The set's main comments thread for reference.

Should we make them on this set and link them here?

Or we could make slots for the skeleton and see which slots we all agree on. We could then desing cards for those slots.

Oh. Well, I already designed my set of blue commons, using basically the layout given on the skeleton, since I agreed with them.
CU01: Blue islandwalk
CU02: Lithe Octopus
CU03: Flood Crab
CU04: Glistening Kraken
CU05: Serpent of the Endless Sea
CU06: Waterspout Warper
CU07: Sorcery that mills for each island
CU08: Wave Burst
CU09: Spell Gyre
CU10: Geyser
CU11: Overflood
CU12: Flow of Memories
CU13: Eroding Current
CU14: Crushing Depths
I have my own criticisms for my submission, but I'll wait an see what everyone else says.

The skeleton is very useful for placing cards, but if looked at too strictly, it can hamper design. Personally, I'd rather have a quick list of "needs" to determine my 14 card selection. So far, our skeleton "needs": ­

I like that idea much more than mine. For the number of creatures, I agree with five. I do think that a vanilla is a must though. I also agree with the 5 spells that flood, but the number that benefit from your opponent having an Island should be less. We already have an Islandwalker, and a "Serpant", and we don't want blue to punish decks to much for being blue. Then no one would play blue in limited especially if there are a lot of strong blue cards.

I think that I managed to include all of those things except the vanilla creature and the five spells that benefit from opponent controlling an island.
For the second, my mind kept going back to "draw a card for each island," whether that be on the battlefield, or under someone's control. This seemed more like uncommon, though, and so I didn't include it. However, Crushing Depths could easily be changed to caring about islands, as could Spell Gyre and Waterspout Warper.
I see the Warper as a way to deal with flying. Originally, it mentioned flying and landwalk, but I changed it around. It's also a way to remove flood counters, which I believe we agreed would end the effect.

I was counting Islandwalking and Serpents as ways to punish an opponent for having an Island. So that would just mean 3 other cards. While we need to be jurisprudent with the mechanic, we do need to have some things that punishes the opponent for controlling islands. Otherwise, what would be the point of all these cards that say "flood target land"?

Oh, and I forgot one. As per the card Firebreathing et. al. Cycle, we should have a blue common (probably creature) that really uses a lot of blue mana activations. Also, in theory, one combat trick per color is recommended.

I suppose I can alter my list later if there are some changes to be made. This list includes 6 creatures, is still a low creature count. We may want to up the number to 7, even, to represent the fact that blue is focusing on its serpents in this set.

CU01: Serpent of the Endless Sea - 5cc Creature, Serpent, Likes Island
CU02: Territorial Octopus - 3cc Creature, Serpent, Likes Island
CU03: Giant Hermit Crab 4cc Creature, Firebreathing
CU04: (((Moray Foamcaster))) 1cc Creature, Flying-dealing with
CU05: Weedy Scorpionfish 3cc Creature, Islandwalking, Likes Island, CCC
CU06: Moray Deepguard 2cc Vanillish Creature, Flood
CU06: Erode 4cc Hard Counter, Flood, CC
CU07: Annul 1cc Soft Counter, Secretly deals with mono-white
CU08: Sudden Undertow 4cc, Twiddle, Combat Trick
CU09: Not a Drop to Drink 3cc Aura, Dehydration effect, Likes Island
CU10: Flow of Memories 5cc, Card Draw, Flood
CU11: Dam Break 3cc Instant, Bounce, Flood
CU12: Adrift the Endless Sea 2cc Instant, Shrink, Likes Island, Combat Trick, CC
CU13: Simple Flood 1cc Sorcery, Flood
CU14: Open.

I have additional notes on Erode and Annul that you may want to check out.

Do you have something against "flood target land?" I thought we decided on that being a keyword action like proliferate. Also, I would say you're missing a high toughness creature.

L2, jmg, I like those outlines. I was sort-of writing one myself, but didn't finish yet. PS. jmg, I like your names.

