Hey guys, I'm back. I will give feedback on Kuk Kuk, the Treasure Hunter from FireOfGolden and then post my own cards.
First of all the text needs to be cleaned up but I get what its doing. The biggest thing that strikes me about this card is its colorlessness. Why is it colorless? This seems like a textbook red card (cares about creating Treasure artifact tokens and deals damage which are both primary in red).
I think that this card is a bit too good. I don't think it needs to be a 4/2 with the immense amount of damage it can already deal. I think you could make it a 2/2. The abilities are interesting, I like how the treasure damage ability makes them not be able to produce mana, but could be too powerful with the high amount of treasure production available. It wouldn't hurt to switch the first ability to only deal 1 damage instead of the amount of treasures that entered (think about the potential with Xorn and/or Anicent Copper Dragon).
Other than these small changes the thing that confuses me the most is it being colorless. It definitely should cost 2RR.
Here are my cards: The first one is a joke. https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/hasbropotence?list=user This second one I designed based on Rite of the Raging Storm and Engineered Plauge. I thought it would be cool to see a creature that is very suspectible to cards that care about ceritan subsets of things (like creature type, name, and color) but is above curve due to those weaknesses.
You'd word it, "Choose a color. Choose another color for each time this spell was kicked." and "Destroy all creatures of the chosen colors." You're really close, and I like this idea of a board wipe, It's pretty well costed for what you're trying to do and would almost certainly struggle to work outside of mono-white, which I hope is intentional. If I'm wanting to be really nit-picky, most, if not all, legendary spells include the reminder text that they can only be cast if you control a legendary permanent, but you know what your card does, and that's what matters.
I was thinking of making a token/aristocrats commander, and here's what I came up with:
I'm not going to lie, the Mark Rosewater joke is floating above my head so I have no relevant feedback on that card in regards to that. However after some extensive mulling, I realised that if we take this card at face value, it can easily be ran in aggro decks that only require a few pieces to work providing a consistent tutor for aggro win cons. I think that this card would be a good rakdos aggro staple and would probably get banned in most formats like dark ritual.
Morphic Mauler
I know that morphic mauler is supposed to be a serious card, but if feels more like an Un card to me. I feel like you can mess around with alot of technicalities if you play this card particularly with that first ability. Take Nicol bolas, dragon god for instance. When it activates it's ability, you can just trigger the first ability and make this card's name "a legendary creature" and by technicallity you would subvert Bolas's trigger making it feel like it would fit well in an unfun set. Mechanically you can get away with alot of color shennenigans as well while running this card. Additionally, the last ability being triggered by your opponent is only to your detriment. I guess my biggest qualm with this card if I had to choose one out of a few, is the color breaking. Mono green shapeshifters rarely are able to change so many qualities about themselves, this card would work better as a full colorless card or a simic card if you want to maintain flavor. I would give it a smaller body, because a 4/4 (eight value) for three is broken. Isamaru Hound Of Konda is a vanila 2/2 (four value) for one and it was made a legendary rare by those merits alone.
Tldr: Color balance to (colorless/simic), Give smaller body or raise cost, consider treating this as an unfun instead of realistic card.
The first thing that caught my attention is the fact that populate tends to be a selesnya mechanic, so this card being mardu is kind of a color pie bend. I think you should consider changing this card to abzan since it wount affect the ruthless warlord feel im assuming you are going for. That would also justify you having the sacrifice populate ability in black which wouldn't need to be changed after the minor tweak. I like the idea of this Warlord doing whatever it takes to win, they essentially turn soldiers with emotions into their pawns and sacrifice them to reach their goal. This card would be a good sacrifice commander which is why im assuming you wanted red to be there so a player can gain access to cards like mayhem devil, and havoc jester, but it would work just as fine if not better with green instead of red and would allow you to go wider with tokens like scute swarm, and go big with cards like sandwurm convergence, all the while using cards like blood artist and bastion to get those death triggers in.
It's strange that a card that appears to be modeled after Necropotence has a Doomsday style ETB. I can't really think of anything to mention here.
Morphic Mauler
While green has plenty of this kind of creature, I'm not sure "vulnerability to narrow effects" is enough of a drawback to justify it, since your opponents aren't likely to be playing said narrow effects unless it's incidentally already on the card (e.g. protection from X) or not particularly narrow (e.g. Power Word Kill).
I don't see any influence from Rite of the Raging Storm or Engineered Plague in this card. It's not a 5/1, doesn't move around between players, can still attack you if someone steals it, and isn't particularly vulnerable to narrow effects that aren't kill spells.
Populate is a Naya ability (extended from Selesnya when Ghired came out), so it's very strange that the associated ability on Domrath is black. Given how the triggered ability works, consider swapping the red in the mana cost and the black in the activated ability (i.e. switch the cost to 2WB and the ability to 2R). This way, the triggered ability comes across as retribution for your dead creature tokens, and the activated ability represents recklessly throwing away your weaker pawns to duplicate a bigger threat.
I'd have to see this in play to make a better judgement, but sacrificing two creatures to populate seems horrible on paper (especially because making it a tap ability implies the player shouldn't be able to do it more than once a turn). Wizards decided the mechanic needed so much help that they gave us cards like Song of the Worldsoul, so why would I want to sacrifice two creatures to do it? (Especially when, for example, you could play the token generators that'd presumably serve as an engine for Domrath with cards like Cathar's Crusade instead.)
Zilgrar doesn't read as a midrange card. It comes out way too late to stall aggro decks, and it doesn't do anything to help you close out the game against control decks. If anything, it seems like it wants to be a control finisher in the same vein as Toxrill, but it doesn't really do anything for control decks either. Thus I neither have any idea as to where you would play this nor understand why you'd play it. (Maybe some sort of reanimator control?)
Why does it need the strange downside of having last strike if it stops flying? It doesn't stop flying by itself, so why spend card space accounting for such a niche situation? (I.e. why does this card need an ability that is clearly just flavor text written into its actual mechanics (using silver-border mechanics at that) solely to its detriment?)
Rais, The Grand Design
Why does Rais have and give all your flying insects deathtouch? There's no need to "spread venom" when said venom kills instantly. It would make more sense to give Rais and your flying insects wither to that end.
Suppose you're building a deck around Rais. Why would you want to "spread venom" when you have access to cards like Simic Ascendancy? Even without an alternate win condition, it's far easier to toss +1/+1 counters around than mess with -1/-1 counters in these colors.
"Flying insect" tribal is exceedingly narrow (and not exactly strong), and Rais doesn't appear to be strong enough or, more importantly, unique enough to justify building. Proliferate already has a variety of powerful universal tools in these colors (e.g. Evolution Sage & Flux Channeler), and there's a million ways to ramp better (e.g. Cryptolith Rite), so what makes Rais worth it?
I'd appreciate feedback on these cards:
(These are meant to be alternate commanders for the same deck, hence the C11 set symbol on all of them.)
Last strike: I do agree with the last strike being kind of niche, but the idea behind it was that since Zilgar is a snail and it slows people down using its slime that when it stopped flying it would move at a snails pace.
Control?: I do agree that Zilgar is a control creature im just bad at placing creatures into stratergy.
Toxril: This card was actually heavily inspired by Toxril, but I figured that I didn't want to make a carbon copy of the card so I ended up making an attempt, from the looks of your critiques (TvT) to make it more versatile in the sense that now it can be some sort of slug / snail commander. I actually considered adding blue so it can resinate with cards like sludge monster but that felt too forced imo so I discarded that idea.
- Rais Critiques.
Why deathtouch: The reason I chose deathtouch over -1/-1 counters is because Rais doesn't give them the ability to produce venom, Rais covers them with poisonous polen that the insects have presumably developed a tolerance to spreading. So by tapping for mana, they are spreading the polen, and by dealing damage to you, they are essentially covering you with leathal polen. Kind of like a fentynal overdose, but with toxins. Why does Rais spread poison like polen? Simic stuff I guess. I mean why does a shark crab exist in Ravnica?
Why Rais over other proliferate commanders: Well Rais isn't really quite a proliferate commander, and I have to contest you on the fact that it is a weak insect commander. The ideal way to run Rais, The Grand Design would not be by using cards like Flux Channeler, Evolution Sage, or Simic Ascendancy. It would be by using cards like Skatewing Spy, Wingspan Mentor, Renata / Leyline Abundance and perhaps Ozolith, together with cards like Iridescent Hornbettle, Scute Mob, and/or Scute Swarm and other similar insect cards to overwhelm your opponents with both mana and creatures. If you wanna get crazy you can add some combat damage triggers, mana buffers like Kinnan or finish with cards like Fynn,The Fangbearer for even more results. It is more like a junk insect simic deck commander if you think about it.
Regardless, thank you for your feedback.
- Now Some Feedback on your cards.
