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| Mechanics | Skeleton | Common Breakdown Ref | All commons for playtesting |
I thought that we could all work together on one set. We should probably pick a theme, like artifacts, tribal, or multicolor. Any ideas?
Nice idea. There are a heck of a lot of potential themes... but it's probably better to go for a mechanical theme (like artifacts, tribal or multicolour) than a flavour-driven theme (like Circus World or Dwarf Fortress set).
Multiverse already has quite a lot of artifact sets, so probably best avoid that one. Tribal, multicolour, enchantments are all good rich mechanical hooks. Or we could go for a central conflict reflected in the mechanics, like monocoloured against multicoloured.
We could go with a no-creature set (opposite of legions) or a color-hate set. A set focused on your hand and/or library vs. in play or spells vs. creatures might be cool.
I like the monocolored vs. multicolored idea.
I'll join you on that. I once started a set that was monocolored once, and multicolored is tried and true.
Things that probably make better sub-themes than themes are lifegain, mill, burn, discard, and ramp. Humm, now that I think about it, those could be the themes for each monocolored faction...
Monocolored vs multicolor sounds interesting.
Chroma or Radiance would be ideal mechanics/ability words for monocolor, but are there similar/mirror mechanics for multicolor? only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Domain and Sunburst.
Chroma and Domain sound fine, but we can always make our own mechanics.
Oh definately we can create our own.
How about this for an idea:
Monocolor = Law, Structure, Conformity, Order, etc (a place for everything and everything in its place)
Multicolor = Chaos, Disorder, Randomness, etc (anything goes, run wild run free)???
Just Brainstorming here - heh,
In my own concept of a mono vs. multi block, the monocolored creatures have only colored mana in their cost. Chroma would work quite well with that concept.
Is the multi-colored theme supposed to look a bit more like a Domain theme (you should play one of each color), or more like a fixed two or three color theme (similar to Ravnica or Alara)? I suppose what I'm asking is "are there only two sides to this conflict, is there 15 factions, or is there somewhere in between?"
I must admit, I was a bit jealous of the idea that popped up in GDS2, where one of the contestants pitted an alienesque Hybrid force against a normal mono-colored world. The design didn't stabilize in the end, but that sounded like a knock-out starting idea.
Also, I wouldn't mind seeing a reverse Chroma design. In other words, something counting to see how many colors of permanents you control. Seems like max cap of 5 would give us some control on costing.
@Darkheart - I don't think "Monocolor = Law, Structure, Conformity, Order, etc" can apply to all five colours. Those are all quite white concepts; I can't see red or green being very happy with them. I think we're going to want factions for each of the individual colours and then have some multicolour invaders come in.
jmgariepy mentions the GDS2 idea of hybrid alien invaders, which did seem to have a lot of possibility. We could adopt that element of it and put it in a different world to the original idea (which as I recall was themed around weird giant insects and enchantments).
If we're having a red faction, etc, then I don't think we need or want to explicitly theme red around burn, black around discard etc. Some of those cards and themes will come out naturally - recall how famously difficult red commons are to design - but I don't think we want to aim for them.
Chroma is an effect I've always wanted to see more done with. A heavy-hybrid set is a good place for it. But a multicolour-themed set (whether hybrid or gold) isn't a very good place for lots of single-coloured-mana-intensive cards. In Limited people almost always need to be two-coloured, and if your deck is full of
and 
cards, then it'll just be an irritating environment where players frequently can't cast their spells.
Monocolor can also be single minded, selfish, or unwilling to make allies.
@Rourke - True! But 5 seperate color identities being unyielding isn't a plot, I suppose. It's certainly something to keep in mind... actually...
Has anybody been reading Alpha Flight as of lately (No, JM... you're the only person who reads that comic book. Sigh.) The recent plot involves a Unity party that takes over Canadian politics and makes one very popular politician. When a major national emergency starts (The current 'Fear Itself' plotline), the popular newly elected Prime Minister asks everyone to be supportive of his government's decision to suspend people's rights in an attempt to stop subversives from taking advantage of the crisis.
So, it's a big morality tale about how individuality, and the inability to see people eye to eye is not always a bad thing. We could play with this concept. Have one group be cultish in their desire to unify their beliefs, while struggling with 5 different colors that see this as a threat to what makes them distinct. Or in other words, the entire plot of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Or maybe not.
In that light, the multicolor is sounding white, and the monocolor red.
Well, the Mirrins were five colors on the same side, as where the Phyrexiens (I probably spelled those wrong). They did, however, have subdivisions.
It would take some math, but we could make two colors monocolor and the other three multicolor among themselves. Not sure how well that would work.
