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CardName: Challenge # 056 Cost: Type: Challenge Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: Design five cards, one of each color, with each card having a mechanical synergy with the next in WUBRG order. (bit more detail in comments) Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Multiverse Design Challenge None

Challenge # 056
 
Challenge
Design five cards, one of each color, with each card having a mechanical synergy with the next in WUBRG order. (bit more detail in comments)
Updated on 24 Oct 2012 by jameschanlee

History: [-]

2012-10-24 11:04:57: jameschanlee created the card Challenge # 056

Just watched Looper the other day. The first four should be straightforward, it's closing the loop that's fun. :)

Fair play rules:

  1. No explicit references. "if you control a white or black permanent..."
  2. If possible, the cards should have no synergies with the enemy-colored cards. While five slivers would be cool, that would just defeat the purpose of the challenge. :P

Masochistic restrictions (choose one or more for added difficulty)

  1. Use five different card types.
  2. Use CMCs 1-5 exactly once.
  3. Don't repeat rarities more than once.
  4. Design a tight cycle.

To start things off:

­Dawnhelm -> Forethought -> Soul Refraction -> Entropy Initiate -> Monk's Enlightenment -> back to Dawnhelm

2012-10-24 11:09:22: jameschanlee edited Challenge # 056:

56 my bad.

2012-10-24 11:17:23: jameschanlee edited Challenge # 056

Wow. Nice... I want to say "cycle", but it's not, is it? Nice loop. I like the idea; I'll have to give this some thought.

Awesome challenge!

I spent all afternoon juggling abilities, but eventually came up with:

­{u}: Flight
­{b}: Unholy strength
­{r}: Fight
­{g}: Deathtouch
­{w}: Commando Training

All one-mana creature enchantments. Commando training is obviously a bit more complicated than the others: I'd hoped to manage it entirely with iconic abilities, but found lots of four-cycles but no five-cycles. I hope there are some, but decided I'd gone far enough :)

I assume the synergies are clear.

I tried to avoid as much enemy-colour overlap as possible. A couple are compatible, but I don't think any are really any better on the same creature than on different creatures.

Edit: I don't know if reprints are appropriate for the challenge or not, but I felt the spirit of the challenge was to design a cycle, not design the cards, and since I was going for the simplest possible, it seemed irrational to pass up Flight and Unholy Strength when they already existed. I'm only sorry Deathtouch and Fight didn't :)

Nice one Jack! I actually like your solution better, since mine has double references to a single word (for instance, both the blue and black ones mention "graveyard"), which can be counted as an explicit reference depending on how strict you are. :P

Originally, I wanted to work with five curses that all fed into each other. I couldn't get the curse thingy to line up, since some colors just don't want to intentionally punish players as much as other colors do. I'm happy with where these cards ended up, though:

­Ceaseless Fever Dream, Continuous Suppression, Unlimited Devotion, Compassion Without End and Boundless Trivia

In order to make this link up, I got sneaky with Compassion Without End. That isn't a 'may' ability...

Yeah, I had thought about the Stations approach here. (Blasting Station-Salvaging Station-Grinding Station-Summoning Station)

That is a clever approach on Compassion - or rather, on Boundless Trivia. You can fail to find, but you can't fail to shuffle.

OK, another reprint cycle :)

­{w} Iona, Shield of Emeria Legendary Creature
­{u} Mass Polymorph Sorcery
­{b} Bitterblossom Tribal Enchantment
­{r} Kessig Wolf Run Land
­{g} Realms Uncharted Instant

I think the synergies are obvious. The one I'm most leery of is Realms Uncharted Iona, which is just "broken expensive creature spells go in green ramp decks", but I think that's still reasonable?

After much debate I decided to go with Kessig Wolf Run rather than creating a new mono-red non-colourless +X/+0 card because the synergy with the land-search and bitterblossom were so nice. But I'm unsatisfied that it's technically colourless and actually G/R.

I got types creature, land, enchantment, instant, sorcery and (grr) tribal. And supertype legendary.

I wished kodama's reach was an instant, so I could have had a land search that gave me the arcane subtype. I could also have changed kessig wolf run to Demonspine Whip, gaining artifact and equipment instead of land. I would have designed a new card, but I didn't want to design an arcane card as I think they're officially Not Coming Back (we may get "splice onto X" where X is "instant" or some other subset of instants that's not confined to one set).

Ideally I would have been able to sneak "artifact" onto a dual-type card and had artifact and land both, but (a.) there's a serious dearth of mono-coloured broken artifact creatures and (b.) whatever I do I'll have a hard time counting a land as one of the colours. Have there EVER been any coloured lands?

I also missed out "snow" and "basic" which are hard to fit in, and a lot of rarely-used subtypes like "gate" and "lair" and "trap" etc.

Five years ago, we probably would have predicted that Snow-Covered Lands wouldn't return. I think we'll see Arcane again... we may never see 'Splice onto Arcane', though.

I was thinking about a possible future block model where the Phyrexians simultaneously attacked three worlds. If Wizards got the same idea I did, then I'd assume Kamigawa would be a shoe in... you get a bit of nostalgia, and you get to intentionally blow up a world that wasn't pulling it's weight. Plus, wizards could go overboard with really powerful Spiritcraft and Arcane spells... why not? If you're officially burying the mechanics, you can let them go with a bang.

(Annoying trivia insert coming up! "Have there EVER been any coloured lands?" -> Yes: Dryad Arbor. Dryad Arbor is the modern Mistform Ultimus of annoying rules trivia.)

Oh yes! Thank you. I was thinking of that, but I forgot it was actually green. I guess I could have tried to squeeze that into the cycle and got land and creature in one slot. But I don't think I would have found much to sensibly combo with it :)

I see they reprinted it with the colour marker thing. I still don't understand that: if they're abandoning the idea that cards should make sense if you only see them in monochrome, then why a special dot for colour, why not just say "the official colour is the colour/colours of the card frame" which is (a.) how everyone thinks it works anyway (b.) visually distinctive and (c.) takes up less space on the card?

Because Erhnam Djinn? :)

Maybe they will create a new colored land frame for when they get serious and plan to print new colored lands? I mean, this is just a reprint for a collectible product. I assume they were going for minimalism here because that's what people who play the game enough to shell out $35 for specialty cards want.

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