Mashup: the Gathering Workbench: Comments

I saw the Magic Card Mashup contest on Goblin Artisan (http://goblinartisans.blogspot.com/2011/06/announcement-design-contest.html) and got kind of inspired. What if an entire set of mashup cards was designed with the intention of ending up with a playable Magic set? It seemed like a cool challenge, so I picked up the mantle.

In order to maintain a stanard of pure randomness, I'm hitting the "random card" button on Gather.Wizards.com twice and seeing what pops up. I reserve the right to ignore certain combinations (For example, a Mash up of Grizzly Bears and Balduvian Bears doesn't seem very interesting...), but I'll try not to dodge difficult choices too often. Okay, time to roll up the sleeves!

I don't pass on many random card that Wizards has thrown at me, but I think I'll report on ones that I just couldn't figure out how to shoehorn together, just in case someone else comes up with a plan for them.

Today's "I just couldn't come up with anything for this one" is Deja Vu and Darkness. I mean, it would be easy to make an instant and just add the text of Deja Vu to the text of Darkness... but would that be a compelling card? It just doesn't work for me. I thought about working with a recurssive black fog, but I can't seem to keep the Deja Vu part of that alive. All in all, 27 cards made and 1 miss, I'll take the pass. I wonder what ratio of cards I'm allowed to pass myself on? 1 in 10?

I think if it offers you Grizzly Bears + Balduvian Bears, you should take it gladly, as your set is likely to be somewhat starved of simple commons otherwise :P

I can't think of much for Deja Vu + Darkness either, though. And I've been quite impressed by the standard of the mashups in here, so I think it's fine to pass on one every now and then!

Let me tell you, I was so happy to see Obsianus Golem and a 2/1 black soldier from Portal 3K pop up. Completely vanilla common. If I get that to happen 4 more times, I'll be a happy man.

I've been thinking of the Deja Vu + Darkness problem, and figured it might work as a Wall of Vapor type creature, with a ETB Deja Vu trigger. But I'd want the creature to be black because of Darkness. And black hasn't done the Wall of Shadows trick since Antiquities. It doesn't return sorceries, and neither, technically, does blue... at least not without returning instants as well. Close, but not cutting it.

How would this work as a mashup of the two (Darkness & Deja Vu)?

Dark Memories -
Instant
Return target sorcery card from your graveyard to your hand, prevent damage equal to its converted mana cost.

It does a bit of each card but isn't just the two abilities together

jpg: Awesome idea for a set, I've loved many of the cards.

Perhaps a compromise would be to choose random vanilla cards, or at least, random cards with at most N words in their text box?

How about (stretching a lot):

2G: Grope in fog. Return target card from your graveyard to your hand. Prevent all combat damage that would be dealt this turn.

U: Return target instant or sorcery card with CMC 1 from your graveyard to your hand?

I think it'd be fine to have a monoblue Wall of Vapor with a Mnemonic Wall trigger as a mashup of those two. Face it, Darkness is way out of pie these days; blue gets something similar from time to time, and you'd clearly have the influence of Darkness in making your choice of the self-fogging effect.

Mmm... multiple options. I also appreciate the idea of just turning the card green and dropping the sorcery part. Don't know why I missed that one.

I'll find a way to get Deja Darko in the set shortly, using one of these ideas. That makes me optimistic. If we can get two cards with no relationship at all together into a card, there doesn't seem to be many combinations that need to be passed on.

This is awesome. I love some (most) of these card ideas!

Hey! Thanks dude1818! We'll see what happens when I start forcing all of these cards into a set, and see how happy people are with me ;)

By the by, for those who'd like to play along at home, I have two new impossible card pairings. I thought of holding these two back, and making a blog article about it, but they just aren't fair for normal folk to tackle. These buggers should be left to the professionals.

The first impossible pairing is: Stormscape Battlemage and Fellwar Stone. The big problem with this pairing is that there is just way too many things going on between the two cards, but the 'too many things going on' is what makes both cards charming in the first place. Every time I attack these two cards and remove abilities, what I end up with... I'd rather play the battlemage, or the stone over. What I really want to do is make a bunch of Kicker abilties based upon what lands my opponent controls. That would be... unwise, and would probably require something idiotic, like a tips and tricks token expressly dedicated to charting out what this card could do.

Impossible challenge #2: Killer Bees and Stormwatch Eagle. The trick here isn't making a card that works. It's making a card that's fun. For example, you could make:

Killer Eagle
­
Creature - Insect Bird
Flying
­, Sacrifice a land: ~ gets +1/+1 until end of turn.
2/1

But I can guarantee you that after the third time you play that card, you won't enjoy it anymore. Even at it's most exciting, it is too swingy. Cards that say "You win, unless your opponent has the proper answer. Then you lose. Slowly." Is a terrible thing to add to any game the requires a slow building of armaments.

Storm Stone
Artifact
­, : Target player gains 3 life. Activate this ability only if an opponent controls a Plains.
­, : Destroy target nonblack creature. Activate this ability only if an opponent controls a Swamp.

Okay, perhaps a Visara stone is a bit too good... Maybe we end up with something like Ethersworn Adjudicator? Or perhaps we take it down to ", : Target creature gets -1/-1", which is a bit fairer as a repeatable effect.

