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I'm super excited to do this with everyone! Last year I tried really hard to make a set all by my lonesome, but it was just too much for one person to undertake. You know what sort of card I like? They were called Mongers, and I'm not going to post them so you'll have to look it up. Basically mongers (and a bunch of cards like them) were creatures with an activated ability that any player could activate. My main favorite format is commander, followed by draft, so cards that encourage multiplayer play is always a plus for me. The reality is though that the monger creature type was sort of bad and limited. Outside of Commander's group hug, why play a card that is just as good for your opponent as it is for you? Here's my solution: Introducing, Monger.    Monger is a keyword that opens up a permanent's activated abilities to everyone at the table, but grants YOU a Silver whenever they do, letting you be a fun merchant for a table. (It's a silver to allow one cost activated abilities to work without encouraging infinites.) This combines people's love of playing other people's stuff and everybody's love of getting a free mana. This card up here is the idea incarnate: This dryad will sell you various herbs. The book will let you scry; it'll let anyone take a look, but they have to pay you. After all, it's your book. The fun thing about monger is you can get pretty weird with it. Here's a Xantcha inspired card that uses the keyword:  This guy represents a sort of card that benefits anyone and even hurts you! But with Monger, you're getting some good out of it every time someone else shocks you with it (PS, should it do 2 damage? I feel like it shouldn't.) This is the sort of card that I think would make a fun Commander, but doesn't feel too out of place in a Conspiracy or Mercadian Masques style set.   Finally you have these two cards. That dragon gets a form of fire breath that doesn't utilize monger in 1v1, but is extremely fun in multiplayer (flailing manticore is a similar card that does this that already exists, though it's far more volatile). Paying someone to kill another player is very in the spirit of the monger. Plague Dealer shows off Monger's ability to give off a universal affect. Do you want to allow these germs to keep getting stronger? Do you join in on the fun or do you shut the card down? Monger works because it allows a wealth of interactions that can, at least on rares, be posted without the extra text of "any player can activate this ability. If a player who is not you activates this ability" all over the place. Just an elementary search of "kingmaker MtG" reveals how many people want to play this "my cards put into motion great stories" style of play. itsmekidney fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Jun 29, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 05:21
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Some Goon posted:If they don't create a Treasure token proper (t,s, 1 mana of any color) they should say it in their card text (create a Silver token with "etc"). Sabak Reak should say "1 life" not "a life". Generally 'you' refers to the card's owner, so "Sabak Reak's controller loses 1 life. Draw a card." is probably the correct wording.  Xantcha, Sleeper Agent sets precedent for "you" being here. Why exactly is it there, I don't actually know, but I wanted to match previous examples just to be safe. I agree with you though that excluding it means avoiding this mess. Specifying what Silver tokens do I think is dependent. If monger is the only way to create such tokens, then I definitely would want to include what they do; but if the set included the artifact token in other ways, it could probably become standardized in the same way as Gold, Treasure, and Food. Finally that last part: I actually worded this card "another player," but this opens up a whole can of worms in two-headed, which allows you to activate the abilities of your partner AND give them a free mana while you're at it. One thing I'd really like to make is an aura (or dare I say it, equipment) that gives the Monger property, which I think would be extremely fun on opponents' creatures, but any ability costing "1" would go infinite in 2-headed if the ability worked for teammates. I'll try experimenting with the description text to clean it up though, I want it to be perfect tbh.
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Jun 29, 2020 07:27
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Mikl posted:Thank you for the feedback, costing stuff is always one of my weak points when designing cards / mechanics. I'm at work right now, but later today I'll go back and try to re-cost the cards I think one of the difficult things about this ability is that as far back as 1997, this ability has costed nothing:  
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Jun 30, 2020 03:17
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  Been thinking more about my monger mechanic, and it made me realize that I sort of had a sub mechanic just within Silver tokens. The cool thing about the Silver token vs the Gold token is that they're just weak enough to allow people to accumulate a bunch of them (the eldrazi spawn comes to mind, where certain eldrazi just created as many as two or three when they entered the battlefield). This isn't nearly as big a deal to me as the Monger mechanic itself, but I think it showcases how the "currency" the monger cards create could influence the board in different ways.
