Archester Revival: Comments

You guys are my people: so much difficulty designing cards with CMC higher than 4 XD

Is it possible to comment on the Skeleton?

I don't think so, you'll have to leave your comments either here or on MTGS

Ok, judging from the skeleton, we're looking at roughly 2 creatures per archetype per color. For example, in we have space for ~8 creatures, 2 for Exploit, 2 for Trash, 2 for Windup/Industrialization, and 2 for general black cards. That means space is ridiculously tight. Some creatures, like Vulturous Aven, are mechanical and flavorful "home-runs" and will almost be auto-includes that will make the competition even harder for the rest of the cards competing for that other slot.

Very soon, we're going to have to make some hard decisions on where we want to go with our archetypes and how we want them to playlist and interact.

Does anyone else feel like there might be issues with "instant-speed" Windup? I was listen to Maro's podcast on KTK recently and I seem to recall them trying that with outlast at first and having to slow it down because it was too strong. Windup is even cheaper to use, since it doesn't cost mana, and gives 2 counters instead of just the one that outlast gives.

It also requires two different cards to both be locked up.

I want to test it before I make that decision. I feel like all sorcery speed things (like Outlast and Level up) started as instants and changed to sorcery when it was deemed necessary. If we test it at instant speed and it's too much we'll obviously change it.

@Raptor about number of cards per archetype : If we give four cards per color pair, that is just 40 cards out of 105 commons. We must not limit ourselves to just creatures, as this obviously makes it really tight at 40 out of 50. We should aim more foran average of 5 creatures and 3 non-creatures dedicated to each color-pair themes.

We can talk more about this on the MTGS thread, but in general I agree with Raptor. Remember that a set needs to have breathing room to have low complexity commons, flavorful one-ofs, generic cards, and cross-archetype cards. All of these things take up a lot of space, and unlike say Ravnica we're not trying to have things be super separated. It takes very little to make a subtheme feel prominent.

It should be noted for the latest change to the Design Skeleton, that non-creature Token producers, such as the one listed for [CW11], are traditionally counted as a creature in the design skeleton.

The token producing slot should be moved upwards, either replacing another Twobrid slot in [CW02] or [CW03] or switched to a non-twobrid creature slot.

Am I correct in assuming that the Common Lands in slots CL01-CL05 are going to be the "Shimmering Grotto" cycle from the original Archester? eg.

Natural Furnace
Land [C]
­: Add to your mana pool.
­, : Add or to your mana pool.
Some rock formations on Archester seem to suggest that the land itself is trying to industrialize.

The above card inspired me to create Glowing Vents.

@Raptor: We are not slaves to the skeleton. That card is where it is because of cycles. The 10 slot is the buckshot cycle so we can't push Patriot Agenda to 11, but moving that card up would do just that (or split the creature section in two). Additionally, every color has 3 creature and 2 non-creature hybrids, all correctly positioned. Plus, its not going to replace one of the existing hybrid creature slots since that token producing card is what allows white to hit its creature count anyway.

Would it be possible to create some blank cards to fill the current holes in the skeleton?

It would give us a place to discuss each hole in particular rather than have them scattered across a bunch of other cards.

Not sure if this is dead or not but in the off chance it's not I was thinking about solving our issue with Components and their do-nothing-ness if there isn't another artifact on the battlefield. What if we blended it with living weapon and Investigate and have them ETB attached to blank colorless artifact tokens.