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Renaissance Set — Design Phase
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https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/sanctifier-angel
Bliss is a near-synonym for Joy; the main difference is that it implies peace or tranquility.
@syntheticreign Nice to meet you.
I believe the very first version had Bliss in green! ^^ If I remember correctly, I switched it with White because, out of the five emotions I had, Bliss/Joy sounded like the best-suited emotion for the "I-care-about-gaining-life" colour and White seemed like a better fit for this than Green, though it's close ^^ As usual, we can try any version as long as we can align each colour with a fitting emotion with a simple different way of caring about life.
By the way, remember the goal is to lock our emotions as soon as we can to start building on it. Don't hesitate to post alternate versions of the colour/emotion/mechanical aspect grid so we can discuss what works and what doesn't ^^
@brcien
Yes, Morbid is also an ability word, it does work the same ^^ Our problem is that we're trying to unify five different ability words under the same "tag" which has not been done before
I really like that illustration too, it's very unique ^^
On characters, not all are going to end up in the story (at least not as fully fleshed out characters, we can always use a handful of supporting characters that appear once or twice.) We're mostly discussing which ones we really want to build the story around ^^
I think the most advanced discussion where we got to lay out most of the best options is the choice of the five emotions. I'd like to have a deadline on this one so we don't let it float around for too long and start forgetting about it again ^^ Let's say we should vote for the definitive five emotions next week-end?
I'm putting here the "original" set of five emotions I proposed. Let's give us until next Sunday to propose modifications and/or completely different sets of emotions ^^ (The details like the names are not of importance, we can adjust them later. For instance, you can consider "Hapiness", "Joy" and "Bliss" to be the same thing for the purpose of this vote ^^)
TL;DR: Let's decide once and for all the five emotions ^^
DEADLINE FOR DECISION: Sun 02/25
I think Black should be Desire. However, that leaves us without sorrow. Any ideas about how to fill in the gap?
About Desire:
- I still think it's a bit close to Love, but we could try it.
- How would you represent desire mechanically?
- I do think Sadness is a more important emotion than Desire. My best bet if we have Desire would be to replace Love with Sadness and try to make it work in green. But I do also think Love is a more important emotion than Desire. Out of the five above, I think the one I'd rather remove for Desire would be Fear.
- The last solution would be to rethink a completely different set of five emotions where Desire makes sense among the other ones (so a cycle of five more secondary emotions most likely, without things like sadness and joy). We've been talking about this for a while though and I'd really like that we settle on one version, whichever it is ^^
@syntheticreign
- Black Fear and Blue Sorrow: Yes, I do agree Blue Fear is the weirdest flavourfully. I still think it makes sense though, as a "don't touch me" kind of fear more than a "Booh! I'm spooky/scary!" kind of fear. If we try to switch fear and sadness, Black Fear that cares about losing life sounds perfectly fine by me (fear of dying, and it gets a more "spooky" meaning) but while Blue sadness also makes sense, I'm unsure how to represent it mechanically? Sadness being "not losing life" just doesn't make sense to me, hence while I think the other way around is better ^^
- Red Desire: I could see that working though I'm uncomfortable with how close it becomes with Green Love (Red Desire becomes really about passion more than it was about Greed in Black.) And I still have no idea on how to represent Desire mechanically as a way of caring about life?
Perhaps to get rid of these debates, we don't limit it to five emotions? Why confine ourselves to a monocolored cycle? My original vision for the Muses was to have them be like kami in Kamigawa. We could have a Muse of Greed and a Muse of Sadness; a Muse of Ire and a Muse of Passion.
So in a nutchell, I don't think the question should be "how many muses do we need until we have covered all emotions we want" but rather "we need an impactful 5-cards mythic rare cycle that will influence the flavour of the whole set, what are the most exciting five emotions we can pick?"
Yes, I do understand how Desire can be linked with Greed more than passion ^^ I was mostly saying that Black Desire leans towards Greed which might be acceptable in the same cycle as Green Love, but that Red Desire really leans too much towards the same meaning as Green Love in my opinion. So I'm ok with considering Black Desire/Greed, as mentioned above, there's still the question of what do we remove that would be less important than Desire from the cycle? And how do we represent Desire mechanically?
About the multicoloured cycle: That's one of the options ^^ I doesn't have to be monocoloured, I actually tried different multicoloured dual-emotions Muses before this monocoloured one. I also tried dual-emotion Muses like Love & Hate, Joy & Sadness, Fear & Hope, etc. I just thought it was more impactful with only one emotion and one colour. Also they were horribly dificult to design in my opinion. But if you can find a way to make a good multicoloured cycle of emotions it's on the table for sure ^^
Also, why five and not ten:
1) It's a matter of being exciting, having only five means that they don't happen often ^^
2) There are only 15 Mythic Rares in a set, having a 10-cards cycle at mythic would be a bit disappointing to people who don't like Muses.
3) I'm not inventing that rule myself, if you look at Theros, even the 15 Gods were distributed five per set, it just works better to have the spashy cycle be a 5-cards cycle and not more to make peope excited about them when they open one ^^
The green ability seem really hard to activate, as you need you and your opponent to lose/gain life while at the same time doing that to yourself.
The black ability does the opposite. It gives your opponent "don't hit me or I trigger" vibes. Flavor fully, it makes sense, but during the game it seems more white.
