I finished all of the cards mechanically, but I haven't gotten to fixing the flavor of each card. I didn't change the wording of sink because its clarified on the harbor reminder token I made (I know it probably could be clarified on the actual cards but I didn't want make sink cards too wordy).
You know, it's funny, when I watch your videos (this is a run on sentence), I am able to piece together all the stupid mistakes I made that you ultimately conclude by the end of the video...
bro. the skull sarcophagus was a bad idea. it was just me high from the cool idea. i know it's bad, there is no redemption of the card, and i scrapped it.
Thanks for the latest batch of feedback! Always good to hear from you!
Endgame Unleashed was my take on a War-of-the-Spark-style set, with a planeswalker heavy format. Although this is in the middle of the listing of sets I gave you—I just listed them in alphabetical order—it is also a culmination of lore and events from a lot of the sets I had made leading up to it, which stopped following the mtg storyline just after Hour of Devastation (mainly so I didn't have to keep rewriting my cross-set lore). In this set, Bolas has ascended to pre-mending power, and is beginning his conquest of the multiverse on Dominaria, while the denizens of Dominaria and the planeswalkers of the multiverse take sides and fight either for or against the tyrannical deity.
One of the biggest things I wanted to do with this set was make it feel distinct from WAR despite using a similar set structure and theme. One of the key ways I chose to do this was to by changing how the planeswalkers were handled. One of the biggest things WAR did was give each of the planeswalkers a static ability that, often, was either the crux of the card (e.g. Nissa Who Shakes the World) or was forgotten about by players until it suddenly became relevant in very narrow situations (e.g. Narset, Parter of Veils). As such, I wanted to avoid statics on most of my planeswalkers unless it was relevant to the card's design. Instead, I went for more "traditional" walker designs with a mix of + and - effects, but at lower power levels comparatively for my lower rarity cards (thus why none of Baltrice's effects are "big" at all).
Another way I wanted to differentiate Endgame from WAR was by changing the mechanical core the set focused on. WAR was a counters-matter set, fueled by planeswalkers and Amass armies getting buffed by proliferate. Instead, I decided to focus on a more top-down approach to the set, and create a very factional feel of the multiverse vs. Bolas (hence why every card has one of two watermarks representing their aligned faction). The Multiverse got Empower and Overcome as mechanics while Bolas got Offering and Rewrite as mechanics (as well as "tainted" cards ala Champion of Divinity). These mechanics were chosen to represent the flavorful feel of the two factions as much as they were for the limited format.
The most controversial mechanical choice from the set was my use of "tainted" cards, which are the cards with the vertical-hybrid flame (which is indeed a custom frame, though it wasn't made by me) and color dot. As part of my goal to show a very factional set, I wanted a very even split of factions within each of the colors. This meant that I would need Bolas-aligned cards in white and green, the two colors Bolas is least prevalent in. To do this, I decided to create the "tainted" cards, which are cards that cast for either white or green mana, but are also blue, black, or red in addition to their other color. This shows how a now-godly Bolas is corrupting the parts of the color pie he previously wasn't able to touch. In doing this, I tried to take care and ensure each of the tainted cards worked within the hybrid-mana space of its main color and its tainting color, such as Champion of Divinity gaining life since both white and black can gain life. I was hoping that Champion being a tainted card that referenced other blue, black, and/or red cards could help signal that this was a recurring set mechanic (I wanted to limit the number of cards I showed you from each of my sets since you didn't want to do a full set review), but you weren't quite sure about that.
I also feel like you missed some important context and references in your reviews this time around.
A) This set takes place on Dominaria, not Amonkhet. While that didn't really affect your judgement on any of the cards, it was something you consistently missed nonetheless, so I figured I'd clear that up. I tried to signal the location of the set by mentioning places such as New Benalia, and people such as the Benalish and Mogg, which are tied to Dominaria as a plane.
B ) There has been an uncommon planeswalker that could plus itself, Chandra, Novice Pyromancer from Core Set 2020. Another important aspect of WAR that you missed was the presence of proliferate in the set. Proliferate essentially served as a way to "+" uncommon walkers in WAR. Because Endgame does not have proliferate, there needs to be other ways for walkers to gain loyalty and "protect" themselves. Furthermore, most of these walkers don't have static abilities that are "always active" and providing more consistent benefit. Because of these factors, and because of the precedent from Chandra, I added on the ability for most of the Endgame walkers to + themselves to allow the gaining of loyalty and to help them stay on the board.
