• Boros: Clearly battalion - radiance was incredibly unpopular.
• Orzhov: Likewise, extort is great and haunt just confused people.
• Azorius: And again, detain is clearly better than forecast. Forecast has flavour of the Azorius courts where detain has the policepeople on the beat, but detail has much better gameplay than forecast.
• Golgari: Dredge is much more potentially broken. People might be more likely to tell you a dredge card is unbalanced :) OTOH, scavenge is kinda boring. Up to you.
• Selesnya: Populate needs a lot of support in the form of interesting token makers like 3/3s, 1/1 flyers, etc. Convoke just wants bog-standard 1/1 tokens like saprolings, and works with fewer token-makers too.

For most of the rest, it doesn't matter too much. Bloodthirst and bloodrush are both pretty good and pretty similar; so are evolve and graft. Replicate and overload are both pretty boring, but I guess there's more design space left with replicate?

Woot. Any others want to weight in?

Ok so far I've got mechanics chosen for some but not all of the guilds.
Boros: Battalion
Orzhov: Extort
Azorius: Detain
Golgari: Scavenge
Selesnya: Populate.

Guilds still weighing theri options.
Gruul:
Izzet:

I'd put Orzhov back on the table. Not because Extort isn't better than Haunt. It's much better. But I got my issues with Extort. It's far too overpowered among the very casual, multiplayer crew, where removal is scarce, and the ability to chug 4 life per spell cast is crazy. We had to deal with two years of Extort in our low-budget Magic league... it roughly translated to "Build a Black-White deck or lose. Also, play with every piece of removal possible. Didn't get much removal in your packs? Too bad."

I like the mechanic. It does an excellent job expressing Orzhovness, and works well in a perfectly sculpted draft environment, or when everyone has access to most cards. It just doesn't work with the traditional "Buy a few packs and play" model. Orzhov should give it one more go. My experiences, however, are probably not the norm. Don't really know.

Gosh. How bizarre. I guess extort does work very well in multiplayer, but I'd have thought the solution is "gang up on the extort player".

I just noticed that I've missed deciding on the mechanic for the Dimir. Which means that Orzhov's and the Dimir's choice of mechanics will impact each other. Since both have options that attach a card to a creature. So If Orzhov gets haunt then Dimir has to get Transfigure and If Dimir gets Cipher then Orzhov has to get extort.

As for the Gruul and the Izzet I think I'll be going with Bloodrush and Replicate respectively.

And Simic and Rakdos?

I'm a much bigger fan of Graft for Simic than Evolve.

Unleash was terrible. It felt incredibly boring compared to the other mechanics. What was the old Rakdos mechanic? Hellbent? You should just make a new mechanic for Rakdos.

Orzhov's haunt has a lot of interesting potential design space, but lots of people didn't like it.

Izzet's overload seems very hard to design a lot more cards for, but I can't say Replicate would be much easier. It does, however, seem more interesting to me, personally.

For Selesnya, I would personally go with Convoke. It requires less card support than populate, which is good if you're really going to try jamming in all of these different mechanics.

Ok I've tried a handful of times to post my comment here put just can't get it to show properly. I've made a details page to continue this discussion.

Unfortunately details pages don't yet have comment threads, so that won't work too well. The problems you were having were 1) your arrows "<-" were being treated as HTML tags. I'm afraid you can't really use "<-" in comments. 2) Separate lines were being run together. The Markdown I use needs you to end a line with two spaces ("  ") or with "<br>" to make it not run on to a new line. Alternatively, start a series of lines with star-space ("* ") to form a list, like I've done for you below.

Here's your comment text, formatted.
Vonmarcus wrote:

Ok so it seems I've missed a guild or two the last few go arounds. I won't need to create all new cards for each mechanic as I plan to reprint plenty of cards from the two blocks.(this set does plan on having a rather large card size for each set in the block.) If it wouldn't bog the block down with too many mechanics I'd like to be able to use a combination of mechanics for each guild. I.E. a simic card with both Graft and Evolve.

• Boros: Battalion
• Orzhov: Extort
• Azorius: Detain
• Golgari: Scavenge
• Selesnya: Populate / Convoke - still weighing the options with this guild.
• Gruul: Bloodrush
• Izzet: Replicate
• Dimir: Transfigure
• Simic: Evolve - could be changed to graft but I'll have to see if I can design a fitting replacement for the Dragon.
• Radkos: Open for a new mechanic - can someone can suggest a custom one?

