Author Topic: Legends of an Eastern Wonderland - A Magic: the Gathering Touhou set (take two)  (Read 13958 times)

KennyMan666

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If that sounds familiar, you might remember that I back in 2013 posted a thread about it. I figured it was better to post a whole new thread instead of bumping a four year old one, given how many changes that have occured since. Both in my set and in actual MtG.

I've been sporadically working on the set since I last posted there, and in recent weeks have really gotten back into it. So I figure it's time to post about it again. In the time that's passed, Magic has gone through some mechanical shifts, some keywords and mechanics have been phased out in favour of others - and I've done an attempt to reflect this in the set. So, some of the major changes that's been done (some of these'll make sense later if you didn't read the old thread):

Intimidate has been replaced with Menace, and River Sanzu now gives Menace rather than unblockable.
Immortal has been reworked to no longer use regeneration (as regeneration's been phased out in favour of making creatures indestructible until end of turn - but the new Immortal doesn't use that), and more creatures have it because it was silly to just have three creatures with it naturally so I found some excuses to give it to more creatures.
More creatures with Faithbound have been introduced, and it's now represented in all colours to a better degree. Used to be that the two-coloured Suwako was the only representative for blue and red Faithbound - that's no longer the case, as each colour now has at least one monocoloured Faithbound Deity.
Certain keywords that occurred only on a few cards have been given to more cards.
Artifact creatures used to be colourless. They now have colours. Some artifacts have been given colours as well. This might change back, but I kinda like the coloured artifacts.
Made some promo cards, that are copies of regular cards but with alternate fancy frames and art. Mostly because I found cool pictures I wanted to use.
Probably some other things I did since 2013 but forgot that I did!
And most obviously, the cards no longer use the old frames - I finally cracked and switched to M15 frames, because as much as I like the old frames, I felt they were constraining me and everything looks more unified now (but they do have one issue that the old frames didn't have). For instance, any colourless non-artifact card now uses the Devoid card frame, though the Devoid keyword is not used. The colourless mana symbol is used where it makes sense, but never in any casting cost.

Starting Monday I'm going to do what I did in the last thread, which is make a post that concerns itself primarily with one colour and its mechanics per day for a week, and see what's happened with that colour since. So more on the new Immortal then. For now, let's just get a little refresher on what I've been calling the spell synergy trio of keywords:

(cards posted at 75% size - click 'em for fullsize, which is too big for inline posting, I feel. Most cards should still be readable at this size, except maybe those with an unreasonable amount of text)

More cheap auras granting common effects have been introduced to fuel Spell circle. All evergreen creature abilities now come in cheap aura form as well.

Additionally, the other mechanics that are featured in all colours - Faithbound and Shrines:


Cards have been made for all the new HSiFS characters, but they're not done yet - some lack images due to there not being enough art of them yet, and anything from the latter half of the game lacks flavour text due to translations not being done yet. A whole bunch of other cards also lack flavour text for a variety of reasons including but not limited to laziness from my part.

So I'm hoping some of you that used to post in the other thread and give me valuable feedback are still around - or that there's some new people around that like Magic and want to give me even more feedback!

I should emphasize that this set has been designed to be balanced with itself, rather than with the rest of Magic - it's not intended to be played with cards from other sets, but at the same time, costs and stuff should of course be comparable to what they'd be in real Magic, and obviously things should not be horribly broken or woefully underpowered for what they are if they, theoretically, were to be played together with... Modern, I guess.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2017, 12:55:30 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

KennyMan666

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Well then - let's just get around to our first stop on the colour pie. Before I start, though, a disclaimer: Not too much thought has gone into card rarities, and some card haven't been changed from their default common rarity. Do not take them as representative of a card's power. In general, I've considered early game bosses commons, mid-to-late game bosses uncommon, and final/extra bosses and main characters rare, but those aren't always 100% true (and with the exception of three special cards, mythic only appears on a special type of card). I've done some attempts at changing rarity on things based on how strong the card is, but I'm not positive I've always hit the right one. Feel free to suggest changed rarities on cards. Another thing that I'm sure I don't have 100% down is mana costs - please let me know if I've over/undercosted something.

Some cards have just an asterisk as their flavour text for the time being - this is because I haven't found any good flavour text for them yet. Taking suggestions!

White
Starting with white is appropriate not only because it's the first colour in the order of the Magic colours, but also because it's where the main heroine of the Touhou series exists, which seems like a good place to start getting into the specifics.

So, yeah, that's Fantasy Nature. But I'm not sure I want it to be like that anymore. It was a pretty early designed card. I do want Reimu to have something special given that she's the main character, though.

Reimu has some spells as well:

Okay, that's Fantasy Nature. It's part of a cycle. I'll be getting back to that later, because as you can see on Evil Sealing Circle, I'm using Entwine in this set. While I have my own mechanics, I'm of course reusing a few. So here's a list of all the non-evergreen keyworded mechanics I'm using in this set:
- Annihilator
- Changeling
- Entwine
- Fortify
- Proliferate
- Protection
- Split second
- Suspend (though only sort of, more on that when we get to blue and you-know-who)
- Totem armor

I figure I'll go over my reasons for each as I get to them, so... Protection is first up, and there's not that much to say about it. And when I started making the set and included Protection, it was still evergreen, so... y'know. At the time there wasn't anything out of the ordinary to include it and it's just remained since. Entwine is there to allow multipurpose spells. So these days Entwine spells are written out as bulleted lists with the options on the cards, but I don't know if I like that... the option exists to replace Entwine with Escalate, if I want to start doing spells with more modes. The possibility will remain.

But let's get into the entirely new mechanics for the set. Apart from the spell ones, there are five new major keywords, each one being primary in one colour and secondary in another. What that largely means is that, obviously, they show up on more cards of the primary colour, but also that only the primary colour can, where it applies, provide the mechanic to other cards, and for multicoloured spells that don't have both of the keyword's colours, it can only be featured to any degree if one of the colours is the primary one. So without further ado, here's white's keyword, the one I mentioned yesterday - Immortal.


It was one of the first keywords I made for the set, and for the longest time it was only something three creatures had naturally, and about two or three other cards could make other things immortal. It was recently expanded to include more creatures. I believe it's the one that's gone through the most revisions, as well - even not counting the original version, Revive, which was completely idiotic. Immortal used to read "Whenever this creature is dealt damage, regenerate it" - automatically activated Regeneration was the vision for the mechanic from the start, the drawback being that you couldn't choose to regenerate something when it got hit by a destroy effect or something of the sort. But Regenerate has been phased out in favour of making things indestructible until end of turn, and for a short while, I had Immortal do exactly that, tap the creature and make it indestructible. But I didn't like that version, so I changed it into "When this creature dies, exile it instead of putting it into your graveyard. Return it to the battlefield at the beginning of your next upkeep." The drawback then was that it would have summoning sickness when returning, plus any auras attached to it would fall off, but it also meant getting rid of it permanently required exiling it - and it also would cause something I dubbed the "Faithbounce", which could get a bit silly. So I put the condition about only triggering if the creature had been dealt damage this turn back in since I realized I could do that without making it sound really stupid, and the only thing I'm on the fence about now is if the combined drawbacks of only triggering on damage and also coming back with summoning sickness makes it too weak - which, of course, would be solved by having it gain haste until end of turn when coming back.

So, either way, here's the rest of the white immortals.


(oh, and there's the little issue with the M15 template for MSE - text sometimes overlaps the P/T box and/or the foil circle. I haven't gotten around to fixing that on all cards where it's happened yet.)
The hermits and Tenshi were recently given Immortal, because I figure it's close enough. Tenshi used to have Protection from Youkai rather than Immortal, and she made slightly more sense then, so she might go through some minor additional redesigning. At this point, I should mention that save for a handful of Artifact creatures, all creatures in the set have the supertype Human or Youkai. That... hasn't ended up being as important as I envisioned it to be originally, though.

And given Spell circle, every basic mechanic needs to come in Aura form as well, so:


Now, as I mentioned, the keywords are secondary in another colour. This one is secondary in red, for, well, obvious reasons:

Her effect used to trigger on regenerating, but that isn't a thing any more, and obviously can't Spell circle enters the battlefield effects. It was changed a little, I think she used to deal 1 damage per regeneration, but I added some fire. I might end up changing that again, though.

And then there's one more red creature that got Immortal, who... is a little bit of a stretch, but hey, she exists in the canon:

Designed to be a mirrored pair with Junko, but I don't actually know what Chang'e's ability is supposed to do yet. Taking suggestions.

So let's go over the other mechanics we saw in the posted cards.

Split second was another keyword I expanded recently. Kaguya used to only have Flash, but Split second wasn't featured on enough cards, and I mean - "manipulation of the instantaneous". If that's not split second, I don't know what is. For obvious reasons, it primarily shows up in blue, but is featured on at least one card in all colours. In white, it shows up on three more cards:


Both flash and split second are, for this set, flavoured somewhere inbetween time magic and going really, really fast.

Faithbound I'm going to get more into later, but there's one more white Faithbound creature, who also has the distinction of being the only creature in the set with native Faithbound that doesn't have the Deity creature type (which is entirely because I didn't have any pure white Faithbound creatures - now there's Junko, but I think it still fits):


As I mentioned before, Fantasy Nature is part of a cycle - there's a couple of them, and here's all the other white cards that are part of cycles, all of which except one are in all colours:



Some new things here - Tribal, Proliferate, and... the untap symbol. Okay. Tribal is actually no longer a thing in actual Magic. Which is a strong argument for no longer using it, but in this set, it only ever exists in the form of specifically Wizard spells - and that's something I've tied into my use of Proliferate. In Scars of Mirrodin, Proliferate represented Phyrexia's glistening oil continuously corrupting things. In this set, it's more about amplifying magic. This set uses +1/+1 counters, which I guess can be thought of as the Power items in the Touhou games. So Proliferating would be... powering up more, I guess. Mostly it's being used because it's a fantastic mechanic and I love it, so I found a way to design it in. I could be convinced to drop calling the spells "Tribal", but for the time being, Wizard spells need to be a thing. I guess it's not entirely impossible to just call them Instant/Sorcery - Wizard, without Tribal. As you may gather from this, and from her theme of using all elements, Patchouli has ended up being kind of a special card in this set. But more on that later!

And then there's the untap symbol. It's featured on the five cards of the fairy cycle and one additional card. I should seriously just make them tap instead and adjust the mana costs accordingly.

Last but not least - Planeswalkers! Because of course there's Planeswalkers. Each colour has one character that I've chosen for the role of Planeswalker... and they each have two Planeswalker cards. Yes, that means this set has ten walkers, which I fully, entirely, 100% admit is too much, but it happened and now that's what it's like. So each one comes in two versions of the character - one monocoloured and one where a second colour has found its way into the character, for one reason or another. Something I eventually noticed had happened entirely on accident was the way these actually ended up the same colour combinations as the keywords - but in the opposite colour order from the primary/secondary split of those. It happens. Representing white is The Saintly White Planeswalker - Byakuren.



Well, this is getting long, so let me just close out this post with a selection of some more white cards. Enjoy!




Okay, so there's one new mechanic in there - Totem armor. It's in because I adore the mechanic and in a set where one of the subthemes is "auras matter", it was a total no-brainer. So there you go. Also, upon reading the Totem armor reminder text again, I notice "Aura" is capitalized in it, so I've gone ahead and made it capitalized in the Spellbind text now as well.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2017, 04:34:02 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

So I'm hoping some of you that used to post in the other thread and give me valuable feedback are still around - or that there's some new people around that like Magic and want to give me even more feedback!

I should emphasize that this set has been designed to be balanced with itself, rather than with the rest of Magic - it's not intended to be played with cards from other sets, but at the same time, costs and stuff should of course be comparable to what they'd be in real Magic, and obviously things should not be horribly broken or woefully underpowered for what they are if they, theoretically, were to be played together with... Modern, I guess.

Hello, that's me, I suppose. It's been a while since I've played a reasonable amount of Magic, but I've been keeping up with someone who streams it a lot so I think I still have a decent idea of good card design and, at least, a solid understanding of how the game mechanics work together.

Modern (well, constructed play in general, honestly) is a notable hole in my knowledge, though. As I go through each card, I'll be judging things through the eyes of a Limited player.

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3/3 for 4 with pro black and an extremely powerful ability that will never happen. I'd pick it.

Writing out "Reimu Hakurei" each time makes the ability a bit of a mouthful. I think, because she's legendary, you can use her given name instead, if you don't like "it"? I'd probably also stitch the second sentence back in to the first just to make it clearer to any insufferable rules lawyers out there that both things have to happen at the same time. Something like "[...] counters from Reimu and Reimu gets +7/+7 until [...]".

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Ah, a Constructed-only card. That's fine.
Well, I say that, but even as a player used to writing off "5 mana do-nothing enchantments", the payoff on this is pretty alright. I'd maybe pick it if I could really trust the set to give me the lifegain I need in later picks.

Also, while I'm here, does every card need flavour text, even the ones which already have three paragraphs of rules text? This one at least fits the card's mechanics well though, instead of merely just fitting the knowledge I already have as a Touhou fan, like some of the later cards.

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Holy moly! This card is nutso!

It seems like pretty excellent removal, even in the context of Constructed. In the context of drafting, this card is set-defining. I have a huge reason to want to play white if there's going to be 5-6 of these going around the table.

Also, can I entwine off a spellcard-discard? Not to say that the other three ways to play it aren't already good enough...

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Immortal.