C) Offering is actually a mechanic spun off from original Kamigawa block. There, it was much more narrow, wanting you to sacrifice a card of a specific creature type as offering, rather than just any creature. I wanted a mechanic that invoked the flavor of sacrificing to a cruel deity and thought this would be an interesting mechanic to bring back with a new spin and at lower rarities. As such, I had no direct control over how the mechanic was worded and formatted. If you want a more refined version of Offering, Emerge from Eldritch moon is definitely a much more refined mechanical take, with a controllable cost attached to it and the lack of an instant speed aspect that makes the mechanic harder to balance. However, it didn't capture the same flavor as Offering, so I chose to work with Offering.
Overall, I costed offering creatures as if they were going to be played on-curved by sacrificing a creature, which, from my understanding, was a similar take to how Emerge was costed in Eldritch Moon. Since most decks in limited are playing creatures, it's reasonable to assume these offering creatures will come out on curve, even if they need to give up a card to do so.
D) The wording for cards like Mogg Warcaller and Vivien, Avenger of Skalla were adapted from Garth, One-Eyes from Modern Horizons 2. While Garth "conjured" the cards he creates onto the stack, my cards conjure the cards to the battlefield, thus the slightly altered wording. I knew as part of Endgame I wanted cards that called back to the history of MTG. Garth came out while I was in the middle of design for this set, and I thought it would be a cool way to reference past MTG cards if I had a selection of cards that created tokens of existing cards in the game. At this point, conjure had not yet been added to the game—and I don't think it would ever be added to a paper set since conjured cards continue to exist even after leaving the battlefield—so Garth was the only wording I had to go off of.
Another reason I went for Garth's wording rather than just creating a token with the card's key characteristics is because by "Garth-ing" these tokens, they get to keep their mana cost, since that's an aspect of creating a token copy of a card. This is important because it interacts with Offering, which cares about the mana cost of the creature sacrificed to it. This makes the tokens "garth-ed" into play this way a little better on average and a little more interactive with the set.
E) Grixis is able to destroy any permanent type, and thus any noncreature permanent type. One thing I was glad you picked up on was that Crushing Dominance's modes corresponded with each color of the color pie. The green mode being "destroy target noncreature permanent" was far from arbitrary and is in pie for grixis. The noncreature types are Artifact, enchantment, land, and planeswalker. In grixis, black gets to destroy enchantments and planeswalkers, while red gets to destroy artifacts and lands. Thus, Grixis can destroy any permanent type. Furthermore, the mode is a direct mechanic reference to the original Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker card, which had destroying noncreature permanents as a + ability.
F) The Bolas from this set had five loyalty abilities, something never done on a planeswalker before. Like I said, I wanted to try to keep Endgame feeling Distinct from WAR, and one of the ways I wanted to do that was by figuring out a new way for the marquee planeswalker to stand out in a set where there's 40 planeswalkers. The way WAR Bolas did that was by having a very flavorful static ability. However, since I was limiting my use of static abilities in the set, I opted for giving Bolas five loyalty abilities to make him stand out as unnaturally powerful, since I feel like the extra ability also makes the card feel uncanny in a sense.
While doing that, however, I also wanted to preserve the "feel" of a Bolas card, which is something I feel like you discounted in your review. It is true that this Bolas does a lot of the same stuff other Bolas cards do, but that's because it's important that each planeswalker card feels like a thorough representation of their planeswalker. For example, every Gideon planeswalker card feels like a Gideon, while every Elspeth planeswalker card feels like an Elspeth. Despite the fact that both are mono-W characters with mono-W planeswalker cards, their cards still stand out from one another. I worry that straying too far away from the traditional role of a Bolas planeswalker—that being a hard-to-cast, game-ending planeswalker with massive, flashy effects—will stop making the card feel like a Bolas planeswalker. You also asked about where I get my card art from. I find the majority of my card art through google images, and then reverse image search with Google Lens or Tineye in order to find the original creator of the artwork. Usually my image search involves the phrase "Fantasy [description] art" when I'm looking for art that meets a general aesthetic or description and I use the phrase "[character/world] mtg fanart" when searching for art that features a specific character or event, such as with Solemn Departure or Crushing Dominance.
@Arceus8523 That's funny, I usually type in "cool fantasy [description] art" into google. I have been trying to use DeviantArt so I don't have to go on the occasional expedition to find the artist, but a lot of the artwork on there is too animated for an MTG card.
@hileandr I've made some alterations to the current batch of cards for you to review, so there are now 7 cards queued. I'm gonna try to get some work done on the sets that I'm working on, and will hopefully have a collection of cards from the same set with the featured mechanics for my next batch of cards.
After you're done judging @GloomyAndSunny1_0_1's GIGANTIC card, can you dive into each of these with a 5-minute review of each? I don't wish to take up your time too much.