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Jun 30, 2020 18:40
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President Ark posted:Is it better for it to trigger on any sacrifice, or only creatures? It being anything plays better with other colors and with things like gold, sac lands, etc; creature-only makes more sense from an intuitive stance ("no blood from a stone" and all that) and may serve as a l I'm a little bit biased here because my own mechanic makes silver tokens and I'm a bit obsessed with my own mechanic at the moment, but I'd like the mechanic to include artifacts.. maybe I'd split the difference, have it work with creatures and artifacts, and call it something like "offering." Material offerings are still a thing, after all.
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Jul 2, 2020 04:25
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PMush Perfect posted:I was thinking about it, and realized we need some mechanics that are exclusive to certain colors, so things don't feel same-y. Instead of just complaining, I came up with something: Wait, does its power and toughness become equal to the sacrificed creature's power and toughness, or does their base power and toughness become equal to the sacrificed creature's power and toughness? Or does it add that creature's power and toughness to the power and toughness already on the creature? I think it's the latter do to your last example card, but I think this is a pretty important thing to clarify. Also, I think a lot of us have been intentionally trying to fit our mechanics into all 5 colors just to suggest the possibility; I could easily see my own mechanic restricted to blue, white, and green,* with a single example in the other colors similar to how Ixalan had Legendary dinosaurs in all colors despite the tribe being Distinctly Naya. EDIT: In retrospect, I want to say the monger mechanic leans heavily Temur: Green being the color that likes sharing, red being the color that likes sharing (things being blown up) and blue being the color that loves shenanigans. The defensive nature of white and the selfish nature of black both don't lend themselves to Monger too much. itsmekidney fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Jul 3, 2020 |
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Jul 2, 2020 21:11
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GoutPatrol posted:The biggest problem is the incredibly complex boardstate something like this would do in multiples. Because this can be done at instant speed, it also leads to some of least favorite kinds of gameplay: the Arcbound Ravager/Walking Balista can't-block-one-you're-dead trick. You're playing against affinity with a Ravager out, they attack with everything, you can block everything but one, they sac everything and put all the counters on that one thing, oops you're dead. Sorry my friend, I'll be honest and say I'm not very used to responding to people's entries; in our old contest thread, it was a competition more than it is now, so it's taking me some time to get into friendly mode. Your unfinished mechanic is pretty neat, but I think it needs to be fine tuned a bit? Part of the mechanic is that it can essentially do anything that auras can do, but once we start building a set I think it would need to be a lot more specific if we were to use it. I specifically was a little shocked to see your cards sort of resembling "ghosts" what with the allusion to haunt and the Unfinished keyword, but then mostly supplying positive benefits to your own creatures. I'd love to see you try a couple "focuses" to show how the cards might fit thematically in a set. I know they're not set specific but I'm still a top-down person at heart and love some inspiration. PS: I made two more cards with the "monger" mechanic, because as I've said earlier I'm a bit obsessed with the idea:  
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Jul 3, 2020 08:12
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Just realized this contest ends on the 11th but also on Sunday.
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Jul 11, 2020 04:07
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Here's another mechanic I call Splash Damage. (name subject to change.) It works like Hydra Omnivore, but would serve as sort of a less complicated way to handle the ability myriad, which I think never really got the support it deserved.   I see this ability being pretty much a shoe-in for Red, but I suppose I could see it ending up in Green (because that's Hydra Omnivore's color). As I type this, I think I'd rather see the ability primarily in green and secondarily in red, just because it works well with equipment and auras and I've always felt like green artifacts is a fun archetype that could use some more love.
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Jul 13, 2020 01:48
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PMush Perfect posted:To make it not useless in 1v1, I'd say it should damage all opponents and planeswalkers they control. It's tempting, but hitting every planeswalker at once a hard sell for me. I'd have to think about it for sure
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Jul 13, 2020 03:03
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Lack of Bear posted:What if it did damage to another target player or planeswalker? One additional seems a good way of keeping it from getting out of hand. You could also make it stack that way. Yeah that's it do that.