> Minimum 5 creatures. True number is up for debate.

Yeah. I based my assumptions on that article, but just now I looked at several recent sets (2011, 2012, scars) and each was 50% creatures, so I think that may be the new guideline (?). Either way, between 5 and 7 seems fine (we still don't know if we'll stay at 14 mono cards). I'd provisionally vote for 7 on the grounds that more creatures hopefully means more interaction, but I don't really know.

> One Islandwalker ­

I would vote for more, if islandwalk is replacing flying. Scars had 3 fliers, 1 unblockable, and conditionally unblockable serpent (out of 14). 2012, slightly less, worldwake much less.

If blue had flying, I would go for 2 flying, maybe 1 islandwalk, and 1 serpent (whether that has islandwalk, islandhome, both, or some variation). So maybe 2 islandwalk, one serpent, one other evasion? I agree that's problematical as islandwalk is stronger than flying -- perhaps make sure one has another restriction?

> Aproximately 5 spells that include Flood? Maybe more? ­

I only have a wild guesses; themes seem to range from a couple of cards to all but a couple of cards. In order to make flood relevant, and since it's a small rider effect, I would guess 5 is reasonable, more if it seems helpful.

> One Hard Counter, and, ­ > One Soft Counter... since people seem to think that's necessary. ­

That seems right. (Matches the example sets I was looking at.)

> One twiddle effect to mess with Red's "All in" mechanic ­

Yep.

> One card draw spell, minimum ­

Yep. Probably either two, or one and a couple of spells that loot or cantrip (?)

> One bounce spell ­

Yep, although the examples I saw all had 2, so it seems its usually higher than I realised.

> One "locking down" enchantment, or enchantment like thing. > I'd say that's debatable, but Mr. Rosewater listed that as > "Blue always gets"

Yeah. I agree this seems usual, but also that it may be ok to cut, although we should probably make sure there's a tapper or a couple of bounce spells or something. We have a reason to cut it if we want to leave as many enchantments as possible for white (or to include it if we want little bits of cross-color synergy).

> One CCC spell ­ > One CC Spell. ­

Yep.

> One way to fight flying...

Yep. I agree there should be something, whether or not it mentions flying specifically, especially because blue usually gets flying. Something like Air Servant, or another tapper would be fine.

> If we wanted to be realistic, probably one vanilla creature.

It looks (at a very brief glance) like core sets usually have a couple (out of 20), big sets 1, and small sets none. So it's probably fine either way, but not necessary, but good if it's not too squeezed. What's probably more important, and that I always find hard, is to have several creatures that are simple (preferably have only one ability, sometimes flying).

> At least 5 spells that benefit from your opponent controlling an island. Maybe more.

Yep. I agree with the difficulty in making it relevant wihtout randomly hosing blue. I think we need to find out how this is going to play. One or two "remove a flood counter as a cost" cards may help, as that interacts only with flooded lands, without being so many the mechanic is purely parasitic. Cost-reduction or granting other small bonuses are not bad, as if it grants an overall advantage but isn't overwhelming in one card (as opposed to islandwalk, where even one islandwalker can be very powerful), it's much less worth splashing for, so will hopefully mainly be played in blue decks -- and does it matter if blue decks are slightly stronger against each other, they hopefully both get the benefit? I would say 2 1/2 islandwalkers, one or two spells that are strong-ish, one or two that have a small bonus, and one or two that remove flood counters ??

Other things. Mill: there's usually at least 1 card, I'd be fine with 2 or 3 if they have some other effect.

Card filtering ("looting"), there's usually one.

That was everything on my list.

@L2i0n0k7: I don't have anything against "Flood target land", I just didn't know which way we were going right now, and to make sure my cards were still acceptable with the long format, I spelled out what the mechanic was doing. Really, I just lifted the text right off Aquitect's Will. Though I prefer the new keyword action "Flood", I fear we will still need reminder text on all the commons anyway.

