See Challenge # 115.

First entry in my own challenge.

I envisaged a cycle of sphinxes that actually follow how I imagine their stereotype, of being creatures that give a riddle, but being on your side, they give a riddle to your opponent.

So I tried to make ones that give the opponent a choice, not just for "you get the worst of these" but the opponent has to genuinely judge which choice is correct.

Here, "Syzygy" is supposed to invoke both ancient astronomy, and high tide (as in, mass tapping/untapping). I'm not completely happy with it -- most people won't get the tide reference, and untapping lands and creatures isn't especially blue. But it's as far as I've got.

I will see the rest of the cycle before deciding whether they should be powered up to rare, or powered down to uncommon.

Alex: Remind me how to make bullet points and m-dashed correctly again, if there is a way? I keep forgetting formatting things like that that aren't obvious from the card creation page. (Maybe there should be an example of each formatting thing in Testing, if there isn't already)

To get an em dash, you need space-dash-dash-space, " -- ". This can be the last characters on a line, as on the current modal card format, but you do need the trailing space.

To get bullets is more fiddly. At the moment I copypaste the UTF8 bullet character from somewhere like Wikipedia or the Gatherer page for a modal card. (Well, I did that once, and now I have it stored in my clipboard library.) Or a comment like this one: •

I should make a nicer way to type bullets into cards, though. It unfortunately is hard to distinguish from using asterisks for emphasis.

My attempt at this cycle is also unsure whether it wants to be uncommon 6-mana 4/4s or rare 5-mana 4/4s.

I should say that I do like the question this poses to the opponent. Either option could legitimately be the right choice.

Thank you!

Copying the unicode character isn't perfect, but is probably fine for now, that's what unicode is for after all :)

Do you know if there's any easy way to avoid the m-dash on a line by itself? If it's not obvious, I might just go back to a colon, that's not official, but is plenty clear.

Hm. No, I can't find a way to do that. Proper DTP software would allow widow/orphan control to prevent punctuation symbols slipping onto a new line, but HTML doesn't have a good way to do that.

I find ALT codes to be easiest for the em dash (ALT+ 0151) and the bullet (ALT+7). That, or I type them on my phone.
This is a very nice way for a sphinx to give a riddle.

Ah! If I don't use the auto-replace, I can make unicode nonbreaking space, and unicode m-dash (ALT+numpad-0160, ALT+numpad-0151). That seems to work. Thank you, all.

Reminds me of Zzzyxas's Abyss for some reason... :p

Reminds me of Zzzyxas's Abyss for some reason... :p

­:)