You could make it something like Pristine Talisman.
Storm Talisman
Artifact
­, : Add to your mana pool. You gain 2 life.
­, : Add to your mana pool. Target nonblack creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn.
The numbers might not be right on this, but it's an idea.

Hmm... yes, these are much better foundational ideas than anything I was coming up with. Again, I want to have 5 separate abilities, but I'm not going to get what I want. I like what you're going for L2i0n0k7. I think I'm going to steal it and make it a much bigger effect, so it smooths out the utility much better.

My obvious guess for killer bees and stormwatch eagle would have been just to give the new creature both original abilities. That seems not very imaginative, and mildly useful and mildly annoying, but not too tedious?

Although it might be more interesting if it was a red creature that pumped power only, and needed the sac more often. Would that be too irritating to play against?

Yeah. I forgot to mention the obvious thing to do with the Eagle/Bee, which is to just give it both abilities adjust its casting cost and walk away. I might do that, given nothing better, but I generally try to find something else in the combination that calls to me, and pull that out of the card.

I'm not sure what you mean by "needed the sac more often", but that does give me an idea. This card could have "At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice a land you control or return ~ to your hand." That keeps the Eagle part, in a twisted way, with an acceptable drawback. ­

I mean, if you can only boost power not toughness, then if you attack with it, you may want to bounce it when its blocked to save it from dying, and pump it only if it's unblocked or you're happy to trade with the blocker.

Yeah, I agree it's more interesting to find a more interesting interpretation than just combining them, but that's bound to be right sometimes? The idea of an upkeep cost wouldn't be bad either.

It's true, Jack... sometimes the correct move in a mashup is to just combine the two cards into one card. But only if the new card is a better card for having strictly been combined. If I got Howling Mine and Black Vise, you could put money down that I wouldn't do anything but add the text of Howling Mine to Black Vise (well... I might get rid of the untapped restriction on Howling Mine, and I might have the Black Vise effect all opponents... but you get the idea. Nothing new). That card would be awesome. Anything I did after that would detract from how well that worked.

But when the end result of combining two cards makes a card that's arguably not as fun as the original two cards, I know it's a mistake. It can also be annoying, too, because cards with no ready combination sometimes just sit on me, asking why they haven't been designed yet.

That's alright. I think we got there with the Eagle/Bee. Check it out. It may not be perfect, but, to me, it looks better than cutting and pasting both abilities.

Oh man. Looks like another episode of "JMG needs some outside help".

Today's mystery crazy combination is Sedge Troll and Defense of the Heart.

Why is this such a problem mashup? It's because of Defense of the Heart. That card is super-busted broken. If your opponent has three creatures, you get to Tooth and Nail. Except Tooth and Nail is an already incredible tutor + acceleration engine, used in many tournament decks, despite its effective cost of . DotH costs whose only drawback is that your opponent needs to be playing a 'fun' deck. You know, one with creatures. For examples of how insane this is... here's a few two card combos you can pull out of your deck: Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Pestermite, Painter's Servant and Iona, Shield of Emeria and, I don't know, maybe Protean Hulk with Bloodfire Colossus? TPmanW on the discussion thread wraps this up very nicely with this comment:

"I was just browsing through the Urza block cards to see just what level of ridiculous I could find and just oh my god... It's like Wizards had some sort of civil war or something, that's the only way I could describe the apparent nonexistence of the development team on this set- they were all killed off by the designers."

So, yeah. I tried my hand at mashing these two cards up, but no matter where I went with it, it just wasn't as impressive as giving your opponent something they don't deserve. I also tried giving your opponent something so narrow that it could be costed this low again "Search your library for two trolls..." but, yeah. I also thought of making a black tutor, that, if you control a forest lets you put the two creatures you tutored for into play. That, of course, is just Tooth and Nail, though. Mull, mull, mull....

Wow, that's really broken. I'm not convinced by someone's argument that "it's inneffective against many legacy/vintage decks" means it's not broken. Black Lotus isn't an auto-win either, but everyone agrees that's pretty broken. There are lots of decks where this is an auto-win! :)

But can we avoid that bit? How about:

2G Sedge Defender 2/3

Defender ~ gets +1/+1 for each creature card in your graveyard. At the beginning of your upkeep, if you control a swamp, you may search your library for a creature card and put it into your graveyard. If ~'s power is 9 or greater, it loses defender.

OK, a repeatable entomb is probably broken too, but I feel it's a plausible start, unless you'd prefer to keep the "put two creature cards into play" bit.

I don't think "not as impressive as a crazy-broken card" needs to be a criterion for rejecting something. How about a tweak on Fierce Empath, a red 3- or 4-mana 2/2 that gets two creature cards into hand if you control a Forest when it ETBs?

That's just OTTOMH, but I think something like that ought to be doable. It can have some echo of the mad rare's ability without its absurd power. (And now I'm reminding myself of Memnarch vs Memnite.)

I agree with you Alex. I think I brought this up for public consumption because I was probably designing to close to source... that's where I kept ramming my head into a wall. As long as it looks too much like a tweaked Defense of the Heart, the card will be thought of as a bad card. If it references Defense of the Heart, though, it would probably be fine. Still mulling.