Also, hmm... yes, I am. Technically, Giant Hermit Crab can have a huge toughness, but doesn't start with one. Though, one of the reasons why blue normally has things like Horned Turtle is because it is trying to hold the ground, while creatures fly over the top. I aimed for mid-range Serpents pounding in... kind of like Green, but requiring some set up. Whether or not that was wise is open for debate.

JMGariepy here taking over the reins of 'Head Designer', and working to get a consensus on which cards are going into our set. First up, the color we understood the best walking into the community project: blue.

So far this much I know: Serpent of the Endless Sea is in. :)

We've had some discussion of what we'd like blue to do in this set. I'd like to see it more of a creature color than in many other sets, since the theme of attacking an opponent with a flooded island seems more flavorful to me than forcing your opponent to have an island, then claiming that that gave you an advantage. I plan to add my bonus Nessian Courser islandholmer, Link's Islandwalkers, and a creature that adds a flood counter. Then, I'll step back and see what needs to be added for spells and/or how we can improve the creature selection. Does anyone see a problem with this plan?

Oh, also, I assume Giant Hermit Crab is in as well, since we wanted a "firebreather" in every color, and that's the only one here?

Oh. Hmm... Looks like there was already some preliminary work on the skeleton in blue and gold. I'm going to assume people don't mind if I completely refudge what's on the skeleton, if it results in people getting what they want to see on the surface...

FWIW, I think we need to assume we'll do some playtesting somehow (if not, I don't think we're going to get anywhere). If so, I think the most important thing at this state is to put in cards that represent our themes, and our more wacky set-specific ideas, on the assumption that we may yet need to revamp/reimagine them significantly, so its important to see what plays well first, and not try to make definite decisions on individual cards.

"Does anyone see a problem with this plan?"

It seems like a good start.

EDIT: I uploaded some more of my suggested commons breakdowns into the details page. I'm not sure if everyone agrees, but I found that sort of breakdown very sensible because I think havnig "N flying creatures, N hexproof creatures, etc" more clearly suggests what a new set should have than assuming that there should, or should not, be a hexproof-flying creature because the last set had one.

In this case, I'd suggest we start by over-comitting to the themes, starting with lots of theme-specific cards even if they're not the most interesting designs, trying it out and seeing the "flood" theme is fun, and then adding in more specific cards later.

So I would suggest something like:

• at least four "flood" spells, probably as riders on simple spells or simple creatures, or a straight-up phantasmal creatures
• at least three evasion creatures (unblockable/islandwalk) in place of the usual flying
• at least three creatures that care about defender islands (either by islandwalk or some other way)
• some number of spells that care about islands
• other usual blue spells, counterspells, etc

What I want to see is, is flood fun? Do we have the right implementation? Do we have the right balance of cards that care about flood so one flooded land is useful, but two is better? Is it too non-interactive if blue has lots of islandwalkers? Is blue too useless as a creature colour if it doesn't have a flying replacement?

Do people agree that's the right approach, not to worry overmuch right now if the most interesting commons are in or not as long as we have a sensible skeleton?

jmg, do you think it would be useful if someone else (or me) made a provisional list? You volunteered, but I think it makes sense to delegate anything someone else is willing to do? :)

I'm banking on someone else playing the part of 'Head Developer' that will go and rip my skeleton to shreds by the time he is done. Since that's the case, yeah, I want the best representation of our ideas much more than perfect numbers. Oh, hey, yeah, I'd like to imagine that we could do this whole thing Athena jumping from the head of Zeus, numbers and all... but, more importantly, I want every concept represented. We won't get that (There are, after all, more cards than the skeleton allows. That's the point of this exercise.), but it's a good ideal.

Since Jack Edited, I need to edit. Give me a second.