@hileandr Thanks for reviewing my cards and giving feedback. I was thinking about reworking Dogun with Ward so he still has some protection but not completely elusive. Also thinking about toning down Kavdean and bumping up his cost by 1. And Gambit was made before the whole mill errata but I'll definitely be rewording it. Overall thanks once again for looking into my cards.
@stijnhommes The removal ability of Necromancer's Locket doesn't go both ways? If you can find a way to sacrifice or bounce the locket, the creature just continues to live without any adverse effects?
@Jadefire No, the removal ability doesn't go both ways and I think that if a player is willing to invest in a deck with enough synergies to make this work on time, it's not too broken. You'd have to have a whole lot of spell cards to consistently remove this and keep the creature around, but that means less creatures to reanimate, that already need discard spells to end up in the graveyard.
I designed it with the flavor of the artwork in mind, but I personally believe that if you manage to move the locket, you deserve to reanimate something else (that's why it has no equip cost).
I also designed it in a vacuum, so I have no clue what spells would be used to combo with this.
Still, I'm still open to discussing the card and maybe I'll change it if I consistently get similar feedback.
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@cadstar369 (10 videos)
Probably not, doing that many videos at once is exhausting
@feralitator
@Globert-the-Martian
By the way, @feralitator, how is your nautical set coming along? I was intrigued by it!
https://mtgcardsmith.com/user/cadstar369/sets/66729
Don't be too had on yourself, we're all here to learn and improve
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/teferi-the-chronologist
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/jace-apostate-seer
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/ajani-warlord-mystic
Endgame Unleashed was my take on a War-of-the-Spark-style set, with a planeswalker heavy format. Although this is in the middle of the listing of sets I gave you—I just listed them in alphabetical order—it is also a culmination of lore and events from a lot of the sets I had made leading up to it, which stopped following the mtg storyline just after Hour of Devastation (mainly so I didn't have to keep rewriting my cross-set lore). In this set, Bolas has ascended to pre-mending power, and is beginning his conquest of the multiverse on Dominaria, while the denizens of Dominaria and the planeswalkers of the multiverse take sides and fight either for or against the tyrannical deity.
One of the biggest things I wanted to do with this set was make it feel distinct from WAR despite using a similar set structure and theme. One of the key ways I chose to do this was to by changing how the planeswalkers were handled. One of the biggest things WAR did was give each of the planeswalkers a static ability that, often, was either the crux of the card (e.g. Nissa Who Shakes the World) or was forgotten about by players until it suddenly became relevant in very narrow situations (e.g. Narset, Parter of Veils). As such, I wanted to avoid statics on most of my planeswalkers unless it was relevant to the card's design. Instead, I went for more "traditional" walker designs with a mix of + and - effects, but at lower power levels comparatively for my lower rarity cards (thus why none of Baltrice's effects are "big" at all).
Another way I wanted to differentiate Endgame from WAR was by changing the mechanical core the set focused on. WAR was a counters-matter set, fueled by planeswalkers and Amass armies getting buffed by proliferate. Instead, I decided to focus on a more top-down approach to the set, and create a very factional feel of the multiverse vs. Bolas (hence why every card has one of two watermarks representing their aligned faction). The Multiverse got Empower and Overcome as mechanics while Bolas got Offering and Rewrite as mechanics (as well as "tainted" cards ala Champion of Divinity). These mechanics were chosen to represent the flavorful feel of the two factions as much as they were for the limited format.
The most controversial mechanical choice from the set was my use of "tainted" cards, which are the cards with the vertical-hybrid flame (which is indeed a custom frame, though it wasn't made by me) and color dot. As part of my goal to show a very factional set, I wanted a very even split of factions within each of the colors. This meant that I would need Bolas-aligned cards in white and green, the two colors Bolas is least prevalent in. To do this, I decided to create the "tainted" cards, which are cards that cast for either white or green mana, but are also blue, black, or red in addition to their other color. This shows how a now-godly Bolas is corrupting the parts of the color pie he previously wasn't able to touch. In doing this, I tried to take care and ensure each of the tainted cards worked within the hybrid-mana space of its main color and its tainting color, such as Champion of Divinity gaining life since both white and black can gain life. I was hoping that Champion being a tainted card that referenced other blue, black, and/or red cards could help signal that this was a recurring set mechanic (I wanted to limit the number of cards I showed you from each of my sets since you didn't want to do a full set review), but you weren't quite sure about that.
I also feel like you missed some important context and references in your reviews this time around.
A) This set takes place on Dominaria, not Amonkhet. While that didn't really affect your judgement on any of the cards, it was something you consistently missed nonetheless, so I figured I'd clear that up. I tried to signal the location of the set by mentioning places such as New Benalia, and people such as the Benalish and Mogg, which are tied to Dominaria as a plane.
B ) There has been an uncommon planeswalker that could plus itself, Chandra, Novice Pyromancer from Core Set 2020.