General Renee: Lets start with General Renee first since it was the one that caught my attention first. I like how it focuses on creatures in the 3 mana value, toughness, power area (defined as the 3-credit for the sake of my typing laziness), it offers some ressurection ability for Boros without requiring black or letting it bleed in to blacks territory by appling the 3-credit restriction on the returns like most white return spells tend to do. My problem is, atleast to me, the highlight of this commander seems to be the ressurection and not the emblem effect because Boros tends to support aggro stratergies. The emblem effect essentially makes the second ability kind of useless since creatures with a mana value of three or less are made harder to kill meaning most of the time you won't need the second ability unless you are going against mill or discard players since most removal will tend to be targeted at it to prevent the second ability from being used. You might have been trying to avoid this since it kinda seems cliche for all Boros commanders to do this, but I would suggest making the card's emblem effect a +2/+0 to all creatures with 3 cms or 3-credit if you wanna make it wider range instead of the +0/+2 to toughness on it. It is still usefull as a commander as is, but the two abilities conflict with each other, lowering its power in a wierd sense if you get what I mean.
Geraint & Alexander: As for Geraint and Alexander, I think they make the perfect duo, but I believe that despite Alexander having first strike, It should actually cost {1}{R}{R}. Alexander seems like an aggro commander to me so by making it 5 cmc you are massively dampening it's power as a pose to balancing it. Believe it or not, "+1/+0 until end of turn" is not a significant ability unless you are running alot of small creatures, and when you are doing that, you usually want to finish the battle quick before your opponents build defenses. Conversely you can just make it "+1/+0, and haste until end of turn" and just keep it at 5 cmc. I just think that it is weak even when being ran alongside Geraint. Geraint is ok though.
Yes i realized that you would be stuck in a clue storm thanks to @Shelko so for the sake of reviewing assume that it says "Whenever a player would draw a card exept from a clue, they investigate instead."
Two errors darn, the card is supposed to be a 4/4 guys.
This seems like a mono-colored take on The Locust God. My first thought is that replacing every card draw with Clue generation could hobble a lot of blue decks. While being able to sit on a card draw until a later point can be helpful, for decks that rely on lots of card draw, you've just made that card draw cost extra every time.
Of course, since the ability effects your opponent as well as yourself, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that having this guy in your deck requires you to build around it. You can't just toss it in to any old blue deck. I could see sideboarding it as a response to those types of decks, but only if my own deck wouldn't be too hurt by its presence.
As a commander, it's not bad on its own. But again, it reminds me of The Locust God, which I'd still consider a stronger commander. In most cases, I think I'd rather play a Locust God deck over this guy.
Also, I've looked at this card multiple times, and wrote all of this up, and only just noticed that this guy doesn't have a power or toughness.
On a purely positive note, I really like the art on this guy. Excellent choice.
re:Nivel, The Final Itteration
Okay, lets get the wording notes out of the way first: Iteration only has one "t" in it, and I'm gonna assume that the insect horror token is a creature token.
Based on the wording of its primary ability, you would only gain control of the creature if you first sacrifice your own. Now, it's possible to have a creature deal noncombat damage to another creature, but that's generally more of a red/green thing than a blue/black, so your main option is gonna be to deal combat damage. So, lets say you've summoned and attacked with one of Nivel's insect horrors. Unless a creature involved has first, double-, or last strike, combat damage is going to be assigned to both creatures simultaneously. So unless you're blocked by a creature with 0 power, your insect will die before you can sacrifice it. And if you use an insect strong enough to survive combat, you're pretty likely to kill the blocking creature before you can control it. The only way I could see this working is if you loaded your deck with insects of higher toughness than power, and I don't know how many of those there are.
As is, this could maybe be a very niche commander, especially if it were in a set with lots of tough insects. I'd either change its main ability to not rely on sacrificing your insect, or at least change its activated ability to create 1/2 creature tokens.
Now as for my own cards, a while back I made a 10-card cycle of 4/5-color creatures. I was still new at this, and some of them didn't turn out great. This one was the best of the lot, in my opinion (and I don't just say that because it got the most favorites). I'd love to hear people's thoughts on it.
@Korora12 Cursebourne Soul is the strangest of your cycle to me.
While the other nine generally have main effects that fit very well with the group their mana cost is named after, Cursebourne Soul fits very poorly in a Grixis strategy, which revolves around creatures going in a out of your graveyard. That's not to say it's a bad card (it's almost a strictly better Grim Guardian), it's just odd to me that this one isn't very Grixis, and it's the only one that feels out of place in this fashion.
The other nine are perfectly functional by themselves with regards to their kicker abilities, while this one requires an odd stratagem or lots of spare mana to make the most of. On the other hand, Cursebourne Soul has one of the strongest non-kicker abilities of the cycle.
The green kicker effect is exceedingly niche, since becoming an enchantment after entering means it doesn't trigger Constellation abilities and such, including its own ability. (This is because 'when' indicates an ETB trigger, where you'd need an 'as' replacement ability to make this function the way I assume it's intended to.) On the other hand, paying WUBR for a momentary, minor, and narrow cost reduction on a tiny body is likely too steep to be worth it. Perhaps you could consider having the kicker abilities return an enchantment card from your graveyard to your hand and/or the battlefield, since that makes sense for green and white while not being in grixis colors.
Overall, I think the base card is strong, but the kicker abilities are very weird and likely to go unused in most circumstances.
I'd appreciate feedback on these two:
(This is a God + Demigod pair made for a Mystery Box challenge.)
I'd also appreciate feedback on the trio from my previous post. (I'm more concerned with these two since they play with ideas I want to explore more in the near future, but I'll probably formally repost the previous trio after this.)
While I think interacting with the bottom of your library is a really neat and interesting mechanic that is yet underexploited in the game except for a few pretty ''bad'' cards (the only ones I can think about without making further research are Grenzo, the recent Epitaph Gollem and Cellar Door), in my honest opinion Xerxes doesn't bring much to the table to work with. That may be that I don't fully see the scope of potential that would result from implementing such a mechanic in the game, but I would have to admit I feel that Xerxes, even though it got a pretty good set of statistics, menace and a nice recursion effect that's typical to the God creatures, would be underwhelming to play with and/or to build a deck (Commander or not) around.
The main reason why I feel this way is that it inherently shares the same ''problem'' the other cards interacting with the bottom of your library have, which is that it doesn't feel very rewarding on its own since it doesn't change much from simply interacting with the top of your library... except that in most situations, I'd even think it's just worse than that other end. If we take in consideration it cares about drawing cards, it's much more difficult to set-up a good draw from the bottom of your library than from the top with most cards in the game being set-up tools thought for use on the top of your library. For explaining myself about this, I'd like to adress that there are plenty of cards that interact with the top of your library and so it's much easier to manipulate. Whereas the bottom of your library is much more niche object you'll be able to interact with. Of course, both have kind of the same treatement with the cards that use scry f.e. (that may be the more common set-up card draw toolkit), but scry is better for the top of your library because you can remove cards from the top using it. There are also not much way to know commonly what's on the bottom of your library (unless you use scry to put cards on the bottom in some reversed fashion). But even though a player would run a lot of scry cards and Xerxes, that would just make Xerxes quite weird because they can't play around it until they reach a pretty advanced step in the game considering its mana cost, so they have to be much more careful with their scry cards since once Xerxes would be on the battlefield, they won't have their set-up on top of their library accessible anymore. I guess it makes sense on that same argument to present the counterpoint that would be to say that in that particular situation, playing Xerxes also grants you access to the cards you've had to put away during the early game and then you can use them for your late game. It's a sounding argument I think, but even then, I think the fact that Xerxes is locking you into the opposite direction from what you'll have tried to set-up is really difficult to follow, and the cards you've put on top also become inaccessible, so I don't really see that upside being much impactful.
I didn't consider much all the cards that have the typical effect that is ''look at X card, do something with one, then put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order,'' because I'd consider it on the same line as scry, although it may also be quite valuable for controlling the bottom of your library. The problem with those effects is that you have to put all the cards except the ones concerned by the spell/ability on the bottom of your library, so you'll probably end up putting there cards you wouldn't much want. And contrarywise to the top of your library, you aren't able to remove those cards you don't want from the bottom of your library using scry, they are just pretty much there forever until you draw them, exile them or shuffle.
With all this, what I'd personally suggest just to make it a bit more flexible would concern to add the possibility to choose to draw from the bottom or not with Xerxes' second ability. That way, it would really open up a lot of potential with scry cards (which as far as I can think of is probably its main archetype and strategy goal). It's only a little suggestion though, and I think Xerxes remain a really interesting card as it stands. It's just that in my opinion, interacting with the bottom card atm with the current cards printed in the game just isn't valuable enough for me to think it would be much playable.
Something like this: ''If you would draw a card, you may instead put the bottom card of your library into your hand.''