I see what you mean. That is a very White vs. Red plot, but I don't think it has to be. White wouldn't be too keen on being all buddy, buddy with its enemies... I think it would mostly be in a matter of portrayal.
After having a little while to think of it, the biggest strike against that plot in my mind is that it sounds supiciously like the plot of Urza's Saga into Invasion. It isn't. It's actually flipping that concept on it's head, but I don't think you'd be able to stop the comparisons...
A new thought: it seems like hybrid is most likely going to show up. If it does, monocolor could have 2/C hybrid, which would combo well with Chroma. We could even try a set where there was no pure colorless mana symbols, only hybrid and C, but again, I don't know about the math.
I like it when a set is themed around a conflict, but both sides of that conflict exist in all five colours. The Mirran-Phyrexian war did that. So did the Kamigawa mortals vs Kami war. You can have assorted mixes, divisions and factions within each side, but the fundamental conflict is the overriding flavour-side theme.
Giving monocolour the
symbols seems fine if we want to. But I don't think we can do away with the standard colourless mana symbols entirely. That seems... unlikely to work.
I agree. Would make a good gimmick for a second small set though.
I designed this card while contemplating a similar concept, but this is starting to take a different direction that my set. There could always be "neutral" colorless creatures, too, to help balance limited and such. Personally, I like the idea of the MONOcolored creatures being alien, and the multicolored (or possibly hybrid) being normal, but maybe that's just me.
We could return to Alara, and monocolored would be the new thing. We could do this with Ravnica to.
I was going to point out that Hybrid + Chroma leads us very close to what Eventide was doing, but then a bunch of complications came up, and I actually had to work. It seems like the pendulum is swinging away from that, though.
I would think, that if the theme is Multicolor vs. Monocolor that we would need the two sides to be as extreme as possible, so that our theme doesn't get lost on people. Hybrid can heavily support this, but we have to be careful to not let the Multicolor cards be too supportive of the Monocolor cards. Cards with a casting cost of
go great in a monocolor deck. That isn't fighting against it... it's supporting it. Cards with a casting cost of 
though at least require a multicolor commitment (though, may not be the way we want to end up.)
Oh, also, I made a tribe in a previous set of mine long ago by the name of cultists. You guys might like them. They go something like this:
Damage dealing cultist
Creature - Cultist
Whenever a non-red Cultist enters the battlefield under your control, deal 1 damage to target creature or player.
2/2
I always thought it was a clever 5 color tribe. Obviously, you need to play cultists of other colors, but the more colors you pack the more you benefit. If you have Red and Green Cultists, Your cultists will trigger 50% of the time. If you have Red, Green and White Cultists, they'll now trigger 66% of time, and so forth. Hence, mono-colored cards that lean toward multicolor.
The point on hybrid is a good one. I think that one problem in differentiating mono/multicolor would be that monocolored cards can easily go in multicolored decks.
It seems to me that the main problems are differentiating mono/multi and keeping mana good in limited.
Mmm. It's tricky creating cards that don't look like all negative when trying to support mono-color strategies. For example:
I like dem' Forests
Creature - Elemental
~ gets -1/-1 for each non-Forest land you control.
5/5
Might make an intriguing card, but it won't make many players happy because you are penalizing them. The real trick is to give players something for playing mono-color without expressly telling them that that's what happening. I suppose one way to do this is through 5 linear mechanics that don't work well in other colors. For example, Green might have a lot of Elves that work great with Elves. Blue might have a lot of cards that Mill your opponent, but won't get the job done until you dedicate yourself to blue. Etc., etc.
I'm quite sure there are other ways to positive reinforce mono-color, but I would need more time to think of it.
So the interesting thing about both Kamigawa and the Mirran/Phyrexian war was that, from a deck-building point of view, you were perfectly happy to combine cards from both opposing factions in your deck. Certainly your Spiritcraft, Soulshift, Infect, and Snake-tribal cards would work better if your deck was more focused on them, but there was no punishment for having a white Spirit and a white Samurai, or a Phyrexian elf alongside a Mirran elf.
I think we need to bear the same thing in mind here: by all means provide mechanical benefits for having lots of the same faction together, but let's not provide mechanical punishment for putting the two different factions together.
So it seems like we need rewards for playing multicolor or monocolor, not penalties for not. Maybe this?
I like dem' Forests
Creature-Elemental
~ gets +1/+1 for each forest you control.
1/1
In practice it is VERY similar, but it reads better. EDIT: How do you get different lines without it "correcting" you?
We could make something that could be played in any deck (any color/s) but gets better in a mono/multicolor deck.
Monocolor Guy
Creature-Guy
As long as all non-land permanents you control are only one color and all share a color, ~ gets +3/+3.