Well, it's difficult to judge Immortal (and therefore also Eirin, who's all about it) right now... it seems extremely powerful, but there are weaknesses that the set could be designed to exploit. I mean, I was just finished with a card that deals with two immortal creatures quite handily. I'll be back for you.

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and the only thing I'm on the fence about now is if the combined drawbacks of only triggering on damage and also coming back with summoning sickness makes it too weak

I mean, those are the only two things stopping it from being functionally identical to "Indestructible" - you can't fly too close to that sun if you want to put the keyword on more than a couple of cards. Without playing with it myself, I think Immortal is already fine as is, my worry would be that it might need to get scaled back.

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So, either way, here's the rest of the white immortals.



Kaguya's fine. Well, maybe there's a way to make her break Constructed over your knee, but it's too conditional for me to worry about.
Junko's nutso-busto but very hard to cast. Unlike Fantasy Nature, where I'm not sure if I'd first-pick it and build around it, I'd definitely do so for Junko - any game I can play her in is a won game.
Futo and Seiga are both astonishingly powerful on defense. Futo is one extra mana for your already-great Kitchen Finks, but with two major upsides (triggers on all creatures, comes back more than once) and Seiga is a cheapish (pseudo-)invincible blocker who pulls off the ol' block-and-tap real good for you. 3 huge creatures blocked every 2 turns, no questions asked*.
Tenshi's a 5 mana 6/5. Good start! She's pseudo-invincible. Okay!? She tells the red player that their time to win the game ends the next time you untap your lands. Yeah??
Miko is a potentially big beefy creature for a moderatly high price. Her ability is extremely powerful, but a bit tricky to trigger. She will never beat any of these other creatures (without enlisting help from the other creatures in your deck, anyway) because she doesn't have evasion or trample.

*MY HUGE POST MUST LITERALLY BE PERFECT EDIT: whoops, actually it's only one per turn, but you can forgo one to get two on the next turn

So this is what I mean by "Immortal is maybe too strong, also the power level of your set is higher than normal". It's still early days, so maybe your set is perfectly balanced with itself, but any one of these creatures would be a force of nature (Miko and Kaguya would merely be worrying) if I saw them in the average Limited game.

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At this point, I should mention that save for a handful of Artifact creatures, all creatures in the set have the supertype Human or Youkai. That... hasn't ended up being as important as I envisioned it to be originally, though.

Actually, yeah... if it's not serving a gameplay purpose, then you should probably change it. Most of these characters aren't really "human", right?

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And given Spell circle, every basic mechanic needs to come in Aura form as well, so:


Seems like a weird thing to put on an aura, even in an aura-centered set. This is basically just a 3 mana enchant-aura that says "No effect. Totem Armor." because it falls off when you revive them.

Well, if there was some way to put it back on each time (and good luck finding the rules wording for that) then this card would be fine and perhaps even weak. The keyword is strong, but the drawbacks of immortal are even stronger when the silver bullets that get you get two cards off the table instead of just one.

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I mean, this card is great, but now my sense of value has been shifted so much higher and I've seen the immortal blockers she'll be running in to every turn, so I dunno.

Also, spell circle and immortal just do not play nicely together. And with this card in particular, it feels really bad. You want to throw her in to combat every single turn, but you just can't because the auras will fall off when she dies. Luckily she's still okay on her own, so you probably wouldn't suit her up in them to begin with.

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Designed to be a mirrored pair with Junko, but I don't actually know what Chang'e's ability is supposed to do yet. Taking suggestions.

Who?
Well, Junko is nutso-busto, like I said, so if you want something that good and mirrored with Junko's ability, it'd be "Make a X/1 with haste and maybe even trample that dies at end of turn and you may deal X damage to a creature". I'm not sure if making ball lightning creatures and blasting dudes is what Chang'e does, though.

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Split second was another keyword I expanded recently. Kaguya used to only have Flash, but Split second wasn't featured on enough cards


Just stepping in to say "hell yeah".

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I like Aya and Hatate. I think Aya might be the slightly better of the two? I like hitting people in the face with my fliers.
Illusionary Dominance is hard to evaluate. Instant first strike is a dangerous place to start with your combat trick, but then it's pretty expensive and doesn't pump up the numbers at all. Even so, this might be too good on defense?

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Huh. A plain old flying lifelinker feels like a breath of fresh air after exploring this alien set.
Well, this card is powerful. Anyone with shrines and white mana would want to pick it in Limited. But it dies when it's killed, which seems like a downside these days.

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Oh, all of these are balanced. Weird.
I particularly like Merlin as the card that a Limited player will see and think "Ah, a 2/3 for 3 mana with no text. That's fine." and Sunny as two nice things for cheap (flying attacker, tapper) barely held together on a tiny body. A card that will feel great when you manage to squeeze tiny bits of value out of it.

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Whoop, the breath of fresh air's over, time to get strange again.

Rage Trilithon - The second Constructed-only card, it seems. Both Silence and Proliferate don't seem like effects I'm going to want frequently enough to include this card in my deck.
Life Spring Infinity - Seems... bad? Am I this desperate for life gain?
Virupaksa's Eyes - Hard to evaluate. Cards usually don't do this kind of thing any more these days.

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Saint:
The +1 is good. I bet the -2 won't be used very often. (+1 makes you unblockable, -2 can't be used on reaction, so it's not even that great)
Should the +1 say "You may"? I'm not sure what happens if you try to use a planeswalker ability with no valid targets.
Her ultimate is at the usual "doesn't quite win the game" power level. The fact that it only takes three turns to do it is slightly worrying, but she costs 5 mana and can't defend herself, so it's probably fine.

Monk:
Oh, the tribes are starting to matter after all.
These abilities are... dangerous. The +1 is balanced for one youkai, the -3 is fine up until I discard some huge youkai-griselbrand to a spellcard and then it's a Vintage Reanimator plan, and the ultimate... oh wait the ultimate is only lifegain. Lifegain never hurt anyone.

I hesitate to just call it broken, though. It's strong and exciting. The +1 seems like it might be backbreaking in Limited but that's kind of just what happens if you get lucky with a planeswalker that fits your deck in Limited.

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I like Konngara and Unzan. Unzan joins the delightful ranks of cards that say "I can't block" only for the response to be "I wasn't planning on that, actually"
The two auras... hm. Good auras always seem so inconsistent. You're either beating your opponent to death with your ludicrous unblockable monstrosity, or they laugh and blast your creature as the aura's being placed on them, or even afterwards sometimes. These cards are good auras, for all the good that does them.
I like Miracle Fruit and Ghost Clifford.


Whew, I really lost myself in this! Man, set design is so much more fun when I don't have to do any of the work.

So looking back on my post, I said I'd be back for what I think about Immortal, and it seems I think it's stronger than you do. All the immortal creatures were very powerful (e.g. Futo, who would be playable if she only came back once!) and the other cards have not yet convinced me that there's going to be plenty of answers to them to go around.

The mechanics you've chosen are all ones that I kind of like as well*, but all of them in addition to the spellcard-discarding-auras trick is a bit much, maybe?

Designing a set around auras... well, I brought it up earlier. It's hard. But this set seems alright so far. Don't give up, skeleton.

*bring back Storm (don't, though)
« Last Edit: August 15, 2017, 05:24:52 AM by Roonerspism »

KennyMan666

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    • One Piece: Pure Corruption
Yay, feedback. I'mma respond to some of that before I get around to posting about blue, since some things have actually changed since yesterday. The untap symbol isn't used anymore, Sunny now does her thing for W, T instead. Other things as they come up.

Writing out "Reimu Hakurei" each time makes the ability a bit of a mouthful. I think, because she's legendary, you can use her given name instead, if you don't like "it"? I'd probably also stitch the second sentence back in to the first just to make it clearer to any insufferable rules lawyers out there that both things have to happen at the same time. Something like "[...] counters from Reimu and Reimu gets +7/+7 until [...]".
[...]
Also, while I'm here, does every card need flavour text, even the ones which already have three paragraphs of rules text? This one at least fits the card's mechanics well though, instead of merely just fitting the knowledge I already have as a Touhou fan, like some of the later cards.
Text length is a problem on a number of cards. I've just been using MSE's CARDNAME function, but if only using the first name for legendaries is a thing that is done these days, that would definitely help. Removing flavour text on a number of cards is an option, and given that playing with this set is mostly theoretical at this point and would probably only ever be done in a digital setting where you'd have infinite access to all cards anyway, maybe I don't need to include the reminder text for my new keywords every time when they're long anyway...

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Holy moly! This card is nutso!

It seems like pretty excellent removal, even in the context of Constructed. In the context of drafting, this card is set-defining. I have a huge reason to want to play white if there's going to be 5-6 of these going around the table.

Also, can I entwine off a spellcard-discard? Not to say that the other three ways to play it aren't already good enough...
Spellcard is just an alternate casting cost, so yes, you can discard the cards instead of paying the regular mana cost and also pay the entwine cost. But perhaps this one needs to cost another mana. Also it's Uncommon now. :V

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I mean, those are the only two things stopping it from being functionally identical to "Indestructible" - you can't fly too close to that sun if you want to put the keyword on more than a couple of cards. Without playing with it myself, I think Immortal is already fine as is, my worry would be that it might need to get scaled back.
Remember that it only triggers if the creature has been dealt damage this turn, so any plain "destroy" effects would send them off to the graveyard.

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Kaguya's fine. Well, maybe there's a way to make her break Constructed over your knee, but it's too conditional for me to worry about.
Junko's nutso-busto but very hard to cast. Unlike Fantasy Nature, where I'm not sure if I'd first-pick it and build around it, I'd definitely do so for Junko - any game I can play her in is a won game.
Futo and Seiga are both astonishingly powerful on defense. Futo is one extra mana for your already-great Kitchen Finks, but with two major upsides (triggers on all creatures, comes back more than once) and Seiga is a cheapish (pseudo-)invincible blocker who pulls off the ol' block-and-tap real good for you. 3 huge creatures blocked every 2 turns, no questions asked*.
Tenshi's a 5 mana 6/5. Good start! She's pseudo-invincible. Okay!? She tells the red player that their time to win the game ends the next time you untap your lands. Yeah??
Miko is a potentially big beefy creature for a moderatly high price. Her ability is extremely powerful, but a bit tricky to trigger. She will never beat any of these other creatures (without enlisting help from the other creatures in your deck, anyway) because she doesn't have evasion or trample.
Futo, Seiga, Tenshi and Miko used to not have Immortal, and I don't think I actually adjusted their casting costs (or Seiga's ability cost) since. So those might do with some tweaking. Tenshi used to have Protection from Youkai rather than Immortal, so she'd just soak up damage from Youkai creatures (the flavour being that the bodies of celestials are poisonous to youkai), and was part of my "Immortal should go on more creatures" sweep. As she is now, maybe her ability needs her to tap as well.

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So this is what I mean by "Immortal is maybe too strong, also the power level of your set is higher than normal". It's still early days, so maybe your set is perfectly balanced with itself, but any one of these creatures would be a force of nature (Miko and Kaguya would merely be worrying) if I saw them in the average Limited game.
A higher than normal power level... kind of happens when almost every creature is legendary, y'know? That's also one of the reasons one of the subthemes is "auras matter" - when they're legendary, the idea becomes fewer but stronger creatures that you're also given incentive to power up, which is much the same reason equipment is a thing in this set too, but more on that when we get to artifacts.

Plus it's very easy to get carried away when making your own custom set. Sure, I could make this creature just a bear, but I could also make it do something cool.

Also, I mean, you're only seeing a selection of cards. There's some more basic things floating around as well. Take Kotohime, for instance - just a 3/3 with Vigilance for 3W. I suppose I'll eventually post "full spoilers" of the set (though this set is a bit of a perpetual work-in-progress anyway), so it can be looked at as a whole rather than just the mostly strong cards I choose to post for now that highlights the special mechanics of the set.

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Actually, yeah... if it's not serving a gameplay purpose, then you should probably change it. Most of these characters aren't really "human", right?
Well, I've typed as Human anything I could get away with - Lunarians are just humans from the moon, Hermits and Celestials are basically Humans But Better... essentially, I've typed as Human any character that is Human or Humans that turned into something that's not necessarily Youkai. Something that'll show up later is that I have ghosts that come from dead humans be Human Spirits, and things like poltergeists are Youkai Spirits.

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Seems like a weird thing to put on an aura, even in an aura-centered set. This is basically just a 3 mana enchant-aura that says "No effect. Totem Armor." because it falls off when you revive them.

Well, if there was some way to put it back on each time (and good luck finding the rules wording for that) then this card would be fine and perhaps even weak. The keyword is strong, but the drawbacks of immortal are even stronger when the silver bullets that get you get two cards off the table instead of just one.
The aura was made back when Immortal was auto-regeneration that triggered on damage, so the Immortal creatures would stick around on the battlefield. It's 100% a remnant from that, so I'm just going to make this card into an instant or sorcery that gives target creature Immortal until end of turn.

I did consider wording Immortal so that Auras stayed on creatures that were in the process of reviving, though. It's not off the table yet.

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Also, spell circle and immortal just do not play nicely together. And with this card in particular, it feels really bad. You want to throw her in to combat every single turn, but you just can't because the auras will fall off when she dies. Luckily she's still okay on her own, so you probably wouldn't suit her up in them to begin with.
So yeha same thing there, and her having spell circle is also a remnant from when Immortal didn't take her off the battlefield. So maybe she just needs a new ability entirely.

