Expansion Set: "The Gifts of Gaea" · 1:57am May 6th, 2022
Inspired by FanOfMostEverything's "Friendship is Card Games," I've decided to try my hand at coming up with custom cards meant to represent characters, events, and locales from my stories. Of course, there is one small problem with my plan:
I've never played a game of MTG in my life.
Time to see if my adventures on Scryfall, the wiki, and YouTube have taught me enough!
New terms:
<me>: Self-referential symbol. Replaces usage of CARDNAME as a self-reference to avoid confusion on non-legendary cards and to save space.
REVISED
Chiefs of Branch and Brook 2U
Legendary Artifact
Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery, as that spell resolves, you may exile it instead of putting it into its owner's graveyard.
T, Put a card exiled with <me> into its owner's graveyard: Add X colorless mana, X is that card's generic mana cost.
River Become a Bridge U
Instant
Target creature gains either "Cannot block" or "Can block creatures that can't be blocked" until end of turn.
Prophetic Dreams UU
Enchantment
Enchant legendary creature.
Enchanted creature has "T: Look at the top X cards of your library, X is this creature's mana value. Add 1 of them to your hand. Shuffle."
Timber Spruce, Wary Whisperer 3GUU
Legendary Creature - Human Ranger
G: Target creature gets -2/-2 while blocking <me> until end of turn.
U: Target creature gains "Must attack or block this turn, if able."
5/5
Dreams of Darkness B
Sorcery.
As an additional cost to cast this spell, pay X life.
Scry X.
... Okay, before I go into too great detail, do you actually want someone to analyze what you've done right and wrong?
5655735
If they'd be willing, yes, please.
Sounds difficult
Okay, you asked for this. Going to go through, offer the best templating I can given how I understand them, and my commentary on the concepts.
• Putting cards aside has been consolidated into exiling for a long time now.
• The five-card cap feels unnecessarily complicated. Yes, if you can get an infinite untap loop going, you could get a lot of mana out of this thing, but the same is true of any mana artifact.
• The mana ability itself is fascinating; nothing in the game cares about a card's generic mana cost. You've hit an interesting balance between potential output and the amount of work needed to get that output. Possibly too complicated for its own good, but still an intriguing innovation.
• On the creative side, that is a very green name for a blue artifact. The effect itself honestly works in blue, red, and possibly even green. Or colorless, because, you know, artifact.
River Becomes a Bridge: I'll be honest, adding a creature to combat once it's already underway... It can work, but it is a very messy and wordy process, especially if you're trying to get an extra attacker in after blockers have already been declared, thus giving the defending player no chance to defend themselves given how combat actually works. This is why most compulsory combat effects have to be used beforehand.
Removing creature from combat, on the other hand, just isn't as good as simply tapping them. Any triggers from attacking or blocking will still go off, and removing a blocker won't make whatever it was blocking unblocked.
There's also an ambiguity with whether this is meant to be a single-target effect or scalable. I'm honestly not sure with your wording. Plus, it's debatable whether this is even a blue effect, though given the options to either force or deny combat, blue is the one color with the most frequent access to all of the necessary effects. Given that, I think this is what you were going for?
... I'm sorry, this is just bad. The entire point of scry is being able to control what your future draws are going to be, putting away cards that aren't useful and keeping ones that are. This accomplishes none of that, and actually gets worse the more expensive the enchanted creature is. You're basically shuffling the top of your library, rendering the knowledge you gain ever more worthless. You may know what you're getting, but not when it's coming. (The thought occurs that this may come off as rather snooty to certain prophets. "What, you can't tell when your visions will come to pass? How terribly provincial.")
There's also the matter of Auras presenting what's known as "card disadvantage." If your opponent uses a kill spell to take out the creature this enchanted, they spent one card to make you lose two. Scaled up across a game, that resource advantage can grind one player out of the game.
• Timber can apparently 1v1 a T. rex, so that's impressive.
• Given that "Homestrian" is a nationality, you're treading very dangerous ground there. They're all human (presumably;) treat them as such.
• Minor quibble with the order of the abilities; green comes before blue when it's just the two of them, as per the mana cost.
• Menace isn't green or blue; it's primarily black and secondarily red. Green's evasion abilities are trample and some infrequently used, unkeyworded options like "<me> can't be blocked by creatures with power 2 or less" or "<me> can't be blocked by more than one creature."
• Adjusting the order of things on the stack is not generally done. It leads to some messy interactions, bizarre outcomes, and yet is often so niche that the ability might as well not be there a lot of the time. What are you trying to accomplish with this? Moreover, what's the flavor of it? Is Timber altering the flow of time and/or causality?
In all, the concepts are interesting, but the execution...
If nothing else, I suggest watching some Arena streamers. Or LoadingReadyRun durdling around. It'll definitely help if you see the game in practice.
5655784
Huh. To be honest, I expected things to go either a lot better (somehow getting things nearly balanced) or a lot, lot worse (everything being either completely busted or worthless). Thanks for the feedback.
* Yeah, Chiefs of Branch and Brooks' cap of 5 is more of a leftover from its inspiration (and a safety precaution).
* River Become a Bridge was more intended as "Surprise an opponent with either more attack power on your side or less on their's," but yeah, it sounds like it just doesn't work in MTG's combat system.
* Good point about Prophetic Dreams.
* Okay, so the creature type is racial, not national, got it. Also, yeah, the visual of Timber wrestling a T-Rex is needlessly amusing. As for the abilities, Menace was the first "difficult to block" one I could think of (meant to represent Everfree helping him get from place to place unseen), while the U ability was more meant to represent the weirdness of Everfree's gifts, though yeah, it does seem a bit unthematic.
* Didn't see anything regarding Dreams of Darkness; does that look fine?
Again, thanks for the help and recommendations.
5655788
Oh! Completely missed Dreams of Darkness.
This is interesting. The power of a scry increases more than linearly as you look at more and more cards. Sculpting your deck to this degree for just one mana may be too good... but the fact that you don't actually get any more cards out of it when you cast it does temper its power somewhat. Still potentially dangerous given the unbounded possibilities, but the time needed to make them pay off, especially when you've bled yourself for it and extra-especially when it's a sorcery...
Well, it's certainly no Vampiric Tutor, but that's not saying much. One to keep an eye on, but I can't say for certain without actual playtesting.