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Jul 13, 2020 07:08
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Naturally I'd already had a couple ideas floating around in my head for build-arounds for my monger keyword. If I'm being honest, I don't know if it'd be a good idea to build a draft deck around my mechanic, but also maybe it would be.  Next, we have a buildaround I wrote for this contest's husk mechanic, which I thought was a neat idea. I don't know if Magic has ever made anything intentionally work with generic cards, but I feel like it's up someone's alley.  My last buildaround card works with the mechanic created by our own judge, Momentum. Draft decks working around things like convoke tend to build around big expensive creatures rather than these sorts of draft enchantments, but I wanted to give it a shot anyway. 
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Jul 14, 2020 00:50
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President Ark posted:you could probably fix it by giving the token an ability like the blue illusion "when this is targeted by something, sac it" thing Yeah, I came to a similar conclusion. I'll probably give the tokens haste.
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Jul 14, 2020 04:36
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ungulateman posted:"a nontoken creature" would also work, seeing as it's currently insanely good with any effect along the lines of "pay x mana: make a 2/2 (3/3, etc.)" and not great with the typical creatures people want to play with, unless people really want to design another 4/2 for 2R in a custom set. The issue here is that it is specifically made for the "husk" mechanic, which creates tokens. I see two possible solutions; one being that I give the tokens haste (theoretically, I could give them flash, which is funny but also feels to much like a wink at the audience); the other is that husk changes to have the creatures enter the battlefield, and if their husk cost is paid they simply have no abilities, rather than being a token. This is a pretty substantial change, getting rid of graveyard synergies (and denying us all the neat "embalm" style token artwork), and I don't feel comfortable assuming that sort of change on a mechanic not my own. On a side note: I think it's important to see vanilla and french vanilla creatures in custom sets, especially if we ever want to try drafting with it. While nobody's favorite thing to design or see in a pack, every card being complicated leads to some very ugly gameplay.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:52
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 At long last I finally fixed my card, and in exchange made it perhaps a little too strong. I might edit it again to fix this; it's probably a bit much at the moment. I also made my MSE use the old frames and it always slows my computer down to go to the "change frame" tab so I'm going to do old frames until I need to use a special one.  This is made for my own Splash Damage mechanic, but it would be a lot stronger in a pingers deck. I sort of think that's okay; Pingers decks are, in my experience, not at huge risk of being broken.  I've been having a good time trying to make cool cards for abilities I didn't design; here is one for the mulch ability. Mulch actually reminds me of an ability I made myself a while back while trying to make a wedge set (I don't really recommend we make a wedge set now, tbh, with Ikoria so closely behind us). Mine works essentially the same way but was called "martyr" and was in the WBG color identity. This card combines the flavor of my idea and the mulch idea, and is in Abzan because I think that's a nice place for it. itsmekidney fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 22:23
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My wife is looking through the set and just realized that Resolute is a lot like Totem armor, which is a neat mechanic I somehow forgot all about despite technically having an Estrid deck.
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Jul 18, 2020 06:50
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hey, so Mimic isn't a mechanic we've done.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:39
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If I'm being honest, this second contest is a lot; it's essentially asking us to come up with a minimum of 5-10 cards (and an ideal 25 or so). More importantly, it's actually asking us to perform 4 incredibly important tasks for the future of the set, all in a single bound: It wants us to (1) design the set's plane, (2) design the set's story, which is going to be incredibly tied to the plane's factions, (3) establish the mechanical identities of the colors, and (4) design what sort of play-style this set primarily appeals to. I worry at the moment that this is simply too much to ask in a single run. What's more, I feel as if the beginning of our contest still isn't very resolved. We're still looking at a whopping 9 mechanics, not all of which seem to play nice with each other. For instance, our third most popular mechanic, bloodrite, is the only mechanic on the list that cares about sacrificing permanents, and it very specifically doesn't function without heavy support from cards that allow us to sacrifice. My own mechanic and special baby, monger, is really only effective in a multiplayer set, and it's the only mechanic in our batch that cares about this specifically. Like I don't want to throw shade on lackofbear's contest, because Lackofbear runs really fun contests and I had a lot of fun making cards for it (and I think I learned how the set could theoretically function), but I feel as though we should have been using this time to host a forum (heh) on the mechanics being made. I feel as though we needed to talk about all the cool mechanics we did, and the fact that we went a week without doing so has taken the wind out of my sails a bit.
