MTG Cardsmith Community Forums
Atlantis-Themed Set
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 do have a few ideas for bounty already, and it does look like there is plenty more design space. I'll try to make a bunch of bounty cards, and see how it turns out.
- Finding the right power level might be difficult. I first imagined them like lessons — watered down versions of strong cards — but, unlike lessons, Bounty is asking you to stack your deck with them so they need to be as strong as possible so you'd want to play them. You'd need to figure out how strong they can be.
- Having three cards with bounty in your graveyard might be very difficult, you might want to play with the ratio (maybe it needs to exile only two cards?) and the as-fan in the pack is a concern since you'd want a lot of bounty cards everywhere in the set for something like this to work. For instance having a couple guaranteed Bounty slots in each pack like for Lessons or MDFCs is probably a consideration.
- It's possible that it would be underwhelming in play if it's too difficult to pull off for not enough reward. I'd consider trying different ratio, including exiling two or three cards and casting *all of them* instead of one at random.
- To adjust the power level, I'd totally explore ideas to allow for cards to have a different effect when you cast them naturally or with bounty.
- As you mentioned, the play style naturally gravitates towards instant and sorceries. That being said, the average Limited deck has less than 10 instant/sorcery spells so activating the bounty ability even once might be tricky. I think flavourfully having artifact-creatures even at common shouldn't be too much of a problem.
- I also agree that it creates friction with Treasure tokens from a flavour perspective albeit not from a mechanical one. I think it's ok to use a couple treasure tokens here and there but I would scale them down not only because Bounty would be flavoured as a treasure mechanic but also because pirates already cared about treasures in Ixalan.
It's a difficult mechanic to implement, but I do think it has the potential to be flashy. My best advice would be to playtest it to get a feel of its power and from there try to adjust each knob: can the effects be stronger, what if we exile only two cards, does the card need to be random, does it need an activation cost, can it cast all the exiled cards instead of one, etc.
I think the first two versions I'd want to playtest would be:
1) The "bread-and-butter" version: The goal here is that activating the Bounty ability happen often enough, meaning it would be associated with weaker effects.
Bounty (Exile two cards with Bounty from your graveyard: Cast one of them chosen at random without paying its mana cost.)
2) The "flashy explosion" version: The goal here is to have it happen once in the average game, two or even three if you're really committed, which creates a big turn.
Bounty ({4}, Exile three cards with Bounty from your graveyard: Cast them without paying their mana costs.)
Another idea I'd consider would be to separate the bounty effect from the card itself, this way you can spread the bounty cards evenly between creature and noncreature cards. This also have the advantage of requiring an alternate frame which is always eye-catching. Basically any way of separating the bounty ability visually on the card is fair game like Split frames, Adventure frames or even Mutate frames.
https://mtgcardsmith.com/user/feralitator/sets/61252?page=1
Edited:
I could probably do a little bit more editing (Maybe the eye and the cloak thing), but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out (Especially for one of, if not, my first time doing some photo editing)!
1) Some effects aren't super synergistic with the bounty mechanic because there are times when casting them would have no effect on the game:
- Luminescent Covering
- Plundering Party
2) A lot of cards are very weak. I'd suggest aiming at effects that are still playable without bounty:
- Analysis of Ruins (I'd suggest Divination rate instead: sorcery, 3 mana, draw two)
- Oceans's trick (I'd suggest making it a 1-mana sorcery)
- Dunk into Depths (I think it might be viable at 2-mana)
- Rescue of the Drowned (I think it might be viable at 1-mana)
- Out for Blood (this one I'm not so sure but I think it can drain 3 life instead of 2)
- Shady Deal (minimum rate would be tormenting Voice I think, otherwise you might want to consider "Exile the top three cards of your library, you may play those cards until the end of your next turn" instead.)
3) Other issues:
- Nyle's Hunt allow you to make the opponent discard at instant speed, this is a very unfun play pattern that is usually better to avoid. I suggest making Mind Rot as a base (sorcery 3-mana, discard two cards) and replacing the second mode with something blue because this card's effects are currently monoblack. I'd consider: sorcery, 1UB, Choose one • Target player discards two cards. • Return target nonland permanent to its owner's hand. • Target player mills eight cards.
- Adah's Assault should mention "you don't control", otherwise it might force you to target your own creatures if you exile it with bounty in the hope of casting the other exiled spell with a 50% chance.
- Acquisitive Plunderer looks really strong.