K'zen, Eternal Archivist
I won't compare much K'zen with Xerxes or look at them with having the other in mind, but as I think they are probably thought to be designed for the same archetype I'll just say a word about what it inspires me concerning your artworks choices I think are perfectly on point and work really well togheter as they are both really sober and clean but still have that kind of eerie, mysterious, aspect and atmosphere I feel like it's floating around them, both characters having oblong forms and having hidden faces, which makes us wonder about what would be their appearance if any, and both being displayed into some sort of blank sky (well, there's actually a cloud on K'zen's artwork) or space that highlights them and adds yet another dimension to that atmosphere. Those artworks fits very well together and compliment nicely this atypical mechanic you've come with that itself is a very unique yet odd take on the very simple and fundamental aspect of the game that is drawing cards.
Well, now about the card itself. First things first, I'm not really totally sold on K'zen hybrid's mana cost. That's mostly because of it's second ability. Maybe it's because I can't think properly about a blue card doing that, but it seems like it's more definitly a black theme to have the possibility to target any card in another player's graveyard. There are blue cards targeting instants such as Flawless Forgery to do something else that's definitly blue-themed with them, but having the possibility to mess up with an opponent's graveyard is more of a black thing to me. That being said, it may be because I'm not knowing or thinking about all cards that could do so, or because I'm being too conservative on the color pie there, given that there are also some artifacts doing that kind of effects.
About the abilities now, I must say I love K'zen's first ability. I find it really nice that it allows each player to try saving something from its milling effect with the possible scry effect. However, I don't really see why it's worded with a ''may'' clause since I can't think about anyone not wanting to scry. That may be a preference choice though, I don't know, it's just that it seems a little weird to me but that's alright and it doesn't affect the card's effects by any means. K'zen's second ability is a much more interesting version of Epitaph Golem's ability. It costs the usually the same except from one hybrid colored mana and it can target cards in other players' graveyards, which brings up a bunch of interactions that are always welcome. While I think the mana cost for activating this ability could actually be seen as fine and fair, I wouldn't mind it costing {u/b}{u/b} since Epitaph Golem would really suffer from the comparison (mostly because it costs more, doesn't have another ability on board, and have less utility overall than K'zen), and given that they are so few cards interacting with the bottom of your library, you'll probably want to include some Epitaph Golem in that archetype as well, so in the end having those feeling like poor versions of K'zen may be unpleasant for the player's game experience.
(Had to cut the message in two halves as I wasn't careful enough while writing it and ended up needing to make some syntaxical edit, sorry.)
All in all, I think both those cards serve a really unique archetype and they are both really nicely designed and well thought! There are some things I mentionned I think may be making them less interesting but that's mainly due to the lack of cards interacting with their very particular archetype in the game and it's not an issue from the cards in themselves. Very cool!
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As for myself, I'd like some feedback on this card. A brieve note about this: I had this idea mainly because there are no way to counterplay Treasure tokens in the game. Also, ''copying an object'' means ''anything being copied'' (copying a spell/an ability/a permanent etb as a copy of something/etc.), and is taken from the rule text about copy effects.
With Xeres, I wanted to make a relatively generic legend while moving in a different direction from my previous Kezzar, Memory Dredger, who allows for more play with both ends of your library. I mainly wanted to acocunt for a couple things: playing from the bottom of your library both works very nicely with effects like Tel-Jilad Stylus and The Cauldron of Eternity, and also is very difficult to disrupt via mill and such. This, along with the fact that you're no longer drawing cards, opens up the ability to play a stax-adjacent deck using effects like Lantern of Insight and Breathstealer's Crypt. (I just realized that Teferi's Puzzle Box can be very effective to this end.) Xeres also has the side effect of avoiding the self-lock cards like Brainstorm and Scroll Rack are prone to without requiring shuffle effects. I do see how Xeres doesn't offer much to more common strategies though.
For K'zen, I admit I didn't have a justification for the hybrid costs in mind when making the card. It was mostly an aesthetic choice that I don't think is too much of a stretch, since blue has a variety of cards that shuffle one or more player's graveyards into their library, as well as colorless cards like Reito Lantern / Reito Sentinel existing. The 'may' in its triggered ability is to match the wording from Eager Construct (which perhaps is worded that way because WoTC didn't want to put 'scries 1' on a card for whatever reason). Epitaph Golem and friends being colorless and nonlegendary is also likely sufficient to justify K'zen having a slightly stronger effect.
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With regards to Evanescence of Greed, my main problem with it is how much life you're probably losing to answer tokens at instant speed (with the upside of also answering copies), especially since you're getting rid of all of them. If you used this to answer an army of Scute Swarms or Elf tokens for example, you'd probably lose an obscene amount of life. While I suppose it doesn't matter so long as you win in the end, I'd much rather have either an instant speed board wipe or a permanent that solves the problem more permanently. (For answering Treasures in particular, we have Yasharn, Angel of Jubilation, a handful of Null Rod / Collector Ouphe effects, and even Leyline of Singularity if you're feeling spicy.)
I do appreciate the additional ability to shut down copying for extra versatility (partially because I built a Miirym clone deck on Arena recently). It feels like a natural extension of cards like Legion's End, and has me wondering what other colors it'd be reasonable to put this sort of effect in.
Overall, while I like the effect, I really don't like paying life (especially not as much as it looks like you'd lose to this card when you really need it), so I'd like to see what others think of Evanescence of Greed.
@cadstar369 Thanks a lot for your explanations and for the feedback!
Now that I know more about your choices for Xerxes and K'zen, I remark that I probably was quite missing some important points on this analysis. I didn't thought about its interactions with such specific stax cards such as Breathstealer's Crypt or Chains of Mephistopheles but it seems indeed quite potent. With Teferi's Box you've also mentionned, it nullify the disadvantage of the card, which is surely a good thing. And you can probably do a lot more in that strategy using some wheel cards. It makes me think that it would somehow work as a different take on that kind of stax archetype you can play actually with the recent Eruth, Tormented Prophet in EDH (I've never seen that played, but I stumbled upon the card while looking for precedents caring about changing how card draw works and I think you can build something similar to Xerxes archetype using it (well, without caring about the bottom card of your library though)), which imo is really interesting and having acces to an additional color and not being limited in time to play your cards surely provides a lot more of options (you can't play neither the Crypt neither the Chains with Eruth, which is alone a big downside if you plan to go that route for your strategy). I think I misjudged the value of such a replacement effect. And for K'zen I have to admit I didn't consider that they could be precedent for the ''may scry'' clause and I should have had a look at it on gatherer before making that remark, my bad. I guess they worded it this way to avoid having to the word scry differently (since it would become ''scries''?) in order to keep things simple and homogeneous, but I'm not entirely sure about that.
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Concerning Evanescence of Greed I wanted to keep it at a somehow low cost but I was afraid it would do too much since it can in some situations give access to a defensive tool this color combination doesn't have against storm decks, f.e. And yeh, since it can solely win the game against some strategy, I thought adding a pretty hefty life cost to the card would be a way to balance it. I'll consider removing the life loss effect and increasing the mana cost. Also about the counterplay to Treasures, the idea was mainly to have something playable at instant speed that would work as a mass removal instead of running a typical stax piece to shut them down. Thanks again as it's very helpful!
Evanescence of Greed is actually interesting card.
But there is something confuses me; While it does apply toward permanents which tokens and copied were exiled. However, does this way applies the copied sorcery and instant while they are still on stack? Theoretically, it can be used against people who prefer to copy their spells a lot. I am looking at red and blue. Where the instant and sorcery would be copied a lot and they are about to be casted for free. Evanescence of Greed is casted and prevents player from copying any furthermore and each copied sorcery and instant becomes exiled before they can be even casted.
While I love the downside is where you must pay life for each token creature was exiled. I believe that it's best defense spell against the group of token creatures with crazy increased power/toughness from enchantment, any source, etc.
I am unfamiliar with "objects". What do you mean by objects? Are you preferring to spells or creatures?
It indeed works against anything that would be refered as a copy, as so it would aslo affect copies of spells that are on the stack. It won't affect copies of abilities that are on the stack though, since an ability can't be exiled, but it would prevent those to be activated in answer to it since it states that once it's on the stack, nothing can be copied anymore until it resolves. Yet, it can exile permanents that have become copies themselves of other permanents, such as Clone-likes f.e.
The objects are a pretty abstract term as it isn't actually used on any card in the game. It's what the copy effects refer to in the rules. I'll copy-paste it from MtgFandom there, but here's the link if you want to look at this more in details: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Copy
707. Copying Objects
707.1. Some objects become or turn another object into a “copy” of a spell, permanent, or card. Some effects create a token that’s a copy of another object. (Certain older cards were printed with the phrase “search for a copy.” This section doesn’t cover those cards, which have received new text in the Oracle card reference.)
707.2. When copying an object, the copy acquires the copiable values of the original object’s characteristics and, for an object on the stack, choices made when casting or activating it (mode, targets, the value of X, whether it was kicked, how it will affect multiple targets, and so on). The copiable values are the values derived from the text printed on the object (that text being name, mana cost, color indicator, card type, subtype, supertype, rules text, power, toughness, and/or loyalty), as modified by other copy effects, by its face-down status, and by “as . . . enters the battlefield” and “as . . . is turned face up” abilities that set power and toughness (and may also set additional characteristics). Other effects (including type-changing and text-changing effects), status, counters, and stickers are not copied.