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Who?
Well, Junko is nutso-busto, like I said, so if you want something that good and mirrored with Junko's ability, it'd be "Make a X/1 with haste and maybe even trample that dies at end of turn and you may deal X damage to a creature". I'm not sure if making ball lightning creatures and blasting dudes is what Chang'e does, though.
Chang'e, that Lunarian who drank the Hourai elixir and her husband killed Junko's son so Junko hates her. And if Junko's that supremely broken, maybe she needs to get toned down a little first.

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Just stepping in to say "hell yeah".

I like Aya and Hatate. I think Aya might be the slightly better of the two? I like hitting people in the face with my fliers.
Illusionary Dominance is hard to evaluate. Instant first strike is a dangerous place to start with your combat trick, but then it's pretty expensive and doesn't pump up the numbers at all. Even so, this might be too good on defense?
Since yesterday, split second has actually been axed from the set. It didn't appear on enough cards to be relevant, and that's for when it's even relevant in the first place. Almost all instances of split second on creatures is now a simple flash instead, and on any spells where it might be relevant, I can just toss in a "can't be countered" instead (because really, that's what split second is in 95% of cases). Aya and Hatate have been redesigned as well - Aya's now a 2/1 with Flash, Flying and First Strike, whereas Hatate is a 2/2 with Flying and First Strike. Their old abilities used to be modeled after what they did in Double Spoiler, but it was really kind of questionable.

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Rage Trilithon - The second Constructed-only card, it seems. Both Silence and Proliferate don't seem like effects I'm going to want frequently enough to include this card in my deck.
Life Spring Infinity - Seems... bad? Am I this desperate for life gain?
Virupaksa's Eyes - Hard to evaluate. Cards usually don't do this kind of thing any more these days.
There's two reasons to want to proliferate in this set: Beefing up creatures with more +1/+1 counters, and more importantly, Shrines. Shrines will be explored more thorougly later.
Life spring... I don't know. It's a five-card cycle of the divine treasures and having something called "Life spring" not provide life gain seemed wrong.
Virupaksa's Eyes was just one of those basic mechanics on auras thing. Obviously, there's one of each colour, providing protection from its two enemy colours. I'm considering upping the cost on them by 1 and giving them Totem armor as well.

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Saint:
The +1 is good. I bet the -2 won't be used very often. (+1 makes you unblockable, -2 can't be used on reaction, so it's not even that great)
Should the +1 say "You may"? I'm not sure what happens if you try to use a planeswalker ability with no valid targets.
Her ultimate is at the usual "doesn't quite win the game" power level. The fact that it only takes three turns to do it is slightly worrying, but she costs 5 mana and can't defend herself, so it's probably fine.

Monk:
Oh, the tribes are starting to matter after all.
These abilities are... dangerous. The +1 is balanced for one youkai, the -3 is fine up until I discard some huge youkai-griselbrand to a spellcard and then it's a Vintage Reanimator plan, and the ultimate... oh wait the ultimate is only lifegain. Lifegain never hurt anyone.

I hesitate to just call it broken, though. It's strong and exciting. The +1 seems like it might be backbreaking in Limited but that's kind of just what happens if you get lucky with a planeswalker that fits your deck in Limited.
There's Planeswalkers around that just say "target" without any "you may" (see original Chandra, for instance). The rules don't actually say anything about what happens if you use a loyalty ability without any legal targets, but I think it's technically two separate actions anyway - you activate the loyalty ability and adjust the walker's loyalty accordingly to put the "spell" on the stack, and then it'll just fizzle if there's no legal targets for it.

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So looking back on my post, I said I'd be back for what I think about Immortal, and it seems I think it's stronger than you do. All the immortal creatures were very powerful (e.g. Futo, who would be playable if she only came back once!) and the other cards have not yet convinced me that there's going to be plenty of answers to them to go around.
Well - we're only in white so far. White's main response to these things is exiling them, and that should be used somewhat sparingly. We've still got blue counterspells and forcing creatures to tap so they can't get into combat, black forcing people to sacrifice, black and red straight up creature destruction, and green... okay, I don't know what good response green has to Immortal, except for maybe big creatures that won't die when they block an Immortal so they'll still be around to attack on the green player's turn while the Immortals are on vacation in the exile zone. But I guess it's not necessarily a bad thing if a mechanic is better against a certain colour than the others.

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The mechanics you've chosen are all ones that I kind of like as well*, but all of them in addition to the spellcard-discarding-auras trick is a bit much, maybe?
It's basically there to incentivize actually using Spellcard costs for things, and get Spell circle going on creatures faster.

Man, this thread is going to get a lot of long posts, it seems. I'll be back with Blue in a bit.
« Last Edit: August 15, 2017, 09:12:55 AM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

KennyMan666

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Alright.

Blue
That most infamous of Magic colours. Counterspells, time magic, card draw, annoyances. It's a colour that's both fun and hard to design for. So there's a few Touhou characters that are very very obviously blue and let's start with the most obvious of them all, who also gets to introduce the keyword that's rooted in blue - Declare.

First things first - it was mostly Sakuya's fault that Split second existed in the set at all (her ability used to also read "Use this ability as an instant with split second") and it's 100% Sakuya's fault that suspended cards and time counters exist at all. As I mentioned, it's never used as a casting cost - only as a way to freeze spells in time. Right now, it's only featured on one other card, the blue entry in the cycle that Fantasy Nature also is in, so here's that and another of Sakuya's spells:

Sakuya's World should probably lose its flavour text for readability's sake.

So anyway - Declare. It's the only one of the five keywords that hasn't gone through any changes since it was first made. Somewhat modeled after Cipher and in every way a very Touhou-appropriate keyword in both name and function, since it has the creature declare literally a spell card to use when it fights. A Declared spell will often have more opportunities to get used than a Ciphered one, given that Cipher requires actually hitting the opponent whereas Declare kicks in whenever the creature enters combat - but Declare doesn't let you cast the spell for free like Cipher does, so if you're planning on using it, you need to keep your mana open. But it also has the advantage of letting you use the spell on your opponent's turn, if you block.

Not an exhaustive list, but some of the other declarers:

Oh, yeah, I'm trying the inverted common symbol now. I think it looks a bit better and more in like with the uncommon/rare colours of it. Maybe. Tell me what you think.

So Declare sits primarily in blue, and if it weren't for that Immortal already occupies the spot of being secondary in red, it would be a good candidate for its other colour - so instead, Declare has also found its way over to green:

Rin kind of exists, okay? (EDIT: I don't think I like her non-Declare ability any more, though, so I should change that.) But there's a returning mechanic on Mamizou. Changeling is, well... gives a creature every creature type. I'm sure you see what you want to do to make Mamizou hilarious and there's among one other thing a spell to facilitate that:


Anyway, when you think blue, you think counterspells. So lets get to counterin':

So, yeah, Ancient Duper is basically Cancel But Better, though one card is worth more than a life, so it's not Force of Will.

And our blue deity:


When you think of blue, you also think card draw. So let's draw some cards, too:


And here's today's entrants in our cycles:


No new mechanics, but you may have reacted to the fact that Yukari is a regular creature. She'd be the obvious choice for a Planeswalker, you'd think, given that, well... she is kind of actually canonically a Planeswalker. Or the closest Touhou gets, at any rate. But I wanted her to be able to redirect spells and Planeswalkers can't do that, plus there was someone else that I wanted in the spot of blue Planeswalker. So let's get to that, shall we?

Really, without Yukari, there's not that many choices left. So representing blue is The Venerable Blue Planeswalker - Kanako.

My favourite part about the alternate version is that she was blue/red before I even found that she has the character title "Avatar of Mountains and Lakes". My least favourite part about the alternate version is that blagh that text is small. I've fixed it slightly - it used to be worse!

So that's blue for you, and let's finish off with some other select blue cards.


« Last Edit: August 15, 2017, 12:51:57 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

Here we go again:

[because of the digital nature of the set...] maybe I don't need to include the reminder text for my new keywords every time when they're long anyway...

Ah, that's an option too. But yeah, I went through some legendary cards in the MTG database and there are at least a few recent ones that skip the title, at least - like the gods of Theros use "Erebos" instead of "Erebos, god of whatever".

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Spellcard is just an alternate casting cost, so yes, you can discard the cards instead of paying the regular mana cost and also pay the entwine cost. But perhaps this one needs to cost another mana. Also it's Uncommon now. :V

Got it. Hoo boy, in a set where discarding stuff is sometimes actually good, exile 2 (well, conditionally. Each condition isn't too hard to meet, though) for 2 cards sounds great to me.

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Remember that it only triggers if the creature has been dealt damage this turn, so any plain "destroy" effects would send them off to the graveyard.

Here's the big difference between the constructed and limited view on the mechanic, I suppose. When you're drafting or doing sealed or whatever, hard removal just sometimes isn't there. I have a better idea for your plans and end-goal with the set now, but if it includes "maybe I want to get 7 Touhou fans together and draft it" then the hard-removal to immortal ratio is going to have to be carefully checked. Or maybe the red player will also have crazy stuff and not even care about the blockers she can't deal with* on the ground, who knows.

*later in your post, you say red gets hard removal in this set instead of just burn. Well, okay.

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[I gave these creatures immortal, and maybe forgot to change their costs. Also...]
A higher than normal power level... kind of happens when almost every creature is legendary, y'know? That's also one of the reasons one of the subthemes is "auras matter" - when they're legendary, the idea becomes fewer but stronger creatures that you're also given incentive to power up, which is much the same reason equipment is a thing in this set too, but more on that when we get to artifacts.

Both of these points make sense, and aside from my concerns with Immortal in general, I think Junko was the only one I would consider so powerful that she'd need to be toned back even with this in mind. The bolded point is interesting. Some of the legendary creatures aren't that powerful, which is fine, but it does kind of go against that a bit? Like, suiting up your 2/3 Merlin on turn four and swinging in is fine, that's what we loved doing in Theros, but she doesn't have any keywords and she's just a 2/3 - she's not bringing anything legendary to the table. Like, that's not a problem unless you really really want to stick to that ideal and then maybe it is?

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Plus it's very easy to get carried away when making your own custom set. Sure, I could make this creature just a bear, but I could also make it do something cool.

Also, I mean, you're only seeing a selection of cards. There's some more basic things floating around as well. Take Kotohime, for instance - just a 3/3 with Vigilance for 3W. I suppose I'll eventually post "full spoilers" of the set (though this set is a bit of a perpetual work-in-progress anyway), so it can be looked at as a whole rather than just the mostly strong cards I choose to post for now that highlights the special mechanics of the set.

I was judging everything as though I was drafting the set, so I really did appreciate some basic, boring cards coming up even if I was a bit facetious about it. And I've played around with MSE a bit, I know the feeling of wanting to make everything big and exciting all too well.


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Chang'e, that Lunarian who drank the Hourai elixir and her husband killed Junko's son so Junko hates her. And if Junko's that supremely broken, maybe she needs to get toned down a little first.

haha, okay yes I did know that sorry I was just- you know
Anyway I'll just quickly go in to why I think Junko's so good even though I was trying to not crush the internet under the weight of my posts this time.


So she costs "6" mana, but then has kind-of-Affinity and the Hakurei Shrine can maybe produce more than one white mana in a white-heavy deck... well, 5 mana would be pretty realistic and 4 or even 3 would be the dream*. Then she's an immortal 4/5. So that's... well, it's almost fair. It's quite the beatdown if you luck in to her on turn 5, but it's still a problem on later turns.

The ability, though! Woah, spicy! That's a kill (even better, an exile) that doesn't cost a card! And you have enough white mana to kill anything south of median CMC, too, because you just cast Junko. And it's instant speed, so good luck ever getting an aura on anything.

When I imagine this card anywhere near a reasonable limited format, I see a lot of "I block your huge dude. Before damage, I tap Junko to kill your other attacker. She comes back next turn. What even is this." Although, there's also a lot of "Wow! I opened Junko!! I'll pick her because she's worth several dollars to somebody, but I don't have enough white mana/shrines to actually play her..."

*In limited, casting her for 5 on turn 10, with your off-colour shrine that you're only including for her, would be more realistic. I'd still be terrified if I was on the other end of the table, because all of my bears, pikers and hill giants are about to die or be forced to stay in my hand.

And I mean sure, she gets exiled or countered or whatever in constructed. But that's the worst case - getting one card for one card. Any big rare has to be judged on what happens if it gets through, like "exile everything with a great but not perfect protective keyword"

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Well - we're only in white so far. White's main response to these things is exiling them, and that should be used somewhat sparingly. We've still got blue counterspells and forcing creatures to tap so they can't get into combat, black forcing people to sacrifice, black and red straight up creature destruction, and green... okay, I don't know what good response green has to Immortal, except for maybe big creatures that won't die when they block an Immortal so they'll still be around to attack on the green player's turn while the Immortals are on vacation in the exile zone. But I guess it's not necessarily a bad thing if a mechanic is better against a certain colour than the others.

Well, I saw more immortal than exile, so I called it like I saw it.

Creatures where the blue answer is "counter them now or deal with them forever" does come up in constructed, but it might be dangerous thinking for a draftable set. Well, that's similar to my argument about having hard removal or not. I'm sure my thoughts on this are clear now.

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Man, this thread is going to get a lot of long posts, it seems. I'll be back with Blue in a bit.

Yeah. Later today I'll be back and try to keep it a bit shorter...
« Last Edit: August 16, 2017, 01:52:26 AM by Roonerspism »

I am convinced of your ability to balance things most of the time, so if I'm not saying anything about a card's power then it's somewhere between decent and very good but probably not busted.



