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Rezatta, the Renaissance plane — Vision Design Part 2
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http://www.wischik.com/damon/Texts/kefir/index.html
@ningyounk I am in search of good art if you need it but here is one now...
It showcases the progressiveness of the plane
Just ping me what you need
Also giving another shot at creating uncommon signposts.
WB: Psylian life
Lifegain is still prominent in both colors, but we definitely need to save Elated/Thrills for WR.
3WB 2/4
Flying
At the beginning of each end step, if you paid life to activate a mana ability this turn, put a +1/+1 counter on ~ and you gain 2 life. (Paying in either regular life or psylian life will still count.)
The wording is a bit weird, but it allows other cards to trigger it as well (e.g. painlands). I don't just want to limit this to psylian life, but it definitely benefits from it. If it seems too strong, I would suggest not adding the counter.
WG: Group Hug
I tried brainstorming some ideas about a payoff but a) the wording is slightly clunkly (or you profit from your opponent doing stuff on their own, which isn't the point) and b) the payoff seems hard to balance. :P
If we're doing payoff, maybe we can go for sth like
2WG Enchantment
Whenever a spell or ability you control causes an opponent to draw one or more cards or gain life, you draw a card.
If we stick to an enabler, we can have
1WG 2/3
When ~ enters the battlefield, choose one:
-You gain 4 life and each other player draws a card.
-You draw a card and each other player gains 4 life.
Not sure if 4 life is a good number. Maybe 3?
BG: Cycle of Life and Death (don't have a good name yet)
Been browsing around in scryfall.com and looking at cards which are both black and green. A lot of them have to do with either the graveyard or sacrificing creatures or creatures dying in general. There are a couple of board wipes but not too much to support a group hurt archetype.
So I guess we can go for something like "people understand the cycle of life and death and accept death as much as they accept living" thingy?
2BG Enchantment
Whenever a creature you control dies, you may pay {2} . If you do, return another target creature card from your graveyard to your hand.
Black and green has multiple effects that return creatures from your graveyard to your hand. So this card basically does it for you. The quirk is that you actually can't recur the creature that died itself or it seems busted (though you can have multiple creatures recur each other).
OR
BG Instant
If target creature you control would die this turn, you may exile it instead. When you do, return up to two target creature cards from ya our graveyard to your hand.
Similar to above. Used Verdant Rebirth as sort off a reference. The exile is to prevent it from looping back itself and ensure there is a real cost to "sacrificing" the creature.
WR: Elated/Thrills (I'll stick to Elated)
The only multicolored payoff for reference seems to be Searing Meditation, which seems meh.
Potential payoff:
2RW Enchantment
At the beginning of your end step, if (Elated), you may have ~ deal 2 damage to target creature.
I think the payoff shouldn't mess with life totals further to avoid confusion. If we want to replace it with another effect, expect Elated to go off every turn when evaluating it.
Potential enabler (seems a bit unecessary, but will put it here anyways):
RW Instant
~ deals 2 damage to any target and you gain 2 life.
Strictly worse Lightning Helix, but is decent removal I guess? It almost triggers Elated but literally anything else will do.
If that seems weird, maybe we can just have a Lightning Helix that costs 1 more.
I haven't stopped working on the set, but as I was a little stuck on ideas with the last mechanic, I figured I would take a little break from posting until I had something a bit more solid to propose. But it's taking quite some time, so here's what happened on my side so far:
1) I first tested a pumping mechanic called Rebirth, it went like that:
[cost}: Rebirth N (This creatures's base power and toughness become N/N until end of turn.)
The idea was that it was a mana sink for all the mana from psylian life, it increased the chances of triggering elated with combat, and it synergised with all the combat-relevant boosts from Masterwork.
It went horribly. I thought I could make it feel unique by caring about specific stats, but it felt like a worst version of "get +N/+N until end of turn", it didn't have much interesting design space, and more importantly it was really fighting over the same design space as Masterwork since the fun interactions usually come from adding bonuses when you activate the Rebirth ability. So I realised the mechanic really needed to go in another direction than combat-relevant mechanics.
2) I then looked at possible returning mechanics we could use. I mainly looked at mana sink mechanics and focused more specifically on those: Multikicker, Escalate, Entwine, Overload, Strive, Investigate, and Cycling.