PS. I agree with the things you think should definitely be in (at least for the moment). Looking at some old discussion I also agree with where you say the flood cr/spells shouldn't be clustered at the same mana cost. PPS. I hope I'm not too much repeating comments I drove into the ground before :)

"In this case, I'd suggest we start by over-comitting to the themes"
Definitely. Last thing I'd want to see is us get timid and not do our job the right way.

"The bullet points"
Seem about right. I don't want to write the entire skeleton down in one pass, and prefer to layer it with things that we must have, then should have, then seem cool. My first thought was to focus on creatures as musts, mostly because almost all the cards in blue, right now, is so focused on flood that I'm not concerned about getting enough of the flood mechanic in there. That being the case, I have no intention of shirking it.

Provisional lists for other colors
Oh, by all means. Like I mentioned in the previous post, whatever we do here will be torn through by our 'development team', so I'm not concerned about making a perfect list anyways as much as getting a good representation. If someone wants to tackle a color, just say so and it's yours. If you want to set up for me to come behind and clean up later, that's fine too.

"layer it with things that we must have, then should have, then seem cool"

Oh yes, good idea, definitely. I probably need to get some other stuff done today, but might have a look at another colour later.

Oh, extra bonus thingy. If anyone is keen on taking up one color, I'd suggest handling multicolored. I know the file on multicolored is a bit of a mess, but it would make sense if the opposition forces were assembled by a different brain than mine.

I could volunteer to have a go at one colour. Discussion of non-blue factions continues on Jump Starting the Community Set.

All right. What we have now is:

­Serpent of the Endless Sea
­Territorial Octopus
­Glistening Kraken
­Sea Drake(which may or may not require a name change)
­Flood Crab(increased in casting cost and toughness to not get in Overflood's way.)
­Giant Hermit Crab(which got more giant to get out of all the other creature's casting costs)
­Overflood(The simplest enabler we have without going my route of super simple enabler.)
­Flow of Memories(Which both Link and I added to our lists, so it seems like fair game.)

Tomorrow I'll be looking at the spells, making sure to add two more flood spells in there, and aiming to get in a utility creature or two.

Added Erode as a straight counterspell/flood enabler
­Eroding Current as an optional mill strategy (though I had to tame it a tad so that it could be a common)
­Dam Break Bounce + flood enabler. Plus Link and I submitted roughly the same card.
­Sponge Foamcaster Anti fly tech, which simultaneously supplies blue with flying as long as there is another flying creature in play.
­Not a Drop to Drink as a blue "Pacifism" option.

Blue commons are almost done, but I'm missing one slot. So here's an open call for someone to submit a blue soft counter. The ability to draw a card somehow is also prized in this slot, since I was only able to get one card draw spell in and Enlighten wants more. Obviously blue has the flood mechanic, but I don't think you need to work with it here. 2cc is ideal, but 1cc is also good.

In case your wondering why I'm passing on the two soft counters I have:

­Spell Gyre is a solid card, and I like it a lot. Unfortunately, it rewards the opponent for playing blue, and, while I'd like to explore that, we don't have room for it with 14 commons. So that idea is being pushed up to uncommon.

­Annul is a funny reprint in this set, and I do like how it counters white's creature suite. But blue isn't really fighting white. It also is bumped up to a possibility in uncommon for the same reason as Spell Gyre.

How about a functional reprint of Runeboggle / Force Void? Seems the most obvious kind of "soft counter + draw a card".

Although looking at the skeleton, looks like you're well supplied for expensive blue noncreature cards already. How about Disrupt?

Disrupt makes a lot of sense (or a Disrupt variant for another card type). I'll be putting it in if no one comes up with a better plan.

Well, I got to cut something to make this color 13 cards. I don't like it, because I like what all these cards add to common, but something's got to give.

As I see it, the loosest cards in this design look like Sponge Foamcaster or Eroding Current, as neither one of those cards are either adding something that blue gets every set. Alternatively, while I argued for a higher creature count in blue than normal, we could pull either Sea Drake or Territorial Octopus, since these would be our second islandwalker and/or second islandhomer. I think I prefer more creatures, then later, taking a creature out if it doesn't seem to be working, but I'm willing to listen to opinions.

