NWO mana maker

Really? It's more complicated than a normal mana-elf.

Yeah, considering that you could gain and lose the city's blessing twice in one turn, I would wonder if anything with Ascend is technically NWO.

I really like the mechanic, though. If I was developing, I'd argue that it was worth the complexity points. I think I'd move to get the number of permanents lowered to 8, though.

There seems to be an issue with reading comprehension.

The problem is obviously that amuseum took a spell mechanic's reminder text wording and applied it to a permanent. If you want to use this on a permanent then you should make certain you specify the timing - e. g. as a trigger on casting, ETB or a game state trigger.

I think the last one would sem reasonable: > "When you control ten or more permanents, you get the city's blessing for the rest of the game."

That's obviously shortened for reminder text since the full rules text would include a condition to only trigger if you do not yet posses the city's blessing.

I don't think the effect is all that servicable. You care less about the mana dork once you progress to a game state that lets you ascend. I'd prefer a design like Werebear here: First a mana dork that helps you get to ten permanents, later a beafy creature to smash through the opposing board or block profitably.

Oh sure; I get that it's a "Has this turned on? Yup, it's on forever".

I'm just... why not remove the 'ascend' completely? And then it's even simpler?

Ooh. Yeah, I missed that it was a permanent change. That said, I think I didn't parce that correctly because it would have sounded like a bad idea in my head. Permanents get removed during play, and remembering if I ascended this game or the last is bound to cause a lot of fights (it gets even worse if you ascend, don't bother to key this information in to your opponent, lose some permanents, play for fifteen minutes, then try to explain to that opponent that yes, you can activate Ixalan Druid.)

This certainly works better if you have a physical reminder that you have ascended e. g. a card that literally says City's Blessing on it.

By the time I have 10 permanents, I don't think I would want a mana dork.

Especially because Ascend seems to be an ability that's checked as the spell resolves, rather than a static effect. You don't ascend until you cast a spell with ascend.

True, so you'd risk dropping this early and then not actually ascending even once you do.

I guess that's actually the secret use of this - sure, you don't want THIS ascend, particularly; but it's cheap, so you can drop it late-game to turn on the big stuff you DO want to turn on, without using up too many resources.

Laving aside silly formats where you can ascend on the first turn by dropping load of artifacts...

I hadn't realised this was an actual mechanic from the next Ixalan set. I wasn't sure about it, but I guess that means it's probably been tested for being reasonably comprehensible.

I agree, a werebear-like card would probably make more sense; you might want to ramp only for big numbers but that's not as usual as wanting to ramp early.