Congrats Dr. @ningyounk! That's pretty impressive! Anyways, when you say exciting legendaries, do they necessarily have to be in the story? Because if so we might just be able to pop in some members of the Serran Church into that slot.
Advancement Rejection(Naming in progress) 1b Instant Destroy target enchantment. You lose life equal to it's converted mana cost.
If you paid serran life to cast this spell, player's life totals can't change until end of turn. --------------------------------------------------- Based on the new design space in black, if this is too narrow we could add destroying creatures as well.
Black enchantment removal is still evolving but we probably want to avoid removal specifically aimed at enchantment in Black for the moment. Since we don't have a strong enchantment theme in the set, the common Animated Tragedy should be enough to fill that role for the set (if you blink it hard enough, you'll eventually force the sacrifice you want).
I'm still working on the uncommons, but it actually made me rethink about the commons a bit. Originally, I removed the enemy-coloured archetypes to avoid having too many apparent themes at common. But now that I'm looking at the as-fan of various archetypes, I'm thinking we could put just one card for each of these archetypes at common (this way without the uncommons they don't signal a theme to worry about, so it's stays relatively simple).
Here's a try with just a light variation on existing commons to help with the as-fan of the enemy-coloured draft archetypes:
WHITE (RED/WHITE - Power 2 or less matters) Old --> New:
BLUE (GREEN/BLUE - Masterwork) Old --> New:
BLACK (WHITE/BLACK - Renewal) Old --> New:
RED (BLUE/RED - Discover) Old --> New:
GREEN (BLACK/GREEN - +1/+1 counters) Old --> New:
And to replace the missing "even life-matters" card:
I tried again to define how each archetype was going to feel gameplay wise by designing three cards for each bicoloured draft archetype that cared about it in a very direct way (one card per colour + the gold signpost card). The idea was to make sure that the pay-offs of each archetype felt unique and pushed towards a certain gameplay feel. We can make some archetypes feel less directional afterwards, but I wanted to start with on simplified canvas.
WU - Storm Instead of focusing on quality, this focuses more on quantity. The idea is to drown your opponent in value and win with an avalanche of medium threats.
UB - Art It is inherently a creature-based archetype so I tried to push for a style of play that would make it complicated for your opponent to block while you pile up on increasing tempo value. I changed Caustic Critic because I realised the lack of backward compatibility with the creature type meant we needed the Art-matters cards to be Art themselves.
BR - Suicide Aggro This is quite straightforward, the idea is that you hit harder and faster by paying life, so I went for very agressive threats.
RG - Even life growth To make it feel different from the other midrange archetype, this is really focused on having over-the-curve stats as long as your life total is even. The BG and UG archetypes, for instance, are more focused on making their big threats evasive in comparison.
GW - Serran life This one is tricky because the fun comes from trying to protect your life total, but it must not prevent the game from ending. So I pushed for a ticking time bomb style of play where there's a point in the game when suddenly you can convert your excess of life into a massive threat.
WB - Renewal I went for the win by bleeding (dealing a lot of small damage over the turns), to fit the more controlling aspect of the archetype. Because I intend to have a cycle of cards with Renewal at uncommon, I made them distinct by adding a rider ability that helps trigger Renewal. If this isn't enough, I was also considering modal enchantments similar to the Retreats from Zendikar instead.
UR - Discover Here it was more about pumping the creatures and emphasising the surprise aspect of the discover mechanic. I kind of gave up on trying to push a big spells theme for now in order to lean on more classic UR finisher styles.
BG - +1/+1 counters To make it feel different from the RG archetype, I provided more evasion while the +1/+1 counters in themselves were considered like enough value stats wise. The play style also pushes you to pile up your counters on the same creature, instead of the usual "if you would put one or more +1/+1 counters on a creature you control, put that many plus one +1/+1 counters on that creature instead" that entices you to go wider.
RW - Power 2 or less matters To make this feel different from the BR archetype, the life loss theme is completely dropped, and it's more oriented towards value, creating a bridge between the WU and BR archetype.