As far as I understood the rules properly, which isn't a sure thing, it seems that whenever you copy a spell, a permanent or something else, it still is refered to as a copy in the game. So here's an exemple as I think it may be more clear this way: Player A casts Crackling Counterpart targeting their Savannah Lions (of course), they get a token that's a copy of Savannah Lions. Yet, that token is still refered to as a copy of Savannah Lions in the game. In answer, player B casts Evanescence of Greed once they get back the priority after Crackling Counterpart resolved and the token that's a copy of Savannah Lions has entered the battlefield, and it exiles the token because it's a copy. / It works the same with copies on the stack, hence why I had it say ''wherever they are'' so it adds extra utility to counter storm decks using Reverberate or tools like this. As you've noted it, it's quite oriented as a card to play against Izzet decks (that usually make a lot of Treasures and play a lot of Spellslinger/Storm archetypes). All in all, that's just to explain that objects refer to both types of copies, either are thy on the stack or on the battlefield.
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I'm very sorry but I don't have much time left and I cannot give you a proper feedback, so, to next the cardsmith passing by, there are both cards above to leave a comment and feedback for: Chaos and Mayhem Deserter!
With regards to Chaos, to put the mana ability in line with the current wording for mana abilities, you might want to write it as
{t}: Add {U/R}. ({U/R} represents purple mana.)
It's kinda janky, but it's kind of like how snow mana works and I can't think of a good symbol to repurpose for this. Also, for future reference, you can center text by copying & pasting a tab key indent from any word processor (e.g. Google Docs) into the card creator. It'll generally take a bunch of them, but it means you don't have to put the period on the side.
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As for Mayhem Deserter, do I correctly understand that the {U/R} symbol is meant to be interpreted as {UR/P}, which means you can cast Mayhem Deserter for 2UURR, 2URP, or 2PP? This idea for P = U+R is rather restrictive, since it disincentivizes any combination of purple with anything other than UR. Unless you intend to make a 'color' for each pair of colors? (That would be super messy in and of itself though for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which being that there's 10 such pairs.)
Purple weirdness aside, the actual ability is ambiguous. Does it replace only the first card you draw during your draw step, or can it replace any draw during your draw step? (The distinction is important because of cards like Yurlok of Scorch Thrash.) To disambiguate, consider this wording:
If you would draw your first card during your draw step, [you may] exile the top card of an opponent's library face down instead. You may look at and play that card for as long as it remains exiled, and you may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast it. If you exile a card this way, reveal the top card of your library. That opponent adds X mana in any combination of colors, where X is equal to the revealed card's mana value. Exile the revealed card. (This affects up to one draw. Removing the bracketed 'you may' makes it affect exactly one draw.)
OR
If you would draw a card during your draw step, [you may] exile the top card of an opponent's library face down instead. You may look at and play that card for as long as it remains exiled, and you may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast it. If you exile a card this way, reveal the top card of your library. That opponent adds X mana in any combination of colors, where X is equal to the revealed card's mana value. Exile the revealed card. (This affects any number of draws. Removing the bracketed 'you may' makes it affect every draw.)
Wording aside, I'm not sure I like this ability. This is mostly because it feels like an overbalanced version of similar effects like Thief of Sanity, Cunning Rhetoric, etc. Of course, it's fine if they don't/can't cast anything during your draw step, but overall I don't think getting your opponent's cards and the 4/4 body is worth the difficulty to cast, losing your own cards and giving them mana. It's probably fine to drop the clause that gives your opponent mana, since you're already losing your own card to get theirs.
P.S. – Just FYI, purple mana (as a sixth color instead of U+R) is a previously discarded concept; see this article stub and its references.
@cadstar369 It's been a while since I've given feedback on a card, so I'm gonna do my best.
Ancient Arcanist is a pretty interesting and flavorful card. I can definitely see this card being heavily played in Modern. It requires a balance between creatures and spells, so finding the right mixture can be a little tricky and will likely require some play and fine-tuning so that you can hit what you want when you want. With that said, top deck manipulation will most likely be included to get the right card, but once you have what you need this card becomes a powerhouse. Being able to essentially play an instant or sorcery from your graveyard with little to no downside is quite powerful. Comparing this to Snapcaster Mage, I feel it should definitely be Rare, as you not only don't have to pitch a card, but you get to keep the instant or sorcery afterwards. Although there a hoops you have to jump through to get Ancient Arcanist going, they don't seem to be too much of a problem.
So in conclusion, I feel Ancient Arcanist should be a Rare, but this is a well designed and interesting card nonetheless, and I would be happy to play with it.
@ShadowReign thanks for the feedback. With regards to Ancient Arcanist, comparing it to something like Snapcaster Mage makes me want to leave it at uncommon because it's significantly slower (both in mana cost and having to attack as opposed to an ETB), less flexible (Snapcaster has flash), and riskier (Ancient Arcanist has to attack and mill a creature). What do you think of Ancient Arcanist relative to something closer in function and usage like Archaeomancer?
As for Izu, I'm honestly not quite sure what to do with it. The implied mill strategy and the activated ability's skew toward high mana value cards seem at odds with each other (outside of cases like Lochmere Serpent). (I suppose you could run wheels, but Nekusar is already amazing for that.) It makes me wonder if Izu would be best in the 99 or being used to access extra colors (considering it's a high-cost, unprotected do-nothing whose strength is heavily reliant on the opposing deck(s), with more colors and less combo potential than something like Syr Konrad).
@cadstar369 When compared to Archaeomancer, I still feel Ancient Arcanist should be a Rare. Archaeomancer is an "enters the battlefield" effect with a mana value of 4. Ancient Arcanist is repeatable, mana value 3, and has a size buff. I know Archaeomancer can be repeatable, but not on it's own. I think if Ancient Arcanist were to be an Uncommon, it should be a 2/2 and lose prowess. But as of now, I still think it should be a Rare.
Izu is just a value card in the command zone (if it's your commander), he'll draw you some cards and drain some life, but he also comes with an ability that can help guide you to the end game. While I'm sure there are some powerful things you can do with him, he himself is not meant to be extremely powerful; just a neat card to build around or include in the 99 of your Nekusar deck.
@ShadowReign is the ability to potentially survive combat damage worth that much? Without prowess I can't see Ancient Arcanist as anything more than a virtually unplayable common. Why gamble on (or spend additional resources trying to guarantee) an attack that will virtually always get Ancient Arcanist killed when there's a variety of cheaper and/or less risky alternatives for recursion that don't make you wait a turn?
To go back to Archaeomancer, that card has the potential to loop easily with the spell it retrieves (and can be triggered at instant speed via a flicker effect), which makes it more valuable than Ancient Arcanist at a quicker pace with significantly less risk on two fronts, and yet Archaeomancer is a common. (For the sake of comparison, I find it fair to assume that both Archaeomancer's and Ancient Arcanist's recursion will be repeated, but don't think it's necessary to argue that Archaeomancer is more valuable, since Ancient Arcanist's success is indeterminate and could thus fail to return anything across any number of attacks.)
If one of the two consecutive gambles on Ancient Arcanist was removed or shifted more in the player's favor, I might agree that it could potentially be pushed up to rare, but with both it seems too inconsistent to be more than uncommon.
It has been a while since I have ventured yonder. I Sir Knight, Of Sparks, awaken this forum from its slumber with my dearly carping. But jokes aside, let has get started.
Remember side : I like this side alot, the effect is very simple but very worth it's rarity for a turn one can trip. You can run alot of shenenigans with this card at the start of battle by muling faulty hands but then returning a specific usefull card you liked from the muled hand right back to you. You can also weave this with various organizational effects to essentially rig the game by using search effects that alow for the organization of the bottom of your library. Conversely, while the mill is insurmounatable, you can still use it to get creatures into your graveyard for reanimation. I would say that the first portion is a 9.5/10 masterfully made card, because we can never trully design a 10/10 card.
Repeat side : I feel like this side needs a little more work. I have no problem with the cacoon framing of cheap conditional reanimation for dimir since black does reanimation shenenigans alot. What I wounder is, If you were to cast this spell at an end phase, does that mean the opponent takes another end phase, or you skip your turn. There is alot of other nuances like this doubling combat phases, potentially doubling draw phases, all which have pretty heavy implications when the color pie is broken. I would make this a sorcery in order to balance the aforementioned. The theory is that, if someone manages to cast this spell in instant speed, they earn it's bonuses. I don't think rasing the cost would be helpful to the structure of the card without overhauling it. I think the rarity can also be bumped to mythic and still be okay after.
Remember This is exceptionally good with the new mulligan rule of putting mulligan tax on the bottom of your library. This way, you can keep your game ender on the bottom, and then wait to cast this spell to get it back to hand. I like it.
Repeat I feel as though, instead of repeating a phase, it should instead untap all lands. Also, repeating the ending phase gets messy.
Here are a set of cards designed for commander. Thoughts and opinions?