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Jul 20, 2020 23:06
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I think determining all the factions is too much. It's a bottom-top set, right? So that should really not be our major concern until we've done quite a bit of work determining the mechanical properties. Also, to get us started with the "talking about ideas" portion: - I don't think this is a token set. Husk is a very cool token mechanic, sure, but for the most part it's the only one we all seem to have agreed on. - I really want to push for a multiplayer focused set here for a variety of reasons. A lot of new players (including myself, relatively speaking) play Commander first and foremost, and experience the rotating format mostly through limited events ... especially pre-release two-headed events. Multiplayer draft has really only been attempted 3 times in all of magic's history, which means it has a lot open design space and pairs well with Commander oriented designers. - Momentum is our strongest mechanic, and I think we should work on that one before we take anything else for granted. I want to include monger in this set so badly, and I'm lowkey bitter that no one talked about it except for for grammar reasons, but I'm willing to table it if it means really carving out a piece of the color pie for a mechanic people seem really fond of. I feel like once we really get a base place to work from, other mechanics both old and new will click into place.
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Jul 21, 2020 01:57
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Personally I feel like sacrificing is a cool subtheme, but that as a focal point of a set it is more about a gameplay style than say, Kaladesh's artifact theme or Inistrad's graveyard theme. Specifically, those places are just new zones to work in, and giving them to new colors gives them new zones to play in, whereas sacrifice to me isn't so much a new space to play in as it is a way to play. Not that it's impossible, but I know a lot of people who don't really play sacrifice decks because sacrificing permanents isn't something they like doing (which you'd never hear about say, playing a land.) Not that I'm completely opposed, but I think I'd have to see some really solid evidence that a sacrifice theme could feel at home for someone who only enjoys playing in the Bant range. ... That said, if we do keep a sacrifice theme going, I happen to know a mechanic that uses silver, which isn't a creature, I admit (which is what comes to mind for me when I think sacrifice) but would be a self creating sacrifice outlet that could work in whatever colors you wanted it to. Something to consider.
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Jul 21, 2020 08:27
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President Ark posted:I think before we get so specific we should probably work out what kind of factions we want in our set (shards, wedges, guilds (ally/enemy/both?)) and how much focus we want each faction to have on its mechanic and how distinct from each other they should be - on the stronger end, something like alara or ravnica where faction = mechanic colors, and on the weaker end, tarkir or ixalan, where the mechanics show up in colors and it's not as important to be in All Of Those Colors for decks of that faction. I usually love wedge, but seeing as Ikoria just gave us a wedge set, I actually think that coming up with like, new wedge identities and new tri-lands and the like is sort of a mistake in the making. As a commander player I like 3 colors though, so might I suggest a return to the shards? Shards haven't been touched in a long time in a standard set iirc, and are pretty cool and deserve a return. Making it a softer shard set (like how Ikoria has been a softer wedge set) is my vote too, but not for any reasons I just think it's neat. Lack of Bear posted:Maybe we should vote on wedges vs shards vs pairs. Seconded itsmekidney fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 07:50
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Anshu posted:One idea I've been playing with in the past couple of days is the idea of creating ten factions, each shard opposed by a wedge, like so: I've played with the idea of Shards & wedges a few times, but yeah, I think you end up with a very diluted card pool. Especially if we go for a strong color identity like the latest Ravnica block (which beginning with new mechanics sort of implies, to me), it gets messy very fast.
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Jul 23, 2020 21:04
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Anshu posted:PMush, could you repost the results of the previous poll regarding the original mechanics? Also tell us what mimic was.