GU - Masterwork The focus here is on the masterwork mechanic; its more fluid nature should help feel different from the RG or BG archetypes though they are synergistic. Because I intend to have a cycle of cards with Masterwork at uncommon, I tried to make them stand out by scaling with the number of creatures you have with masterwork. I really liked the idea of doubling power and toughness from previous iterations, but I'm confident this is exciting enough that it can be used as a rare slot later ^^
I just looked into your Crescent Sun set! Yeap, it's pretty much the same idea though the base is black/red on Rezatta, white is more of a side-colour to spice it up ^^
Target player draws a card and gains 3 life. If this is the second spell you've cast this turn, change its text by replacing all instances of “target” with “each.”
Might be strong with the instant renewal trigger, so maybe reduce it to 2 life.
For some reason I get notified every time someone comments on this thread. Is it a glitch, or did I press something by accident? Can someone help me fix it?
@RandomFandom Oh! You need to click the star at the right side of the discussion name where all the discussions are listed. If you star this discussion, it pings you every time someone comments.
@ningyounk Do you think "Adamant Cello Player" could become "Adamant Cellist"?
Cello Player seems a little clunky for a card name.
I love how you have cards that care about the number of cards with masterwork you have. I think that is a great way to solve the issue when you're just focusing on one masterwork and don't want to change it anymore. I'll try and drop some more designs here when I get some more time!
Last thing, congrats on your PhD! It takes a lot of work to get through a long process like that. What was your thesis about?
Oh yeah, Cellist would be better — I googled it before and I couldn't find it so I assumed it wsan't an actual word that's all x) Don't worry too much though, the names and illustrations are all placeholders at this stage.
Thank you! I wrote a thesis in neuroscience about a new cerebral pathway involved in behavioural stress responses
Alright, at this stage I kind of wished I would have posted the cards that entices you to splash the enemy colour of the allied-colour draft archetypes (I call them "enemy winks") as well as the removal cards, but I struggled more than I expected with the enemy winks. So instead of posting the cards, I'm going to present you my issues, in hope that someone gets a good idea ^^
The idea of these enemy winks is that they do not use the usual rider that signals the pay-off cards of this archetype (for UB Art tribal for instance, it's "whenever an Art enters or leaves the battlefield under your control") but are still very oriented towards this specific archetype. Here is where I am at with each of them:
GREEN - Meant to be splashed in the UB Art tribal deck.
The green one is the easiest. It simply needs to be a really effective Art creature with a useful ETB ability. I have three candidates for this slot:
4GG Creature - Art 4/5 When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, you may have it fight target creature you don't control. ==> Useful in any green deck and fills one of Green's removal slot in the process.
2GG Creature - Art 2/2 When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, distribute two +1/+1 counters among one or two target creatures you control. ==> This has high synergy with the other green archetypes, especially with BG +1/+1 counters, RG Even life, and GU Masterwork.
1GG Creature - Art 1/1 When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, create two colorless 1/1 Art creature tokens. ==> This has low synergy with the other green archetypes though the GW archetype is looking to go wide. It could help making it more directional toward the Art deck.
BLACK - Meant to be splashed in the GW Serran life deck.
This is pretty straight forward as well. It needs to be a card that can gain you a good chunk of serran life efficiently. I tried a few things but I kind of like something along these lines: B Creature - Cleric 0/3 1, T, Sacrifice a creature: You gain serran life equal to its toughness. ==> This probably needs to be polished balance wise, but you get the general idea.
RED - Meant to be splashed in the WU Second spell deck.
From there it starts to get a bit trickier. It basically needs to help you play two cards per turn but it's a bit difficult to do it in a way that really drives you towards the WU archetype. We had these two designs lying around that I think could work but I'm not convinced they're directional enough as other decks might want to pick them up: 1R Sorcery Discover three times. ==> I'm a little wary that this is not repeatable. 2R Creature 3/2 Menace (or first strike) Whenever CARDNAME attacks, discover. ==> I still think it's missing some more specific synergies.
WHITE - Meant to be splashed in the BR Suicide aggro deck.
This needs to be an agressive card that lets you pay life repeatedly. The problem I encountered here is that it shouldn't let you pay 3 life to consistently or it makes the renewal mechanic too easy to trigger and becomes too valuable to pass for the WB Renewal deck. So I'm searching for a variation over either Adanto Vanguard or Isamaru that would allow you to pay up to 2 life each turn.
Here's an example:
W Creature 2/2 Whenever CARDNAME attacks, you lose 1 life.
BLUE - Meant to be splashed in the RG even life deck.
This is the real tough cookie. This slot is supposed to help you keep your life total even while synergising with over-the curve attackers. The problem is that Blue is terrible at interacting with life totals. I had intended to alter the colour pie a bit and give Blue some effects that set life totals to specific numbers, or any effect that can result in either a gain or loss of life depending on the state of the game (e.g: your life total becomes half your starting life total, your life total becomes equal to the difference between your life total and your starting life total, exchange the life total of two target players). But the more I look into cards that do these effects, the more I realise this is not really something that would be uncommon-friendly, even in a life-matters set.
So instead I figured maybe a card that says "T, Pay up to 2 life: EFFECT" and have an effect that synergises with big creatures. Maybe an untap ability to help ramp for instance?
@ningyounk I like your concepts, but I was worried about something: Renewal, to be exact. The main reason why I am worried is that it would be very, VERY easy to activate, since you just have to gain or lose 3 life... I think a good way to avoid exploits with life gaining/burn decks is that we could try to increase the needed life gained or lost. Maybe 5? It's just a suggestion, but I'd like to avoid WBG life-matter decks that leash out fat creatures and receive little to no punishment for life lost, because they can easily regain it AND activate all the Renewal abilities in the meantime.
Another way to do it would be to make Renewal activate only once. Let me explain:
You have 3 creatures. We'll say they are an Angel, a Demon and a Wolf. They ALL have Renewal as a keyword. Once you gain 3 life, you can decide only one of the cards' Renewal to activate (so if you choose the Angel's Renewal, you can't activate the Demon or the Wolf's at the same time). This, of course, has to be ignored if your objective IS to just spam Renewal as much as you can. But I would see it as sort of frustrating to play against.
@Scaccogaming I think that that's the beauty of the mechanic. This cares about life, but all colors can access it easily. (maybe blue not as much)
Red- noncombat damage White- life gain black- life loss/gain blue- some unblockable /flying creatures or tapping effects to get damage in green- trample stuff
I think the power of the renewal triggers would just have to be a little less powerful when it comes to designing.
After playtesting with it, I was suprised to see that Renewal is even a bit hard to enable consistently, to be honest! Because some decks can only enable Renaissance through damage to the opponent, it's important that the threshold is not too high (5 for instance, would be a tremendous amount of damage).
It's ok if the mechanic can be enabled every turn, that would be the point of the decks built around it so this actually needs to be possible with a bit of setting up. However, I do want to avoid cards that would make it too trivial, "At the beginning of your upkeep, you gain 3 serran life" for instance would not be very fun. The spirit behind the designs so far is that you either have cards that can enable Renewal by themselves but for one turn only, cards that require a substantial cost to trigger Renewal by themselves every turn, or cards that will produce a gain/loss of 1 or 2 life every turn and need to be complemented with either other cards or a bit of combat damage.
As long as the effects scale according to the difficulty (I ranked it just a little harder than Spectacle), this shouldn't be a problem balance wise ^^ Think Landfall for example, it's quite easy to trigger, that's not inherently a problem.
The black effect is interesting but very strong, that's more something you'd see on a Mythic! (That wouldn't be misplaced on an Athreos card, for instance.)