Also if it will help in the voting Process the set will be using:

• Poison counter - not sure it it will be infect based or not
• Phyrexian mana - possibly Phyrexian hybrid mana

Ok thank you for the info. I'll use the details page I made then to keep an up to date view of the mechanics, and later how many cards in the set use them.

What do you mean by "Phyrexian hybrid mana?"
I would put in a vote for Cipher for Dimir rather than than Transmute. Transmute goes against current Wizards design maxims of trying to avoid repetitive games by nerfing library search/manipulation. Cipher also has a lot more interesting design space than Transmute.
How do other people on Multiverse feel about Poison? I loathe it, Jon loathes it, and actually, I don't have any friends that like it. As far as I know, I've literally never met someone in person who likes it. Yet Maro insists that it was "popular" based on their metrics.

sounds more like BYOB or custom standard, than an actual set that needs to be designed.

By Phyrexian hybrid mana I mean that could also be paid with 2 life. Cipher for Dimir would work too. I've not got a lot of hands on play with the recent Ravnica block. So I'm not too sure on the balance of designing things with Cipher.

As for this sounding like a BYOB or custom standard rather than feeling like a set. That's likely due to the fact that this block is going to come after my Phryrexian block that I am working on. So for now the whole block is getting a single file to get things started.

Also Poison was fun unless you're on the receiving end. I plan on having a handful of things in the block that can remove poison counters. one of them being an ability like Proliferate except instead of adding counters to things it will remove them.

Two of the things you just said made me say "Oh no."
The first: How would you possibly represent Phyrexian Hybrid Mana in a sensible way? It just seems silly. It's also way too many options for a single payment. Colorblind people, as I understand it, already have issues with Phyrexian mana because all of the symbols are look the same. That's why having a cost of is a bad idea. Plus, the ease of just paying 2 life sort of negates the multicolor-ness of the card, anyway.
The second: Removing Poison counters!? As much as I hate poison, this is something that should never happen. Poison is meant to be something you can never remove. If you can recover from poison, it loses its entire point and just becomes a second life total. Leeches was a mistake and will never be reprinted. Maro agrees with me.

I see your point on the hybrid Phyrexian mana. As for removing poison counters the route that I am taking to do so will affect poison counters as a side effect. Simply put there is no way to have a mechanic (purge is the current name I'm going with) that is the opposite of Proliferate without it removing the poison counters. And Flavor wise I see no reason poison can't be removed (when do it in real life all the time) other than it's what Wotc and Maro have said. It's not like the effect is going to be around has much as proliferate was and honestly there are times when a custom set has to go against the grain. And it's not like you will just be suddenly cured. There are ways to counter every win con but poison, which irks me. Part of what makes magic great is that any win con has a counter.

­Melira, Sylvok Outcast is the counter to poison. Not letting yourself get poisoned is also a counter, though it's not always very effective.
While I don't think Maro is always right, in this case, he is. Poison is to life total as exile is to the graveyard. It is very important that the lines between these things do not bleed, and for Poison that means you shouldn't be able to recover from it.

@Alex: "Everyone gang up on the Orzhov player" works. It doesn't work when 3 out of 5 people at the table start to play Orzhov because it's so strong. What makes matters worse is that, since Orzhov prefers a certain locked board play style, all 3 of the 5 Orzhov players will start aiming their removal at the non-Orzhov aggressive creatures. What a pain. Again, this was mostly what happened in the "crack 10 packs and play" world, and isn't representative of normal Magic.

That said, it occurred to me a couple years back that Haunt doesn't need to be used in the crazy way that it was used the first time. You could just use it like Imprint. For example.

Boogeybuddy
­
Intimidate
Haunt (When this creature dies, exile it haunting target creature.)
Creatures haunted by ~ have intimidate.
2/2

Suddenly, not confusing. Funny that.

Personally I don't think a single card counts as a true counter. And having only a single card that is the counter means that it will be a chase rare and skews people to playing a color they may not enjoy playing just so they don't get screwed over.

The only counter to poison that every color has access to in that line of thought is Karn Liberated

For now though I'll set Purge aside.

Now I don't want to get deep into design discussion just yet. I am happy that I'm getting this level of feedback. though.

Also with this being a custom set I'll be treating the meta as though any given player will have access to whatever 75% of the card pool they want.

With all of that said. Any thoughts on a new mechanic for Radkos? I'm a player at heart so am weak in the design for and .

