesting is about 4 to 10 (enough to kill 2 to five 2-toughness creatures on the other side). And I'd say 0-3 mana is the perfect range of price for a small wrath, 4-7 mana is still acceptable but expensive, more than 8-mana is asking too much.
Based on that, here's the rate of the spell (you have the number of creatures at the top, the damage dealt on the left, and the amount of mana needed inside the table).
Even if we take just 3 damage, you need to control 4 creatures just to be able to cast it for 3-mana (which is pretty meh), so I don't think the numbers are satisfying.
2) Masterwork equipment
I actually like the idea of a one-of hexproof trigger a lot! I think a couple of changes might make it more interesting:
• An "equip masterwork" cost just to signal to players what the card is intended to do.
• I don't think the masterwork deck want to tap its masterwork for mana, it wants to attack with it, so I made the equipment itself tap for mana filtering instead.
3) Catch-All Removal
The idea behind this catch-all colourless removal slot is that any deck gets to remove any threat regardless of colour pie restrictions, but that comes at a very excessive mana cost. Letting the opponent decide which permanent they keep would defeat the purpose of this silver bullet, this slot is not about the card advantage but about the deadly precision of the removal ability. In this sense, my weird 7/7 design might be a bit generous xD I got caught-up in the illustration, but maybe this would be more appropriate:
I prefer to have the masks with the choose ability because they're telling a better story and that's their main goal as top-down designs. We don't *need* those in the set, so the previous masks felt really forced while this last concept feels less like it's a filler, to me.
That being said, I agree they're on the complex side and that is not ideal. I see three options here:
1) We move this concept to rare where it's easier to have wordy cards.
2) We abandon this concept, it's cute but there's nothing important for the set here.
3) We keep it at uncommon but we try less wordy and complex abilities. E.g.: