@horusbreak You skipped @joemamajoe and thank you for the feedback! Both of your cards are way too powerful unfortunately. 2 life (or 1 mana for that matter) means pretty much nothing on a mana rock that enters untapped. You need to really rethink the balance on both of them. Did you make the art? If you did, nice work on that for sure!
@shadow123 thx for the comment. It was my goal to make a powerful staple mythic card... but saying it's too powerful is arguable since more powerful cards already exist: Mox Ruby and Mox Emerald. To be as good as a Mox for theses card, you need to pay life. Otherwise it is restricted by color. Yes its good, but mana rocks don't make you win the game... I could see them being 2 green/up to 4 life... but it wouldn't feel as satisfying and mythical. Not all cards need to be as weak as the weakest existing one.
Mox Ruby and Mox Emerald are extremely broken because they get your deck running super quickly. Those mana rocks do cause people to suddenly be able to do crazy things really quickly. I'm not saying to balance cards based on the worst card. I'm saying that you might want to scale its power to match the current meta. Also, I could make a 1 mana card that draws me 2 cards and it would still be broken even though ancestral recall is a thing. If you're trying to make a card of that power level, you can go ahead and do so. I'm not stopping you haha. I think having this enter the battlefield tapped would make this design much better for sure. If we want to continue this discussion, let's take it into PMs so that we don't clog up this thread.
I like both cards, however, I don't see how they play together. There is almost no synergy between them, which is my problem. Inktrail is cool, but Zitec should be worded like this:
If you would draw any number of cards, you may instead put that many loyalty counters on Zitec, Inkblood Ritualist.
@ChoyBoi - The card link is busted, but I found it anyway.
I feel like this is way overcosted, since it also benefits the opponents. This will pretty much always deal 4 damage to your opponents and I think each player should have the option to choose the mana they are adding. I think it should also have players keep the mana until your next turn. I'd suggest this kind of mana cost and wording, or something close to this. Bumping the rarity to mythic should be considered too, since this kind of effect is pretty unique:
{3}{r}{r}
Starting with you, each player adds four mana of any one color of their choice, then Ritual of Blazes deals damage to each opponent equal to the amount of unspent mana they have. Until your next turn, players don't lose this mana as steps and phases end.
Also, "to your mana pool" clause is no longer used by WotC.
Here's my cards. Post a constructive comment on both/either of them, then you may favorite the ones you like before posting up to two cards of your own:
@shadow123 , Memory Dismissal is cool but definitely an idea I've seen a few times before and done slightly better, such as on a kicker card or an entwine card. Balanced, but the black cost could be an Entwine and the base card could be at 3 mana.
@FourEyesIsAFish , the Partner commanders you posted were neat, but not particularly strong. Zitec's only payoff for skipping out on actual card advantage is gaining loyalty to give your spells cascade, which isn't strong enough to skip 4-5 draws just to get to, not to mention that Planeswalkers are high value targets in Commander and a 6 mana 4-loyalty planeswalker without protection is going to die. Inktrail is also overcosted even as a partner.
@ChoyBoi , I feel the idea of "Unspent Mana Hate" is a bad mechanic outside of being on a 1-off commander. It's hard to utilize properly, as it's not like someone is just going to have unspent mana at any time without immediately using it to cast a spell that they have priority for unless you significantly build around it using the one mana burn commander in existence. If you want to make hate for Floating Mana, do it like Yurlok, who can turn the effect into a signifcant benefit on his own and has the hate ability as a passive ability that doesn't do weird stuff with priority.
@TenebrisNemo , Feast or Famine seems flawed. Most people at WotC hate life-gain hate that both don't do it passively or don't have it tacked onto another effect, as none have been printed recently. Stuff like Atarka's Commands and Flames of the Blood Hand have another effect tacked on, Rain of Gore and Tainted Remedy do it passively, eta. Doubling your life gain is also generally a terrible effect - life gain decks want to gain small amounts of life constantly and use it to trigger effects or combo infinitely with their life gain, not stockpile up lots of life with big life swings.
@TenebrisNemo Alright. Wording (for Feast of Famine):
Until end of turn, if target player would gain life, that player gains twice that much life instead.