I ask my dear friends, that you forgive the amount of cards I post because they are a part of a set.
Choose Mirans Or Phyrexians
If someone feels like reviewing all of them, more love to you, but I ask that you review the cards in atleast one of the two ways. A: Either choose (Miran or phyrexian) and review atleast two cards...please? maybe? but even one will be appreciated; or B: Review a single card and its miran or phyrexian counterparts. If you review all of them, I will feel like a millionare in Vegas.
A darn, someone posted between my review at no fault of their own. This is why I try to type in one chunk T_T. Well I did my review on top for the curious, I promise I am not a psycopath.
Given the existence of Doran, the Siege Tower, I don't see the point of this card. It costs more, has a smaller body, and doesn't mess with your opponents. Sure it gives you vigilance and lifelink, but you already have plenty of access to both in these colors.
In general, defender commanders would likely need to be in a new color combination and/or do something fairly interesting to compete with various Treefolk legends & Arcades, the Strategist.
Agent Kael
This card is a huge lightning rod for removal, and if it's your commander your opponents will likely remove any creature you try to land. Thus Agent Kael would likely be relegated to the same kind of finisher slot as Craterhoof and friends. Unlike many of those cards though, Agent Kael has to see you attack instead of being an ETB, making it significantly more vulnerable and less versatile.
Aleta, Immortal Sorceress
Why is this a 3/7? Doesn't feel like a mono-red creature at all, considering it doesn't gain power and/or lose toughness with any of its abilities.
Having Lightning Strike on a stick is crazy strong on a creature this difficult to remove. (Consider how potent this would be in a burn or control deck.)
Most similar cards either take way more mana to get going and/or have an additional cost, so perhaps consider lowering the damage to 2 and/or adding a drawback, plus something else to balance the 'immortality' effect. You might also consider changing her P/T or doing something to justify the exceedingly high toughness (e.g. adding a color).
Ancient Aether
I don't think there's much to say here aside from how annoying this card is. Perhaps it should cost 1 more since Spellshock exists, requires colored mana, and affects all spells. (Ancient Aether is colorless and focused, so you can put it in a deck that isn't affected [as much] by it.)
Adorable Monkey
The mill five feels like a lot for a 2-drop that replaces itself, especially in themes like exploit, reanimator, etc. Perhaps consider increasing the mana cost or reducing the mill.
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@Tonysparks with regards to Repeat, note that you can't duplicate draw steps (since that's part of the beginning phase). Duplicating someone's end phase would create an additional end step and cleanup step. As for the color pie, blue has a number of phase manipulating cards that represent time manipulation (including a combat reset or two), and black covers the resurrection effect. While the potential extra combat mode is theoretically an outlier, it generally won't do much unless all your creatures died in combat (in which case Repeat does exactly what it's supposed to do flavor-wise), and even then you'd still need haste to make it truly effective. This, combined with being 7 mana with quad colored pips should be more than sufficient restriction to keep it where it is (it's theoretically fairly unimpressive, since the main value comes from the phase duplication, which isn't particularly easy to take advantage of in unique ways).
MTG Cardsmith Community Forums
Comments
All feedback is good feedback. No wrong way to go about it.
First of all the text needs to be cleaned up but I get what its doing. The biggest thing that strikes me about this card is its colorlessness. Why is it colorless? This seems like a textbook red card (cares about creating Treasure artifact tokens and deals damage which are both primary in red).
I think that this card is a bit too good. I don't think it needs to be a 4/2 with the immense amount of damage it can already deal. I think you could make it a 2/2. The abilities are interesting, I like how the treasure damage ability makes them not be able to produce mana, but could be too powerful with the high amount of treasure production available. It wouldn't hurt to switch the first ability to only deal 1 damage instead of the amount of treasures that entered (think about the potential with Xorn and/or Anicent Copper Dragon).
Other than these small changes the thing that confuses me the most is it being colorless. It definitely should cost 2RR.
Here are my cards:
The first one is a joke.
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/hasbropotence?list=user
This second one I designed based on Rite of the Raging Storm and Engineered Plauge. I thought it would be cool to see a creature that is very suspectible to cards that care about ceritan subsets of things (like creature type, name, and color) but is above curve due to those weaknesses.
You'd word it, "Choose a color. Choose another color for each time this spell was kicked." and "Destroy all creatures of the chosen colors." You're really close, and I like this idea of a board wipe, It's pretty well costed for what you're trying to do and would almost certainly struggle to work outside of mono-white, which I hope is intentional. If I'm wanting to be really nit-picky, most, if not all, legendary spells include the reminder text that they can only be cast if you control a legendary permanent, but you know what your card does, and that's what matters.
I was thinking of making a token/aristocrats commander, and here's what I came up with:
Hasbropotence
I'm not going to lie, the Mark Rosewater joke is floating above my head so I have no relevant feedback on that card in regards to that. However after some extensive mulling, I realised that if we take this card at face value, it can easily be ran in aggro decks that only require a few pieces to work providing a consistent tutor for aggro win cons. I think that this card would be a good rakdos aggro staple and would probably get banned in most formats like dark ritual.
Morphic Mauler
I know that morphic mauler is supposed to be a serious card, but if feels more like an Un card to me. I feel like you can mess around with alot of technicalities if you play this card particularly with that first ability. Take Nicol bolas, dragon god for instance. When it activates it's ability, you can just trigger the first ability and make this card's name "a legendary creature" and by technicallity you would subvert Bolas's trigger making it feel like it would fit well in an unfun set. Mechanically you can get away with alot of color shennenigans as well while running this card. Additionally, the last ability being triggered by your opponent is only to your detriment. I guess my biggest qualm with this card if I had to choose one out of a few, is the color breaking. Mono green shapeshifters rarely are able to change so many qualities about themselves, this card would work better as a full colorless card or a simic card if you want to maintain flavor. I would give it a smaller body, because a 4/4 (eight value) for three is broken. Isamaru Hound Of Konda is a vanila 2/2 (four value) for one and it was made a legendary rare by those merits alone.
Tldr: Color balance to (colorless/simic), Give smaller body or raise cost, consider treating this as an unfun instead of realistic card.
@StuffnSuch
Domrath Ruthless Warlord
The first thing that caught my attention is the fact that populate tends to be a selesnya mechanic, so this card being mardu is kind of a color pie bend. I think you should consider changing this card to abzan since it wount affect the ruthless warlord feel im assuming you are going for. That would also justify you having the sacrifice populate ability in black which wouldn't need to be changed after the minor tweak. I like the idea of this Warlord doing whatever it takes to win, they essentially turn soldiers with emotions into their pawns and sacrifice them to reach their goal. This card would be a good sacrifice commander which is why im assuming you wanted red to be there so a player can gain access to cards like mayhem devil, and havoc jester, but it would work just as fine if not better with green instead of red and would allow you to go wider with tokens like scute swarm, and go big with cards like sandwurm convergence, all the while using cards like blood artist and bastion to get those death triggers in.
The cards I would like Reviewed are
Zilgar, The Slugborn
(Abzan Midrange)
Rais (Rayas), The Grand Design
(Simic Ramp)
Hasbropotence
- It's strange that a card that appears to be modeled after Necropotence has a Doomsday style ETB. I can't really think of anything to mention here.
Morphic Mauler- While green has plenty of this kind of creature, I'm not sure "vulnerability to narrow effects" is enough of a drawback to justify it, since your opponents aren't likely to be playing said narrow effects unless it's incidentally already on the card (e.g. protection from X) or not particularly narrow (e.g. Power Word Kill).
- I don't see any influence from Rite of the Raging Storm or Engineered Plague in this card. It's not a 5/1, doesn't move around between players, can still attack you if someone steals it, and isn't particularly vulnerable to narrow effects that aren't kill spells.
@StuffnSuch- Populate is a Naya ability (extended from Selesnya when Ghired came out), so it's very strange that the associated ability on Domrath is black. Given how the triggered ability works, consider swapping the red in the mana cost and the black in the activated ability (i.e. switch the cost to 2WB and the ability to 2R). This way, the triggered ability comes across as retribution for your dead creature tokens, and the activated ability represents recklessly throwing away your weaker pawns to duplicate a bigger threat.
- I'd have to see this in play to make a better judgement, but sacrificing two creatures to populate seems horrible on paper (especially because making it a tap ability implies the player shouldn't be able to do it more than once a turn). Wizards decided the mechanic needed so much help that they gave us cards like Song of the Worldsoul, so why would I want to sacrifice two creatures to do it? (Especially when, for example, you could play the token generators that'd presumably serve as an engine for Domrath with cards like Cathar's Crusade instead.)
@TonysparksZilgrar, The Slugborn
- Zilgrar doesn't read as a midrange card. It comes out way too late to stall aggro decks, and it doesn't do anything to help you close out the game against control decks. If anything, it seems like it wants to be a control finisher in the same vein as Toxrill, but it doesn't really do anything for control decks either. Thus I neither have any idea as to where you would play this nor understand why you'd play it. (Maybe some sort of reanimator control?)
