New Land subtype!

Require some (a lot of) rules modifications. But the basic idea is:

1. Poleis enter the battlefield with some amount of loyalty.

2. They can use a single loyalty ability per turn.

3. Whenever you're dealt damage, remove that many counters from Poleis you control.

4. When they get to 0 → Ded.

Ooh, so they get attacked automatically whenever you do? But multiple of them let you divide the damage between them? Hmm. That's quite different to Jack's loyalty land cycle of Arcane Scriptorium, Mouldering Laboratory and friends. You'll definitely need to spell that out somewhere - perhaps your point 3 could be reminder text on this card.

I like the idea, anyway. Presumably also they can only use loyalty abilities in your turn?

Five months later, and now I'm not sure if Poleis should be different from Planeswalkers. It should be hell to balance either way.

Ah, I remember this concept as "Sanctuary" from "Paiura block". That was waay back. It can be hard to find examples of those since that thread is so old, but the main difference was that they didn't have abilities similar to those of planeswalkers, but instead had static enchantment like abilities. They also could be attacked similarly to those of 'walkers. So they only used that starting "loyalty" or whatever it's called for these. One interesting concept was a land that produced any color untapped, but could be attacked since it was a sanctuary.

Also, it's probably worth of note that Garfield originally came up with the walker concept, but he had flavored them as structures. Later on, WotC turned that mechanical concept into the planeswalkers as we known them in Lorwyn. They were intended to be released in Future Sight before it was realized they needed further polish. Some random trivia for y'all.

I don't understand why you would even want these to be attackable, Kauefr. I'd hate for my opponent to be able to tap his Grizzly Bears to destroy my land. I presume that would cause some players to not play Athens no matter how good the abilities are.

Why not just accumulate counters and use them for abilities? The land already comes with a drawback: You can only use it during your turn.

Admittedly, if that's the plan, then the second two abilities need to be more expensive...

Aww. Loyalty lands :)

I made a ton of these at one point. I still don't know if they're a good idea.

@Link:

You didn't ever playtest with them? To me it seems a bit too much busywork for just managing the mana base: crazy amounts of counters on lands (which can get irritating really fast), leaving blockers up, multi-choice abilities on each land, etc. If you have five of those on the field it might get hard to even remember if you have activated one or not.

Counters on lands is a problem; no joke. I found that out when I tested my Frozen Delta cycle. Sounded great in principle. Became a gigantic annoyance in practice.

As far as I'm concerned it can be worth it. Legendary is definitely the way to go with this. In retrospect, I think pushing the abilities to only work within certain archetypes is probably important too, so you don't feel like you always need to play with them. For example, working with auras, or Soldier tribal.