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Rezatta, the life-matters Renaissance plane — SET DESIGN PHASE
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Random question, I know.
What if we gave red Flaxen's static?
I feel that that could work with a red aggro, maybe also rakdos sac. I dunno, my opinion should not be counted on things of significance.
Triggerring Renaissance is pretty difficult so I'm trying to make the bonus universally good. That means I'd like to avoid sideboard-style effects on Renaissance triggers as much as possible.
LordTachanka123
The time in Nice:
Lol, it was the middle of the night for me when you sent that message so... x)
Bending colours to what your set is doing:
You can bend the colour pie a little bit as long as you don't break it. The idea is that colours have weaknesses that should be respected, notably red is supposed to be pretty short-sighted so it can't gain life back, it's really an all-in colour, there's no fixing your mistakes xD I've actually done a little bit of a bend and allowed Red to gain serran life without undermining its weakness:
As you can see you end up with the same life total so it's not a break. But that little trick won't support serran life enough in Red to have cards that actually care about it. Also, even if it was possible, it's not necessarily desirable. The set will feel better if we compartimentalize the mechanics and themes so not all colours have access to everything.
Flaxen Intruder's ability:
Yeah, actually that ability would synergise interestingly with a pump spell now that I think about it. Sure Strike is not doing anything specific for the set outside of being a recognisable reprint so it could be the host for this ability:
This opens some interesting gameplay option since first strike does nothing on an unblocked creature but you want the creature to connect to destroy the artifact, forcing you to make a choice on how to use it. It might be a bit complex for common though.
Alternatively, putting it on a creature could also work. An ETB ability in particular would go well with an Art so Red has at least one Art creature on which you could want to use your recursion tools. The Melting Frostfang might be the best host for this, I was already looking for something to make it more punchy when I added Reach to it.
I was feeling uncertain about giving vigilance to the Endangered Winterwolf as well since I liked the clean design of when it became a 5/5 for 4, but I felt the two of them worked better if they were symmetrical. So it would become this:
I'm still unsure which option I prefer.
KorandAngels
On specific cards, we can start to think about what we want them to depict, and the themes we want to represent. So far I've used mostly Church of Serra + Science + Art + Carnival + Exploration as the main themes of the commons. If you have any idea for a cool flavour we can try to incorporate it. I think we're not far from starting to add higher rarity cards to the set so we might even want to do some top-down designs if you think of something that would be especially cool to have in the world.
If you're thinking about flavour text on the other hand, that's something that will come pretty late once we have a set of cards that don't change that often.
It's a try at making it more branded! Psylian life was a pun on phyrexian mana because mechanically it was derived from it, but I wanted to have a name that meant something to that world. Since the Church of Serra embodied really well the values of Renaissance, we're trying to flavourfully tie psylian life to the rebirth of Serra in the set, hence why it's now called serran life. It's still the same mechanic ^^
For the fire-breathing enchantment, I worry that it may become a finisher on its own in the late game. Maybe restrict the mana cost a bit and/or give it "double fire-breathing" (i.e. 1R: ~ gets +2/+2) instead?
(BTW the images' head and bottom seem to be cut off. Maybe try uploading them directly into the post?)
Yeap, I think I'm going to lean into the Art creature one instead. On top of keeping complexity lower, it also has the upside of being a desirable recursion target for the Art tribal archetype in the other colours:
Yeah, I definitely want to try the red enchantment in case it's too strong. But I was thinking that, even if you have some mana to pump into the firebreathing ability, it's likely less damage than Gravitic Punch with Jump-Start so it's probably fine (?).
The thing with "1R: Gets +2/+0" is that it actually makes thing easier for players to activate the ability than "R: Gets +1/+0", the main result is that it lets player tap their non-red mana to boost the creature as well. That's why it was used a lot during the Ravnica block, since they wanted to encourage multicolour play.
We could go the route of "3R: Gets +3/+3" or things like that for instance but that's a bit of a bend, it's usually more of a Green ability.
MonkeyPirate2002
Yeap, I think we're reaching a consensus for now, we'll try the creature version first for the artifact removal ^^
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Here's a little list of things missing if someone wants to try their hand at it:
1) Silver Statue
I like this ability but I think I'll save it for an uncommon draft archetype, I don't want cards to care about too many different things at common and Masterwork is the kind of mechanic that works well at common without needing pay-off cards. Which leaves an empty slot for a large (4+ mana) artifact-creature. Honestly, I was thinking turning it into a vanilla or french vanilla creature, it's usually not a bad idea to have one of those in the artifact slot. But if anyone has another idea in mind for this slot, I'll take it ^^
2) Land removal
Oops, another thing I forgot. The set needs some land removal. Just one is fine, I don't expect the set to have any problematic lands, but I know there is a subset of players who like to try to make land destruction work in literally every set and it's important to them xD The card can be red or green, must be four mana or more, and I'd rather avoid putting it on something that can be blinked or reanimated because that gets old very quickly. There's always the option of revisiting the land freezing ability they were experimenting with a few years ago to soften land destruction, but I don't think it really fits what land destruction players really want.