Inflection - If {B} was spent to cast this spell, change its text by replacing "gains" with "loses" and removing "twice."
Basically just a small fix in the first ability for a double time clause. Before I move on to random notes, I'll briefly mention the fact that text-changing seems like a weird route to go on here. Perhaps there's a reason, and it certainly does a good job of reminding me of something less-used, but it jars against the entire history of cards changing up an "instead" kind of effect. Now, about those notes, starting with a little stuff about Feast of Famine:
- I'm not certain how I feel about the card at uncommon. It's a niche little semi-tech card that I wouldn't wouldn't necessarily feel gleeful about opening at rare, but neither of the effects are traditionally uncommon and I wouldn't be happy about it taking up an uncommon slot for draft either. Possibly a rarity bump would be the right way to go.
- Possibly the name's a bit too close to Feast or Famine, with a difference of one minor letter. Not hugely important, just saying.
- While I don't necessarily agree with everything Potato13 said, they're pretty valid on the whole. Neither side of the card actually does all that much in a lot of situations. I'd probably really, really much rather have a Rain of Gore / Tainted Remedy for one side or one of the life-doublers for the other, and I highly doubt any decks will ever have any degree of interest in using both. All this seems to bring to the table is a way to very rarely instant-speed mess with Tendrils storm, and even then it's possible that you'll end up dead / tie in such a way that other counters are just better. In fact, this sheer degree of niche-ness is another reason for that whole rarity-bump thing.
And now some brief stuff about Dog Mox. Since it's a silver-border card, I'll obviously evaluate with that in mind:
- One of the things I see a lot of people slip up on is that silver-border shouldn't necessarily equate to "broken as heck / utterly worthless". They might be silly, but real ones technically still tend to end up in a playable set. I suspect that this falls a little too far into the "worthless" category for its own good. While Dog is a vaguely supported tribe, I certainly wouldn't call it the best thing in the world, and a silver-bordered mythic should perhaps be a good experience rather than "Wow! This is worthless." I'm aware it's bad reasoning to apply to all cards (Mox Amber, for example. Garbage in limited, but at least you get a nice feeling of "this could be cool elsewhere"). Perhaps this takes the niche-ness a bit too far, though. I reckon that it'd benefit from a slightly less tight clause on the underdog effect. Sorry about the vaguely-rant nature of that. I'm vaguely trying to get a point that's really hard for me to articulate across, so that's the best I can do. Hopefully you have some degree of understanding of what I mean.
- For the sake of being an aesthetics pest, the part of the art taken from ethamari is way more reminiscent of an Anubis-black jackal than a dog, and MTG defines Jackals as their own tribe separate from Dogs. Hardly a significant issue, but I may as well write it.
Hopefully at least some tiny amount of all of that was actually useful. I get the sense that a lot of it might just be worthless rambling.
Next, this. It's an idea that I had a really long time ago that got scrapped because of the character limit, but I've now reworked in a form that doesn't hit that particular issue. Give it a favorite and / or a constructive comment before posting up to two cards of your own.
@MemoryHead I see its use, I wonder if Wizards will make a card with two text boxes in the future, I'd vote for words every time to keep from being annihilated.
@Jedidiah The pikachu is a decent design, although the formatting is very confusing. Taranis is more interesting, and the effect is quite fun, but "Wheels" in magic normall refer to discarding our hand and drawing a new one. Also, why does it have the enchantment creature frame? Next up: https://www.mtgcardsmith.com/view/striped-herbivore
@shadow123, I like the idea, but the card is just too underpowered. It is only remotely playable in a Food tribal/token deck, even then I still wouldn't usually use it.
There are two things you can do -
- Lower rarity to common.
- Change the cost to adventure cost to 1B.
I like the idea though. ______________________________________________________________________________________
@joemamajoe Wow! Your cards have gotten really good! So, Volcinerate. I don’t think there’s much to comment on, this is absolutely insane. Really reminds me of Shatterskull Smashing. I left a favorite! Fighting the Mintmonster. I think it’s very exploitable by just having a creature with a power of 1, and it also has a blue effect and a red effect mixed in with the white and green. Also, a teensy rules error: It should say "exile each creature with the greatest toughness," as there may be multiple that tie for the greatest toughness. Overall, I think it could benefit from just being less complicated.