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Jul 26, 2020 06:03
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PMush Perfect posted:I’m concerned we might not have enough entries, but I’d totally be cool with a contrast where each entry is a faction with a specific shard, whatever mix of flavor and mechanics feels right. Then each shard gets individual votes, and we can tweak the flavor and setting after the fact to make it all fit together. Are you saying like an Esper contest, a Naya (momentum) contest, etc?
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Jul 27, 2020 02:42
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Coincidentally, I did have an idea for Momentum (I'm calling it Galvanize at the moment.) So my idea is to create a mercantile plane, I think I've talked about it before? I don't actually know what that means for most of the shards, or really for any of the shards that aren't Naya, but I was thinking that Naya could represent a sort of commoner's revolution flavored by the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, etc etc. One of the things that always irks me about a lot of fantasy works is the idea that the (non-undead) nobility are the good guys and the best guys, so this runs directly counter to that. Even though I want to include monger in the set, I like to think Naya is a little too wild to really get in on the ground floor of the silver token game. Anyway, here are my cards. I'd like to find art that isn't so blatantly Russian propaganda, but I was having a hell of a time finding it.   
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Jul 29, 2020 04:36
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Anshu posted:I think you're wrong that RGW is too "wild" for monger to fit; I whipped up these three as concepts: These are neat (though costed a bit wonky) but I want to bring up that monger cards necessarily need to have costs other than tapping. This is because activating an ability that taps the card essentially guarantees that the card's owner will activate the ability on their upkeep with priority, since failing to do so means that another player will get to activate that ability to keep that card tapped essentially forever. It gets weirder if you have two monger cards, as you'll activate one on your upkeep only to have the next player in the turn order activate the next one in response. I want to take this time to give sort of a Monger Primer. Fortunately for us there are a few ways to keep non-tap abilities from getting out of control. A few examples*:   These two cards have built in self-destructs.   These cards force you to pay additional costs and essentially handle it sort of like spellshapers. I like the discard idea a lot more than the sacrifice feature, but both are valid.  Flailing manticore here can be boosted by anyone, but can also be killed by anyone, making boosting it a sort of arms race. This method is fun mostly because it forces people to spend huge amounts of mana in order to deal such as 3 damage. On my own monger cards, I liked to use hybrid mana for the costs (specifically the 2/color variant), mostly because I wanted anyone to be able to activate the abilities even if they weren't playing those colors, but again, that's sort of a personal thing. *None of these examples are what people consider "good" cards, and when people make their own monger cards I recommend costing them and their effects a little more aggressively.
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Jul 29, 2020 18:18
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Zurai posted:You're right that they need costs in addition to/in place of tapping, but doesn't the controller have the first opportunity to respond to anything happening on their turn? In other words, they can hold priority and tap the second one in response to the first, etc. It's been a while since I actively played Magic, so I might be misremembering the rules or they might have changed on me. You have priority for the first tap, I believe, but then the next player has priority to respond? To be honest, it's a bit of a headache, which is why it's better to leave tapping out of it. On that note, here are some more cards I wanted to submit. First off are these penguins.   Ever since I saw Yu-Gi-Oh's Penguin Soldier as a kid, I've been pretty into the idea of little penguin warriors. Avens are my favorite creatures in Magic, and little penguin avens are just so cute! I understand that Penguins do not inhabit Russia, but this is a magic world so why the heck not. Also, note that when you make gold cards, cards sharing an ally color can work within two different decks, while cards sharing an enemy color will only fit into one. Whether they'll be good in decks not matching the intended shard is another story. Okay, time for the next one.  I'm a firm believer in the "rule of three" that Magic has been doing with planeswalkers for a while. I noticed the trend in Eldraine (though it's probably older than that) of having 3 planeswalkers per set; two returned, one new. In my theoretical "revolution" set, Samut is the absolute perfect choice for a returning planeswalker: She's been Naya before, she's seen and fought against tyrannical government, and she's not overexposed the way say, the Gatewatch is.  This doesn't belong to any particular shard (though it's flavored as anti-revolutionary), but the Czar tank is a really cool piece of dumb history so I thought I'd include it here. itsmekidney fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jul 29, 2020 |