Getting some mill at common happens more often than not. And Eroding Current is more playable than most mill commons because it works a bit like a Fatigue as well. Sponge Foamcaster on the other hand is indeed a pretty unusual effect, and nobody'd blink an eye to see it at uncommon.

Makes sense. Moving the Foamcaster out of common, unless someone rallies to its defense.

The biggest find from initial playtesting is that the blue commons are madly strong. There can be a little tension waiting to see if they get a flood card, but there are enough of them that they happen, and at that point suddenly it's a terrifying aggro-control deck with two good counterspells, a good removal spell, and some ludicrous attackers. Serpent of the Endless Sea is terrifying in a monocolour deck; Glistening Kraken is also terrifyingly good. At least the other islandwalkers can be shot or Runearrow Archered.

Part of the problem may be that the commons all want you to jump through one hoop, it's the same hoop for each of them, and it stays jumped. None of the other colours have any way to un-Flood lands (apart from Creeping Mold and the red LD if it does that), and even then just one more flood turns all the blue cards on again.

It might help if we did have some cards that care about number of Islands the opponent controls, although I recall we discussed that and decided against it. Perhaps at uncommon?

I always thought it would be nice if flood was more interactive, and that it was a matter of "keeping up the pressure" rather than "find a flood card, ok, now hammer the opponent with islandwalk before they find an answer". (I enjoyed it, but I think I because the one game I played I drew disproportionately few and disproportionately mixed cards.)

I mused over a possible variants. One is that creatures have tapped-islandwalk. That way, in the early game, the opponent probably has to tap all their lands anyway, but in the mid-game and late-game, they can probably avoid doing so, but you can keep the pressure on by flooding more of their lands, and wondering if they'll dare tap out.

Another would be that each islandwalker requires a separate island. That would need a new ability, not just islandwalk, but again it would represent the trade-off of doing more as the game goes on.

It would obviously help if there were a way for other colours to remove flood counters, although I'm not sure if one per colour would be enough. Vitenka ingeniously suggested the Sweep ability word, which is hilarious, but actually seems relevant, because then it's not an all or nothing decision -- the blue deck has to decide whether to flood heavily now and gamble that the other deck won't be able to return ALL their flooded lands witout crippling their mana, or to save some flood cards for later.

Alternatively, an early suggestion was that there should be some inbuilt way of removing flood, eg. a mana payment to remove a flood counter. Possibly only one per turn, or an exponential cost to remove them? Or a temporary payment that suppressed the flood counter for a turn only? I don't think this is ever going to work -- having a pile of flooded lands is already a little messy, and having to remember extra rules not really written on the cards is confusing, but I mention it for completeness.

ETA: Obviously, "care about number of islands" is good answer if it works; if we could think of effects that counted islands, but in reality the first one or two mattered the most, that would probably work well, but if some cards are "at least one" and some cards are "N" it may get confusing.

I like the sweep idea, but what if, rather than go full-out with it, there was simply a cycle of creatures that returned lands to your hand as a cost? If there was a blue one, it would even disguise the fact that it was meant to hose blue's strategy.

I'm super pleased by this report. It tells us that we did some things right and some things wrong and that we know what the wrong things are... I couldn't ask for a better playtest response... and that's from a guy who, you know, actually playtests games for companies.

I guess the only question nobody raised so far in this discussion is "is it possible we need to increase the quality of the mono-colored cards in other decks instead of do something to these cards". The big, big problems seem to be Serpent of the Endless Sea and Glistening Kraken. Do these cards seem broken because the other colors don't have equivalent monsters in their CCC and CCCCC slots? Or is the problem the one hoop model?