For the blue Pastor, the difficulty is that I don't want to break the colour pie completely and give blue straight up life gain. I would like to find a way to incorporate some life manipulation in Blue but make it feel like its own thing. As Blue likes transformation, exchanges, and time manipulation, I'm thinking of borrowing some of the quirkier effects from other colours such as setting life totals to fixed numbers, exchanging life totals, or maybe freezing life totals (preventing any life loss and gain). Alternatively, something no colour is doing currently would be to give life to an opponent as payment. For instance:
___
Ok, here's a try at the enemy winks I was talking above. They're not great but they can at least act as placeholders because I'd really like to move on to removals and finish the first draft of the uncommons to have a global view before starting to correct things that are out of place.
Rezatta is looking awesome! Please let me know if I can be of any assistance whatsoever- I really want to help make concepts if possible but I'm not sure where to step in.
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Anyways, when you say exciting legendaries, do they necessarily have to be in the story? Because if so we might just be able to pop in some members of the Serran Church into that slot.
Instant
Destroy target enchantment. You lose life equal to it's converted mana cost.
If you paid serran life to cast this spell, player's life totals can't change until end of turn.
---------------------------------------------------
Based on the new design space in black, if this is too narrow we could add destroying creatures as well.
_
LordTachanka123
Black enchantment removal is still evolving but we probably want to avoid removal specifically aimed at enchantment in Black for the moment. Since we don't have a strong enchantment theme in the set, the common Animated Tragedy should be enough to fill that role for the set (if you blink it hard enough, you'll eventually force the sacrifice you want).
Here's a try with just a light variation on existing commons to help with the as-fan of the enemy-coloured draft archetypes:
WHITE (RED/WHITE - Power 2 or less matters)
Old --> New:
BLUE (GREEN/BLUE - Masterwork)
Old --> New:
BLACK (WHITE/BLACK - Renewal)
Old --> New:
RED (BLUE/RED - Discover)
Old --> New:
GREEN (BLACK/GREEN - +1/+1 counters)
Old --> New:
And to replace the missing "even life-matters" card:
WU - Storm
Instead of focusing on quality, this focuses more on quantity. The idea is to drown your opponent in value and win with an avalanche of medium threats.
UB - Art
It is inherently a creature-based archetype so I tried to push for a style of play that would make it complicated for your opponent to block while you pile up on increasing tempo value. I changed Caustic Critic because I realised the lack of backward compatibility with the creature type meant we needed the Art-matters cards to be Art themselves.
BR - Suicide Aggro
This is quite straightforward, the idea is that you hit harder and faster by paying life, so I went for very agressive threats.
RG - Even life growth
To make it feel different from the other midrange archetype, this is really focused on having over-the-curve stats as long as your life total is even. The BG and UG archetypes, for instance, are more focused on making their big threats evasive in comparison.
GW - Serran life
This one is tricky because the fun comes from trying to protect your life total, but it must not prevent the game from ending. So I pushed for a ticking time bomb style of play where there's a point in the game when suddenly you can convert your excess of life into a massive threat.
I went for the win by bleeding (dealing a lot of small damage over the turns), to fit the more controlling aspect of the archetype. Because I intend to have a cycle of cards with Renewal at uncommon, I made them distinct by adding a rider ability that helps trigger Renewal. If this isn't enough, I was also considering modal enchantments similar to the Retreats from Zendikar instead.
UR - Discover
Here it was more about pumping the creatures and emphasising the surprise aspect of the discover mechanic. I kind of gave up on trying to push a big spells theme for now in order to lean on more classic UR finisher styles.
BG - +1/+1 counters
To make it feel different from the RG archetype, I provided more evasion while the +1/+1 counters in themselves were considered like enough value stats wise. The play style also pushes you to pile up your counters on the same creature, instead of the usual "if you would put one or more +1/+1 counters on a creature you control, put that many plus one +1/+1 counters on that creature instead" that entices you to go wider.
RW - Power 2 or less matters
To make this feel different from the BR archetype, the life loss theme is completely dropped, and it's more oriented towards value, creating a bridge between the WU and BR archetype.
