Strike The Earth: Comments

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Mechanics | Skeleton | White Decklist

Yay!

Concepts that I think should be involved somehow:

Many of the monster types can have creature cards associated with them - but I don't think we want too much of the set to just be wandering monsters.

Dwarves need to be in all five colours, otherwise it won't feel like Dwarf Fortress. I think it'd be fine to have assorted types of skill and soldier and so on as dwarf creature types.

It'd be nice to have legends with specific names, but it's a bit problematic that every DF install has a different backstory and set of legends. Nonetheless, legendary / master dwarves should exist as rare creatures with funky abilities.

Different types of rock are a big part of the game. These could be nonbasic lands ("Seam of Dolomite" and so on), or artifacts, or perhaps enchantments or some such. How to make them actually do anything I'm not sure.

The process of being struck by a strange mood, withdrawing to a workshop, demanding obscure goods and then producing a legendary artifact is one that could yield several cards for different parts of the process.

You probably don't want that many elf creature cards - say no more than a third, leaving some for monsters and dwarves - but they could have a nice mechanical theme. Liking things the natural way, dislike of artifice, etc; it's all pretty much in keeping with green's usual Magic philosophy.

My thinking is that it's going to be a set focussed on destroying your own lands, using them to block the opponent, and mining them for stuff!

And punishment for doing it too often, as the great evils rise up to eat everything.

I'm thinking something a bit like the "card in hand <4/4/>4" mechanic, only for "lands you control" Green really likes you to have exactly 4 lands. Red likes to blow them up for its own benefit, white wants to acquire lots of them.

Black REALLY likes you to dig far too deep (and yes, I want to keyword 'dig') and will generate huge demons when you do.

Blue likes to sneak in when your attention is turned elsewhere - if manaburn was still extant I'd say it gets benefits when an opponent fails to use their land, but not quite sure where to go otherwise.

I'm thinking probably a couple of creatures in each colour are not dwarves, and everything else is. Green gets an elf and an elephant.

It's probably worth looking at the keyword mechanic Dig that was in the Penumbria set made for the Great Designer Search 2. That set was themed around being underground. The mechanic is clearest in the Round 3 commons. That's one way that digging can be done in Magic.

Certainly it's going to want to be digging through your deck. I'm not sure I like that version though - it's just a variant on landcycling. (It puts them on the bottom, instead of shuffling, but I don't think that's important to my set)

Made borders white to ease up on printer ink

Since there'll certainly need to be tweaks made: Here's a note from QQs use of Stifle to kill fetchlands. Blue doesn't get to destroy your lands directly - but it does get to turn them into islands and trick you into killing them yourself.

Note: The skeleton view is the best view for the whole set. Unaddressed comments is the best view for what is being worked on.

I need to add at least one stone-rain alike.

I need to add a bit more removal.

Scary mask is WAY too good in limited; I either need more artifacts or to give it a downside.

A few overall notes:

  • Most of the creatures are power 1, or occasionally power 2, especially at common. This actually works fine: it makes it feel like a set full of, well, dwarves.
  • Red has too much first strike at common.
  • Red's and black's common removal spells are both pretty reasonable. White needs one though.
  • Black has way too much {b}{b} in its costs at common.
  • The minerals are utterly unplayable. I think drastic action is needed. In a normal set, I'd say the fix is to change "sacrifice a land" to "bounce a land" (and up the cost to 1C or 2C) or "discard a land". But the problem is, you want them to be a way to get lands into graveyards. One fix to that is to make them tap for two mana, so they're occupying a slot similar to a land (sac 1 land, get 2). Problem with that is you'd never want to give that up to give some junky 1/X creature haste or deathtouch. So perhaps make them tap for 2 mana and make craft also return a land from graveyard to the battlefield?

Strange and Fey. Really aren't.

Really need to be. Anyone got any ideas?

Um. Could you elaborate what you mean?

I'm not really sure myself. The defining characteristics appear to be "Requires strange stuff to make" "Drives dwarves insane" "Really admired" "Usually very hard to see why anyone would, or even could, build it out of THAT" and "It does what? WHY?"

So you're referring to a desire to make some cards reflecting the strange and fey moods from the game? Presumably relating to the slots in the skeleton which you've labelled "strange" and "fey". What are you wanting to do to the cards already in those slots? Would you like mechanical suggestions for ways to reflect things associated with strange and fey moods?

The latter would be great. The cards in those slots are, as you noted, not really very interesting.

So ... all done barring the artwork.

Who wants to try and make a boat-murdered theme deck?

FYI, your dig mechanic is exactly the same as mine in my Liberia and Harmony sets (even the same word), except mine has an additional variable. (Hope for Change)

If it was parallel design, it's very funny.

'tis amusing; but "Dig" is a commonly used word for searching the top of a stack of things ("Let me just dig out...") so I guess it' expected to happen sometimes. Surprisingly close implementation from the two of us, though.

And for even closer convergence - I even do have "Artifact Dig" on Lord of Smoky Mountain (but only there, I think)

Your front page says that the second part isn't happening so much. You need some calamities that explicitly support death spirals!

Also, that stuff they did in Innistrad where they set the stage for players to be afraid of opponents' creatures getting scarier (transform). Or just being afraid of death triggers in general (morbid). Or afraid of creepy dolls winning a coin flip and murdering things. Have some cards that cause LOOMING DREAD.

The Sickness (mana cost)
Enchantment
Whenever a creature dies, you may pay {1}{b}: flip a coin. If you win the flip, put an emblem into play with "whenever a creature dies, it deals 1 damage to each creature". If you lose the flip, put a -1/-1 counter on each creature.

on 12 Jan 2016 by Vitenka (unsigned):

Man; I'd forgotten about this set :)

Assuming you're talking the lack of big-black "You delved too deep, now die!"?

It needs to be a little bit more than just that kind of thing - I want to have more things that flip from good to bad; based primarily on how much you've sacrificed.

Part of the problem with coming up with a way of doing it is that the flavour of such things is very black - but it actually wants to be {g/w} because it's punishing the black player.

Still; there are some cards added to support the theme A Straighter Road, Amethyst Man, Demon of Armok, Fear of the Dark, Master of Desolation, Soul Channel, Tunnel Skeleton.

So there are lots of cards that care about number of lands in graveyards, and punish opponents for having too many. Including at common - so it looks like it's a supported theme. But it won't play that way?

Maybe I just don't have enough support to encourage dumping lands into graveyards. (The 'craft into' cycle being, to put it politely, rubbish; is probably a large part of that; they were meant to be the cross-colour support for the theme.)

Red doesn't seem to get any 'punish' - preferring, instead, to blow up its own lands. (Making a {r/b} deck on the theme very viable) Green, oddly; also doesn't really punish - maybe that needs a fix? It has a lot of 'return lands to play' and some (untemplated) landfall which is nice (and a nice variant on the deck, I guess) but maybe it needs more ability to return opponents lands to play too.

Oh; also - a lot of the land-destruction-punishment got shifted off to the putative next set in the block; Llanowar Burned

Consider Masterful Engravings as a possible

Where are the artist credits on the cards in this set? O_o

What little art there is was generated by me, using a local stable diffusion install. Credit therefore is impossible to assign.

In other communities, they'd credit the model to indicate it was AI-generated

And it is? Comment upon adding the image is always "aimage".

Yeah, add the base model reference (usually stable diffusion checkpoint), for example "NeverEnding Dream (NED)". I find something like "ai-image" wayyy too generic considering there are hundreds upon hundreds of models out there. Leaving the artist credit blank implies you don't know where they are from or just forgot to put it there.

yeahno; I'm not crediting the keyboard I use either.

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