I believe you can use this ability as "UU, T: exile all spells on the stack" (and I also believe you didn't do that on purpose). Suspend spells are cast when the last counter is removed, but in this case they never get any.

Declare is... interesting? Turn your spells in to auras. Chase extra value by painting a big target on the back of Sakuya's head as she sallies forth in to combat.

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Sakuya's World should probably lose its flavour text for readability's sake.
Ha, maybe.

Sakuya's World should probably say "non-land" on that first thing, if I'm correct on how Suspend 0 works.
Also, would you ever want to actually keep Sakuya's World going more than 1% of the time? I don't really get why you'd want to keep suspending cards if you can afford to cast them normally.

"Exile target spell as it's being cast" can just be "exile target spell". That's how spell queller does it, for example.
Killing Doll is... kiiind of bad? I feel like either I'm missing something or you're expecting the blue player to work pretty hard to get something like "You cast removal, I cast this then bounce my only girl, hahaha now you have to remove one of your girls".

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Not an exhaustive list, but some of the other declarers:


SORRY WHAT? I'M TRYING TO JUDGE CHIYURI, BUT THE ALARM TITLED "REPEATABLE COUNTERSPELL" KEEPS BLARING AND IT'S HARD TO HEAR OVER IT
Okay it's fine I turned it off. You've been extremely careful with the cost of the ability and I respect that. Regardless of whether my worries are founded or not, this would definitely be a rare/mythic outside of LEW.

Iku - How does stacking totem armor work, again? There's probably rules for multiple auras with totem armor, but an aura that has totem armor twice because of Iku would be weird.

Satori's cool. I'll leave it to someone else to figure out where you're supposed to get the mana to cast someone else's spell with a UU tax added on, though.

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Oh, yeah, I'm trying the inverted common symbol now. I think it looks a bit better and more in like with the uncommon/rare colours of it. Maybe. Tell me what you think.

Looks good.

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Rin kind of exists, okay? (EDIT: I don't think I like her non-Declare ability any more, though, so I should change that.)

There's a deck for Mamizou out there, but I don't think it's my drafted deck. "So I get a 5 mana 3/3 (maybe even 2/2, ugh) with the promise that if I work hard maybe I get something bigger?"

I kind of like Rin's ability, actually? It's difficult to evaluate. I wish I knew what the average board state would look like with all the giant suited-up creatures people will be trying to build.

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Anyway, when you think blue, you think counterspells. So lets get to counterin':


Typo on One Legged Return Hit - "target" when it should be "targets".
Also, the same thing I said earlier, you can just exile spells and the "while it's being cast" is implied. ...unless you know something I don't about how spells are going to be in weird zones but still interactable in this set.

The comparison to Force of Will is an important one to think about. That card costs 5 mana, which makes it very unwieldy if you want to keep all your cards - you have to keep 5 mana untapped all the way through your turn. If you don't end up needing to counter anything, the mana is "wasted". (But you're playing a control deck, so you don't mind too much). These cards are all costed as though they don't have Spellcard, with the Spellcard being a nice bonus on top.

...also, isn't Force of Will in like, the S- tier of ridiculously powerful spells? Like, Ancestral Recall is an S on this scale. A dangerous thing to invite comparison to.

Oh! And I forgot, back in White I was going to bring up that Spellcard doesn't have a colour requirement like Force of Will does. I can't recall seeing anything too good yet (aside from maybe Evil Sealing Circle, but I want to entwine it so I want white mana) but keep in mind that if you don't want to change that, every single deck will have 4 copies of whatever your best Spellcard card is, regardless of colour. Or in limited, I'll draft white and everyone will steal my ESCs anyway.

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This card sucks. Wait, no, this card rules. Sorry, took me a second to actually read it.

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This card sucks. So you've tried to make your 3 mana draw 2 more interesting and I respect that, but it's too inconsistent to just use it, and I don't want to have to work this hard to guarantee my 3 mana sorcery draw 2.

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And here's today's entrants in our cycles:


Yukari - Countering is lame, redirection is cool and my friend, I'm picking every one of these I see.
Cirno - Woah woah, wait, this is way better than Sunny. This card is powerful for a cheap common.
Buddhist Diamond - This card is hard to evaluate. I can't imagine it will ever achieve anything if you try to get your opponent with it, but it might result in infinites (or at least, mana rituals) if you name blue and try to storm off or something.

I imagine the fairy in the fodder enemy cycle is going to be the best. 1/1 with keyword is usually bad, with flying being an exception.

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The Venerable Blue Planeswalker - Kanako.


Goddess:
Seems fine. Another -2 I wish I could use on reaction.

Avatar:
Seems strong...?
I'm not 100% sure on this, but because Kanako can take damage during her 0, she will die to loyalty loss if she's blocked by a huge creature. Even though she's indestructible. Gideon cards usually say "prevent all damage that would be dealt to ya boy" in addition to indestructible.
The ulti wins the game on the spot. I mean, some ultis do, but it is a bit better than most. It seems like you balanced it by making the +3 bad, but...
Hm. The balance is weird.

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So that's blue for you, and let's finish off with some other select blue cards.


Ha! You're good at this, sometimes. She doesn't tap if you use recursion to bring her back from the grave, because it's not as surprising the second time, right? I don't really get why she's uncounterable, though.

Oh also this card is quite powerful for a cheap common. Probably needs another point of mana.

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You're playing with fire here. The obvious, absurd argument is recurring time walks - but any spell that gets exiled should probably stay exiled.
So, how do you rework it to be more like a library effect and less like a "you can bring back any face-up exiled card, which is to say most of them"? ?\_(ツ)_/?

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Is "as though it were in your hand" necessary here? I'm not sure on the templating myself.

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"I declare this on to my creature that untaps something when it enters the battlefield"
"this doesn't work like you want it to for like 7 different reasons"

KennyMan666

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later in your post, you say red gets hard removal in this set instead of just burn. Well, okay.
Not a whole lot of it, but red gets some destruction effects mostly in the form of certain characters. Black kills - red blows shit up.

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Like, that's not a problem unless you really really want to stick to that ideal and then maybe it is?
I mean I freely admit the whole design philosophy around a set where the vast majority of creatures are legendary will get super weird - on the one hand legendaries should be stronger but on the other hand not all creatures should be super fancy. It gets even more weird since while I'll design some not super fancy creatures as commons because it's a Magic set and they're made that way, this set is probably never really going to be played in such a manner where those creatures are ever going to be relevant. Basically, they're supposed to be theoretically relevant in that they're cards that exist and you might put them in your deck if you drafted the set or just bought a few boosters, or they might be featured in preconstructed decks that are sold, but... it's practically going to be completely impossible to hit the right point of balance to account for those in a set where all creatures except for (currently) eight are Legendary. This set started as a fun small thing - in a community where we used to play Magic online through LackeyCCG, we had used MSE previously to make 45 custom cards each and then do a digital draft with those, and we talked about doing it again so I made 45 Touhou cards... and then I started adding more characters and spells to it and eventually it got a little out of fucking hand. But I still enjoy trying to design cards that are cool, could technically be playable with each other, and aren't mondo broken.

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Junko
Junko was design around the whole "purifying" thing, and exiling seemed like the best way to flavour purifying things in white. So perhaps I should, at least, up the cost of the effect or redesign it to be less insane.

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I believe you can use this ability as "UU, T: exile all spells on the stack" (and I also believe you didn't do that on purpose). Suspend spells are cast when the last counter is removed, but in this case they never get any.
Yep, that was supposed to have a "X can't be 0". So it does now.

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Sakuya's World should probably say "non-land" on that first thing, if I'm correct on how Suspend 0 works.
Also, would you ever want to actually keep Sakuya's World going more than 1% of the time? I don't really get why you'd want to keep suspending cards if you can afford to cast them normally.

"Exile target spell as it's being cast" can just be "exile target spell". That's how spell queller does it, for example.
Killing Doll is... kiiind of bad? I feel like either I'm missing something or you're expecting the blue player to work pretty hard to get something like "You cast removal, I cast this then bounce my only girl, hahaha now you have to remove one of your girls".
Suspending a land would make it get stuck in exile, yeah, so maybe don't cast that when you have a hand full of lands. :V
It's definitely a card where I was going with flavour over function, but I'm also envisioning that you could technically stack up spells to have them go off at the same time, not that I know if that's ever something you'd want to do. Also you could suspend a sorcery during your turn and remove the time counter on it during your opponent's turn to effectively cast it at instant speed, which seems like something it's appropriate for time magic to be able to do.

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Iku - How does stacking totem armor work, again? There's probably rules for multiple auras with totem armor, but an aura that has totem armor twice because of Iku would be weird.
The controller of the permanent with multiple totem armored auras chooses one of those auras to destroy when the totem armor effect triggers. It's a static keyword ability, so double totem armor isn't any different from single totem armor - it's the same as if two different effects would both give flying to the same creature. It's just a quality the permanent has - either it has it, or it doesn't.

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There's a deck for Mamizou out there, but I don't think it's my drafted deck. "So I get a 5 mana 3/3 (maybe even 2/2, ugh) with the promise that if I work hard maybe I get something bigger?"
Yeah, probably not a draft pick. You could do something like play U/G, cast Mamizou, then Spellcard 2-discard two green auras (I know one I'd pick, that'll show up later) and Spellbind them onto her, then next turn cast Primate Danmaku Transformation on another one of your creatures. I don't know exactly how much that'd make Mami grow, because I don't know how many creature types exist, but it's easily north of +200/+200. :V

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Stuff about Force of Will & Spellcard doesn't have a colour requirement
Yeah. Only reason I mentioned FoW at all was since it was breught up in the last thread. Maybe it needs to be Spellcard 3. Spellcard allowing for off-colour play is one of the purposes it has, too.

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I don't want to have to work this hard to guarantee my 3 mana sorcery draw 2.
For the time being, dropped it to 2 mana and made it common. I don't know why it was uncommon.

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Woah woah, wait, this is way better than Sunny. This card is powerful for a cheap common.
Went and adjusted the cost of the ability on all the fairies yet again, to 1C, T.

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1/1 with keyword is usually bad, with flying being an exception.
*cough*

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I'm not 100% sure on this, but because Kanako can take damage during her 0, she will die to loyalty loss if she's blocked by a huge creature. Even though she's indestructible. Gideon cards usually say "prevent all damage that would be dealt to ya boy" in addition to indestructible.
Ooooh, right, that's why they say that. For a bit, Kanako had damage prevention but not indestructible. I've given her both for now.

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She doesn't tap if you use recursion to bring her back from the grave, because it's not as surprising the second time, right? I don't really get why she's uncounterable, though.

Oh also this card is quite powerful for a cheap common. Probably needs another point of mana.
It's only a surprise if you didn't see her first, obvs. :V She had split second for a while, and I figured it was thematically appropriate enough. Upped the cost to 1UU.

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You're playing with fire here. The obvious, absurd argument is recurring time walks - but any spell that gets exiled should probably stay exiled.
Time Walk doesn't exile itself though? And you're also hoping your opponent doesn't breathe on Akyuu so she falls over.

Exile is weird. Sometimes it's really meant to be the removed from the game zone it used to be, sometimes it's just a zone where cards get stored due to other cards and the intention is that they're only supposed to interact with the card that exiled them in the first place but they're still all in the same gameplay zone so weird things end up happening with certain cards.

Akyuu's flavour, of course, is her ability to remember everything she's seen. So.

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Is "as though it were in your hand" necessary here? I'm not sure on the templating myself.
I'm not 100% sure. But the point is to treat it like you have the physical card in your hand, so you have to pay for casting, but when you don't, it's specificed that you don't. I guess it's there to make it unambigous?

Next colour coming in a bit.
Fly & High!!

KennyMan666

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Black
Ever since I got introduced to Magic way back in the day, black's always been my favourite singular colour. So let's jump right into it, and you might think a certain playable character would introduce us, but there's a reason it's not so let's have another very, very obvious black character introduce us, which is also fitting for more reasons.

'cause it's Yuyuko who's got the big black Enchantment, and a kind of important spell:


So the story of black's keyword is a bumpy road. Originally, I had a keyword named Reaper, because I thought it was great as a keyword name and it's kind of weird that Wizards hasn't made that keyword yet. In its original inception, Reaper 100% didn't even work. It was reworked a bit but I ended up not really liking what it became, plus it was purely black, so it didn't fit in the coloured keyword structure I settled on. It remained for a while, and an even further reworked version exists in the keyword list for the set, but it's not used on anything anymore and I'm not going to bring it back. Instead, black got something that you'd also think they'd have made a keyword already - Curse. I think it might have done something different originally, then it was re-tooled, and that version was revised once. It's also the keyword with the longest reminder text of the five.


There's a number of purely black cursers:


(edit: I'm noticing that a bunch of cursers are strictly better than Noroiko, being stronger for the same mana cost - I've decreased Noroiko to BB but 2 mana might be too cheap for a Curse)

It's somewhat modeled after Haunt, so it should come as no surprise that the secondary colour for it is white:


And since it's appropriate now, a curser in both black and white:

I'm really not sure about her current incarnation, though - she's gone through some revisions, and I don't know if I like this one. Curse definitely stays on her, though. Also I just realized I don't know if that ability even works as printed because I don't know if cards in exile are considered "controlled".

Black does a number of things and I think this card about sums it up:


And then there's the other cat.


Black cycle members (yes, I've seen the typo on Reisen and fixed it):



So who might be our black planeswalker? For me, that was never a question. Along with the green one, it was probably the most obvious one to me. Of course, representing black is The Unforgiving Black Planeswalker - Shinki.