The main problem for each of them was the lack of flavour. Renaissance is not an easy theme to convey, and I really wanted each mechanic to be as flavourful as possible to compensate. So I tried to take those mechanics and tweak them into something slightly different which would allow me to change the name into something more flavourful for our set.
3) Here, I had various mechanic concepts for the renamed and slightly tweaked returning mechanics. The first ones where variations on Cycling like so:
Renewal {cost} ({cost}, Pay 2 life, Discard this card: Draw a card, you gain 2 psylian life.)
==> This one got many variations, but it doesn't have a lot of interesting design space and is not that exciting, but seemed functional, I'm not completely giving up on making it work.
Renewal {cost} ({cost}, Discard this card: Draw a card. It has this ability when you draw it.
==> The idea is that you could create a cascade of cycling to dig for what you want but it looked really broken once I started iterating on it.
There were also Investigate-like mechanics that made various Discovery tokens (2: Draw a card or gain 2 psylian life ; 4: Draw two cards ; etc.) But the combination of psylian life + elated + masterwork is really demanding memory wise so I was not kean on adding a new kind of tokens to the mix.
Finally, there were the kicker-like mechanics. I focused more on the choice mechanics because I thought I could link them easily with the progress theme of the set. For instance I had a variation on Escalate that had an additional, more powerful, mode you could only choose if you had selected all other modes before that.
Research {cost} (Choose one or more. Pay {cost} for each mode chosen beyond the first. Choose Discovery last.)
• Mode 1
• Mode 2
• Discovery — Mode 3 (more powerful).
OR:
Discovery {cost} (Choose one or more in order from top to bottom. Pay {cost} for each mode chosen beyond the first.)
Overall, that idea had very little design space. It played poorly with anything that had less than three modes. And it made the card incredibly wordy.
4) I refocused on other ways of being a mana sink than having an activation cost. I finally found a mechanic I liked. It goes like this:
Discover (Look at the top card of your library. You may cast it as though it had flash. If you don't, you may put it in your graveyard.)
On the upside, it's both a good mana sink and a good card flow mechanic. It feels red at first, but the flash aspect makes it more blue/green, and Temur is definitely a colour combination that could use some juice in the set right now. It also doesn't require to remember anything as it happens immediately. Finally, chaining multiple cards with Discover sounded like a super fun and combo-y way of gaining card advantage.
On the downside, it's another action word like Masterwork, and allowing any card to be cast at instant speed is not common-friendly. I figured that we had full control over when our commons could Discover, so that wouldn't be a deal breaker as long as we were cautious with that last bemol.
I finished the playtest deck but have yet to play with it. I had to cut cards to make room for the most interesting designs while making the deck, so I'm confident there's a good amount of design space here.
___
Et voilà! This is where I'm at with the set ^^
My plan was kind of settling on a final mechanic I like so I could present you with a playtest deck, and then create a first sheet of commons to see how the mechanics interact with each other. But since we're there, I suppose it's not a bad idea to regroup and discuss this ^^
Oh yeah, good point thanks! That makes it way shorter! =D
@Tigersol
I'm going to playtest both and see if Discovering at instant speed is fun or not before making a decision ^^ A priori, I was thinking keeping the instant-speed discovering out of common entirely but dipping a toe or two into it at higher rarities. It will really all depend on the playtest.
@EnvyReaper
I'll call you half-right on this, I think we are slightly late on the development of the story compared to how a real set would be at that point, but I don't think we're making random cards, we have a clear path ahead of us ^^ Let me summarise:
1) ADVANCEMENT OF THE STORY
Usually, for a real set, the world and the main knobs of the story are figured out during Creative Design, before any mechanical aspect is really discussed. We definitely did that with the world building and we have enough ideas as a starting point for the set, but we're late on the story aspect since we couldn't decide what kind of story we're telling, though we did discuss it a lot.
That being said, the story won't impact the cards until much later. At the beginning, we're trying to make the set tick mechanically. We know our themes, and we've weaved them into the mechanics of the set (emotions are dialed up which is represented by the life theme, Art is coming to life, discoveries are being made, etc...) so we're on track with the top-down aspect of the set, in this case it doesn't really need the story yet since we're building on the idea of Renaissance and not a story. The story will only affect the commons we're making through names, illustrations and flavour text, which is something we'll do much much later anyway. We'll need to discuss important characters and events once we go up in rarity though, to make room for them. The rest will be added later directly on existing cards in the file as just a flavour layer.