Red and white are perfect, as white you just cast a life gain spell and in red you just sling a burn spell or attack with the team. I don't think these should change at all.
Emotion (If you gain life this turn, [effect])
Originally, the point of having all these ways of caring about life is not to fill a mechanic slot, but trying to answer a very hard question: How do you do a "Life-matters set"' without a real-world example. The trick is to have all colours care about life in slightly different ways, then find the synergies between them. Finding a way to notify this theme is under discussion but not a goal to achieve in order to make the mechanical theme a thing ^^ It can be untold, like no keyword in Kaladesh specified that each colour cared about artifacts or Energy in a different way. (For more details on the making of Kaladesh, and Energy philosophy you can change this article: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/making-kaladesh-2016-11-09)
At the beginning we had "If you gained and/or lost N or more life this turn." It evolved into those five different triggers because some colours really want to care specifically about gaining or losing life in this kind of set an it felt weird to have the general trigger coexist with more specific triggers. But if it turns out it's too complicated, we'll certainly get back to this conversation and try it ^^
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About the specific conditions, it's a bit difficult to tell how easy each is to fulfill without a playtest including a large number of cards. Here's the rationale behind some of them:
- Blue's ability creates tension which is mostly a good thing. Players want to attack you anyway and the idea behind the blue/white archetype would be to force the opponent to crash on your defenses so it fits the theme ^^ The idea is that if you take control over the game, you will start not losing life anymore and this trigger will accelerate the end of the game by snowballing for slow control decks.
- Green's ability may be the hardest to activate in a regular set, yes, but it can be made easier if we build the set the right way. Notably, the unusual Group Hug archetype will give you access to commons that heal all players at once. Lifelink creatures are also especially important in this set anyway and allow you to trigger that condition repeatedly. We have the means to make it so any colour can fulfill its own condition consistently by playing only one card, but yes we will need to build the set skeleton in a specific way to achieve that ^^
- Black's ability is admittedly a little trickier. We don't want players to stop attacking because it could trigger that condition. I think we can bypass this issue by making abilities that are especially relevant on your turn or before the combat phase. ("As long as you lost life this turn, this creature has flying" is a simple example of design that will incentivize you to pay life but won't make the opponent think twice about attacking you.) That's definitely a good point and we should keep track of it though, you're entirely right ^^
1) Dissociate mechanics and flavour.
In this concept, the way each colour cares about life doesn't tie into its Big Muse's emotion. I think it greatly reduces the importance of both the life-matters aspect by making it less recognizable (which is our main mechanical theme) and the emotion aspect by making it purely cosmetic (which is our second main flavour theme.) Still, it's an option.
Here's how I would do it:
WHITE — Love ; If you gained life this turn
BLUE — Sorrow ; If you didn't lose life since your last turn
BLACK — Fear ; If you lost life this turn
RED — Ire ; If an opponent lost life this turn
GREEN — Bliss ; If you gained and/or lost 4 or more life this turn
N.B.: Note the new trigger for green that cares for the size of lize swings ^^
2) Forcing DESIRE/ENVY/JALEOUSY into the primary emotions cycle
a. How to represent it? If Black, we could play into the drain effects "If you gained life and an opponent lost life this turn." This means all the other triggers have to be made longer and more difficult to compensate though.
b. What emotion does it replace? It strongly depends on how everything gets together, I removed Fear, here's my attempt:
WHITE — Love ; If you gained 3 or more life this turn
BLUE — Sorrow ; If you lost 3 or more life this turn
BLACK — Envy ; If you gained life and an opponent lost life this turn
RED — Ire ; If an opponent lost 3 or more life this turn
GREEN — Bliss ; If you gained and/or lost 5 or more life this turn
N.B: Blue caring about losing life is definitely weird but it could make sense as a "don't attack me" mechanic, rather than a life sacrifice one. Basically, if Black is taken, the only good colour for caring about losing life would be Red, but there's no other good colour to care about opponents losing life, and there aren't that many other interesting ways of caring about life in the game. For Bliss, I don't know how to make "if you didn't lose life since your last turn" more difficult, so I tried something different.
3) Making a new nonprimary emotions cycle that include DESIRE/ENVY/JALEOUSY
Here, I kept the above mechanical cycle but I purposefully avoided main emotions like "joy" and "sadness" to keep Desire from feeling too different from the rest. Here are two different attempts:
Based on Darwin's theories
WHITE — Kindness ; If you gained 3 or more life this turn
BLUE — Weeping ; If you lost 3 or more life this turn
BLACK — Envy ; If you gained life and an opponent lost life this turn
RED — Anger ; If an opponent lost 3 or more life this turn
GREEN — Courage ; If you gained and/or lost 5 or more life this turn
Based on Aristotle's "Rethoric"
WHITE — Pride ; If you gained 3 or more life this turn
BLUE — Anxiety ; If you lost 3 or more life this turn
BLACK — Envy ; If you gained life and an opponent lost life this turn
RED — Contempt ; If an opponent lost 3 or more life this turn
GREEN — Determination ; If you gained and/or lost 5 or more life this turn
I hope this helps a bit and inspire some other people to try an alternate cycle. I personally do think the original cycle Bliss/Fear/Sorrow/Ire/Love is the best compromise between flavour and functionality though ^^