How did you get hybrid snow mana? As far as I can tell you created the symbol yourself and incorporated it

It's a cheat with the mechanics to get custom symbols to work in a card's rules text. See Mechanics. Unfortunately, it can't be used in cards' mana costs.

Nobody ever looks at the plain card text, I suppose. :) Yeah, I'm hacker at heart after all. Tahazzar covered this one correctly.

I prefer calling it "exploit" rather than "cheat". And I actually talked Alex into allowing this particular exploit (at least until we get proper custom mana symbol support), so I think that's a fair distinction.

So, I probably am going to replace the second activated ability, since it never comes up and Scrapheap Scrounger laughs at this being mythic rare.

Replacement ability candidate:

> Whenever you activate an ability that isn't a mana ability of a permanent you control, each opponent loses 1 life for each black mana and/or snow mana spent to activate it.

This is too many trigger events for me though. I considered an intervening if-clause, but for what I want it makes the text hard to pass and technical and too long, so alternatively an end of turn trigger:

> At the beginning of your end step, each opponent loses 1 life for each black mana and/or snow mana you spent this turn to activate abilities that aren't mana abilities.

Why do I exclude mana abilities? Because I want the exploitative infinite combo to be a little harder to achieve than Bog Initiate - though if I count snow mana rather than snow mana and black mana that would solve those particular cases as well.

That sounds very messy with those options.

One of my older designs was (roughly) a card with

> You don't lose unspent black mana as steps and phases end.
> At the beginning of your upkeep, target opponent loses life equal to the amount of unspent black mana you have.

A black Omnath, Locus of Mana might be something to consider given that it's essentially a green Looming Shade+. Though that might move too far from the original design.

­Chilling Shade, actually.

Should a legendary Shade discourage activating the signature ability of its tribe?

Omnath doesn't have flying - hence Looming. I do realize that this card is essentially Chilling Shade+ and is inspired by it, but that's not what I was referring to.

Omnath discourages activating abilities the same way it discourages using mana in general (ie. casting spells.) Actually, if you have Omnath like effect piling up mana, and then you attack with a couple of shades, the opponent will be really hard pressed to block them all. Say, if you have 20+ mana hanging around, any one of them would be instakills if unblocked. So it synergies with shades in that they like you to have large amounts of mana available.

Oh, I misread the word "green" as "grand" which makes the connection to Omnath less apparent. ^^

Oh, I get that storing mana helps make the Shades overall more threatening. That's why I had a short flirt with putting storage lands into the deck. Maybe I'll try both and see what happens.

Previous playtests indicate though that such a play pattern is unlikely to occur with the decks as they are and would require rewriting at least the black one substantially.

Another card that comes to mind as a direct attempt at a mythic shade is Nirkana Revenant, where the idea is also to go big with the amount of mana you have.

Like Chill Conduit?

I have hoped to not use "another mythic rare that already exists, but with flying and snow" as my face card, so I have delegated that ability to another rare. It's a fallback ability for sure.

> "another mythic rare that already exists, but with flying and snow"

Yeah, this was exactly why I was a bit iffy on the Omnath thing.

I forgot that Chill Conduit was here. However, it's existing especially makes me think that some card that stores your mana could be very nice. Constructing your ultimate shade monster "engine" with these cards could be fun. That also makes me that Witch Engine reprint or callback could be a thing maybe? That isn't in 's modern pie either at the moment, but whatever.

Certainly some ability that gives this card staying power makes sense since there aren't that many shades into which dump your mana into here. What if the current ability returned Duergin straight to the battlefield instead to your hand? Returning to hand seems quite weak. Perhaps it could be some kind of a trigger instead of an activate ability? I'm thinking of Vengevine and Bloodghast here. Something that occurs naturally throughout the game because how the deck is constructed? A common black trigger could be creatures dying for example.

EDIT: There seems to be a lot of saccing going here, so maybe:

> "Whenever a creature you control dies, if it's the second non-Shade creature you control that died this turn, you may return ~ from your graveyard to the battlefield."

­Duergin, Frozen Sovereign & Forlorn Totem

> Tahazzar: "What if the current ability returned Duergin straight to the battlefield instead to your hand? Returning to hand seems quite weak."

I'll let you in on a secret: During playtests the ability has been upgraded to return to the battlefield already.

Also despite the frequency sacrificing appears in card text it happens not that often in gameplay. I think I'll need to encourage it more.