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Jul 29, 2020 19:18
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Jade Rider posted:I'm not really that enthused with the mercantile/revolution theme. It just doesn't feel fantasy enough for my tastes. I do think this is an issue we risk running into if we push the "literal images of communist propaganda" angle too hard. I do want to suggest though that class struggle isn't an inherently modern idea, and if we are careful to include images of classic and ancient Russian mythology and intrigue, I think we can still manage to make the theme feel properly fantasy. Semi-related, I wanted to keep posting Naya stuff exclusively but it feels like I might as well just post this. I've been looking for inspiration art based on the "Russian revolution" theme, and ended up with some just like generally neat stuff based on Russian mythology and culture (as well as a picture of Rasputin using lightning magic.):           
itsmekidney fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 06:50
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Lack of Bear posted:What if it was just a cute animal set? Working class revolution vs fluffy doggo, truly the toughest decision I've ever had to make
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Jul 30, 2020 19:00
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Anshu posted:I was joking. Revolutionary pets sounds like an unset. To invoke "Death of the Author", I think people might end up liking your joke idea. I'm not the biggest fan of Animal Farm set myself, but oh well. President Ark posted:i still like the idea of a faction of weird bug monsters that reanimate their own shed exoskeletons though, sounds like a fun way to do husk I've always been thinking of Husk more or less like this, and insect tribal having been pretty strictly Golgari up to this point, it could be neat to see it in Grixis. Or perhaps husk is actually Jund? This is one of those things that gets complicated when we aren't too clear on being top-down or bottom-up in our set design.
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Jul 31, 2020 03:08
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PMush Perfect posted:There are so many good ideas. I especially dig Husk as literal husks. I have arguments against Revolutionaries as well even though it was my own idea) and they're as follows: - Animal Revolutionaries, and especially cute animal revolutionaries, will never carry the amount of gravitas needed to make this set work. Revolutions are bloody and cruel as well as heroic, and I honestly think having a puppy execute a kitty is in pretty bad taste. - How were we really planning on making the different types of nobility and bougie immediately recognizable and iconic? It's a complicated thing to get right, and while Magic has an entire team of artists they can hire to paint a complicated and relatively new world, we don't have such luxuries. - A continuation of that last idea is that I'm seriously struggling to find art that would work. The stuff I presented earlier was cool and like, could work, but we need a hell of a lot more than that, and there's surprisingly little out there. SO, my current suggestion is that we make a plane with cute animals and maybe not even worry about the story; we can treat it like a Modern Masters or an M21 set. Then, we can bring back everyone's favorite planeswalking dog Mowu and he can wear a hat.
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Aug 4, 2020 10:13
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AJ_Impy posted:I’m sure an Ainok from Tarkir has sparked up at some point. I don't know. We still don't have an aven planeswalker card even though they've been mainstays since Dominaria.
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Aug 5, 2020 06:57
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I have a big theory style post to talk about on how to make this set, but I want to first post these commons, just because it's been a long time since we've posted a card. Mark Rosewater wrote in an article once that the commons are the most important part of every set, and should tell of the deck strategies all on their own.      And also this uncommon... 