Here’s my card, Mind Stab. I’ve had the concept in my mind for a while. And before you say the player basically only discards one card, yes, but it’s basically Maddening Cacophony with some black mixed in, since eight cards end up in their graveyard, with at least one from their hand. And I was thinking it’d see a lot of play in Rogues, since it’s very useful in both the blue/black mill archetype and it immediately puts eight cards in the opponent’s graveyard. Tell me what you think!
@TenebrisNemo Alrighty. There aren't any wording errors, so I'll just get to thoughts and points:
- I'm not totally sure how I feel about the balance. As a land-becomes-creature, this is comparable to things like Stalking Stones (also becomes a 3/3 permanently for a six mana input). This asks colors to become a creature and enters tapped, sure, but it also gives you two colors and has a (potentially extremely impactful) extra ability. Also, land types mean it can be grabbed by an assortment of things, including fetchlands.
- I'm guessing that it's been given the "Island Swamp" subtypes because there wasn't space to fit "{T}: Add {U} or {B}." on the card. I've got my suspicions that those land types and the associated fetchland stuff are one of the main aspects at the heart of my concerns. There isn't any way to magic more space into existence, of course, and none of the clauses can really be cut, so it probably isn't the way to solve it.
- The fact that when this works best (when your opponent has equipments) is also a point where it becomes even better since you can afford to tap it to help pay for its own effect during combat or whatever and still get the impact of snatching a Batterskull or Sword or something.
- I'm kind of getting the sense that my overall grievances might be best solved by a small increase in the monstrosity cost. Probably just by {1} or something. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that I'm being overly paranoid and overvaluing the chance of encountering those niche situations where it does stuff, but I get the sense that it's still a very solid land pretty much all of the time even without this whole equipment thing going on. You don't want it against aggro because it etbs tapped, I guess, but it's a fetchable piece of fixing for two colors that can be converted into an on-board tool creature, sometimes inflict vast tempo swings on certain decks, and even without that has the super-niche ability to pick up your own equipment cards in a pinch.
- Another point that just occurred to me is "Why's the card black"? Is it just to ensure mono-blue can't run it? Nothing about the card is black except for a few scraps of flavor.
Sorry that I haven't really really provided any really definitive answers or suggestions. I fear I'm not in the best mindset for feedbacking right now. Hopefully somebody else's thoughts are at least slightly valuable, I guess, and maybe I'll have some better ones to return with later.
Experimental stupidity, mostly just done so I can say "I made this really stupid thing once", and also to test a few mechanical ideas and how they appear in CS. They're intended for Planechase, and there are various little note-y disclaimers written in the card comments. This'll probably make them major annoyances to evaluate, so I'm really, really sorry in advance to whoever has to suffer them. Give one or both a favorite and / or a comment before posting up to two cards of your own.
@MemoryHead, fantastic work as always pushing the boundaries of what is a Magic card. I personally think while Spark is a great start for a mechanic, it needs some room to evolve. I would be afraid that Spark has the same problems as Energy in that it's difficult to interact with the counters. Maybe similar to planeswalkers whenever you take damage you remove that many spark counters. In addition, does the rules text imply that you can only activate each permanent's spark abilities once per turn, or only one spark ability total each turn?
Regardless, as an experienced magic player I love the idea of cards transforming into a plane. It certainly shouldn't be a uncommon with how complex it is, but in a masters-masters set it's beautiful. I cannot properly emphasize how cool these cards are.
Can I have some help on my mechanically complex card? I would love some feedback!
@MemoryHead are these a planeshift exclusive card (which I’ve never actually played unfortunately) or do you see it in other contexts as well. Edit: Sorry didn’t fully read your comment. I probably dont have enough experience in the format to really give proper critique. But it does seem cool to have creatures actually interacting with that format (I’m assuming there aren’t any actually.)
