Summon the Pack · 11:30pm Jan 14th, 2020
AlexTFish has been hard at work taking my various Equestria Girls card blogs and wrestling the contents into a vaguely playable set. His first draft is complete and viewable here. This link will give you a randomly generated booster pack, which can even include a premium foil card in place of one of the commons!
Note that since I don't write the blogs with overarching set design in mind, I had to fill some of the holes I'd left in the set. For the sake of completion, here are the additions:
Costume Coordinator 1W
Creature — Human Artificer
Soulbond (You may pair this creature with another unpaired creature when either enters the battlefield. They remain paired for as long as you control both of them.)
As long as Costume Coordinator is paired with another creature, spells you cast that target one or both of those creatures cost 1 less to cast.
2/1
Songbound Rioter BR
Creature — Human Berserker
Protection from Humans (This creature can’t be blocked, targeted, or dealt damage by anything that’s a Human.)
Songbound Rioter can’t block.
“They’re all scum, but some are useful scum.”
—Adagio Dazzle
3/1
Darkest Mareapor
Land
When Darkest Mareapor enters the battlefield, you gain 1 life.
T: Add C.
1, T: Add B, R, or G.
Sometimes Daring Do’s worst foe is the jungle itself.
Sirens’ Stage
Land
Sirens’ Stage enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add B.
T, Sacrifice Sirens’ Stage: Add GW.
It’s always darkest before the rainbow.
Suburban Orchard
Land
Suburban Orchard enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add G or W.
T, Exert Suburban Orchard: Add GW. (An exerted land won’t untap during your next untap step.)
The Apples can make one acre do the work of forty.
Neat!
Never played Magic before and don't plan to change that, but that's still really cool!
It's lovely to see people putting what I assume is really quite a lot of time into contaminating something with ponies (For its own good, of course--pony deficiency is a very serious condition).
Awesome! Now all we need is to hook this up into some inevitable online play solution.
Now to set up the online cube drafts
Cool, although the gifs in card art are a little disconcerting.
I'm having fun generating sealed pools and seeing what they tell me about the set. At the moment, the density of common is a little bit skewed towards noncreatures so I need to tweak a few things to get the common creature count up a smidgen.
I had one pool that could have used Backup Supplies to awesome effect on Conclusive Evidence, Canterlot Banner, Licorice Lasso, two copies of Animated Fossil and a Salvaged Wreck in a blue-white-green artifacts deck, but I concluded the red-green ramp deck was better thanks to all the removal like Rainbow Laser, Dance-Off and 2xCaber Toss.
Meanwhile I tried another pool, which admits some variations WUB Sacrifice (using 2x Piecake Eating, 2x Aven Operative, 3x Royal Detectives, Conclusive Evidence, Welcome to the Show, and Cupcake Fountain Expedition), but also has a rather terrifying-looking mainly-red-some-blue aggro deck: the blue provides 2x Telekinetic Arrester and a Contact Telepath, which are good with Electric Rainboom but also necessary as early/cheap Humans to enable the 2x Transformed Courser -- the pool's red early creatures include Hamster Roughrider, Eager Troublemaker and 2x Surly Hound, which are mostly not Humans!
(The above comment might be slightly easier to read over at MagicMultiverse where you get hover tooltips of the cards.)
I'm having fun
5186635
Heh. Yeah... obviously when I print this to play with other local Magic-playing pony fans (so... that's just my wife, then) I'll have to choose a still from the animated GIF. But until that point, in cases like Pastrify or Ground Pounder, the animation conveys the flavour better than a still could, so I figure why not? (In a few cases it's just that the animated GIF was the first vaguely representative image that came up in the Derpibooru search, and when I'm having to collect 250+ pieces of card art, I'm not wanting to spend very long searching for each one.)
5186520
I am so totally up for arranging online play of this, when I get a bit further through the set design. PonyMTG's Cockatrice integration is probably the best way to go for that.
I'm also planning more sets. I started with Equestria Girls, but I think there might be enough material for one set from Seasons 1-3, another from Seasons 4-6, and another from Seasons 7-9... and then I sortof want to do another set collecting all the cards from certain themes like Snow which I'm having to cut because they'd be too dilute if they were included in one of the regular sets.
Testing is progressing fine. The typical FICG creature size is somewhat smaller than in a regular MtG set, but we knew that already. I'm going to try deckbuilding a few more solo sealed pools, and then have a couple of face-to-face playtest games :)
I have a couple of small questions for you, though.
1) Can you confirm whether Nest Crown's Bird tokens are meant to have flying? I'd expect them to, especially since Crown of the Grove Queen's Bird tokens do, so I hope this is just an oversight.
2) The Legendary Equipment representing the girls' geodes - Amulet of Magic and friends - all have a "As long as ~ is attached, [colour] spells cost you {1} less to cast" clause. This is almost entirely the same as "Equipped creature has '[Colour] spells cost you {1} less to cast'", modulo effects that remove abilities or similar niche cases. I assume you chose the wording you did because it's slightly more comprehensible than having a nested ability inside quotes. However... the set contains Bootmother's Blessing, a delightful innovative Aura that animates an artifact, and if it's an Equipment replaces "Equipped creature" with "This creature". That forms a mildly annoying anti-combo with the first clause on each of the Amulets, which sticks out particularly because the Amulets are more than 50% of the set's Equipment. I wouldn't normally ask for design changes, but this feels more like editing or templating... What do you think of tweaking the wording on the Amulets to be more compatible with Bootmother's Blessing?
5190763
1. Omitting flying from the Nest Crown token was absolutely a mistake on my part. Go right ahead in fixing it.
2. Honestly, I'm glad this is the only nonbo that cropped up in forcing these things together. You're cleared to tweak the Amulets' abilities. Bootmother bless us, every one.
The other nonbo is harder to fix, and has an in-set workaround. Overwhelmed Petsitter says "At the beginning of each end step, if you created a token this turn, populate." At first I thought "Ooh, that'll work really well with all the Treasure tokens, Clue tokens and Food tokens!" But populate only creates copies of creature tokens. So we're in the weird situation where the Petsitter is fairly likely to trigger, but often won't have any creature tokens to copy. But it's not like I can ask you to tweak the functionality of populate!
The workaround is to enchant your Clue token with Bootmother's Blessing
Then each turn you make a (creature or noncreature) token, you can choose the animated Clue to populate a copy of. You get an inanimate Clue copy, but that's fine.
Latest update: I've done five sealed pools, building a few decks from each. The conclusions are that I needed to tweak the burn to be less expensive, which I've done, but apart from that things look good. I'm planning to print out 3-4 of those 40-card sealed decks, as well as the two 60-card constructed decks I've made, Rainbooms Songs and Lifegain/Artifacts, for face-to-face playtesting. (When I add the pages for the 40-card decks they'll appear in the green box at the top next to the current decklist names.)
I've been working my way through adding art to the set, a long process that's mostly done now. I've got art for all of the cards in the 60-card decks (except Conduct Cognition whose flavour I'm having a little trouble following, or at least distinguishing from Siren-Swayed). If you happen to spot that the art I've chosen for a card is not the moment or character you had in mind when designing it, or anyone has suggestions for alternate better screencaps for any card's art, do let me know.