GU - Masterwork
The focus here is on the masterwork mechanic; its more fluid nature should help feel different from the RG or BG archetypes though they are synergistic. Because I intend to have a cycle of cards with Masterwork at uncommon, I tried to make them stand out by scaling with the number of creatures you have with masterwork. I really liked the idea of doubling power and toughness from previous iterations, but I'm confident this is exciting enough that it can be used as a rare slot later ^^
If you want you can use some cards from there.
I just looked into your Crescent Sun set! Yeap, it's pretty much the same idea though the base is black/red on Rezatta, white is more of a side-colour to spice it up ^^
Creature-Soldier
Renewal-At the beginning of your end step, if the sum of all life gained and lost this turn is 3 or more, each player loses 2 life.
2/2
Sorcery
Target player draws a card and gains 3 life. If this is the second spell you've cast this turn, change its text by replacing all instances of “target” with “each.”
Might be strong with the instant renewal trigger, so maybe reduce it to 2 life.
Creature-Art Whale
Whenever CARDNAME taps, you may discover. If the discovered card is an art, and you cast it, untap CARDNAME.
1/7
Sorry about wording issues, but this one's to overlap with the UR archetype as well.
Your "Drunk Swine" Boar Soldier card has artwork of a wolf on it...
Oops I thought it was a pig at a smaller scale xD Thanks for mentioning it!
No problem
Cello Player seems a little clunky for a card name.
I love how you have cards that care about the number of cards with masterwork you have. I think that is a great way to solve the issue when you're just focusing on one masterwork and don't want to change it anymore. I'll try and drop some more designs here when I get some more time!
Last thing, congrats on your PhD! It takes a lot of work to get through a long process like that. What was your thesis about?
Thank you! I wrote a thesis in neuroscience about a new cerebral pathway involved in behavioural stress responses
The idea of these enemy winks is that they do not use the usual rider that signals the pay-off cards of this archetype (for UB Art tribal for instance, it's "whenever an Art enters or leaves the battlefield under your control") but are still very oriented towards this specific archetype. Here is where I am at with each of them:
GREEN - Meant to be splashed in the UB Art tribal deck.
The green one is the easiest. It simply needs to be a really effective Art creature with a useful ETB ability. I have three candidates for this slot:
4GG
Creature - Art
4/5
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, you may have it fight target creature you don't control.
==> Useful in any green deck and fills one of Green's removal slot in the process.
2GG
Creature - Art
2/2
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, distribute two +1/+1 counters among one or two target creatures you control.
==> This has high synergy with the other green archetypes, especially with BG +1/+1 counters, RG Even life, and GU Masterwork.
1GG
Creature - Art
1/1
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, create two colorless 1/1 Art creature tokens.
==> This has low synergy with the other green archetypes though the GW archetype is looking to go wide. It could help making it more directional toward the Art deck.
BLACK - Meant to be splashed in the GW Serran life deck.
This is pretty straight forward as well. It needs to be a card that can gain you a good chunk of serran life efficiently. I tried a few things but I kind of like something along these lines:
B
Creature - Cleric
0/3
1, T, Sacrifice a creature: You gain serran life equal to its toughness.
==> This probably needs to be polished balance wise, but you get the general idea.
RED - Meant to be splashed in the WU Second spell deck.
From there it starts to get a bit trickier. It basically needs to help you play two cards per turn but it's a bit difficult to do it in a way that really drives you towards the WU archetype. We had these two designs lying around that I think could work but I'm not convinced they're directional enough as other decks might want to pick them up:
1R
Sorcery
Discover three times.
==> I'm a little wary that this is not repeatable.
2R
Creature
3/2
Menace (or first strike)
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, discover.
==> I still think it's missing some more specific synergies.
WHITE - Meant to be splashed in the BR Suicide aggro deck.
This needs to be an agressive card that lets you pay life repeatedly. The problem I encountered here is that it shouldn't let you pay 3 life to consistently or it makes the renewal mechanic too easy to trigger and becomes too valuable to pass for the WB Renewal deck. So I'm searching for a variation over either Adanto Vanguard or Isamaru that would allow you to pay up to 2 life each turn.