Colour on the background picture doesn't play super nicely with the text on the first one so I might need to do something about that. And look at that, another returning mechanic - Annihilator. In actual Magic, it only ever appeared on the colourless Eldrazi - but if it would have a colour, then it would absolutely be black. In this set, Shinki and one other special friend we'll get to later on are the only ones that get to play with it. Black/green Shinki's ultimate is pretty much super-Scavenge.

And as usual, here's some other things you'll find in black.



(one of these nine cards is a "reference" to my favourite Magic card. Guess which one!)
« Last Edit: August 16, 2017, 10:55:52 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

Alright just a couple of things before I check out some new cards.

I mean I freely admit the whole design philosophy around a set where the vast majority of creatures are legendary will get super weird - on the one hand legendaries should be stronger but on the other hand not all creatures should be super fancy. It gets even more weird since while I'll design some not super fancy creatures as commons because it's a Magic set and they're made that way, this set is probably never really going to be played in such a manner where those creatures are ever going to be relevant. Basically, they're supposed to be theoretically relevant in that they're cards that exist and you might put them in your deck if you drafted the set or just bought a few boosters, or they might be featured in preconstructed decks that are sold, but... it's practically going to be completely impossible to hit the right point of balance to account for those in a set where all creatures except for (currently) eight are Legendary. This set started as a fun small thing - in a community where we used to play Magic online through LackeyCCG, we had used MSE previously to make 45 custom cards each and then do a digital draft with those, and we talked about doing it again so I made 45 Touhou cards... and then I started adding more characters and spells to it and eventually it got a little out of fucking hand. But I still enjoy trying to design cards that are cool, could technically be playable with each other, and aren't mondo broken.

This is all cool and noted.

A set with mainly legendary creatures is probably "bad design", yeah, but if it's large enough* then it might be more playable casually/draftingly than you think? Most drafts I do/watch end up with few, sometimes even no, duplicate creatures. And then colour mirror matches where I play my legendary creature as a removal spell for yours - but they were both just hill giants with keywords, so who even cares - that would be kind of funny.

*how many cards is a cube draft again? 360? There would be no problems if your set was that huge. Except for your set being huge.

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Time Walk doesn't exile itself though? And you're also hoping your opponent doesn't breathe on Akyuu so she falls over.

Oh, right, Time Walk is really really old. I meant that whenever they print a Time Walk-like effect these days they always make it exile itself to prevent recursion, so it's the first thing I think of when I see a card that can recur things from exile. And I mean, yeah she has 1 toughness, but also the payoff (for this weird Vintage but also Touhou deck I'm apparently trying to make) is infinite turns so I'm willing to keep counterspells up and wait for the perfect moment if that's what it takes.

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Exile is weird. Sometimes it's really meant to be the removed from the game zone it used to be, sometimes it's just a zone where cards get stored due to other cards and the intention is that they're only supposed to interact with the card that exiled them in the first place but they're still all in the same gameplay zone so weird things end up happening with certain cards.

Akyuu's flavour, of course, is her ability to remember everything she's seen. So.

Well, alright. As long as you're aware that exile is weird and that's what Akyuu's supposed to do, then that's what she does.
(Although, I would say that if you wanted to rebalance it, you could just explain it as "Sure, she remembers it, but it's not like she can recreate a spell card just by looking at its effects, she needs an original copy" instead)


Black


This card is strong, exciting, maybe busted but you do have to throw away any counterspells or whatever you could have used to protect it. Cool.
Why do the cards get exiled face down? Usually that means the cards are going to be important later, so they need to stay secret, but this card doesn't do anything with them.

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Cuuuuuurrrse


[More curse cards]
(edit: I'm noticing that a bunch of cursers are strictly better than Noroiko, being stronger for the same mana cost - I've decreased Noroiko to BB but 2 mana might be too cheap for a Curse)

It's somewhat modeled after Haunt

Oh yeah, haunt. It could also be described as "threaten but weird" - you have to combo it with a kill spell (or a complicit opponent*) but the opportunity for some really rude instant-speed plays ("I declare these attackers." "I kill the cursed one." worms2_ohdear.wav) is there.

*Do you have any Curse cards that make the cursed creature harm its controller each turn, making them want to throw it away? Or hell, you could be extremely non-subtle about it with something like "The creature cursed by ~ must attack if able" on a very overcosted creature.

I'd be wary of Curse for 2 mana, yeah. Especially on a card which already boasts playable P/T for a 2 mana creature.

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There's a really cool play here that doesn't work and it makes me sad:
So you curse a creature with this, wait until opponent declares attackers, you spellcard-cast a kill spell targeting the cursed girl and discard a couple of auras...
And I'm pretty sure it falls apart there, you have to put the auras on someone and Kikuri hasn't hit the battlefield yet because the kill spell is still resolving. You don't get your Flash and Deathtouch-but-better blocker.

I guess I'm mentioning this because a) Maybe you can tell me it actually works? Stack wizardry is hard. b) man wouldn't it be cool though

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I would maybe make this a "takes combat damage from" instead of "blocks or blocked by". I think that makes more intuitive sense (especially so for non-expert players).

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I'm really not sure about her current incarnation, though - she's gone through some revisions, and I don't know if I like this one. [Also are exiled cards "controlled"?]

I think if a card isn't obviously controlled by someone, you just default to "the controller is the owner"? I haven't read the rules that much, but I think I remember hearing that one.

I'm glad you said you don't like this card, because that was my reaction too. There's three things that I don't really like:
1. "How many exiled creatures do you control?" "Oh my god. Okay, the 2 you just exiled, plus this one here. 3." "What about this Curse card?" "Ugh, that counts. 4. Probably." "How sure are you?"
2. No matter when she comes in to play, she can't make use of the P/T increase that she only gets that turn. Your opponent controls no creatures to block and she's summoning-sick so she can't attack.
3. For Limited specifically, 5 mana "you can't block this turn" is going to win games and the only way to stop it is counterspell (Or some kind of other really great spell, like "tap all creatures")

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Skulls. Finally, I've got through whatever colour those last several cards were* and we're ready for some black cards.

The effect of Zombie Fairy (err, the sorcery) is powerful and yet I still hate it. I like to sacrifice things on reaction to them being targeted. Also, imagine how owned you are if you spellcard-cast this and then it gets countered. Yuck. Someone else can cast this card and kill me with the fairy tokens, I don't care.

*Elly was also technically black.

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Ah, right. I forgot about deathtouch. Next you'll tell me that kedama are 1/1 for 1 with firebreathing and crows are indestructible for some reason.
I feel the need to comment on every divine treasure enchantment I see because they're all weird. I'm now convinced that I think the white one is probably too weak, because these last two have been "weird but maybe it can work" instead of just "weird and then all I get is lifegain?" I do put a very low value on lifegain, though.

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The Unforgiving Black Planeswalker - Shinki.

Colour on the background picture doesn't play super nicely with the text on the first one so I might need to do something about that.
Yep, agreed.

God:
This... seems weak, actually. The ultimate is great (it takes quite a few creatures before it gets close to "win the game on the spot", though), but the ultimate is the least important part of a planeswalker.
The +2 doesn't do anything*, so aside from "pray for ultimate" your best plan is to play her as a 5 mana draw 1-2 from grave?

*I mean, sometimes +X abilities don't do anything, but this really doesn't do anything unless your opponent is trying to recur/reanimate

Creator:
If I was going to be very nit-picky, it's a bit strange that neither ability fuels the ultimate.
All of these abilities seem pretty good. I'd even consider playing her and just -4 immediately (against an opponent with a big flier, or something).

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And as usual, here's some other things you'll find in black.



Woah, Mystia's learned a neat trick from hanging out with Cirno. She's powerful but maybe not worth an urgent nerf.
Her ability is strange. It taps (or destroys, murder is good too) a creature and reduces its power? Seems a bit redundant.

The word "sacrifice" should be capitalised on Yoshika's card. "Three mana 3/3, but also with two abilities" is a heck of a place to put a common.

The wording on Regretful Bound Spirits is strange. I mean, it gives deathtouch so the "lethal damage" part is less ambiguous than it usually would be, but still. The Sengir Vampire wording ("Whenever a creature dealt damage by enchanted creature this turn dies", in this case) is what our grandpappies used and I'll be damned if I let some punk-
*ahem* Also I'd personally remove the "you don't control" clause, just because it makes it wordier and I like the idea of some idiot chasing value by infighting their own creatures.

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(one of these nine cards is a "reference" to my favourite Magic card. Guess which one!)

Filled Miasma is dangerous. It's making me want to go back to Regretful Bound Spirits and say "ALSO MAKE SURE IT SAYS COMBAT DAMAGE".
This card kind of just works on its own (discounting whatever idiot you attach it to), though, right? If you have more life than your opponent and you play this card, it's easy to see the game progressing like this:
"I have more life than you and control Filled Miasma."
"Okay, I'll start agressively attacking to dissuade you from using it all the time."
"Ah yes, agressive creatures. The ones that have low toughness and die to Filled Miasma."
"Yes, those ones, and I don't like your tone."

Your favourite card is Mind Rot.

I'll be overly strict again and say "-0/-X is just a dumb way to give direct damage to black". Although if I was going to whine every time an amateur designer strayed out of colour I wouldn't have time to do anything else.

"Spellcard 3, also it hits you" seems kind of harsh for the spellcard cost on Your Days are Numbered? I think it could be "2, also it hits you".
« Last Edit: August 17, 2017, 02:28:16 AM by Roonerspism »

KennyMan666

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the payoff (for this weird Vintage but also Touhou deck I'm apparently trying to make) is infinite turns
I'm not sure "make sure it's balanced with Vintage" is something any sane man should ever attempt. :V

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Why do the cards get exiled face down? Usually that means the cards are going to be important later, so they need to stay secret, but this card doesn't do anything with them.
Specifically because what you exile is not important. It's just a loss of a card and exiling something face down in this set, because of Akyuu and such, should mean it really is removed from the game.

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Do you have any Curse cards that make the cursed creature harm its controller each turn, making them want to throw it away? Or hell, you could be extremely non-subtle about it with something like "The creature cursed by ~ must attack if able" on a very overcosted creature.
No, there's nothing that actually puts any effect on the cursed creature. The curse is supposed to loom over the creature and be that "if I let this creature die then my opponent gets 2 creatures in return". It would also probably make Curse too strong since the first step of Curse is done without paying any mana - so any Curse creature that gave the cursed creature a negative effect would be a negative aura you can't get rid of you could put on an opponent's creature for free.

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I'd be wary of Curse for 2 mana, yeah. Especially on a card which already boasts playable P/T for a 2 mana creature.
Adjusted things up the other way, then. Noroiko's back to 1BB and the others, where it was relevant, have had their cost increased - anything with Curse now has at least two coloured mana in their casting cost.

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I guess I'm mentioning this because a) Maybe you can tell me it actually works? Stack wizardry is hard. b) man wouldn't it be cool though
Doesn't work, no, and wasn't really the idea with her... the exiling and spell circle things were on her before she got Curse, so there's that.

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I'm glad you said you don't like this card, because that was my reaction too.
Yeah I'm just going to rework her. She got weird.

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Next you'll tell me that kedama are 1/1 for 1 with firebreathing and crows are indestructible for some reason.
There actually is a Kedama card, but probably not in the way you think, and it's one of the odder cards in the set. But more on that later.

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I'm now convinced that I think the white one is probably too weak, because these last two have been "weird but maybe it can work" instead of just "weird and then all I get is lifegain?" I do put a very low value on lifegain, though.
Lifegain is pretty weak, but then there's Fantasy Nature to combo it with...

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Shinki
Right, then. Guess I should rethink that +2. I'm not entirely sure why it was like that from the start. And I guess what holds Creator together thematically is that all of her things power up creatures. I guess spitting out demon tokens wouldn't be a bad fit, but... idk.

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Her ability is strange. It taps (or destroys, murder is good too) a creature and reduces its power? Seems a bit redundant.
True. The idea was being restricted by the darkness. Removed the tap effect.

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The word "sacrifice" should be capitalised on Yoshika's card. "Three mana 3/3, but also with two abilities" is a heck of a place to put a common.
It's two abilities but only one of them is probably actually relevant - you probably don't care to prevent damage to Yoshika at the cost of another one of your creatures unless you've souped her up with auras or something, and there's other cards that do the second thing better. It's flavourfully appropriate, but they can't all be winners, kid.

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Your favourite card is Mind Rot.
Nope! It's actually Pestilence (which also comes in the form of a creature, and colourshifted as Pyrohemia). So of course I couldn't resist making Pestilence on a stick aura. It's like the ultimate in weenie gimping and it should, optimally, make token decks cry.

More cards coming later.
Fly & High!!

KennyMan666

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Red
Let's blow some fuckers up.

I wasn't sure who would get to introduce read because there's no one creature who does it cleanly so just let's go with that most famous of red creature types. Even though this might not actually be true.


And then let's continue as we did with the other colours, with the big enchantment.


So I guess we should have some spells to repeat with that. But first, let's talk the red keyword, because of the five keywords it's the one I'm the second least sure about. While the name remained, it went through a couple of versions that didn't all really do the same thing, but it's the only one of the five that goes on spells rather than creatures and it's called Deathbomb.


(edit: Since Master Spark specifies attacking creature, I'm not super sure it even works to Deathbomb it - at the point creatures die in the combat phase, do the other guy's attacking creatures still actually count as "attacking"?)

