LibraryPlane: Recent Activity
LibraryPlane: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
Mechanics | Skeleton | Underpinning Theme | expensive stuff matters theme | About LibraryPlane |
Recent updates to LibraryPlane: (Generated at 2024-04-30 03:24:13)
Rename, flavour text, smaller body, and moved to uncommon
picture added - it's a little incoherent, it's supposed to be a little guy writing in a book with a quill pen (looks like a beakless penguin)
Cool, now I get it. No wonder I was limited to just 4 badlands to a deck. Thanks for your help.
Ah, the mistake you were making is in thinking that swamps are basic. From the original Badlands cycle through Godless Shrine to the modern Leechridden Swamp and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, something being a swamp - having type Swamp - has never implied it's basic. The card with name Swamp has supertype Basic, but there's nothing in the rules to imply that something that has or gains the type Swamp is basic. A subtle point, I'll agree!
New Phyrexia has Deceiver Exarch, which is basically this but without defender and with a modal-ized twiddle attached. And it looks like Deceiver Exarch might see standard play alongside splinter twin. So I figure that in a few months this card will just read as a more boring version of the exarch. Unless I can find some new flavour for it that I really like, I intend on cutting this card.
Oh yeah, it looks like evil presence found its way into New Phyrexia. I was a little disappointed that the only swampwalk I could find in the set was on the Black mythic rare. Actually, I'm not sure why it got reprinted in that set at all, especially since the spread of phyrexia isn't exclusively Black anymore.
I see (maybe). I suppose I had assumed that basic and non-basic are two logically separable supertypes that may be treated in isolation of one another, rather than a pair of contradictories, the one describing that which is mutually exclusive from the other. The clue that they have this logical relationship is the use of the prefix 'non', which implies that basic/non-basic forms a dichotomy such that anything that is not basic is nonbasic and vice versa (I feel a little silly for having missed this).
But I'm still confused. If non-basic-ness is defined by way of its being the contradictory of basic-ness, then it is implied that wherever we have a basic land, we cannot at the same time have a non-basic land. So, because swamps are basic, my evil presenced library of alexandria is basic. But if it can still be wastelanded, it must still be non-basic. How can it be both without breaking the rule of non-contradiction?
I suspect that my mistake is bringing first-year logic to bear on a set of rules that is quite a bit more sophisticated than I realize.
I think I might appreciate some of that templating-and-terminology-nitpicking myself. A good chunk of the fun I derive from making these cards comes from trying to speak in Magic's peculiar language. So I'd be happy to have you and others school me in Magic-ese.
Well, it's saying that it doesn't affect them either way. "Doesn't change whether it's basic" means the same thing as "Doesn't change whether or not it's basic".
Sorry, looks like I missed this reply until now... There's a great variety in Multiverse's users. There are some of us who're very practiced and skilled in modern templating and design conventions; some who generally know the modern terminology but don't make too much fuss over it; and some who tend to write cards phrased the way they were in Alpha, like this kind of thing :)
My general approach is to offer templating advice whenever asked for it, and to point out when an ability would have real problems working within the current rules, but otherwise to avoid nitpicking templating and terminology unless it's by somebody who I know will appreciate it.
added creature type
Eight lines of flavour text this time! Here's another large creature at common that breaks the colour pie but is justified by way of the set theme of late-game matters.
The intention of the name is to describe a predominant desire ('will' in the sense of 'I'm weak-willed') animated as a spirit. But I suspect most will read it as describing a legend ('King William'). Much of me likes that kind of confusion. But it's obvious that in any real Magic set, this name would be cut for its ambiguity. Oh well, it stays for the time being.
Cutting down the flavour text
typo in flavour text
We don't seem to see all that many cards with seven lines of flavour text any more. And yet my set is poised to be filled with them. I take this to be an indication that I'm failing to convey my world as coherently as I should. But I'm willing to allow myself lengthy flavour text as a concession to the fact that this is just a beginner's experiment anyway.
Here's this set's biggest common in Blue. Very few blue vanillas are bigger than some variation of 2/3 (as far as I can tell giant octopus, water elemental and vizzerdrix are the exceptions). (((Thinkbeast))) would be the biggest common vanilla Blue has ever gotten. That has me a little nervous, but I think it's justifiable given the themes of the set.