Pemberly: Comments

wanted to say that overall i really like the flavour you're evoking here, i think it's a new and interesting direction that opens up some great flavour options

and i think you've designed some mechanics that really evoke that flavour, glory and bargain both do a good job conveying what you want them to convey (although cards with just bargain on them need other cards around them to make sense).

i think you've had that as your first priority, and now you should look at tweaking the mechanics for gameplay. i remember on one of his podcasts maro talked about how at first mechanics often really strongly evoke flavour at the expense of gameplay, and as the set develops further you loosen the links in order to make things run smoother (that's the whole point of development, and designers do it as well).

turns out that the message still comes across loud and clear if the design is good; during design the innistrad team played around with a bunch of werewolves variants including one that involved a moon card waxing and waning, and in the end settled for a much more abstracted implementation. but it still delivers that anxious moment where the opponent knows they're going to transform and wreck shit but they can't stop it. that's what the mechanic had to do, not deliver the most accurate depiction of werewolf transformation possible

hope i'm not coming across as too critical here btw, like i said i like the ideas you've got. keen to see where it all goes.

Oh hey, you're using Grandeur too!

I used it in my set, Hylonautica. You can click my username to get a link to it; feel free to borrow any of the designs I made.

A note about Grandeur is that it allows you to support a Legendary much better than Kamigawa did; Grandeur allows you to draft multiple copies of a single legend without the second copy being dead in your hand when you draw into it, allowing you to put legendary creatures at common as long as they have Grandeur. I feel that there's a lot of design space that can be examined there.

i think he's got a couple of grandeur legends at common already, but i'm not seeing a lot in the way of legendary matters. might be hard to weave it into the overall set without seeming too parasitic, but i think it needs that to not feel like a bolted-on mechanic for future sight's sake

Ah, yeah. Seems there's two that are. Most were uncommon, so I missed those two apparently.

As for Legendary matters, I was mostly just noting that Grandeur would allow him to slot that in if he felt like it.

my thoughts on grandeur is that without supporting cards around it, you're just making a bunch of Faerie Miscreants and cards like that have never been good. there has to be a strong reason the mechanic is in your set, because otherwise people will just think "oh it's here because they wanted a future sight flashback". legendary matters is a clear & obvious one, although it's not perfect unless you want to make the legendary supertype a core component of the set. at the moment, that doesn't seem to be the case

you're right that grandeur makes supporting legendary easier than it was in kamigawa block, but the reason that's a good thing is because it allows you to achieve greater saturation of legendary cards making legendary matters a better set component. unless you do that, you're not really getting much benefit

oh also i'm more or less purely approaching this from a limited perspective, most of this is irrelevant for constructed. so how important this all is depends on what people will be using your set for

Well, I also put in a discard theme.

lol no need to defend your set, i haven't taken as close a look at it and don't really have any business commenting on it just yet

happy to give it a once-over if you like, we should all be collaborating a bit more really

Legendary matters will be a small sub-theme in all colours, mostly intended for constructed, and will be the RG draft archetype. There is also a small discard matters subtheme.

Additionally, I'd like a o thank keflexxx for all your recent insight :)

@Keflexx: Feel free to take a look. Right now what I need most is a better way of handling the gods in the set (They're artifact creatures that are not creatures unless certain conditions are met, but I'm having trouble implementing them).

@continuumg: Like I said, feel free to borrow any of the stuff in my set. That includes Clear the Chaff; just import it wholesale if you feel like it fits. Cards that only hit non-legendary creatures are a decent way of playing into a theme without being parasitic outside of their environment or needing a theme to be particularly pervasive. See Go For The Throat and Ruthless Invasion for similar examples. As a clause, stuff that doesn't work on legends is a lot less intrusive than stuff that only works on legends, in my experience.

yeah cool, i'll go take a look at them then. nobody else in the office today so i don't think much work is getting done. Clear the Chaff is a good implementation, I hadn't considered this way of doing it. do you think it's got enough legs to carry the set, or do you also need some legendary-specific cards thrown in?

While the Clear the Chaff method works, there's only so many effects you can staple it to. It's probably best on only a handful of cards. I'm still trying to work out a few more indirect ways of supporting the theme like that.

The most important part though is that you don't want cards that do nothing when you don't have a legend.

as long as you've got a clear view of the problem then you won't say the set's done until it's fixed. nice not having to work to deadlines