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Aug 7, 2020 08:49
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Okay, so I'm going to talk theory a little bit. I'm sort of winging it at the moment, so bare with me; I'll probably be a bit ranty but what can you do. I want to begin by talking about Guilds of Ravnica. GRN isn't a shard set like the one we're making, but it is a set with 5 clans all identifiable by unique mechanics, and also it's a very good set in terms of limited play. Allow me to show you a couple of the mono-white commons in GRN.    Commons are actually really important to any set; just ask Mark Rosewater: Mark Rosewater posted:The heart of a set lives in the common cards. They are going to make up the vast majority of the cards. As I often say, "If the theme of your set isn't in common, it isn't your theme." Guilds of Ravnica has two guilds that include white. Those guilds are Boros, with the Mentor mechanic, and Selesnya with the Convoke mechanic. What I think is very important to talk about is the similarity of these two guilds. While they don't share a mechanic, they absolutely share themes. In this case, both of those colors desire tokens, green in order to build up to big Convoke payoffs, and Boros in order to provide more attackers that key off each other. By keeping the mechanics separate, these two guilds do not feel particularly similar, yet their reliance on the same stuff allows the designers to save valuable design space and create a better limited environment by creating cards that cater to both.    In the black commons we have the Dimir mechanic Surveil and the Golgari mechanic Undergrowth. A curious change here from white, however, is that while the white commons featured only two mentor cards and two convoke cards, in black you have an entire 3 surveil cards (and a whole 4 in blue). My belief (though this is conjecture) is that surveil is more prominent because no one running those colors doesn't want to stack their deck a bit. In a weird way, Golgari and Dimir share surveil here; they both want to use it as a pseudo-scry, but both of them want something very different from it. Golgari benefits specifically from throwing creatures away to pump their other spells with Undergrowth, while Dimir, being the surveil guild, cares about surveilling by name and turns surveiling from a twiddling action to one with immediate payoffs. It's simplistic but it's brilliant: the Dimir drafter will snatch up all the surveil cards immediately, but if there are still some lying around, a Golgari drafter isn't going to say no. So! My personal belief is that for this set to work, we need to talk specifically about how our mechanics feed into end-game strategies, and how those end-game strategies intertwine. Here's a little something to keep in mind.
This means that, if we want our set to work, we need to talk about what will make our mechanics really tick. What's the end game of these mechanics and how are we going to get there? In GRN, the goals of each of the guilds are different, while the getting their portion shares things in common. I believe we can get something similar done within 3 colors, though it does end up a bit more complicated with that extra color. Okay, now for something semi-unrelated: Again, I really want to focus on Naya first because establishing these two answers can tell us the best mechanics and identities for its nearest neighbors, Bant (Green/White) and Jund (Red/Green). So... Let's do it. Naya is, I think people agree with me (but feel free to tell me how wrong I am), our momentum mechanic. Momentum is very cool, and supports creatures that attack and block. I keep wanting to think of it as being sort of like Boros with an emphasis on attacking, but the blocking aspect of the mechanic leads me to realize I might be wrong about this. The one thing that Momentum really likes is combat: It likes when creatures turn sideways and hit each other. This actually puts it at odds with enchanters, which wants to tap the enchanters to create tokens that also don't attack, and it arguably plays poorly with bloodrite, which wants things to die more outside of combat. I can't believe I'm saying this, but is it possible that Unfinished might be nothing like haunt, and is maybe actually a Bant mechanic? If Unfinished works when creatures die and powers up the creatures we already have, it ends up well suited for combat and thus has some friends in Naya's WG. Husk is another mechanic that cares about things being in the graveyard, and so it could be the Jund mechanic we've been looking for. Husk being insects fits Jund pretty well too, so it's a win win. With that, I suggest we allow the "enchanters" mechanic to work in Esper, which will have an "enchantments matter" subtheme with Unfinished, while Bloodrite could go into Grixis, which shares the word "sacrifice" with Enchanters, now that I really look at it (I don't like this connection that implies both mechanics would be played together, since enchanters are probably too messy to have in large numbers, but this is all speculative). Bloodrite would then share the "creatures belong in the grave" aspect of Husk, which brings us full circle. So my hastily thought out proposition is this: Bant: with the key mechanic Unfinished, Bant relies on skirmishes that eventually lead to a big "voltron" esque creature card. Esper: with the key mechanic Enchanter, Esper uses lots of small enchantments that have big payoffs, and abhor's combat. Grixis: Grixis uses the key mechanic Bloodrite, sacrificing creatures in order to trigger devastating affects. Jund: with the key mechanic Husk, Jund uses graveyard strategies to cheat multiple creatures out of a single card. Naya: with the key mechanic momentum, Naya attempts to overwhelm with combat intensive ramp. PS: Alternatively, Husk could do a "vanilla tokens matters" theme, which would benefit from creating creature tokens, something that bloodrite will be hungry for. PSPS: I actually think Enchanters and Bloodrite, while pretty neat, aren't actually mechanics so much as descriptive terms for affects, and could be a bit confusing. I recommend including them, but also designing new mechanics that do something specific while working in the shard's same wheelhouse.