- In general, I expect the lack of creatures is going to be very apparent. That's just not the normal creature/noncreature ratio of a Limited deck and that's an issue that's going to need to be addressed if you decide the mechanic is fun enough in playtest to be worth the effort. I'd playtest at least a couple creatures with bounty (in addition to Iville's Summons) to get a feel for it. Making them artifact creatures could help for flavour.
- I don't see any mill effect, which seems like a missed opportunity. Nyle's Hunt looks like it could get a third mode with that for instance.
Having 99% of these effects going from sorcery to instant speed isn't really an issue (for instance a divination would be perfectly acceptable) but discard is really the one black sheep in there.
(If treasure tokens aren't used in this set, then I'll remove the treasure type and ability, but I still think this is a neat card that would be like this set's gingerbrute.)
I also have another red and blue bounty card to replace Plundering Party and Luminescent Covering.
I also have thought of a possible way to thematically implement something like scrycast into this set. The wording might be off a little, but I think that I found a theme that works well with the concept.
If this doesn't seem like a "Wow factor" mechanic, I do have another idea, but it's a little too complex. Maybe there's a way to simplify it?
The second lurker mechanic doesn't look much like a mechanic to me, a priori, simply because there's very little synergy with putting cards on top of your library and that's overall something you want to avoid as a player since it slows you down. I could see a couple cards doing this, maybe, but I have a hard time imagining that's something you'd want on plenty of cards around the set.
___
Thinking about crazy stuff you could do that synergise with Scrycast, this one is *really* up there and I don't even know how you would playtest it online but there might be some design space with cards that are face-up INSIDE your library xD The idea is that everyone including you knows you're drawing this card, and this allow you to have bonus effect from your library.
E.g:
Looking back at some previous ideas from the thread, what happened to Harbor (the second library) by the way? I can't remember, did it get killed? Because I still think that's one of the most interesting ones so far in terms of gameplay.
Playing a bit with the idea, I think it would be especially interesting if the second library was face-up. This way it's always asking you the question "do I want this card or do I want a random card instead".
In addition, here are some examples of effects that would work with the mechanic:
- Look at the top three cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest on top of your abyss library in any order.
- Draw a card from each of your library.
- Return any number of target creature cards from your graveyard to the top of your abyss library.
- Put target creature on top of it's owner's abyss library.
- If a card would be put from your hand or library into your graveyard, put it into your abyss library instead.
- Draw two cards then put two cards from your hand on top of your abyss library.
- If CARDNAME would die, put it on top of your abyss library instead
But really, even "When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, put the top card of your library on top of your abyss library" is already working on its own. Especially if you try the idea of it being face-up. Imagine that you put a land into your second library this way, now you can decide to draw a land on your draw step whenever it's most useful to you, or just ignore it if you need action. Besides, again if you go with the face-up version, it synergises super well with scrycast as you could cast the cards with scrycast as long as they're face-up onto your second library. And obviously moving cards around between library enables Sink.Also, anything I presented with the concept of lurk being face-up cards in your library works with this concept of face-up library as well. You can design cards that put themselves on top of your abyss library and have an effect as long as they're there. This way you get an interesting choice between drawing them or leaving them here and keeping the bonus.
I came up with some designs for harbor. I probably made some mistakes with wording and such, but I think that getting out the general idea of the mechanic is more important than the little wording errors at this stage.
I feel like there should be a ruling that says "If a card refers to your library, you may have it refer to your harbor instead, unless both your library and harbor are mentioned", but I feel like that would be too complex.
A few random thoughts:
• If a card says "draw three cards", should it be allowed to draw one card from your library and two cards from your harbor for instance? I feel like it should.
• Seeing Ghastly Ripjaw, I think it could be cool to have a recurring phoenix that goes to the top of your harbor at rare/mythic (since you can draw it every turn in your draw step) and a recurring skeleton that goes to the bottom of your harbor at lower rarity.
• Stemming from the same idea above, there might be some interesting archetypal difference between a deck that wants as much cards in their harbor as possible and a deck that wants a harbour but with as few cards as possible in it.
E.g.:
- When CARDNAME dies, put it at the bottom of your harbor.
- At the beginning of your upkeep, CARDNAME deals damage to you equal to the number of cards in your harbor. Then, if you have no harbor, sacrifice CARDNAME.
- Whenever you draw the last card of your harbor, create a 2/2 blue Serpent creature token with flying.