Another important aspect of WAR that you missed was the presence of proliferate in the set. Proliferate essentially served as a way to "+" uncommon walkers in WAR. Because Endgame does not have proliferate, there needs to be other ways for walkers to gain loyalty and "protect" themselves. Furthermore, most of these walkers don't have static abilities that are "always active" and providing more consistent benefit. Because of these factors, and because of the precedent from Chandra, I added on the ability for most of the Endgame walkers to + themselves to allow the gaining of loyalty and to help them stay on the board.
C) Offering is actually a mechanic spun off from original Kamigawa block. There, it was much more narrow, wanting you to sacrifice a card of a specific creature type as offering, rather than just any creature.
I wanted a mechanic that invoked the flavor of sacrificing to a cruel deity and thought this would be an interesting mechanic to bring back with a new spin and at lower rarities. As such, I had no direct control over how the mechanic was worded and formatted. If you want a more refined version of Offering, Emerge from Eldritch moon is definitely a much more refined mechanical take, with a controllable cost attached to it and the lack of an instant speed aspect that makes the mechanic harder to balance. However, it didn't capture the same flavor as Offering, so I chose to work with Offering.
Overall, I costed offering creatures as if they were going to be played on-curved by sacrificing a creature, which, from my understanding, was a similar take to how Emerge was costed in Eldritch Moon. Since most decks in limited are playing creatures, it's reasonable to assume these offering creatures will come out on curve, even if they need to give up a card to do so.
D) The wording for cards like Mogg Warcaller and Vivien, Avenger of Skalla were adapted from Garth, One-Eyes from Modern Horizons 2.
While Garth "conjured" the cards he creates onto the stack, my cards conjure the cards to the battlefield, thus the slightly altered wording. I knew as part of Endgame I wanted cards that called back to the history of MTG. Garth came out while I was in the middle of design for this set, and I thought it would be a cool way to reference past MTG cards if I had a selection of cards that created tokens of existing cards in the game. At this point, conjure had not yet been added to the game—and I don't think it would ever be added to a paper set since conjured cards continue to exist even after leaving the battlefield—so Garth was the only wording I had to go off of.
Another reason I went for Garth's wording rather than just creating a token with the card's key characteristics is because by "Garth-ing" these tokens, they get to keep their mana cost, since that's an aspect of creating a token copy of a card. This is important because it interacts with Offering, which cares about the mana cost of the creature sacrificed to it. This makes the tokens "garth-ed" into play this way a little better on average and a little more interactive with the set.
F) The Bolas from this set had five loyalty abilities, something never done on a planeswalker before. Like I said, I wanted to try to keep Endgame feeling Distinct from WAR, and one of the ways I wanted to do that was by figuring out a new way for the marquee planeswalker to stand out in a set where there's 40 planeswalkers. The way WAR Bolas did that was by having a very flavorful static ability. However, since I was limiting my use of static abilities in the set, I opted for giving Bolas five loyalty abilities to make him stand out as unnaturally powerful, since I feel like the extra ability also makes the card feel uncanny in a sense.
While doing that, however, I also wanted to preserve the "feel" of a Bolas card, which is something I feel like you discounted in your review. It is true that this Bolas does a lot of the same stuff other Bolas cards do, but that's because it's important that each planeswalker card feels like a thorough representation of their planeswalker. For example, every Gideon planeswalker card feels like a Gideon, while every Elspeth planeswalker card feels like an Elspeth. Despite the fact that both are mono-W characters with mono-W planeswalker cards, their cards still stand out from one another. I worry that straying too far away from the traditional role of a Bolas planeswalker—that being a hard-to-cast, game-ending planeswalker with massive, flashy effects—will stop making the card feel like a Bolas planeswalker.
You also asked about where I get my card art from. I find the majority of my card art through google images, and then reverse image search with Google Lens or Tineye in order to find the original creator of the artwork. Usually my image search involves the phrase "Fantasy [description] art" when I'm looking for art that meets a general aesthetic or description and I use the phrase "[character/world] mtg fanart" when searching for art that features a specific character or event, such as with Solemn Departure or Crushing Dominance.
Thank you sir!
@KorandAngels (3 videos)
Also, in the videos I called you "Kora and Angels" but after looking at your name more closely it appears to be "Korand Angels." My mistake! Sorry!
@Commando (3 videos)
My pleasure! Happy to see new blood in here
I designed it with the flavor of the artwork in mind, but I personally believe that if you manage to move the locket, you deserve to reanimate something else (that's why it has no equip cost).
I also designed it in a vacuum, so I have no clue what spells would be used to combo with this.
Still, I'm still open to discussing the card and maybe I'll change it if I consistently get similar feedback.