- Why does it need the strange downside of having last strike if it stops flying? It doesn't stop flying by itself, so why spend card space accounting for such a niche situation? (I.e. why does this card need an ability that is clearly just flavor text written into its actual mechanics (using silver-border mechanics at that) solely to its detriment?)
Rais, The Grand DesignI'd appreciate feedback on these cards:
(These are meant to be alternate commanders for the same deck, hence the C11 set symbol on all of them.)
- Adressing a few of your points.
Last strike: I do agree with the last strike being kind of niche, but the idea behind it was that since Zilgar is a snail and it slows people down using its slime that when it stopped flying it would move at a snails pace.
Control?: I do agree that Zilgar is a control creature im just bad at placing creatures into stratergy.
Toxril: This card was actually heavily inspired by Toxril, but I figured that I didn't want to make a carbon copy of the card so I ended up making an attempt, from the looks of your critiques (TvT) to make it more versatile in the sense that now it can be some sort of slug / snail commander. I actually considered adding blue so it can resinate with cards like sludge monster but that felt too forced imo so I discarded that idea.
- Rais Critiques.
Why deathtouch: The reason I chose deathtouch over -1/-1 counters is because Rais doesn't give them the ability to produce venom, Rais covers them with poisonous polen that the insects have presumably developed a tolerance to spreading. So by tapping for mana, they are spreading the polen, and by dealing damage to you, they are essentially covering you with leathal polen. Kind of like a fentynal overdose, but with toxins. Why does Rais spread poison like polen? Simic stuff I guess. I mean why does a shark crab exist in Ravnica?
Why Rais over other proliferate commanders: Well Rais isn't really quite a proliferate commander, and I have to contest you on the fact that it is a weak insect commander. The ideal way to run Rais, The Grand Design would not be by using cards like Flux Channeler, Evolution Sage, or Simic Ascendancy. It would be by using cards like Skatewing Spy, Wingspan Mentor, Renata / Leyline Abundance and perhaps Ozolith, together with cards like Iridescent Hornbettle, Scute Mob, and/or Scute Swarm and other similar insect cards to overwhelm your opponents with both mana and creatures. If you wanna get crazy you can add some combat damage triggers, mana buffers like Kinnan or finish with cards like Fynn,The Fangbearer for even more results. It is more like a junk insect simic deck commander if you think about it.
Regardless, thank you for your feedback.
- Now Some Feedback on your cards.
General Renee: Lets start with General Renee first since it was the one that caught my attention first. I like how it focuses on creatures in the 3 mana value, toughness, power area (defined as the 3-credit for the sake of my typing laziness), it offers some ressurection ability for Boros without requiring black or letting it bleed in to blacks territory by appling the 3-credit restriction on the returns like most white return spells tend to do. My problem is, atleast to me, the highlight of this commander seems to be the ressurection and not the emblem effect because Boros tends to support aggro stratergies. The emblem effect essentially makes the second ability kind of useless since creatures with a mana value of three or less are made harder to kill meaning most of the time you won't need the second ability unless you are going against mill or discard players since most removal will tend to be targeted at it to prevent the second ability from being used. You might have been trying to avoid this since it kinda seems cliche for all Boros commanders to do this, but I would suggest making the card's emblem effect a +2/+0 to all creatures with 3 cms or 3-credit if you wanna make it wider range instead of the +0/+2 to toughness on it. It is still usefull as a commander as is, but the two abilities conflict with each other, lowering its power in a wierd sense if you get what I mean.
Geraint & Alexander: As for Geraint and Alexander, I think they make the perfect duo, but I believe that despite Alexander having first strike, It should actually cost {1}{R}{R}. Alexander seems like an aggro commander to me so by making it 5 cmc you are massively dampening it's power as a pose to balancing it. Believe it or not, "+1/+0 until end of turn" is not a significant ability unless you are running alot of small creatures, and when you are doing that, you usually want to finish the battle quick before your opponents build defenses. Conversely you can just make it "+1/+0, and haste until end of turn" and just keep it at 5 cmc. I just think that it is weak even when being ran alongside Geraint. Geraint is ok though.
Nivel, Researcher's Grail
Yes i realized that you would be stuck in a clue storm thanks to @Shelko so for the sake of reviewing assume that it says "Whenever a player would draw a card exept from a clue, they investigate instead."
Two errors darn, the card is supposed to be a 4/4 guys.
Inspired by Abherent Researcher
Nivel, The Final Itteration
Inspired by Docent Perfection
I'd appreciate feedback on these two:
(This is a God + Demigod pair made for a Mystery Box challenge.)
I'd also appreciate feedback on the trio from my previous post. (I'm more concerned with these two since they play with ideas I want to explore more in the near future, but I'll probably formally repost the previous trio after this.)
I beg your pardon?
@Korora12 I just realized that. I can't believe I missed that cause I could have sworn I'd made it a 4/4.
Xerxes, Lost Lorekeeper
While I think interacting with the bottom of your library is a really neat and interesting mechanic that is yet underexploited in the game except for a few pretty ''bad'' cards (the only ones I can think about without making further research are Grenzo, the recent Epitaph Gollem and Cellar Door), in my honest opinion Xerxes doesn't bring much to the table to work with. That may be that I don't fully see the scope of potential that would result from implementing such a mechanic in the game, but I would have to admit I feel that Xerxes, even though it got a pretty good set of statistics, menace and a nice recursion effect that's typical to the God creatures, would be underwhelming to play with and/or to build a deck (Commander or not) around.
The main reason why I feel this way is that it inherently shares the same ''problem'' the other cards interacting with the bottom of your library have, which is that it doesn't feel very rewarding on its own since it doesn't change much from simply interacting with the top of your library... except that in most situations, I'd even think it's just worse than that other end. If we take in consideration it cares about drawing cards, it's much more difficult to set-up a good draw from the bottom of your library than from the top with most cards in the game being set-up tools thought for use on the top of your library. For explaining myself about this, I'd like to adress that there are plenty of cards that interact with the top of your library and so it's much easier to manipulate. Whereas the bottom of your library is much more niche object you'll be able to interact with. Of course, both have kind of the same treatement with the cards that use scry f.e. (that may be the more common set-up card draw toolkit), but scry is better for the top of your library because you can remove cards from the top using it. There are also not much way to know commonly what's on the bottom of your library (unless you use scry to put cards on the bottom in some reversed fashion). But even though a player would run a lot of scry cards and Xerxes, that would just make Xerxes quite weird because they can't play around it until they reach a pretty advanced step in the game considering its mana cost, so they have to be much more careful with their scry cards since once Xerxes would be on the battlefield, they won't have their set-up on top of their library accessible anymore. I guess it makes sense on that same argument to present the counterpoint that would be to say that in that particular situation, playing Xerxes also grants you access to the cards you've had to put away during the early game and then you can use them for your late game. It's a sounding argument I think, but even then, I think the fact that Xerxes is locking you into the opposite direction from what you'll have tried to set-up is really difficult to follow, and the cards you've put on top also become inaccessible, so I don't really see that upside being much impactful.
I didn't consider much all the cards that have the typical effect that is ''look at X card, do something with one, then put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order,'' because I'd consider it on the same line as scry, although it may also be quite valuable for controlling the bottom of your library. The problem with those effects is that you have to put all the cards except the ones concerned by the spell/ability on the bottom of your library, so you'll probably end up putting there cards you wouldn't much want. And contrarywise to the top of your library, you aren't able to remove those cards you don't want from the bottom of your library using scry, they are just pretty much there forever until you draw them, exile them or shuffle.
With all this, what I'd personally suggest just to make it a bit more flexible would concern to add the possibility to choose to draw from the bottom or not with Xerxes' second ability. That way, it would really open up a lot of potential with scry cards (which as far as I can think of is probably its main archetype and strategy goal). It's only a little suggestion though, and I think Xerxes remain a really interesting card as it stands. It's just that in my opinion, interacting with the bottom card atm with the current cards printed in the game just isn't valuable enough for me to think it would be much playable.
Something like this: ''If you would draw a card, you may instead put the bottom card of your library into your hand.''
K'zen, Eternal Archivist
I won't compare much K'zen with Xerxes or look at them with having the other in mind, but as I think they are probably thought to be designed for the same archetype I'll just say a word about what it inspires me concerning your artworks choices I think are perfectly on point and work really well togheter as they are both really sober and clean but still have that kind of eerie, mysterious, aspect and atmosphere I feel like it's floating around them, both characters having oblong forms and having hidden faces, which makes us wonder about what would be their appearance if any, and both being displayed into some sort of blank sky (well, there's actually a cloud on K'zen's artwork) or space that highlights them and adds yet another dimension to that atmosphere. Those artworks fits very well together and compliment nicely this atypical mechanic you've come with that itself is a very unique yet odd take on the very simple and fundamental aspect of the game that is drawing cards.