Being a spell-based keyword, no real surprise it's secondary in blue, so here's the blue deathbombing spells, including the strongest card draw in the set:


Anyway. We've seen some burn. Actually, we've seen most of the burn, since nearly all red burn spells come with Deathbomb, but I have to show off this too:

(edit: fixed so that it now says "if you cast this spell by paying its spellcard cost" like the other sparks)

And here's my favourite Touhou who it took me the longest time to get a design on that I was satisfied with.


Also the other purely red deity, who I honestly made red just because I didn't have any red deities. She was made before Chang'e.


Also some strong girls.


But what about blowing things up, you ask? Well, that comes in two flavours:

Okuu: For when you absolutely, positively have to kill every motherfucker on the battlefield. Flandre's ability might need a mana cost as well, but I think she used to have that and it was taken off for some reason I don't remember.

So I think we can just move on to the cycles.



The red planeswalker was the least obvious one of the five, but there was no way I wasn't going to give this character her proper dues and red was kind of the only colour left because most of the rest were obvious so I designed her red. So, representing red is The Vengeful Red Planeswalker - Mima.


No other mechanics to talk about, so here's the regular assortment of other things you'll find in red.


« Last Edit: August 17, 2017, 07:30:16 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

any Curse creature that gave the cursed creature a negative effect would be a negative aura you can't get rid of you could put on an opponent's creature for free.

Ah, of course. It's a bit of a shame that you can't do that.

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Lifegain is pretty weak, but then there's Fantasy Nature to combo it with...

They always say you can combo it with whatever, but I'd rather get a card that also does something else - like a nice big lifestealer or something.

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It's two abilities but only one of them is probably actually relevant[...]

Well, the point was more "here's your 3 mana 3/3 at common" "what's the catch" "catch? actually, quite the opposite..."
A 3/3 on the ground probably isn't going to be the common that breaks the set, but she'd still be pretty fantastic as a 3/2 or something.

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Nope! It's actually Pestilence

I'd actually never heard of this one. You really can do some rude stuff in old magic.


*
I put that asterix there to remind myself "come back when you know what you'll be copying with this."
It's Blaze, apparently!

The fact that it's balanced by the way you might randomly discard your win condition sucks.

EDIT: This card says "at the beginning of the end step" instead of "each of your end steps" (or "each end step" would be a little bit more strict) like I think it's supposed to.
Also, as it's currently written, you have to cast a spell on the turn you play it (I hope you don't discard that cheap one you're holding) or it immedaitely sacrifices itself. But then you can get around it by using a burn spell on your opponent's turn 4, but theeennn that turn 4 spell doesn't count towards your combo multiplier. This sucks. I don't think it'll be all that fun to take a spin on the Triple Twilight Spark lottery with this card.

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(edit: Since Master Spark specifies attacking creature, I'm not super sure it even works to Deathbomb it - at the point creatures die in the combat phase, do the other guy's attacking creatures still actually count as "attacking"?)

I had the hardest time searching for real cards to compare Laevateinn to because they template it as "deal X damage to each creature", not "all creatures".
Similarly, Asteroid Belt should be "...each of up to three target..." to make it more clear that I can't say "I target this creature, then that same one another 2 times."

Master Spark should work on deathbomb, if I'm reading these rules right. There's a chance to cast spells after damage happens (or each time damage happens, if there's a first striker) but before the end of combat step finishes. Creatures are "attacking" up until the end of the end of combat step.
Master Spark can be cast as RR "destroy target attacker" which is strong, but strange? And being able to get your Blaze for just X is pretty great, even for being forced to use it after damage happens. I like it! Anyway, let me just pan my eyes a little bit to the right and

hey, Twilight Spark is hyper-omega-busted, right? Like we start with "if your opponent blocks your attacker, you cast Blaze on everything she controls in second main, if she doesn't block then okay we'll pay a one mana tax to do it anyway or fish for it again next turn" and then it doesn't take too much mana to start heading towards "one-sided wrath of god" territory.
This could really be double X on both costs or something.

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Perfect Freeze is probably too strong even for constructed, to say nothing of my neck of the woods. This card, when cast during your opponent's upkeep, completely turns off most strategies they can use for a turn (I mean, I don't want to say "Time Walk"...) for three mana. It's like noted constructed-playable card Exhaustion, but better. Being able to use it as a weird Silence on deathbomb is interesting, but it's not going to happen ever with this current design.

Oh, I really like Three Sacred Treasures! um. that's it. it's good. Your keywords made an interesting draw spell.

Haha Tunnel Effect is frequently less of a Time Walk than Perfect Freeze is

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Okay the amount of Blazes in this set is starting to get ridiculous. The card itself is fine, though.

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And here's my favourite Touhou who it took me the longest time to get a design on that I was satisfied with.


Again, sacrifice should be capitalised here. This card is giving me flashbacks to Bitterblossom. It might be too good.

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Also the other purely red deity, who I honestly made red just because I didn't have any red deities. She was made before Chang'e.


"its" is a little ambiguous. Some rules laywer could say "I deal damage equal to Okina's CMC - 5 - to all of your creatures." when from context I think you mean the CMC of the tapped creature.
Oh by the way this ability is basically a one-sided Wrath of God every single time. Creatures don't have toughness > CMC most of the time, so you just pick the enemy creature with the most CMC and kill them all. I didn't think I'd see anything stronger than Twilight Spark today!

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Suika's cool. Yuugi is rare and triple red for some reason? Her design is fairly simple and while she's a bit of a buster she's not as powerful as a lot of the things I've seen in the past few days.

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Well, 7 mana is just about where creatures need to go from "I'm big" to "maybe I'll win the game on my own" to stay competitive, but... yep, you're right, Flandre's strong and her ability probably needs some cost.
Some of these huge abilities I keep seeing could maybe be "do this only at sorcery speed" abilities, too, or there's going to be a bunch of games where nobody's even attacking because they're either using their powerful tap abilities on opponent's end step or being threatened by the idea of being blocked by a huge creature that's waiting to do that.

Utsuho's reset button should probably tap her, right? Usually when a reset button is put on a body or artefact you don't get to do it on the turn you play it (I mean, it costs 4RRRRRRRR, but still...). I guess the more interesting part would be that you couldn't attack with your powerful flier unless you're willing to drop the reset button for a turn.

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So I think we can just move on to the cycles.


Shou's weird. I like it.
Okay none of these fairies are overly weak or powerful, but isn't Cirno just going to be the strongest of them if she taps the target - which is basically "can't attack or block"?
I'm pretty sure it's "Agni Shine", not Shrine.

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The Vengeful Red Planeswalker - Mima.


Ghost:
The -X is quite strong. That, and 5's a lot of loyalty for a 4 mana planeswalker with a good -7 ulti. I think I would reduce starting loyalty to 4?
The +1 is a bit situational, though. Wouldn't want to make her too weak... hm.

Last of the honest men??:
This card's neat. +1 might be a tiny bit too strong.

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Possessed by Phoenix has two problems: It does a million things and it's very strong. Spellbind and giving Haste are the two things on the chopping block in my mind, but I think you're trying to make every Aura have Spellbind.

Orreries Sun is weird ("Enchanted creature has Firstest Strike, loses and cannot gain Trample, and is very hard to multi-block". Okay?) and maybe a little weak? I would consider reworking it as a Bushido/Rampage-like "for each creature blocking/blocked by this creature, something good happens (until EOT)" but it's not a huge deal.

Knockout in Three Steps is expensive. If I were to compare it to recent commons (in Black, not Red, admittedly), you can generally get "Unconditional kill, with small upside" for about 6 mana, and this is "Conditional kill, also you have to tap a creature" for the same price.
« Last Edit: August 18, 2017, 03:23:40 AM by Roonerspism »

KennyMan666

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Twilight Spark is hyper-omega-busted, right?
Quite possible. Balancing burn spells is probably not my strong side. Made it more expensive, at least.

I tried to make some things, namely the sparks, more interesting than just straight burn by giving them X costs, but I might have gone overboard with that. So maybe I should rethink them. Master Spark should be the baseline, Double Spark slightly weaker but do two things and Twilight Spark a more expensive, souped-up version. If they're going to have X costs, maybe they should just hit creatures - I mostly liked the flavour of a big fuckoff beam piercing through the creature line and hitting the controller in the face as well.

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Perfect Freeze is probably too strong even for constructed
Changed it so it now just taps all creatures rather than all permanents.

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[Alice] might be too good.
And here I didn't want to seem like I was playing favourites by making my favourite Touhou too stronk. She was blank for the longest time, I knew I wanted her to make dolls though. And throw ing dolls for direct damage seemed red to me. So how2balance? Hm.

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Okina
I don't know if I was ever satsified with her. The ability was kiiiiind of supposed to work with the whole opening a doorway on someone's back and something something magic powers. I'll rethink for a bit.

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Yuugi is rare and triple red for some reason?
idk why, she's 3RR and Uncommon now.

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Utsuho's reset button should probably tap her, right?
Yes. And Flandre's ability costs RR now, should maybe be one more.

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Okay none of these fairies are overly weak or powerful, but isn't Cirno just going to be the strongest of them if she taps the target - which is basically "can't attack or block"?
Very possible! The idea of the fairies is that theyir abilites are basically, well, annoyances. So Cirno should maybe get something that's more in line with the rest of them. I think she was the first one made, possibly even before I decided to make it a cycle. So what's a balanced blue annoyance at common that doesn't involve making something tap?

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I'm pretty sure it's "Agni Shine", not Shrine.
So it is, huh. I've misread that for years.

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Last of the honest men??:
This card's neat. +1 might be a tiny bit too strong.
So if you're questioning why the card is called that, it's based on the story from Dolls in Pseudo Paradise - it tells the story of the "Eight honest men", who all disappear over the course of the story but only seven of them actually die. The one that is seen afterwards is noted to having been the only woman among them, and while I'm not going to go into too many specifics to avoid taking a hard right into fanon territory, I like to think that that's Mima, or rather the person that Mima was before becoming a ghost. There's no kind of confirmation that it actually was Mima while living, but there's nothing that contradicts it either, so I think it fits and it makes for a neat alternate version of her.

The +1 could change, but the +1 being strong might be weighed up by that she doesn't really have any ultimate? Though looking at Chandra, +1 damage to target creature tends to land at 1 point of damage, so I've adjusted that down. I think maybe it was 2 damage so that there'd be less incentive to burn your own creatures for the life? Though, again, lol lifegain.

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Possessed by Phoenix has two problems: It does a million things and it's very strong. Spellbind and giving Haste are the two things on the chopping block in my mind, but I think you're trying to make every Aura have Spellbind.
There's actually some auras later that don't have it, but only multicoloured auras that Spellbind would have been far too strong on. I dropped Haste from this one, at any rate.

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Orreries Sun is weird
Agreed, I'll think it over.

Green to follow later.
Fly & High!!

KennyMan666

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Green
Last stop on the regular colour pie. Green! Colour of big stompers, buffing, and hating things that fly. And it's become a little bit of a problematic colour for me, because the keyword is... not optimal. I said I was the second least sure about Deathbomb, but this one I am by far and wide the most unsure about. So let's just look at it right away - it's called Focus, has gone through a few variations and showing it off is someone who became a bit of an ability list.


Focus has a number of issues, the two chief ones being that keywording a pumping effect is... questionable, and I'm not sure that the way it's currently written ever makes it worth actually using. But here's the rest of the focusers:



And Youki efficiently brings us over to that Focus is secondary in black (not like there was any other colour left):

Komachi has one of the coolest pictures in the set imo.

Anyway. Focus is the one that's most up for a redesign. I've been considering making it use +1/+1 counters instead so it could build up over time - either just making it static, so that you may choose to add a +1/+1 counter whenever it becomes blocked and then it doesn't untap, or keep the value and cost and add a variable number of +1/+1 counters, still with the not untapping. That would technically more be getting power items rather than focusing, but Focus is a good name.

Bleh.

But talking about counters segways us nicely into the big green enchantment:


Other than that, green is good at making creatures grow.

(Great Oni was not supposed to be common, it's uncommon now)

Someone who got to inspire a number of spells mostly because I found good pictures to use for them.


Also, introducing who probably is the strongest stage 1 boss in the whole set.


Green ended up with the most deities - even when doing a charitable count that counts any multicoloured deity for both colours they're in, green wins with one more deity than any other colour, and when it comes to monocoloured deities or rather Faithbound creatures, blue has one, white, black and red have two each, but green lands at a full four. Even if they're, lorewise, among the lesser deities of the setting. And one of them kind of actually isn't a deity at all, so maybe she should just become an Elemental instead.


With one-and-a-half-kind-of exceptions, the final entrants in our regular cycles:



And then probably the most obvious planeswalker of all colours because I mean come on. The only one who could possibly be representing green is The Powerful Green Planeswalker - Yuuka.


And then we close off like we always do.



(tbh that last one is a mess)
« Last Edit: August 18, 2017, 06:45:30 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

Quite possible. Balancing burn spells is probably not my strong side. Made it more expensive, at least.

I tried to make some things, namely the sparks, more interesting than just straight burn by giving them X costs, but I might have gone overboard with that. So maybe I should rethink them. Master Spark should be the baseline, Double Spark slightly weaker but do two things and Twilight Spark a more expensive, souped-up version. If they're going to have X costs, maybe they should just hit creatures - I mostly liked the flavour of a big fuckoff beam piercing through the creature line and hitting the controller in the face as well.