I don't think you have to be quite so hard-line about poison having no way to remove it. MaRo says poison is not a second life total, but, well, it walks like a life total and it quacks like a life total. His hardline rule that poison can't be removed was an attempt to make poison less like a life total. I don't think it absolutely has to be a hard rule for all custom sets though. I think it's fine for some custom Phyrexian sets to continue to follow that rule, and others like Vonmarcus's to change it up.

Thank you Alex. For example the Phyrexian block that I am working on the will lead into this block won't have a way to get rid of Poison counters. Also as will any kind of game effect the turns back the clock, it has to work fast enough. Case and point... With out enough life gain you can still get crushed by an aggressive opponent or two.

Anyway here is the updated Mechanics list...

Boros: Battalion
Orzhov: Extort
Azorius: Detain
Golgari: Scavenge
Selesnya: Convoke
Gruul: Bloodrush
Izzet: Replicate
Dimir: Cipher
Simic: Evolve - could be changed to graft but I'll have to see if I can design a fitting replacement for the Dragon.
Radkos: NEEDS A CUSTOM MECHANIC

Out of curiosity, how odd would it be for Rakdos' mechanic to be Morbid? IMHO, it fits the theme of Rakdos perfectly, and there's plenty of design space left in that mechanic...

Actually I like that idea. Very much I like that idea.

If you're adding other mechanics, MaRo has stated that battle cry would be a great Boros mechanic as well.

I think that giving fitting mechanics to the guilds from other sets would be a nice route to take. While it was not my original plan, I think that would open up some design space.

Something I missed before: if your set is using infect, you can't use scavenge, graft, or evolve.

Why not they've already mixed +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters in the same block before. Lorwyn/Shadowmore. Doing it in the same set while frowned upon is bound to happen.

Agree. Infect is unlikely to go evergreen, due to it's -1/-1; but it's a mixing that they do sometimes do. You'd want to sacrifice complexity elsewhere though, to make room for it.

What? No, it's not something they "sometimes do" or "are bound to do" - it's something they explicitly avoid doing. Lorwyn-Shadowmoor were two different blocks for Limited purposes, which is where it matters: they were never drafted together. (Standard is allowed to contain both +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters because otherwise they'd never be able to use -1/-1s at all.)

The only limited set to ever contain -1/-1 counters and +1/+1 counters was Time Spiral, whose timeshifted bonus sheet contained Serrated Arrows, Giant Oyster and Unstable Mutation. This was the block that contained how many keywords? Twenty? Thirty? And was widely recognised as way too complicated. In other words, it's not a good precedent.

For complexity each Ravnica block had at least ten mechanics.

And If needed Infect can become Poisonous From Futuresight.

On the limited note it's protected by design rules like it is because it's the primary way for magic to get new players and they are careful not to scare them away by making the game hard to grasp.

When they design for any other format they don't care about mixing the types of counters because it's meant for people who already grasp the game well.

By all means stop me if I'm wrong though, but isn't the point of a custom set to design something that's close to what a real set would be while still being able to break a rule now and then?

That's for you to determine for yourself, by in my opinion, you're wrong. I would strive to make custom sweets as close to Wizard's standards as possible.
Mixing +1/+1 counters is completely taboo and should always be avoided. It's not like it's just some random arbitrary rule. There's perfectly sound reasoning behind it.

Oh, you're most definitely able to break the rules in custom sets :) I guess the thing is that most custom set designs are assumed to be "trying to do it how Wizards would do, except when otherwise stated".

So if you say up front "This set is breaking Wizards' rules about X and Y", that's entirely fair enough. (And there are a fair few sets on Multiverse doing that already; for example, Link has stated that he knows Anhydria's central idea is definitely not something Wizards would do in a real set.) If you don't indicate you're aware you're breaking some particular design rule, people on here will likely point this out to you, is all.

And you're right, supplemental products aimed at experts like Commander and Planechase will occasionally contain -1/-1 counter cards: Gwyllion Hedge-Mage and Incremental Blight respectively. I'd have no objection if this were a Custom Cube, for example, because those are explicitly targeted at expert players.

So if you want to break the "no +1/+1 counters and -1/-1 counters in the same set" rule? Sure, feel free. Anything goes, really :) You might want to make an explicit statement somewhere that that's what you're doing, though, so that people don't keep coming along and saying "BTW, not sure if you know this or not, but Wizards have this rule..."

Ok I will Put a comment in the set comments section stating just that.

Thank you for the advice. And again that you all for giving me so much feedback.