Well, now about the card itself. First things first, I'm not really totally sold on K'zen hybrid's mana cost. That's mostly because of it's second ability. Maybe it's because I can't think properly about a blue card doing that, but it seems like it's more definitly a black theme to have the possibility to target any card in another player's graveyard. There are blue cards targeting instants such as Flawless Forgery to do something else that's definitly blue-themed with them, but having the possibility to mess up with an opponent's graveyard is more of a black thing to me. That being said, it may be because I'm not knowing or thinking about all cards that could do so, or because I'm being too conservative on the color pie there, given that there are also some artifacts doing that kind of effects.
About the abilities now, I must say I love K'zen's first ability. I find it really nice that it allows each player to try saving something from its milling effect with the possible scry effect. However, I don't really see why it's worded with a ''may'' clause since I can't think about anyone not wanting to scry. That may be a preference choice though, I don't know, it's just that it seems a little weird to me but that's alright and it doesn't affect the card's effects by any means.
K'zen's second ability is a much more interesting version of Epitaph Golem's ability. It costs the usually the same except from one hybrid colored mana and it can target cards in other players' graveyards, which brings up a bunch of interactions that are always welcome. While I think the mana cost for activating this ability could actually be seen as fine and fair, I wouldn't mind it costing {u/b}{u/b} since Epitaph Golem would really suffer from the comparison (mostly because it costs more, doesn't have another ability on board, and have less utility overall than K'zen), and given that they are so few cards interacting with the bottom of your library, you'll probably want to include some Epitaph Golem in that archetype as well, so in the end having those feeling like poor versions of K'zen may be unpleasant for the player's game experience.
All in all, I think both those cards serve a really unique archetype and they are both really nicely designed and well thought! There are some things I mentionned I think may be making them less interesting but that's mainly due to the lack of cards interacting with their very particular archetype in the game and it's not an issue from the cards in themselves. Very cool!
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As for myself, I'd like some feedback on this card. A brieve note about this: I had this idea mainly because there are no way to counterplay Treasure tokens in the game. Also, ''copying an object'' means ''anything being copied'' (copying a spell/an ability/a permanent etb as a copy of something/etc.), and is taken from the rule text about copy effects.
With Xeres, I wanted to make a relatively generic legend while moving in a different direction from my previous Kezzar, Memory Dredger, who allows for more play with both ends of your library. I mainly wanted to acocunt for a couple things: playing from the bottom of your library both works very nicely with effects like Tel-Jilad Stylus and The Cauldron of Eternity, and also is very difficult to disrupt via mill and such. This, along with the fact that you're no longer drawing cards, opens up the ability to play a stax-adjacent deck using effects like Lantern of Insight and Breathstealer's Crypt. (I just realized that Teferi's Puzzle Box can be very effective to this end.) Xeres also has the side effect of avoiding the self-lock cards like Brainstorm and Scroll Rack are prone to without requiring shuffle effects. I do see how Xeres doesn't offer much to more common strategies though.
For K'zen, I admit I didn't have a justification for the hybrid costs in mind when making the card. It was mostly an aesthetic choice that I don't think is too much of a stretch, since blue has a variety of cards that shuffle one or more player's graveyards into their library, as well as colorless cards like Reito Lantern / Reito Sentinel existing. The 'may' in its triggered ability is to match the wording from Eager Construct (which perhaps is worded that way because WoTC didn't want to put 'scries 1' on a card for whatever reason). Epitaph Golem and friends being colorless and nonlegendary is also likely sufficient to justify K'zen having a slightly stronger effect.
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With regards to Evanescence of Greed, my main problem with it is how much life you're probably losing to answer tokens at instant speed (with the upside of also answering copies), especially since you're getting rid of all of them. If you used this to answer an army of Scute Swarms or Elf tokens for example, you'd probably lose an obscene amount of life. While I suppose it doesn't matter so long as you win in the end, I'd much rather have either an instant speed board wipe or a permanent that solves the problem more permanently. (For answering Treasures in particular, we have Yasharn, Angel of Jubilation, a handful of Null Rod / Collector Ouphe effects, and even Leyline of Singularity if you're feeling spicy.)
I do appreciate the additional ability to shut down copying for extra versatility (partially because I built a Miirym clone deck on Arena recently). It feels like a natural extension of cards like Legion's End, and has me wondering what other colors it'd be reasonable to put this sort of effect in.
Overall, while I like the effect, I really don't like paying life (especially not as much as it looks like you'd lose to this card when you really need it), so I'd like to see what others think of Evanescence of Greed.
Now that I know more about your choices for Xerxes and K'zen, I remark that I probably was quite missing some important points on this analysis. I didn't thought about its interactions with such specific stax cards such as Breathstealer's Crypt or Chains of Mephistopheles but it seems indeed quite potent. With Teferi's Box you've also mentionned, it nullify the disadvantage of the card, which is surely a good thing. And you can probably do a lot more in that strategy using some wheel cards. It makes me think that it would somehow work as a different take on that kind of stax archetype you can play actually with the recent Eruth, Tormented Prophet in EDH (I've never seen that played, but I stumbled upon the card while looking for precedents caring about changing how card draw works and I think you can build something similar to Xerxes archetype using it (well, without caring about the bottom card of your library though)), which imo is really interesting and having acces to an additional color and not being limited in time to play your cards surely provides a lot more of options (you can't play neither the Crypt neither the Chains with Eruth, which is alone a big downside if you plan to go that route for your strategy). I think I misjudged the value of such a replacement effect. And for K'zen I have to admit I didn't consider that they could be precedent for the ''may scry'' clause and I should have had a look at it on gatherer before making that remark, my bad. I guess they worded it this way to avoid having to the word scry differently (since it would become ''scries''?) in order to keep things simple and homogeneous, but I'm not entirely sure about that.
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Concerning Evanescence of Greed I wanted to keep it at a somehow low cost but I was afraid it would do too much since it can in some situations give access to a defensive tool this color combination doesn't have against storm decks, f.e. And yeh, since it can solely win the game against some strategy, I thought adding a pretty hefty life cost to the card would be a way to balance it. I'll consider removing the life loss effect and increasing the mana cost. Also about the counterplay to Treasures, the idea was mainly to have something playable at instant speed that would work as a mass removal instead of running a typical stax piece to shut them down. Thanks again as it's very helpful!
Evanescence of Greed is actually interesting card.
But there is something confuses me; While it does apply toward permanents which tokens and copied were exiled. However, does this way applies the copied sorcery and instant while they are still on stack? Theoretically, it can be used against people who prefer to copy their spells a lot. I am looking at red and blue. Where the instant and sorcery would be copied a lot and they are about to be casted for free. Evanescence of Greed is casted and prevents player from copying any furthermore and each copied sorcery and instant becomes exiled before they can be even casted.
While I love the downside is where you must pay life for each token creature was exiled. I believe that it's best defense spell against the group of token creatures with crazy increased power/toughness from enchantment, any source, etc.
I am unfamiliar with "objects". What do you mean by objects? Are you preferring to spells or creatures?
I am trying something new...
Chaos by FireOfGolden | MTG Cardsmith
Mayhem Deserter by FireOfGolden | MTG Cardsmith
It indeed works against anything that would be refered as a copy, as so it would aslo affect copies of spells that are on the stack. It won't affect copies of abilities that are on the stack though, since an ability can't be exiled, but it would prevent those to be activated in answer to it since it states that once it's on the stack, nothing can be copied anymore until it resolves. Yet, it can exile permanents that have become copies themselves of other permanents, such as Clone-likes f.e.
The objects are a pretty abstract term as it isn't actually used on any card in the game. It's what the copy effects refer to in the rules. I'll copy-paste it from MtgFandom there, but here's the link if you want to look at this more in details: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Copy
As far as I understood the rules properly, which isn't a sure thing, it seems that whenever you copy a spell, a permanent or something else, it still is refered to as a copy in the game. So here's an exemple as I think it may be more clear this way: Player A casts Crackling Counterpart targeting their Savannah Lions (of course), they get a token that's a copy of Savannah Lions. Yet, that token is still refered to as a copy of Savannah Lions in the game. In answer, player B casts Evanescence of Greed once they get back the priority after Crackling Counterpart resolved and the token that's a copy of Savannah Lions has entered the battlefield, and it exiles the token because it's a copy. / It works the same with copies on the stack, hence why I had it say ''wherever they are'' so it adds extra utility to counter storm decks using Reverberate or tools like this. As you've noted it, it's quite oriented as a card to play against Izzet decks (that usually make a lot of Treasures and play a lot of Spellslinger/Storm archetypes). All in all, that's just to explain that objects refer to both types of copies, either are thy on the stack or on the battlefield.
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I'm very sorry but I don't have much time left and I cannot give you a proper feedback, so, to next the cardsmith passing by, there are both cards above to leave a comment and feedback for: Chaos and Mayhem Deserter!
With regards to Chaos, to put the mana ability in line with the current wording for mana abilities, you might want to write it as
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As for Mayhem Deserter, do I correctly understand that the {U/R} symbol is meant to be interpreted as {UR/P}, which means you can cast Mayhem Deserter for 2UURR, 2URP, or 2PP? This idea for P = U+R is rather restrictive, since it disincentivizes any combination of purple with anything other than UR. Unless you intend to make a 'color' for each pair of colors? (That would be super messy in and of itself though for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which being that there's 10 such pairs.)