• About the reminder text, I don't think you need the "can't draw from empty harbor" clause since it's physically impossible anyways. There are a lot of rules attached to the idea of a second library, my best advice would be to put only the essential information in the reminder text (you can choose to interact with your harbor instead of your library and it's face up) then make a few commons that create the corner cases in interesting ways and add specific reminder text on them (I'd say the golden 3 are: 1) how to handle being milled with a harbor 2) how to draw multiple cards when you have a harbor 3) how to handle effects that interact with your library outside of just drawing like searching or looking at the top cards or playing cards from the top of your library.E.g.
Depending on your taste, there are different ruling options you could choose:
1) Making the harbor not count as a library would simplify things by preventing players from milling it, searching it, counting it for the size of their library, etc. Basically it would be only for drawing. A serious option actually to make the rules work. One thing I didn't mention with the mill card for instance would be: are you allowed to mill some cards from your harbor and some from your library? If so, are you allowed to choose independently one card after the other to take the face up card of your harbor into consideration? Making the harbor "draw only" might prevent those questions and many I didn't think of yet.
2) If you allow to search your harbor, you might prefer players to only be able to search their library or harbor but not both at the same time.
• Seeing gone fishing made me realise that you can go even subtler in the card draw: "Put the top card of your library on top of your harbor. Draw a card" is Opt! You get to see the top card of your library and decide if you want that one or the second, unknown, one XD I also added reminder text to answer the basic question: How do you draw with an active harbor?
I agree that "You can't draw from an empty harbor" doesn't need to be in the reminder text, but I think that it does need to be a rule, as this is one of the rulings for Split Screen:
In terms of how things interact with the library, I feel like allowing things like card draw and mill to split up would make it very confusing. I also think that this way makes design interesting. For example, the card I made "Gone Fishing" would be different from divination, which would only allow you to draw two cards from your library, or two cards from your harbor. For searching your library, I think that having cards search your library or harbor is fine, as it also opens up the possibility of cards saying "Search your library and harbor".
I don't plan on using at least Divination or Crow of Dark Tidings as reprints, but I just made these to show how I think that the general idea of basic library interactions would work.
Hence, it might make sense to consider having each card you draw as a separate choice between your harbor and library. That being said, ultimately you can make anything work the way you envision it in the rule of the harbor if you're confident you don't want to split card draw. Split draw does have a few cons as you mentioned, including the fact that it might get a bit tedious when you draw a lot of cards at once.
_
For the first point about the harbor not being synergistic with sink if it's not a library, consider that you also have the option of tackling this issue from the sink side if you want. E.g.: Sink — If three or more cards left your library and/or harbor this turn, EFFECT.
Again, this does simplify things by just making the harbor a pile of face up cards you can decide to draw from instead of your library and no other rules attached.
I made a mock-up reminder token to show one of the benefits of having a simpler version of the mechanic. In this version (on the left), your harbor wouldn't be counted as a library and you would be allowed to split the way you draw cards. In the version on the right, your harbor is a library and you can't split draws.
Here's some set I found that uses it: https://www.planesculptors.net/set/sparks
I feel like most of the rules that apply to Archive can apply to harbor as well. I'll copy the rules for Archive that I think apply to Harbor:
Seeing as the reminder text for Archive uses "main library", I think that I should use it too. Maybe there should be a keyword action related to harbor that specifies putting card(s) from your main library into your harbor? I think that having "library" and "main library" both in card text might make it hard to tell the difference from one another. By using a keyword, "main library" would only appear in reminder text (I don't see a need for most effects to care specifically about your main library), whereas plain "library" wouldn't.
If "main library" is used to refer to your starting library, then I think that it's possible to call your harbor a "library" as well.
I actually think your current version of the mechanic is better. I would consider it a downside that the only way to interact with their secondary library is to shuffle cards into it as it cuts off a tremendous amount of interesting design space and constant shuffling should be avoided as much as possible. In addition the fact that cards with archive sacrifice themselves when the archive is empty feels unnecessary, it's cool on a couple specific designs but it's probably creating a lot of issues in the long run and makes the mechanic more complex than it needs to be.
Overall, I think Archive breaks the elegance of the concept of a second library by over-designing it. That's also why I would avoid keywording both your second library as a harbor and the action of putting a card in it. At some points it makes the cards too wordy and you lose the semantical elegance of effects that interact with your harbor. I'd 100% go with the second version of Blastbolt Deadeye, personally.
On the subject of "main library" I think that's a good way of referring to your regular library in reminder text if you ever need it (I can't see a reason why a priori, though). Ideally, I think you don't want this term to appear in actual rules text simply because the whole point of the harbor is to leave you with a choice between libraries so preventing you from interacting with your harbor prevents the fun interactions you're trying to make happen.