My guess, having not been involved in the playtest, is that we should do something about the one hoop model. 'No player interaction' is generally not fun. There's a lot of good suggestions in here about how to deal with it... I don't want to muddy those arguments by leaning on one way of doing it. But I'd also guess that we could use something explosive like Serpent of the Endless Sea in all the colors. The CCC slots probably need to be toyed with too. ­

I agree that each colour should have some strong rewards for going monocolour. Blue definitely has that in Serpent of the Endless Sea. I'm not sure if the CCC cards are enough for that.

It may be that Serpent of the Endless Sea only felt so dominant because red can't burn it, green can't do anything to it, and white theoretically could Pacify / O-Ring it but the blue deck has loads of answers to that (counter, counter, bounce). Or just play more gigantic island-themed creatures than the white deck has removal spells. Bigger or more effective blockers or counterattackers might help, I suppose.

But yes, I think the one-hoop model wants addressing. It does feel silly that "islandwalk is too good", but that does seem to be the spot we're in. Tapped-islandwalk is an ingenious idea. I can't tell if it'd lead to board stalls or to games where the nonblue player is looking forward to drawing more lands late-game.

I also do like the idea of a cycle of sweep spells like Charge Across the Araba, except that they'd feel somewhat odd in, say, a red-on-white matchup, somewhat irrelevant; and even actively at odds with green's minor have-lots-of-lands theme.

Link's idea of some creatures that bounce lands could be a cunning solution. I fear it would need some mechanical interactions with the other colours for it to look like anything other than a jarring "we were trying to make Flood more interactive".

Might be too complex an idea for common (so Maro would shoot it down), but how about some sort of "tidal" mechanic reference?

"Play with the top card of your library revealed; for as long as that card is an Island, Flooded lands are Islands"

I like the flavor, but there's too much downside for that to really appeal to me, cmeister.

Would having a green, land version of Master Transmuter be too ouch for common? Possibly. But we could put the "moonfolk" cycle at uncommon. That way, you're still fairly likely to get one, and they aren't clogging up our common slots.

Come to think of it, we still have a cycle of lands, we could have abilities with "T, remove a counter from a land you control: blah" or similar? That's a bit blatant, and too annoying to clutter up common with lands with counters on, but would be one way of having a mechanic that naturally limited blue.

We could have our common color-fixing land do that. Maybe wit could tap for and also tap and remove a counter frkm something for mana of any color.

If we did tapped-islandwalk, we could try to squeeze a little more tapping in somewhere to give blue a way to break stalls. Overflood is already tailor-made for that :)

Tapped land-walk... I like that. It does, however, go against the premise of "Flood one land, Bud many creatures". That being said, that principle might be on its way out. I had the chance to play a game tonight, and could already see that, whether we intended it or not, multiple lands were going to get flooded...

While we're talking about this, is there a chance that we want to split up two or three layers of flooding? Perhaps one flood counter for most cards, three flood counters needed for some cards and 5 counters needed for a couple rares/mythics?

I like that idea. I think it's good if some cards (quite a small number) want a lot of flooding to have happened. That might be overly based on having played the monoblue deck though; I'm not sure how well it'll work in a two- or three-colour deck.

Flood turned out to be SERIOUSLY powerful. "All your lands are islands too, and all my creatures have perfect evasion" Very glad flood isn't "It is an island" because I was pretty trivially able to flood all my opponents lands. With flood around, I'd expect everyone to splash blue.

The hexproof stuff was pretty nasty as well. Blue was easily the most powerful of the decks - blue aggro, without flying no less. A bit of removal just made it all the lovlier. Combined with pretty much ANY pump, and I fear blue aggro would be devastating. It was far better than red's all-in aggro deck.

You know, to some extent, I'm happy that I pushed the pendulum that far in that direction. It gives us a place to move backwards from. That should be much easier to do then trying to convince people that, no, these creatures could use more potency.

Obviously, we have to pull back a few steps, and the other colors forward, but I do think it's awesome to see Blue say "No flying? Fine. I can still come out a winner."

Yeah, I like the feel of the blue aggro, even if we scale it back.