Targeting the lands causes rules problems, since you don't know how many targets to choose until the spell resolves. Write "you may tap an untapped land" instead

I want to make it so that if the there aren't enough opponents lands to tap, you have to tap your own as well. Its an overwhelming darkness after all.

Just take out the "may" then, and it'll work the way you want.

You do need to make this change. The "rules problems" BKM are alluding to are things like:

• You cast this when there are 2 creatures to be destroyed, targeting 2 untapped lands. Then I play Withstand Death to save one of them. Now you have to tap 1 untapped land... but you're targeting two! Which target do you affect? The rules don't like it.
• You cast this when there are 2 creatures to be destroyed, targeting 2 untapped lands. Then I play Sprout. Now you have to tap 3 untapped lands... but you're only targeting two! Where does the third one come from? The rules really don't like it.

The solution is as BKM said. If you want it to force you to tap your own lands, say "for each creature destroyed this way, tap an untapped land".

Im an idiot, lol. Fixed. ( I think)

For what it's worth, Wizards never talks about the stack on the cards. I only mention that in way of passing, though, now that I think about it, what's wrong with just adding black mana to the mana pool equal to the number of creatures killed?

­Sundial of the Infinite, a recent card mentions the stack.

The flavor behind this card is that the darkness is so perfect, so terrifying, that the planeswalker/wizard (player) can't even begin to cope with it on a mental level. Even evil sees the abyss and has to fear it. living minds are just frozen with fear and unable to act from the darkness.

Huh, so it does, albeit as reminder text. Personally, I think messing with the stack is rife territory, but Wizards, in general, doesn't like to go there because a very large number of players don't even know the stack exists. At least that's what the judges kept saying throughout the Great Designer Search 1 and 2. Any submission that talked about the stack got an immediate "This card fails" hammer.

WotC, i feel, is scared to force players to "smarten" up, I've noticed that cards (other then transform,) have been getting "dumber" recently...

Well, they go by the numbers. When they force their audience to "smarten up", like in Time Spiral, attendance drops, and they make less money. When they "get dumber" like in Zendikar, attendance increases and they make more money. Was Time Spiral better than Zendikar? In my opinion, yes. But only marginally so... and I prefer to have more people playing the game, to be honest.

The key point, with them, is to find ways to make the game just as complex, without increasing the barrier to entry. There are some categories that provide a rich vein of complexity without asking the players to learn something they don't want to learn, or perform actions they don't want to keep doing (shuffling), or provide on board complexity that doesn't add value to the decision making process of the game (too many activated abilities at common. In the time it takes you to figure out the math, you could have played another game). Players could learn to respect these things, but they don't. Wizards, therefore, learns to respect what the players respect and act accordingly.

By the way, being a kind-of-sort-of game tester, I can tell you that this is one of the major ways for games to fail in the market. I don't know how many times I've seen the team came back to the designer and said "people don't like this" and watched the designer say "people should like this", then watched the game hit the market, then watched the players say "I don't like this" and the game never takes off. If the point of designing a game is to get a large number of players interested and having fun with your game, then those designers failed. ­

That said, there's always happy exceptions. After all, Monopoly's been doing a lot of things wrong for years, and people still like that game. Arkham Horror seems needlessly complex, but I know a lot of people who swear by that game as well. Most of this is about finding your niche audience and delivering what they want. Magic is so big, however, that its niche audience has become "people with average to above average intelligence who like games". They don't have much leeway to work with there.

Lets make this easy,

keep which black mass removal: this one; or the other one?

Well, setting the whole stack argument aside... you have a card that costs XXBBB in the file, and this one which costs XBBB. Since this card seems to overlap ideas on two cards, it's probably easiest to just pull this one. Perhaps the Baron sired a new vampire, and you can base your new card on that? Looking down the line, it looks like you haven't used either Joven or Chandler... I'd think one of them getting turned into a black vampire, and somehow morphing their ability to be black, would be kind of fun...

I like that idea!

There's also a problem with this card's first ability in that you can't actually cast it the way most people usually cast things.

That is, when you cast a spell, the first thing you do is put it on the stack (601.2a); you later get the opportunity to tap for mana (601.2f) before costs are paid (601.2g).

Now, that's not insurmountable: you can still play the card by tapping for mana before you cast it. But it is odd.

I'm just going to go with jmpariepy's idead.

Alright y, here is a preliminary Eron design.

How is this card, by the way?

It's a 4/2 that the opponent doesn't dare kill, because doing so only helps you. It produces a weenie horde repeatedly - and cannot ever be killed. It strikes me as too annoying to be allowed to live; and yet I cannot ever kill it. I would hate to play against this card. Though I would laugh a lot if it was in a set that let me turn it into an untargetable snake.

lol So I created an Eron the Unkillable ^_^

Perfect. But is it to annoying? Should I add something that states sacrificing doesn't trigger it? I probably should.