I was thinking that maybe the land removal would be put onto the green flying removal card Through the Dirt, though it's complicated because a two-for-one might be a bit much for common and I already have a choice spell in Serran Gift:
3) Little details I wouldn't mind ironing
• Breathing Waltz might be a bit potent at 3-mana. We've had examples of cards like this in the past at common, but also at uncommon (albeit in core sets). Four-mana might just be a safer place on the curve, but I still want a good target to blink at 3-mana in blue/black in this case.
• New Findings without Renaissance is still Sift. Is that too strong for common? The card used to be an uncommon in the latest core set though it was printed at common multiple times as well. I personally wouldn't mind trying to push a little in that direction at common, but the card might want to be a little safer.
Sure! So far what we know about them is that they're embodiment of different emotions and that they inspire some artists and other kind of creators. They could be central to the story or they could be a background thing. However, since we now have the rebirth of Serra implemented in the set, we know they won't be the source of the Renaissance era that Rezatta is experiencing like we considered a while ago. They will likely end up being the exciting Mythic cycle of the set (on the same level as the Apex cycle of Ikoria, Gods of Theros, or the legendary Artefacts of Eldraine) so we need five of them and they need to be colour-balanced. Because the set doesn't have a strong multi-coloured theme, they should likely be mono- or bicouloured.
Visually, I am fond of using Peter Mohrbacher's Angelarium to represent them but I know those illustrations are used very often on the site so we can use something else as long as it's cool-looking ^^
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There are about a hundred ways to depict them mechanically, so here's one try: I like to think of them as Avatars so we could look into cards that depict the player becoming a part of the game for instance?
It might be a bit much for a five-card cycle but I was thinking something like "CARDNAME's toughness is equal to your life total. Whenever CARDNAME is dealt damage, you lose that much life." This way they play into the life theme by being an embodiment of the player's emotion.
E.g.:
Feel free to propose any interesting idea you have, whether it's about the lore of the Muses or what their cards could. And, I can't stress this enough, this is NOT the final concept for the muse, it's just one concept out of a billion possible.
This was just something I made, I suck at balancing so there's probably a MILLION issues with it. Hope you didn't mind it being bi colored, it could probably be simplified to mono-red.
As I said before, I suck at rarities.
Yeah it's not really common, that's more rare or mythic material ^^ That's because land destruction can be very obnoxious to play against so you want to make sure you can't destroy lands repeatedly at common. In addition, the drawback is very huge so you need to build your deck in a certain way to not lose to this, which is why this goes at rare or mythic and not uncommon.
Also, the bicoloured commons usually only appear in sets that have a multicoloured theme like Ravnica or Tarkir. It's because they need more support mana wise to be played consistently (for instance Tarkir had the 10 life taplands at common and Ravnica had the 10 guildgates at common) so it requires a specific type of set skeleton to slot them in.
Like before, it would be easy to create a new design from scratch for a land destruction card. The difficulty is that the set is running out of room at common so we need to identify a card that can be replaced by it, or insert the land destruction on an already existing card.
I'll remake my land destruction.
Hope this is better @ningyounk
Also, I really love your idea for the muses.
This is just the same first draft that I submitted earlier, so we can change things if need be.
@MonkeyPirate2002, really liked how the deck felt!
Double strike is probably a little much for a common colorless card ^^ That can get surprisingly powerful with any kind of pump effect. I'm more in the market for something that can fill any deck that's a bit light on end-curve creature in Sealed or Draft, but nothing you would put in your deck over something else if you had the choice.
@MonkeyPirate2002
Yeap in normal circumstances it would be a *, but technically you could put whatever you want there so I figured a heart would be a more flashy and branded way of using the "*" technology, especially if it's a full cycle ^^
@Aggroman15
It's around what I'm looking for but I would like to avoid anything with Reach or Flying because the common equipment already gives flying and I dont want flyiers to struggle too much with the colorless commons.
That being said, you reminded me that red is a little too weak to flyiers right now, so I went to look for a red creature that wasn't too wordy and gave reach to this guy:
The-DM
Absolutely, everyone can come and go as they please here ^^ Right now we're polishing the commons, I think we're about to hit the uncommons soon. Because it's kind of the end of this iteration, there's little work to do at common though we're still looking for a place to fit a land removal somewhere in red or green. Otherwise, cool concepts for higher rarity cards are always welcome but they'll be more useful if they're tied to the mechanics or flavour of the set than if they're doing something cool in a vacuum. With all the changes, there is no easy way of seeing the full set of commons right now but once the couple missing slots are filled I'll post an updated version so it shouldn't be long from now. The intro on page 1 does help but it's a bit outdated now. I'll make a fresh thread once we start doing uncommons.
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For the colorless 4+mana creature, I figured another vanilla creature wouldn't hurt so I went to see all colorless vanilla creatures in that slot and tried to find something original that had not been done before:
I'm thinking one of these:
Four-mana: 5/1 or 4/2
Five-mana: 3/5, 3/6, 5/3, or 2/6
I'm liking the 3/6 for 5 option so far:
@ningyounk
Is there a story segment at one point? Is there even a story? Did you already do the story?