I went to bed thinking of giant laser beams (as usual) and I reminded myself of Bonfire of the Damned, which does actually do Twilight Spark's effect at mythic-rare for XR, although Miracle is hard to rely on compared to Deathbomb. So if Twilight Spark was Sorcery and the non-deathbomb cost was XXR, it would still be better than that card (and I believe Bonfire of the Damned was already pretty great even in constructed) but there would be precedent.

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So if you're questioning why the card is called that[...]

Oh, cool.

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And here I didn't want to seem like I was playing favourites by making my favourite Touhou too stronk. She was blank for the longest time, I knew I wanted her to make dolls though. And throw ing dolls for direct damage seemed red to me. So how2balance? Hm.

Oh, if anything people would assume you're really in to all of the new characters.
Alice is your favourite and she's friends with the actual coolest characters, so I'll do a deeper analysis of set balance beginning with her.

Bitterblossom is a hell of a card. It comes up in the Vintage Cube a lot - anyone in black will heavily consider picking it up. The Stacks player (if they exist) is especially interested, which I only mention because I love anyone who drafts Stacks.

Alice has various upsides and downsides over this card, but I'd say she's about as good as it. She could find a home in Vintage Cube. You'd have to start tearing out functionality pretty hard to get her down to, say, the usual level of a limited-playable uncommon:
She makes one doll on enters-the-battlefield. She makes one doll per turn with spell circle. She can't throw them.
(4 power, 3 toughness for 4 mana, and some of it flies. Neat. I'd pick it.)

But is that the best course of action? Well, if you're making a set that's supposed to be balanced for limited, probably. "If a card can run away with the game on its own, it has to be rare or mythic", "You already have a bunch of big powerful cards, so increasing her cost/rarity and keeping her this strong is off the table".

These rules* are ones that you're ignoring on purpose, to make a more fun and exciting set, right? But you follow them sometimes, to make the set feel more legitimate? I hope I'm not misunderstanding what you said earlier about the origins of these cards. And then, because of all of that, uncommons like this show up and I don't know whether it needs a huge nerf to get in line (with cards like Merlin - she really sticks out in my mind for some reason) or whether it can remain as is because everything's just kind of powerful around these parts.

At any rate, Alice is near the top of any reasonable scale of Magic card power levels, unlike the 6 or so of them that I've called out as above the top of that scale. She could be nerfed a bit, she could be nerfed a lot. It's hard to tell.

*(that I just made up, although based on my own study in set design, but you get what I mean)


This took a while. I'm taking a small break then checking out some green cards.

Focus has a number of issues, the two chief ones being that keywording a pumping effect is... questionable, and I'm not sure that the way it's currently written ever makes it worth actually using.


Man, WotC kind of came over and ate your lunch with Exert, huh?
You're right that Focus is rarely worth using, but only because of your opponent respecting the threat of Focus. It's not like they'll do a bad block and dare you to spend mana to kill their blocker for free.

Focus X is weird, but I think I like it? If anyone was ever stupid enough to block this card, my thoughts would start racing. "Do I flush in all of my mana, expecting a combat trick, or do I do nothing because they would only do this if they had a kill spell ready anyway?" It could lead to some really cool bluff moments.

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Oh, this card's cool.

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Anyway. Focus is the one that's most up for a redesign. I've been considering making it use +1/+1 counters instead so it could build up over time - either just making it static, so that you may choose to add a +1/+1 counter whenever it becomes blocked and then it doesn't untap, or keep the value and cost and add a variable number of +1/+1 counters, still with the not untapping. That would technically more be getting power items rather than focusing, but Focus is a good name.

Bleh.

Yep, agreed.
I had hoped I'd think of something cool for you over the course of my post, but I didn't.

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But talking about counters segways us nicely into the big green enchantment:


That first ability should have a "may". I'm not sure how it would even resolve as written, because I might have no creatures in hand and it doesn't say "or reveal your hand if you can't".

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Other than that, green is good at making creatures grow.


Dango Influence suuuucks, i hate sorcery speed pump, i want to go home, someone let me off
Well, it could probably be officially printed as-is, but it seems weak-ish even for limited. If you want to buff it, don't just make it instant. Or do, but it would be kind of a boring way to improve it, right?

Slash of the Eternal Future is weird. Only pumping power makes its usefulness a bit narrow (Like, it only really gets you value if it turns a "body check" - a block where neither creature dies - in to a kill) and also makes it colour-bleed in to red a bit.
Designing good pump spells is hard.

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Someone who got to inspire a number of spells mostly because I found good pictures to use for them.


Parsee herself is really, really cool.

Green-Eyed Invisible Monster - How many creatures do you think your opponent is going to control!?
This could be +X/+X, I think.

Shiro's Ashes - Fine as is, but can it be reworked to be "when an opponent taps a land for mana"? Like with Mana Drain's templating, or something. Let's lean right in to the theme.

Large Box and Small Box - Oh, what is it now!? The Sneak Attack alarm is going off. I have a lot of Magic-related alarms in my house.
This should probably be Sorcery. Also, there's a bunch of ways this card can go very wrong in real Magic (Blightsteel Collosus, anything super-huge + Flicker) or maybe just give unreasonable value (my good friend Griselbrand, Sundering Titan). Be careful out there when designing your own huge creatures.

While I'm saying "haw haw what if they were all based on jealousy of your opponent", this card would be cooler and less abusable if it was "opponent reveals hand, you sneak attack with one of their creatures". But that comes with its own problems (colour bleed in to black, how would you even balance the cost, sometimes it whiffs and you feel bad)

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Also, introducing who probably is the strongest stage 1 boss in the whole set.


I like these cards.

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I'm not sure how I feel about Letty... one of those cards that's either too good or too bad depending on what's going on.

Aww man, I found some burn that was way too strong and some absurd countering and ridiculous removal... but your ramp creatures are basically reasonable. You even remembered to say that the forest has to be untapped for Minoriko. This sucks.

Does every Faithbound card need to have such high colour requirements? I mean, I say that but I can't really think of which ones I'd change. Just something to think about.

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Be wary of infinite combos, if you're not going to say "non-token" here.

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The Powerful Green Planeswalker - Yuuka.


Master:
The two abilities don't feel strong...
The 0's fine, but it doesn't help me kill my opponent on its own, so it feels bad even though it's balanced.
The +1... ramping from 5-6 to 7-8 is useful for some decks, I suppose...
I can't get excited or scared about this card in quite the same way I can for your other rares.

Maiden:
Okay, one ramp ability on a planeswalker is fine, but two? Surely this is overkill.
Even so, I would probably be happier playing this planeswalker than the other one, just as a draw engine.

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(tbh that last one is a mess)

I was honestly surprised to find "Ouphe" on the MTG wiki.

When you put Roc Fist right after Rabies Bite like that, it makes me think "haha Trampletouch will be pretty easy to achieve in this set" and also "Roc Fist seems a little overcosted". My logic being that Rabies bite even on a small creature makes a safe block on them impossible (deathtouch) and a one creature trade unlikely (+3/+3), whereas Roc Fist says "if you don't control the biggest creature, this spell won't really help".

Lure effects on common cards is a little dangerous, but apparently it's happened before. Putting a lure on an opponent's creature to force it to attack is going to be very funny when it backfires horribly.

That last card is a mess.

KennyMan666

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Quote
Man, WotC kind of came over and ate your lunch with Exert, huh?
Heh, I hadn't considered that before, but I guess Exert really kind of is the current incarnation of Focus but done better.

So the alternatives for Focus I guess would be:
Focus n - <cost> (Whenever this creature becomes blocked, you may pay <cost> to put n +1/+1 counters on it. If you do, it does not untap during your next untap step.)
Focus n (Whenever this creature becomes blocked, you may put n +1/+1 counters on it. If you do, it does not untap during your next untap step.)
Focus (Whenever this creature becomes blocked, you may put a +1/+1 counter on it. If you do, it does not untap during your next untap step.)

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Does every Faithbound card need to have such high colour requirements? I mean, I say that but I can't really think of which ones I'd change. Just something to think about.
Well - they've mostly been costed by more or less considering what mana cost they'd regularly have, and then turning one generic mana into one coloured mana. While I'm sure there might be some dumb reason to do it anyway, the idea is that you won't play those creatures unless you control at least one Shrine - so they'll cost one less mana. And if you manage to keep up multiple Shrines, your reward is that you get to play deities for really cheap. That said, they should probably cost at least one mana, so Shizuha's 1GG now. Okay, there's Junko and Chang'e, but at the point you're keeping enough Shrines alive to cast them for free, you should probably have won the game several turns ago anyway.

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Be wary of infinite combos, if you're not going to say "non-token" here.
Changed that to nontoken.

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Trampletouch will be pretty easy to achieve in this set
I mean, you can do it for a lot cheaper than with those two, if you're playing Green/Black...

Beauty of Nature is getting a redesign. Next bunch of posts are going to be about the remaining odds and ends that don't fit into any of the five colours specifically.
Fly & High!!

KennyMan666

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Colourless
Well - a few things left. You'd think that primary among them would be multicolour, but we're starting on the other end - the colourless cards. There's not a lot of them - since when I say "colourless", I don't mean artifacts. The most known colourless creatures in regular Magic would be the Eldrazi, and, weeeeeell...


Yeah.

Then there's a card that I made once upon a time that I don't know if it even has a point anymore because I don't think it's ever worth playing and has been redesigned like three times, and a card that... might maybe be worth using. I don't know. Might also just be a pointless common you'd never want to open.

I am realizing that Invocation might be redesignable into a colourless entry in the large Enchantment cycle. And speaking of cycles!

I also mentioned we were only almost done with the cycles. So here's the two colourless entries in them. Or one-and-a-half.

So Kedama was meant to be the colourless entry in the common small fry enemy cycle. It ended up being not quite that and I have my doubts about its current version. And then we have the colourless Wizard instant - which leads me to our next bit.

Multicolour
I'm sure you've wondered when the payoff for all those Wizard spells is going to come, and the answer to that question is right now. So that, and introducing us to the multicoloured section, is one of two engines of a theoretical Wizard deck - and it is of course...


We've seen six Wizard spells so far, six Wizard instants. That's not all of them, though.



Two engines, I said. The other one would be this here little thing that doesn't technically concern itself specifically with Wizard spells, but...

It actually used to have a requirement of paying WUBRG at your upkeep or it'd be sacrificed. I did remove that but I'm realizing it might need some kind of way to deliberately destroy it to trigger that ability.

Also not part of a cycle, but this is what the Prismrivers lead up to.


Some multicoloured deities.

Hecatia is... a thing. I'm not sure it's worth all that effort to make sure only 3 can exist at one time. Might rejigger her some.

Shiki got some spells, too.


Then, well... there's not a whole lot thematically connected left in the multicolours. Auras.


Creatures.



Spells.


And last but not least, here's Mamizou's best friend.


Two more categories to deal with - we'll get into those tomorrow.
« Last Edit: August 19, 2017, 07:06:04 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

Colourless
I also mentioned we were only almost done with the cycles. So here's the two colourless entries in them. Or one-and-a-half.


Costing two then refunding one, when it's all colourless so it can't fix your mana or anything like that, is weird - it doesn't do anything (I think?) and it makes it fit the cycle less. I think this card wouldn't be too powerful if you just let people play it on turn one by making it cost one without the refund.

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Multicolour


[All of Patchouli's spells are basically fine]

Even in constructed it seems like wishful thinking to say "I'm gonna make the big Wizard spells deck" but also with enough enchantments and ways to protect a creature to get Patchouli's Spell Circle working.
Normally I wouldn't mention it, because when I see a creature's Spell Circle I'm thinking "Pfft that'll never happen, but I guess it's a nice bonus if it does" but in this case specifically the Spell Circle is kind of what holds the card together. The fixing is weak (for a creature you paid anywhere between Domain and 8 mana for), the stats are weak (making getting value off Declare less likely), the Proliferate on Wizard spells is difficult to set up uses for - but it gets easier with the Spell Circle.

So this card could be stronger? At least, it could be redesigned to take some power out of the Spell Circle and put it back in to the base-level card - even something as simple as increasing the cost on the tutor but buffing her stats or something.

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Also not part of a cycle, but this is what the Prismrivers lead up to.


It's strange how if you were playing a Prismriver-themed deck, this card can do their abilities better than they can - so if you had both them and this in play they would just kind of become textless creatures. Changing the abilities to be different would sacrifice flavour for balance, though. Hmmm...

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Oh god watch out, a rules lawyer is about to jump out of my body and start being a big jerk bluuaarrgh

Does Faithbound U/B actually work? "I control 4 shrines, so-" "So she costs 1UUBB. There's no U/B mana to get rid of."
It's a new mechanic in a set that won't really be played by Magic turbo-nerds, so even in the worst case you can probably just say "Yes it does work, because I say so."

The templating on her enters the battlefield ability bothered me (and there was another card back in white with this problem, I think?)
When a permanent does two things on ETB, you have to template it as "When ~ ETBs, draw a card, then target player discards a card."

The token doesn't have power or toughness. Whoops. Also, isn't the token missing two abilities if the only change is supposed to be that it's not legen- ow ow ow OW okay, okay, I'm leaving geez

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[Suwako and Eiki are cool. Suwako has the same hybrid mana "problem" that Hecatia does]

Hecatia is... a thing. I'm not sure it's worth all that effort to make sure only 3 can exist at one time. Might rejigger her some.