@Temurzoa Spark was actually featured on a Mystery Booster playtest card, MemoryHead didn’t come up with it himself. About the reminder text, it says you can only activate one of the abilities each turn, and if you activated an ability of one spark permanent and another ability of another spark permanent, you just activated two of them. So I assume you’re only allowed to activate one total.
Obidiah Very nice use of the flip coin mechanic, be nice to see more of it in the game. There could be a problem when Alther deals 2 damage and kills himself. Unless that's what you intended to do, i think changing "each creature" to "each other creature" would work better.
Thank you, @Kuma89, I agree with the coin flip thing, it would be nicer to see more of that. Also, the 2 damage was intentional so that if you had a whole bunch of mana you couldn't keep creating treasure tokens without incident or completely eliminate the entire field.
@Kuma89 I like the concept of Rayniece, it’s pretty innovative. Just a couple things: menace shouldn’t be capitalized, you only capitalize keyword abilities at the beginning of a new sentence. I would also drop the deathtouch, since if you attack with this, you either get a free hit in or destroy two creatures. Other than that, cool card!
My card, inspired by the Slizt clan of viashino, Rubblebelt Strategist.
RandomFandom thanks for pointing out the Menace, i forget about not capitalize things like that. As for the deathtouch, I was working off the thought of using it as bargaining at the table. Example being passing control of a problematic creature to another player and offering to block it with deathtouch. I may just drop menace all together.
Kuma89 I like the Idea, but I feel like it is a little too strong... If three opponents each swing at you with a 1/1, all your creatures get a permanent +3/+3 boost. I feel like the blood counters should be put on Faryant itself, so that the buff is reset when they die, or it only buffs itself from the blood counters. Otherwise, its a really neat effect!
Here's a line of non-blue "counterspells" I made. Note that the intent is to transform the opponent's spell into another spell, so the opponent still casts a spell, just not the one they wanted. Also, the white one should say "You gain 6 life" instead of "target opponent gains 6 life". Finally, I made Grim Refute first, so technically the wording of the flavor text on all the others is wrong.
Sorry if I posted too many cards. It just made more sense to me to show all four than just one.
MTG Cardsmith Community Forums
Comments
@joemamajoe I commented on your cards.
My card:
My card(s):
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/zitec-inkblood-ritualist?list=user
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/inktrail-ritual-familiar-2?list=user
Mox Ruby and Mox Emerald are extremely broken because they get your deck running super quickly. Those mana rocks do cause people to suddenly be able to do crazy things really quickly. I'm not saying to balance cards based on the worst card. I'm saying that you might want to scale its power to match the current meta. Also, I could make a 1 mana card that draws me 2 cards and it would still be broken even though ancestral recall is a thing. If you're trying to make a card of that power level, you can go ahead and do so. I'm not stopping you haha. I think having this enter the battlefield tapped would make this design much better for sure. If we want to continue this discussion, let's take it into PMs so that we don't clog up this thread.
@FourEyesIsAFish Thanks for the fave!
If you would draw any number of cards, you may instead put that many loyalty counters on Zitec, Inkblood Ritualist.
Here's my card:
I feel like this is way overcosted, since it also benefits the opponents. This will pretty much always deal 4 damage to your opponents and I think each player should have the option to choose the mana they are adding. I think it should also have players keep the mana until your next turn. I'd suggest this kind of mana cost and wording, or something close to this. Bumping the rarity to mythic should be considered too, since this kind of effect is pretty unique:
{3}{r}{r}
Starting with you, each player adds four mana of any one color of their choice, then Ritual of Blazes deals damage to each opponent equal to the amount of unspent mana they have. Until your next turn, players don't lose this mana as steps and phases end.
Also, "to your mana pool" clause is no longer used by WotC.
Here's my cards. Post a constructive comment on both/either of them, then you may favorite the ones you like before posting up to two cards of your own:
@shadow123 , Memory Dismissal is cool but definitely an idea I've seen a few times before and done slightly better, such as on a kicker card or an entwine card. Balanced, but the black cost could be an Entwine and the base card could be at 3 mana.