For the specific rules, here are my thoughts:
Cards are not revealed when they are put into a face up library. Cards can still become revealed even though the cards are already visible.
However, due to the second rules, I'm starting to realise this is probably the wrong way to go. With cards that can have effects when you see them in your library (and you are planning to use scrycast) having the whole harbor face-up would let you play any scrycast card in your harbor. Admittedly, it could be cool, but might be too strong and create too many rules issues. They try to cirumvent this with the second rules but honestly it feels clunky and unintuitive in my opinion. I don't think this rules would help me decide what to do when playing. A better rules might just be: "Each harbor is kept in a single face-down pile with the top card revealed to all players." This way you only have access to the top card of your harbor. It does create a memory issue in that you're probably going to know the order of a lot of face-down cards in your harbor, which could entice players to take an unhealthy amount of notes. Maybe the best solution is simply to word scrycast so it doesn't apply from being face-up in a library — though you lose the super cool interaction of casting the top card of your harbor if it has scrycast.
If a cost or nonstatic effect would refer to a player's undefined library and that player has multiple libraries, that effect's controller chooses any library that player has upon resolution and the effect is applied to that library. If that effect has no controller, that player chooses the library instead.
That seems functional though redundant. I'd keep that but merge them into a general rules for every interaction with a library then create a bunch of examples defining each situation. As I was saying earlier, the split draw is already how the game rules would handle it if harbor was implemented so if you don't want to prevent players from splitting their draw you don't need a separate rules to set that up.
If a fair number of cards replace scry by putting the top card of your library on the top of your harbor, I feel like scrycast won't be needed. However, I do like the idea of a small handful of cards that can be cast from the top of your harbor.
For the rulings on choosing a library, how does this sound?
I would strongly suggest changing the second rules so the owner of the library is always choosing which of their library to use in all cases. Otherwise, you could use a card like Field of Ruin and choose that your opponent searches their harbor instead of their library, for instance. This does mean that cards like Surgical Extraction are easily diverted by a harbor but I suspect there are far more dangerous interactions possible if you let the opponent decide what library you have access to (cards like Polymorph come to mind.)
I would also drop the last part of the second rules, simply because there is a dedicated section in the comprehensive rules so nothing is without a controller in the game (it usually defaults to the owner). This seems a bit out of place in a mechanic description.
Finally, I'd suggest following the separate card draw thing with a bunch of concrete examples. Notably, what you just wrote is a rules that's already in the comprehensive rules, I think you could use specific descriptions of how to interact with the harbor in that section. I was thinking one of those list of examples you sometimes see in the comprehensive rules, like this:
Similarly, I would add something like this:
How does this look as a rough draft for rules on harbor?
Your harbor is a zone alongside any card in it. It counts as a secondary library.
- Unlike your starting library, you don't start with any cards in your harbor.
- Each harbor is kept in a single face-up pile. Any player can examine cards and count the number of cards in a harbor at any time but normally can’t change their order.
- If a player would draw a card, or if a cost or nonstatic effect would refer to a player's undefined library and that player also has at least one card in their harbor, the player who would interact with that library chooses between their starting library or harbor upon resolution and the effect is applied to that library.
- If an effect causes you to draw multiple cards, draw one card after the other by choosing whether you want to draw from your main library or harbor for each of them.
- If an effect causes you to mill cards, choose one of your libraries and mill that many cards from that library. You can't divide the number of cards milled between multiple libraries.
- If an effect causes you to search your library or look at the top card of your library, choose one of your library to search or look at. You can't search multiple libraries this way, or look at the top of multiple libraries.
- If an effect tells you to play with the top of your library revealed, or if an effect allows you to look at the top card of your library at any time, choose one of your libraries to apply this effect (remember that the top card of your harbor is already revealed by default, but you can still choose it). Sometimes, the same cards will allow you to play cards you see on top of your library. In that case, you can only play the top card of the library you've chosen.
Example: When you have no cards in your harbor, you can't choose to draw from it. This means that you can't use cards like Laboratory Maniac with the ability "If you would draw a card while your library has no cards in it, you win the game instead" to win the game by drawing from your empty harbor.Example: Divination is a sorcery with the ability "draw two cards". If you have at least one card in your harbor, you choose to draw a card from your library or your harbor. Then, if you still have at least one card in your harbor, repeat this choice. Otherwise, draw from your library.