Oh, right - I should maybe talk about that and her balance, too, now that the rules lawyer is gone.
Her ETB is pretty strong, and the tap ability gives me the ability to keep doing it at instant speed! Main phase and combat phase discard is nice until your opponent becomes empty-handed, but instant speed discard can be done on your opponent's draw step!
So limiting the copies of herself she can make is important - being able to say "If you ever become empty-handed (good luck avoiding that, I control a discard engine), you never draw anything again unless you can play it on your draw step" is pretty crazy, and being able to maybe pull it off twice is already very powerful. If you decide to rework her, make sure that the other player is allowed to draw cards.

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Hahaha you can entwine it. Not only that, but I can think of some non-3P scenarios where you'd want to do it, too.

Anyway that's funny, but quit printing one-sided Wraths of God, damn it! This only costs one extra mana over it, too!
If you really want to kill everything your opponent controls, it costs 9 mana. Okay, if you're committed to three colours and only need one survivor on your end, then it costs 7 mana sometimes. Duneblast can get kind of nuts.

Exiling all creatures is even stronger (6 mana for Final Judgement, compared to Wrath of God at 4), and I can't seem to find any card that does a one-sided exile all creatures. So you're exploring new design space, and that's cool, but the design space around here seems to cost about 10 mana.

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[There were a couple of huge auras here. I love 'em.]

Creatures.


Clownpiece is pretty good - compares to your good friend and mine, Hypnotic Specter. She's probably not broken, but I'd keep my eye out.
Tewi is pretty good - compares to your good friend and mine, Shadowmage Infiltrator. She's a 1/1 in a removal-heavy set, it'll probably be fine.

Sumireko - Declare kind of sucks on low toughness, no evasion creatures. Yeah, I attack and block with these creatures sometimes, but it's hard to be able to say "I'm so confident in the fact that this creature will attack and block more than once (or god, at least once hopefully) that I'm willing to bet a card on it, one turn in advance." On this expensive and important creature, I'd never do it.

I really like Raiko's design!

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stop it stop it stop it
Well yeah okay Exiled Doll doesn't just kill everything like those other cards I hate do - there's some pretty big ladies strutting around Gensokyo who can survive an extinction event for everyone weaker than 5/3* - but this card could still probably be more expensive or just hit all players for once

Nue's cool. She might dilute the colours a bit in a draft, though - I could be drafting green/white and still basically be fine playing her for 6.

*That's how it works, right? I entwine, I choose that the -2/-2 happens first, then we check power?

KennyMan666

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Quote
Does Faithbound U/B actually work?
Yes. The U/B mana symbol is just shorthand for "You can pay for this with your choice of blue or black mana", so each Shrine you control decreases her mana cost by your choice of either a blue or a black mana.

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isn't the token missing two abilities
Technically yes but even when using the custom token style with a taller text box I can't actually fit all that text. I can fit Faithbound U/B on it if I disable the reminder text, at least. And the idea is that you should never be able to control a Hecatia token if you're not also controlling the Hecatia creature. I considered making her a Precursor Golem, but that seemed kind of eh. (even if I already did something like it in making Suika a Pentavus)

And you can't really lock the opponent down for that long - you can only make two copies, and as soon as any of them die, all Hecatias die.

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quit printing one-sided Wraths of God
Yeah, yeah, that's again me going for flavour over mechanics and not considering how many different ways I already have to make the same thing happen. Guess I should look that over.

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Declare kind of sucks on low toughness, no evasion creatures.
I can see that. In this case it just seemed like it fit thematically.

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That's how it works, right? I entwine, I choose that the -2/-2 happens first, then we check power?
Yes - when two effects happen at the same time, like with an entwined spell, the controller of the spell picks the order those effects go on the stack.

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I really like Raiko's design!
I never posted them, but she's designed like that because Benben is blue with Flash and Tsukumo is red with Haste.
Fly & High!!

KennyMan666

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Artifacts
And then comes the artifacts. We're going to start not with actual artifacts, however, but with to creatures that concern themselves with them:


And then... so, I mentioned I had coloured a number of artifacts. This is still a bit up in the air, but at the moment, every colour except blue has a monocoloured artifact creature.


There's three multicoloured artifact creatures, one of which does feature blue, that could maybe become just blue. There's even an artifact creature deity.

I will say, though, that I am very, very unsure on Hisou Tensoku's design.

That's all the artifact creatures we have. Then there's some regular artifacts.


And since this set is somewhat about powering up creatures, of course there's equipment.



And then! A mechanic I'm using that in regular Magic has so far only been used on one single card, in Future Sight - Fortifications. So far most of them have to do with Shrines.



Which brings us to our last stop.

Lands
The cornerstone of every single Magic deck that has ever been made and ever will be made. The lands from which you get your mana. Let's start out basically because I actually made basic lands as well, just to be inclusive. Two variants of each - one regular and one full-art.






Swiftly moving on to special lands. Once upon a time I had a cycle of five special lands. If I recall, in order of colour, they were Hakurei Shrine, Misty Lake, Netherworld (or maybe Hakugyokurou), Youkai Mountain and Forest of Magic. I also had a land called Moriya Shrine and one called Gensokyo. The cycle did something really dumb that I don't even want to talk about, Moriya Shrine and Gensokyo I was never satisfied with. So eventually I scrapped everything I was doing with those and made two different land cycles instead - the first one of which being ten dual lands. So here goes.




And now, almost finally, it's time for the Shrines. I did post one of them early, but hey.



So there you go.

One more land exists. It was made separately from the land that was called Gensokyo, but it ended up being more like what I wanted Gensokyo to be than what that card ever actually ended up as, so I deleted that one and kept this one instead.


And that concludes the megaposts. I won't be doing daily posts any more, and I have a lot of things to do the upcoming week, but I might post a couple of cards, redesigned/rebalanced ones, previously unposted, maybe stuff like that. We'll see.

EDIT: Also holy shit unrelated to Magic but I finally figured out where I recognized your username from, while reading my SomethingAwful post history in search of another thing. Unless there's two Roonerspism/Roonespisms wandering the streets of the internet, you and I were in the same Advance Wars By Web game that was bonus content in Paul.Power's Advance Wars LP back in 2014!
« Last Edit: August 20, 2017, 01:31:21 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

That's all the artifact creatures we have [none of them seemed overpowered or very interesting. sorry. I think they were all bug-free at least.] Then there's some regular artifacts.


You can target something that's already a copy token to get another copy for 0 mana, right?
So if any creature untaps an artifact on ETB, you've got an infinite combo.

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Flower Tank's kind of nuts but it seems like every creature is going to have a million keywords so maybe the drawback will actually keep it in line.

"At the beginning of the end step" should be either "each end step" or "your end step" depending on how much you want it to trigger.

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Hey set designer, I found an oversight with this card: The flavour text suuuuuucks.

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Hokora seems really expensive? Is "owning a shrine" really so great that you're willing to use a card and spend 6 + 1PT mana for it? I admit that I've forgotten most of what having a shrine does aside from making your Faithbound creatures cost 1 less mana (completely offset by this card's upkeep) and allowing you to play Faithbound creatures in the first place (surely you'd just put in more shrines instead of adding this card to your deck)

Donation Box is expensive enough where the first ability could maybe cost 0 instead of 1 (keeping in mind that tapping the land itself already makes it mana-neutral).
Maybe I just don't know how to value Fortifications.

Wait, why would I ever want to not untap my land when it's fortified by Onbashira? What's even going on?

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Lands


I'm probably just telling you what you already know here, but there's no way these things are balanced with eachother. When you can pass a keyword to a creature for 3,T on your land...
Haste or Lifelink: You'd have to be swimming in mana to consider it
Flying or Menace: It's not great, but it would win you games
Deathtouch or Immortal: Opponent groans and slams their head in to the table, scattering their library

The condition for getting them in to play untapped is kind of cool. It's not going to happen much, but it's not like they'd be unplayably bad if it just said "they come in tapped no matter what" so you can afford to be really cute with the condition like that.

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[and the other ones aren't that much different]

Shrines are pretty cool. Only one per colour and they're all rare, huh? Guess I'm not going to try to draft Junko after all.
I'm not sure why they say "remove a faith counter or sacrifice ~". Obviously you'd only sacrifice if you had to, but if you have to sacrifice it then why did you tap it in the first place - it has no counters! It's basically just a mean way to kick the player when they're down - a punishment for allowing your opponent to play land-tapping spells/abilities.

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EDIT: Also holy shit unrelated to Magic but I finally figured out where I recognized your username from, while reading my SomethingAwful post history in search of another thing. Unless there's two Roonerspism/Roonespisms wandering the streets of the internet, you and I were in the same Advance Wars By Web game that was bonus content in Paul.Power's Advance Wars LP back in 2014!

Ah, right! It only makes sense that we'd cross paths again considering that we apparently have shared excellent taste in games.

KennyMan666

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You can target something that's already a copy token to get another copy for 0 mana, right?
Oh yeah that says nontoken now.

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Hey set designer, I found an oversight with this card: The flavour text suuuuuucks.
Like that's the only one. You should also have seen that card before I both redesigned it from an artifact creature into a fortification and also found a better picture for it. It was easily the most boring card in the whole set, and that includes creatures without any rules text and basic lands.

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Hokora seems really expensive? Is "owning a shrine" really so great that you're willing to use a card and spend 6 + 1PT mana for it?
Maybe. Probably not. There's some interactions with Shrines and a land fortified with Hokora doesn't run on Faith like the other ones do, so you can keep a Shrine running in another way. Plus, for a while I had the idea of this thing as a regular block with three expansions (since this was before the two-block model became a thing), and this was meant to be a card hinting at Shrines an expansion or two before they would really become a major thing - now I'm just thinking of it as a large set (and the two-block model is dying anyway), but still. I even came up with names for all of the expansions - Legends of an Eastern Wonderland (which would also be the name of the block, and would introduce the mechanics of the block), Forgotten Dreamscape (which would contain the majority of the PC-98 characters) and then it would all end with Conflict of Faith (where the power of the Shrines and most of the Deities would come in). Plus, the main cycle of Shrines are legendary, so you can only play one of each. And you're not going to play Shrines for colours you're not focusing on, so a deck would probably at most contain two of the main Shrines. I guess you could go for multiple copies and Spellcard away the ones you can't play once you have one down. The Hokora can "go around" that limitation. It fuels Hakurei Barrier and Yin-Yang (which in turn fuels your other Shrines by proliferating faith counters), makes Donation Box and Onbashira stronger... and then there's another thing I haven't posted yet that I'm not actually sure is a good idea. We'll see. (and again I go with theoretical ways of playing with the set that probably wouldn't ever be done because there's faster and more efficient way to build a hilariously overpowered deck)

And it's down to being a common now. You probably wouldn't play it if you opened it, but that goes for a lot of commons. :V

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I'm probably just telling you what you already know here, but there's no way these things are balanced with eachother.
Given that Immortal is unique to this set I'll give you that I can't really say if giving it to anything for 3 mana (I guess effectively 4 since you're not using the buffland that turn either) is far too cheap, but from what I can tell, giving something Deathtouch until end of turn is costed at 2 mana (even repeateable) and there's equipment with it that cost in total 3 mana to cast and equip. So expending 4 lands on giving something Deathtouch doesn't seem that busted?

But that they're not all the same power level isn't much of a surprise. I wanted to do dual lands but I wanted to do something more than just ho hum here's another dual land that comes into play tapped.

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Wait, why would I ever want to not untap my land when it's fortified by Onbashira? What's even going on?
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I'm not sure why they say "remove a faith counter or sacrifice ~". Obviously you'd only sacrifice if you had to, but if you have to sacrifice it then why did you tap it in the first place - it has no counters!
Okay, I'm seeing what happened - in an attempt to streamline Shrine wording by combining the lines about removing faith counters and sacrificing the Shrine when you run out of them, I ended up changing the functionality. The intention is/was for Shrines to get sacrificed as a state-based effect when they have no faith counters on them (which means you need to start building faith on the same turn you play the Shrine, either by casting spells or proliferating (and Wizard spells let you do both because Faith is Magic apparently)), but with what I did, you can have a faithless Shrine stick around - and you wouldn't tap a faithless shrine. I've reverted the Shrines to their old functionality for now. The Onbashira was thus intended as a way to "lock down" a Shrine that's low on faith, so you can keep it from losing any more counters and build it back up before untapping it again.

Also one of my favourite things about the Shrines is the flavour text of Moriya Shrine, because there are no red tengu or kappa. Casting the tengu and kappa gives you faith for Hakurei and Myouren, respectively.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2017, 10:47:40 PM by KennyMan666 »
Fly & High!!

Like that's the only one.

Well, I didn't want to sound like a broken record every time. That one really sucked.

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From what I can tell, giving something Deathtouch until end of turn is costed at 2 mana (even repeateable) and there's equipment with it that cost in total 3 mana to cast and equip. So expending 4 lands on giving something Deathtouch doesn't seem that busted?

I'll admit that I didn't actually look up any repeatable deathtouch cards to see if 4 mana for it was fair or not, just because my immediate reaction to "land that can give deathtouch" was "Uuuugghh"

Equipment isn't a good comparison just because you can't equip at instant speed, but even comparing it to having the effect on a creature is still slightly wrong - lands are harder to destroy (usually) and if the land can still tap for mana then you've snuck some functionality in to one of the cards that usually make up the "Land Tax" that every* deck has to pay 40% of itself to. That's why man-lands are always so expensive to change them from land to man-d for just one turn.

But yeah it does seem like passing deathtouch to a guy only costs 2 mana, so having it for 4 mana on a land probably isn't busted. I stand by "not wanting to be the person on the other end of the table" though, just for how much it complicates blocks and my combat tricks.

*except for the really cool ones, that are either 0% or 90%+ lands