@FourEyesIsAFish , the Partner commanders you posted were neat, but not particularly strong. Zitec's only payoff for skipping out on actual card advantage is gaining loyalty to give your spells cascade, which isn't strong enough to skip 4-5 draws just to get to, not to mention that Planeswalkers are high value targets in Commander and a 6 mana 4-loyalty planeswalker without protection is going to die. Inktrail is also overcosted even as a partner.
@ChoyBoi , I feel the idea of "Unspent Mana Hate" is a bad mechanic outside of being on a 1-off commander. It's hard to utilize properly, as it's not like someone is just going to have unspent mana at any time without immediately using it to cast a spell that they have priority for unless you significantly build around it using the one mana burn commander in existence. If you want to make hate for Floating Mana, do it like Yurlok, who can turn the effect into a signifcant benefit on his own and has the hate ability as a passive ability that doesn't do weird stuff with priority.
@TenebrisNemo , Feast or Famine seems flawed. Most people at WotC hate life-gain hate that both don't do it passively or don't have it tacked onto another effect, as none have been printed recently. Stuff like Atarka's Commands and Flames of the Blood Hand have another effect tacked on, Rain of Gore and Tainted Remedy do it passively, eta. Doubling your life gain is also generally a terrible effect - life gain decks want to gain small amounts of life constantly and use it to trigger effects or combo infinitely with their life gain, not stockpile up lots of life with big life swings.
Inflection - If {B} was spent to cast this spell, change its text by replacing "gains" with "loses" and removing "twice."
- I'm not certain how I feel about the card at uncommon. It's a niche little semi-tech card that I wouldn't wouldn't necessarily feel gleeful about opening at rare, but neither of the effects are traditionally uncommon and I wouldn't be happy about it taking up an uncommon slot for draft either. Possibly a rarity bump would be the right way to go.
- Possibly the name's a bit too close to Feast or Famine, with a difference of one minor letter. Not hugely important, just saying.
- While I don't necessarily agree with everything Potato13 said, they're pretty valid on the whole. Neither side of the card actually does all that much in a lot of situations. I'd probably really, really much rather have a Rain of Gore / Tainted Remedy for one side or one of the life-doublers for the other, and I highly doubt any decks will ever have any degree of interest in using both. All this seems to bring to the table is a way to very rarely instant-speed mess with Tendrils storm, and even then it's possible that you'll end up dead / tie in such a way that other counters are just better. In fact, this sheer degree of niche-ness is another reason for that whole rarity-bump thing.
And now some brief stuff about Dog Mox. Since it's a silver-border card, I'll obviously evaluate with that in mind:
- One of the things I see a lot of people slip up on is that silver-border shouldn't necessarily equate to "broken as heck / utterly worthless". They might be silly, but real ones technically still tend to end up in a playable set. I suspect that this falls a little too far into the "worthless" category for its own good. While Dog is a vaguely supported tribe, I certainly wouldn't call it the best thing in the world, and a silver-bordered mythic should perhaps be a good experience rather than "Wow! This is worthless." I'm aware it's bad reasoning to apply to all cards (Mox Amber, for example. Garbage in limited, but at least you get a nice feeling of "this could be cool elsewhere"). Perhaps this takes the niche-ness a bit too far, though. I reckon that it'd benefit from a slightly less tight clause on the underdog effect.
Sorry about the vaguely-rant nature of that. I'm vaguely trying to get a point that's really hard for me to articulate across, so that's the best I can do. Hopefully you have some degree of understanding of what I mean.
- For the sake of being an aesthetics pest, the part of the art taken from ethamari is way more reminiscent of an Anubis-black jackal than a dog, and MTG defines Jackals as their own tribe separate from Dogs. Hardly a significant issue, but I may as well write it.
Hopefully at least some tiny amount of all of that was actually useful. I get the sense that a lot of it might just be worthless rambling.
Next, this. It's an idea that I had a really long time ago that got scrapped because of the character limit, but I've now reworked in a form that doesn't hit that particular issue. Give it a favorite and / or a constructive comment before posting up to two cards of your own.
Taranis is more interesting, and the effect is quite fun, but "Wheels" in magic normall refer to discarding our hand and drawing a new one. Also, why does it have the enchantment creature frame?
Next up:
https://www.mtgcardsmith.com/view/striped-herbivore
My card:
There are two things you can do -
- Lower rarity to common.