Purple weirdness aside, the actual ability is ambiguous. Does it replace only the first card you draw during your draw step, or can it replace any draw during your draw step? (The distinction is important because of cards like Yurlok of Scorch Thrash.) To disambiguate, consider this wording:
OR
If you would draw a card during your draw step, [you may] exile the top card of an opponent's library face down instead. You may look at and play that card for as long as it remains exiled, and you may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast it. If you exile a card this way, reveal the top card of your library. That opponent adds X mana in any combination of colors, where X is equal to the revealed card's mana value. Exile the revealed card. (This affects any number of draws. Removing the bracketed 'you may' makes it affect every draw.)
Wording aside, I'm not sure I like this ability. This is mostly because it feels like an overbalanced version of similar effects like Thief of Sanity, Cunning Rhetoric, etc. Of course, it's fine if they don't/can't cast anything during your draw step, but overall I don't think getting your opponent's cards and the 4/4 body is worth the difficulty to cast, losing your own cards and giving them mana. It's probably fine to drop the clause that gives your opponent mana, since you're already losing your own card to get theirs.
P.S. – Just FYI, purple mana (as a sixth color instead of U+R) is a previously discarded concept; see this article stub and its references.
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I'd appreciate feedback on this card:
Ancient Arcanist is a pretty interesting and flavorful card. I can definitely see this card being heavily played in Modern. It requires a balance between creatures and spells, so finding the right mixture can be a little tricky and will likely require some play and fine-tuning so that you can hit what you want when you want. With that said, top deck manipulation will most likely be included to get the right card, but once you have what you need this card becomes a powerhouse. Being able to essentially play an instant or sorcery from your graveyard with little to no downside is quite powerful. Comparing this to Snapcaster Mage, I feel it should definitely be Rare, as you not only don't have to pitch a card, but you get to keep the instant or sorcery afterwards. Although there a hoops you have to jump through to get Ancient Arcanist going, they don't seem to be too much of a problem.
So in conclusion, I feel Ancient Arcanist should be a Rare, but this is a well designed and interesting card nonetheless, and I would be happy to play with it.
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Here's my card:
If some of you have a minute, please go cote on my other discussion:
https://forums.mtgcardsmith.com/discussion/6001/vote-for-the-next-batch-of-most-popular-menu-items
With regards to Ancient Arcanist, comparing it to something like Snapcaster Mage makes me want to leave it at uncommon because it's significantly slower (both in mana cost and having to attack as opposed to an ETB), less flexible (Snapcaster has flash), and riskier (Ancient Arcanist has to attack and mill a creature). What do you think of Ancient Arcanist relative to something closer in function and usage like Archaeomancer?
As for Izu, I'm honestly not quite sure what to do with it. The implied mill strategy and the activated ability's skew toward high mana value cards seem at odds with each other (outside of cases like Lochmere Serpent). (I suppose you could run wheels, but Nekusar is already amazing for that.) It makes me wonder if Izu would be best in the 99 or being used to access extra colors (considering it's a high-cost, unprotected do-nothing whose strength is heavily reliant on the opposing deck(s), with more colors and less combo potential than something like Syr Konrad).
I'd appreciate feedback on this split card:
Izu is just a value card in the command zone (if it's your commander), he'll draw you some cards and drain some life, but he also comes with an ability that can help guide you to the end game. While I'm sure there are some powerful things you can do with him, he himself is not meant to be extremely powerful; just a neat card to build around or include in the 99 of your Nekusar deck.
To go back to Archaeomancer, that card has the potential to loop easily with the spell it retrieves (and can be triggered at instant speed via a flicker effect), which makes it more valuable than Ancient Arcanist at a quicker pace with significantly less risk on two fronts, and yet Archaeomancer is a common. (For the sake of comparison, I find it fair to assume that both Archaeomancer's and Ancient Arcanist's recursion will be repeated, but don't think it's necessary to argue that Archaeomancer is more valuable, since Ancient Arcanist's success is indeterminate and could thus fail to return anything across any number of attacks.)
If one of the two consecutive gambles on Ancient Arcanist was removed or shifted more in the player's favor, I might agree that it could potentially be pushed up to rare, but with both it seems too inconsistent to be more than uncommon.
@cadstar369 ;
Remeber/Repeat
Remember side : I like this side alot, the effect is very simple but very worth it's rarity for a turn one can trip. You can run alot of shenenigans with this card at the start of battle by muling faulty hands but then returning a specific usefull card you liked from the muled hand right back to you. You can also weave this with various organizational effects to essentially rig the game by using search effects that alow for the organization of the bottom of your library. Conversely, while the mill is insurmounatable, you can still use it to get creatures into your graveyard for reanimation. I would say that the first portion is a 9.5/10 masterfully made card, because we can never trully design a 10/10 card.
Repeat side : I feel like this side needs a little more work. I have no problem with the cacoon framing of cheap conditional reanimation for dimir since black does reanimation shenenigans alot. What I wounder is, If you were to cast this spell at an end phase, does that mean the opponent takes another end phase, or you skip your turn. There is alot of other nuances like this doubling combat phases, potentially doubling draw phases, all which have pretty heavy implications when the color pie is broken. I would make this a sorcery in order to balance the aforementioned. The theory is that, if someone manages to cast this spell in instant speed, they earn it's bonuses. I don't think rasing the cost would be helpful to the structure of the card without overhauling it. I think the rarity can also be bumped to mythic and still be okay after.
Overall, good cards mate. Cheers!
Remember
This is exceptionally good with the new mulligan rule of putting mulligan tax on the bottom of your library. This way, you can keep your game ender on the bottom, and then wait to cast this spell to get it back to hand. I like it.
Repeat
I feel as though, instead of repeating a phase, it should instead untap all lands. Also, repeating the ending phase gets messy.
Here are a set of cards designed for commander. Thoughts and opinions?
If someone feels like reviewing all of them, more love to you, but I ask that you review the cards in atleast one of the two ways. A: Either choose (Miran or phyrexian) and review atleast two cards...please? maybe? but even one will be appreciated; or B: Review a single card and its miran or phyrexian counterparts. If you review all of them, I will feel like a millionare in Vegas.
(Set link - Dawn Of The Dukes): https://mtgcardsmith.com/user/ReviewMaster/sets/65578
Agent Cheryl, Cultivating Life
- Given the existence of Doran, the Siege Tower, I don't see the point of this card. It costs more, has a smaller body, and doesn't mess with your opponents. Sure it gives you vigilance and lifelink, but you already have plenty of access to both in these colors.
- In general, defender commanders would likely need to be in a new color combination and/or do something fairly interesting to compete with various Treefolk legends & Arcades, the Strategist.
Agent Kael- This card is a huge lightning rod for removal, and if it's your commander your opponents will likely remove any creature you try to land. Thus Agent Kael would likely be relegated to the same kind of finisher slot as Craterhoof and friends. Unlike many of those cards though, Agent Kael has to see you attack instead of being an ETB, making it significantly more vulnerable and less versatile.
Aleta, Immortal Sorceress- Why is this a 3/7? Doesn't feel like a mono-red creature at all, considering it doesn't gain power and/or lose toughness with any of its abilities.
- Having Lightning Strike on a stick is crazy strong on a creature this difficult to remove. (Consider how potent this would be in a burn or control deck.)
- Most similar cards either take way more mana to get going and/or have an additional cost, so perhaps consider lowering the damage to 2 and/or adding a drawback, plus something else to balance the 'immortality' effect. You might also consider changing her P/T or doing something to justify the exceedingly high toughness (e.g. adding a color).
Ancient Aether- I don't think there's much to say here aside from how annoying this card is. Perhaps it should cost 1 more since Spellshock exists, requires colored mana, and affects all spells. (Ancient Aether is colorless and focused, so you can put it in a deck that isn't affected [as much] by it.)
Adorable Monkey- The mill five feels like a lot for a 2-drop that replaces itself, especially in themes like exploit, reanimator, etc. Perhaps consider increasing the mana cost or reducing the mill.
~ ~ ~@Tonysparks with regards to Repeat, note that you can't duplicate draw steps (since that's part of the beginning phase). Duplicating someone's end phase would create an additional end step and cleanup step. As for the color pie, blue has a number of phase manipulating cards that represent time manipulation (including a combat reset or two), and black covers the resurrection effect. While the potential extra combat mode is theoretically an outlier, it generally won't do much unless all your creatures died in combat (in which case Repeat does exactly what it's supposed to do flavor-wise), and even then you'd still need haste to make it truly effective. This, combined with being 7 mana with quad colored pips should be more than sufficient restriction to keep it where it is (it's theoretically fairly unimpressive, since the main value comes from the phase duplication, which isn't particularly easy to take advantage of in unique ways).
<Will review the dragons later.>