Here's an example:
W
Creature
2/2
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, you lose 1 life.
BLUE - Meant to be splashed in the RG even life deck.
This is the real tough cookie. This slot is supposed to help you keep your life total even while synergising with over-the curve attackers. The problem is that Blue is terrible at interacting with life totals. I had intended to alter the colour pie a bit and give Blue some effects that set life totals to specific numbers, or any effect that can result in either a gain or loss of life depending on the state of the game (e.g: your life total becomes half your starting life total, your life total becomes equal to the difference between your life total and your starting life total, exchange the life total of two target players). But the more I look into cards that do these effects, the more I realise this is not really something that would be uncommon-friendly, even in a life-matters set.
So instead I figured maybe a card that says "T, Pay up to 2 life: EFFECT" and have an effect that synergises with big creatures. Maybe an untap ability to help ramp for instance?
Another way to do it would be to make Renewal activate only once. Let me explain:
You have 3 creatures. We'll say they are an Angel, a Demon and a Wolf. They ALL have Renewal as a keyword. Once you gain 3 life, you can decide only one of the cards' Renewal to activate (so if you choose the Angel's Renewal, you can't activate the Demon or the Wolf's at the same time). This, of course, has to be ignored if your objective IS to just spam Renewal as much as you can. But I would see it as sort of frustrating to play against.
Red- noncombat damage
White- life gain
black- life loss/gain
blue- some unblockable /flying creatures or tapping effects to get damage in
green- trample stuff
I think the power of the renewal triggers would just have to be a little less powerful when it comes to designing.
Enchantment
Whenever a creature card leaves the battlefield, you may pay 2 life. If you, return it to your hand.
Meant to splash with the UB(The leaves the battlefield recursion) and WB(2 life, didn't know if 3 would be fine) archetypes.
Creature-(Race) Cleric
Renewal-Untap CARDNAME.
Whenever CARDNAME untaps, untap target creature with cmc less than CARDNAME's. You gain life equal to it's cmc.
1/3
After playtesting with it, I was suprised to see that Renewal is even a bit hard to enable consistently, to be honest! Because some decks can only enable Renaissance through damage to the opponent, it's important that the threshold is not too high (5 for instance, would be a tremendous amount of damage).
It's ok if the mechanic can be enabled every turn, that would be the point of the decks built around it so this actually needs to be possible with a bit of setting up. However, I do want to avoid cards that would make it too trivial, "At the beginning of your upkeep, you gain 3 serran life" for instance would not be very fun. The spirit behind the designs so far is that you either have cards that can enable Renewal by themselves but for one turn only, cards that require a substantial cost to trigger Renewal by themselves every turn, or cards that will produce a gain/loss of 1 or 2 life every turn and need to be complemented with either other cards or a bit of combat damage.
As long as the effects scale according to the difficulty (I ranked it just a little harder than Spectacle), this shouldn't be a problem balance wise ^^ Think Landfall for example, it's quite easy to trigger, that's not inherently a problem.
@LordTachanka123
The black effect is interesting but very strong, that's more something you'd see on a Mythic! (That wouldn't be misplaced on an Athreos card, for instance.)
For the blue Pastor, the difficulty is that I don't want to break the colour pie completely and give blue straight up life gain. I would like to find a way to incorporate some life manipulation in Blue but make it feel like its own thing. As Blue likes transformation, exchanges, and time manipulation, I'm thinking of borrowing some of the quirkier effects from other colours such as setting life totals to fixed numbers, exchanging life totals, or maybe freezing life totals (preventing any life loss and gain). Alternatively, something no colour is doing currently would be to give life to an opponent as payment. For instance:
___
Ok, here's a try at the enemy winks I was talking above. They're not great but they can at least act as placeholders because I'd really like to move on to removals and finish the first draft of the uncommons to have a global view before starting to correct things that are out of place.
Rezatta is looking awesome! Please let me know if I can be of any assistance whatsoever- I really want to help make concepts if possible but I'm not sure where to step in.