2) ADVANCEMENT OF VISION DESIGN
I know it can feel frustrating but, yes, designing random cards at this point is basically throwing paint on a wall and hoping it sticks. That's because we fill in the set skeleton in a specific order because the cards depend on other cards. But there's actually a very clear path ahead of us, there are simply many people participating in this project so when they have an idea it's cool that they throw it in the air and we'll catch it up later once it matters. That's why it feels aimless sometimes, a lot of the designs I can't really tell you "Yes, it's cool, let's put that in the set" because it's not time for this kind of cards yet ^^ So, what are we designing that matters right now? Here's the path:
• The first step is finding the mechanics. We're almost done with that step I believe. So we need cards that push our mechanics in interesting directions. Note that those cards aren't even meant to be in the set, but they are still very important and are anything but random designs, their purpose is to define what is fun and what is not about those mechanics, we really need to try all the ways of using those mechanics we can think of.
• The next step will be to try how those mechanics interact together. That's when we start filling in the set skeleton with commons. Once again, this won't be random at all, it's not "Hey I made a card with deathtouch and Masterwork because why not", we have a grid with what all our cards need to do for the set to be balanced, and we're going to add the mechanics onto it, trying to find where they best fit at common.
• After that, we'll refine our common sheet until we have our limited archetypes and we're fully satisfied with them. We'll then move on to higher rarities ^^
Hope this clear things up and make it feel less of an aimless wandering where people just throw random cards in the air ^^ As you can see, we're not designing cards at random, the set hasn't lost its focus, and at this point it's not that dependent on the story anyways since we still have to make the basic mechanical aspect work before we can add flavour to it. That being said, we could use some progress on the story aspect, because it's still a bit late compared to where it should be, though I don't think that's the reason why the design is lagging. (Mostly, it's lagging because it's a full-time job and we can only do that during our free time xD)
Well, WLOP just released a new illustration as she creates a painting that comes alive!
I don't think it gets more perfect than this for the set xD
I also found this from artist panjoool which could very well fit:
It is XD Well, it gets stuck for a few weeks from time to time but we're still slowly making progress towards something cool ^^
A legendary creature, or a planeswalker maybe? Depending on what is the most interesting story wise I guess ^^
Just noticed that Discovered is like drawing a card, but you don't get the freedom of when to cast it, and it'll whiff if it's a land or has timing restrictions.
So I guess some good sample cards could be:
CARDNAME
Sorcery U
Common
Scry 1, then discover.
I based it on Opt but made it a sorcery to reduce the flexibility of giving a creature/sorcery flash.
and
CARDNAME
Sorcery 2R
Uncommon
Discover, then discover again.
I based it on Act on Impulse / Light up the Stage. It's sort of worse than both, but other cards at 1R seem to only "draw" one card.
Another idea I have is to generalize it and potentially have:
Discover a card (Exile that card. You may cast that card. If you don't, put it into its owner's graveyard.)
to allow for a bit more possibilities e.g. from graveyards / opponents' libraries.
It also makes the ability sound more natural.
(Compare "... then discover." to "... then discover the top card of your library." from above)
(also see "explore". The wordings are "it explores", not just "when ~ etb, explore".)
I think you really got the essence of it ^^ It's somewhere between Surveil, Explore and impulsive drawing.
I think the idea of discovering a card from somewhere else than the top of your library is definitely interesting and worth looking into. I'll try to implement the idea into my playtest deck to see how it plays. Don't forget that you don't have to put the card in your graveyard in the original version, it's more like Surveil, but with the added bonus that you can play the card directly if you have enough mana.
Innovate (You get an innovation counter.)
Then cards say something like:
Draw a number of cards equal to your innovation.
It may be a bit similar to energy though.
Other names:
Wit, ingenuity.
We don't know much of Rezatta's whereabouts though we did discuss having a bunch of islands to play into the geographical discovery theme. But it's not something we have touched upon a lot so far. If you have ideas, feel free to draw a map! That may spark some ideas, and we might find some names we like and keep them for cards names later ^^ We can adjust it later if the story needs it
@KJMartin
It's definitely interesting but it's very important that this last mechanic requires zero memory effort from the player. It needs to be immediate, as psylian life, elated and masterwork all already ask you to track stuff. So counters are a no-no for that reason