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Aug 8, 2020 23:54
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I'm good
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Aug 20, 2020 20:12
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PMush Perfect posted:Looking like we may need to have at least one runoff secondary vote, but it's much too early to say without many responses. I'll leave it up for a couple of days and we can go from there. Is there anything we should be doing in the meantime?
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Aug 25, 2020 19:52
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Cute animals is a good set theme specifically because it lets us reveal what sort of archetypes to play from mechanics rather than from a narrative. A recent-ish example of a bottom-up set design, Kaladesh, is a great example of this. Kaladesh has draft archetypes based on styles of play, but doesn't have 10 distinct factions with leaders. This is good to me because it makes it easy to just design good cards, not having to worry about finding art that looks like the correct faction, featuring the correct creature type, etc etc. So... I guess my theme for Naya is "cute animalfolk." They don't have a clear philosophical identity but they have a mechanical identity of aggressive and overwhelming attackers, a sort of combination of white weenies and goblins (minus the creature type) in a way.            
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Aug 28, 2020 22:22
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I'm a little alarmed to find out about mirror winning because it's basically made to pair with twin, which I think will lead to people trying to draft both at the same time. I can't think of any world where the twin mechanics and the mirror win conditions aren't essentially the same.
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Aug 30, 2020 08:28
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Honestly, I'm all for revisiting the idea of the Revolutionary Set. I think it's good, and that's not just because it was my own idea. That said, I don't think I agree with your factions. While those factions make sense historically, in Magic we only have so much design space to differentiate a faction from another. Especially because this set is top-down, if you can't demonstrate it in a single picture, it might as well not exist. I've been really struggling to figure out how a newcomer would be able to differentiate between petty and grand bourgeois and nobility, which I think will all end up blending together into "wealthy." I have a few ideas, but most importantly I just want to stress the idea that we need to work in big, broad strokes.
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Sep 8, 2020 21:45
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Here's my own ideas. They're divorced from mechanics right now but only because this is my first draft. The Proles: This is the first faction, and the only one I'm dead set on, really. Here we have a group of serfs who are fighting for revolutionary freedom. I don't know if I've brought this up before but honestly, they don't have to be Russian. The French and to a much lesser extent the US also had violent uprisings, and if your theme is less "Russia" than it is "revolution" you actually end up with a lot to work with. The Nobles: Our nobility group is the main villains of the story. I feel a natural want to make them vampires, but also Ixilan did "Nobility as vampires" so incredibly well that it feels like we're stepping on grounds that have been done better. One classic trope I sort of like is the idea that the nobles are in league with devils, having sold their souls for power. Classic. Foreign Agents: In real world revolutions, there's literally always this group of foreigners who are getting their grubby paws in there. I like this idea because the foreign agents can be very different from the Nobility in terms of being very sneaky and underhanded. They're spies, after all. These guys would need blue-black of course. The Fey: This is a wild card, but one thing that's very important in any Magic set is the feeling of a magic world, and the Revolution is modern enough that it doesn't really feel like it's there. Russia specifically has a ton of folklore that could be interpreted into the set in big ways, and a lot of it is very fun. A Magic equivalent of Baba Yaga would be a very cool but also sort of classic fantasy thing to include, and could rope in players who didn't want to do the old set. The umm, Stalinists: At first I was hesitant to include this, because I think they might be tough to differentiate from the Proles... But actually I think they're pretty different. Specifically, their tactics could be different in such a way as to make it clear that these guys aren't actually buddies. I know I already suggested that the nobles sold their souls to devils, but it'd be way better if these guys did. A group of people who perhaps caused the revolution by allying with devils, searching for an internal power coup but getting swept up in evil, feels like a pretty classic trope of revolution gone bad. And the leader could be an immortal lich Rasputin, now that I think about it. Also though, this is, and I can't stress this enough, extremely top-down design. Bottom-Up design would have us design the cards in more detail before we even talked about this, imo.
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Sep 8, 2020 23:14
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