- Change the cost to adventure cost to 1B.
I like the idea though.
______________________________________________________________________________________
My cards:
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/volcinerate
and,
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/fighting-the-mintmonster
Here’s my card, Mind Stab. I’ve had the concept in my mind for a while. And before you say the player basically only discards one card, yes, but it’s basically Maddening Cacophony with some black mixed in, since eight cards end up in their graveyard, with at least one from their hand. And I was thinking it’d see a lot of play in Rogues, since it’s very useful in both the blue/black mill archetype and it immediately puts eight cards in the opponent’s graveyard. Tell me what you think!
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/mind-stab-2?list=user
Here's my card. Post a constructive comment on it, then if you like it, you may favorite it before posting up to two cards of your own:
- I'm not totally sure how I feel about the balance. As a land-becomes-creature, this is comparable to things like Stalking Stones (also becomes a 3/3 permanently for a six mana input). This asks colors to become a creature and enters tapped, sure, but it also gives you two colors and has a (potentially extremely impactful) extra ability. Also, land types mean it can be grabbed by an assortment of things, including fetchlands.
- I'm guessing that it's been given the "Island Swamp" subtypes because there wasn't space to fit "{T}: Add {U} or {B}." on the card. I've got my suspicions that those land types and the associated fetchland stuff are one of the main aspects at the heart of my concerns. There isn't any way to magic more space into existence, of course, and none of the clauses can really be cut, so it probably isn't the way to solve it.
- The fact that when this works best (when your opponent has equipments) is also a point where it becomes even better since you can afford to tap it to help pay for its own effect during combat or whatever and still get the impact of snatching a Batterskull or Sword or something.
- I'm kind of getting the sense that my overall grievances might be best solved by a small increase in the monstrosity cost. Probably just by {1} or something. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that I'm being overly paranoid and overvaluing the chance of encountering those niche situations where it does stuff, but I get the sense that it's still a very solid land pretty much all of the time even without this whole equipment thing going on. You don't want it against aggro because it etbs tapped, I guess, but it's a fetchable piece of fixing for two colors that can be converted into an on-board tool creature, sometimes inflict vast tempo swings on certain decks, and even without that has the super-niche ability to pick up your own equipment cards in a pinch.
- Another point that just occurred to me is "Why's the card black"? Is it just to ensure mono-blue can't run it? Nothing about the card is black except for a few scraps of flavor.
Sorry that I haven't really really provided any really definitive answers or suggestions. I fear I'm not in the best mindset for feedbacking right now. Hopefully somebody else's thoughts are at least slightly valuable, I guess, and maybe I'll have some better ones to return with later.
Experimental stupidity, mostly just done so I can say "I made this really stupid thing once", and also to test a few mechanical ideas and how they appear in CS. They're intended for Planechase, and there are various little note-y disclaimers written in the card comments. This'll probably make them major annoyances to evaluate, so I'm really, really sorry in advance to whoever has to suffer them. Give one or both a favorite and / or a comment before posting up to two cards of your own.
@Temurzoa commented there.
Here’s a couple Silmarillion inspired partner cards, I’m not sure about the power level on these two if they’re too aggressively costed.
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/luthien-intrepid-princess?list=user
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/beren-undaunted-hero?list=user
Here’s the Mystery Booster card it was featured on:
https://scryfall.com/card/cmb1/34/blood-poet
Here's a card:
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/rayniece-spirit-of-betrayal
I would also drop the deathtouch, since if you attack with this, you either get a free hit in or destroy two creatures. Other than that, cool card!
My card, inspired by the Slizt clan of viashino, Rubblebelt Strategist.
Here is another I did. Giving an interesting incentive for opponents to attack you.
Here's a line of non-blue "counterspells" I made. Note that the intent is to transform the opponent's spell into another spell, so the opponent still casts a spell, just not the one they wanted. Also, the white one should say "You gain 6 life" instead of "target opponent gains 6 life". Finally, I made Grim Refute first, so technically the wording of the flavor text on all the others is wrong.
Sorry if I posted too many cards. It just made more sense to me to show all four than just one.