2/2
You can add linebreaks by either including
<br>, or ending a line with two-or-more spaces followed by a newline (i.e. tap Space, Space, Enter to insert a linebreak).How about we take the sample card designs onto their own card-design pages? With no expectation that they'll make it into the set unchanged!
Thank you! And sure thing.
Does anyone have any good mechanic ideas to encourage monocolor but not discourage multicolor, or vice versa?
Obvious example: Firebreathing. You can splash it, but it's much much more effective if you're pure-red.
You could do something the opposite of subnburst - "If only red was spent..."
Or how about "As an additional cost, tap one of each type of land you control" (that's more on the penalty side though)
How about "Reveal a non-land card from top of deck, for each R in its casting cost {do something good}" - penalises splashing slightly.
Sunburst is the obvious multicolour kick, also cards with abilities in a colour other than their casting cost.
I really like the if only red was spent thing. I say we go with it. Anyone else?
I don't see why we can't have some cards that tell you to play mono (Shades, Firebreathers) and some mechanics that make you want to go mono (Infect, Goblins). I'll make sure to add a bunch of example cards to the file shortly.
Yea, we definitely can do both. Probably higher amounts of colored mana needed to. Now for multicolor...
If everyone agrees, we could keyword the "If only red was spent..." thing. Some things off the top of my head are... well, I can't really think of what to call it.
Focus? Single-mindedness? Dedication?
Flying Guy,
, 1/3
was spent to cast it, you gain 5 life.
Flying
Dedication - When ~ ETBs, if only
Or:
Dedication - you gain 5 life. (When ~ ETBs, if only
was spent to cast it, you gain 5 life.)
I'd go with the first one, if only because it has less words. I have no idea which is correct. Also, I really like "Dedication". Any color can be dedicated.
You could definately do a reverse Sunburst that could be like the illegitimate child of Sunburst and Chroma:
spent to cast it.)
just being the example color here, you could have it work with any of the colors obviously. They're still useful in multicolor decks as they'll usually always get at least 1 counter but in the right mono deck they are just that much stronger.
Anti-Sunburst (This enters the battlefield with a charge_+1/+1 counter on it for each
Do a cycle of Instants costing
{colour} (I think I'll use white this time)
spent to cast this.
White Life Gain,
Instant
gain 1 life for each
Again in this case, it is useable by any deck running that colour but best in mono.
Ah. Was planning to add a bunch of new cards for the purpose of discussing individual mechanics, but it appears that adding new cards to this set is not open to everyone. That may be a wise plan... I just wish there was, as an alternative, a way to start multiple comment threads about multiple different ideas, but I know that the situation we're in is a bit unique.
Anyhow, I'll just make it a bunch of comment posts, instead.
Linear Mechanic 1: Modular made Linear
Creature - Human Knight
Flanking
Whenever three or more Flanking creatures you control attacks, destroy target enchantment.
1/3
The first mechanic here isn't an advertisment for Flanking, it's more just a reminder that any mechanic can feel mono-color if it is turned into a linear mechanic. In fact, making modular mechanics linear could be an interesting twist on how that modular mechanic works. I'd go further into it, but the subject is a pandora's box, and I've got a lot more linear ideas to throw out.
Linear Mechanic 2: Infect
Creature - Zombie
Infect
3/1
The idea behind all these linear mechanics is that they are only appear in one color. Infect creatures by themselves aren't spectacular, but when every creature in your deck has infect, they're deadly. If only black creature in your set have infect, then players would lean toward mono-black when making an Infect deck, but we aren't telling players what they can and can't play at the same time, and they're more than welcome to mix and match mechanics.
Linear Mechanic 3: Madness
Instant
Madness
Discard two cards, then draw two cards.
Madness, in theory is not a linear mechanic. But if there are no real ways to discard your own cards except in one color, then the mechanic defacto becomes linear. I went for a card that both had Madness, and enabled madness to showcase the concept.
Linear Mechanic 4: Tribal
.
Creature - Bird Wizard
Flying
You may play Birds in your hand as if they had flash.
Whenever you play a Bird, you may counter target spell unless its controller pays
1/3
I'm not specifically endorsing birds here... I just like to give them a break, since they kind of got the shaft in Onslaught. If we do use Tribal, I would suggest only having one color have one tribe that matters, so that players don't think this is a tribal block. In fact, if we went the linear mechanic route, I would suggest exactly 5 linear mechanics for 5 colors. Anything outside of that would just muddle the presentation, and make what we're doing lose meaning.
Linear Mechanic 5: Mill
Creature - Crab Rogue
When ~ enters the battlefield, target player puts the top three cards of their library and puts them in their graveyard.
3/3
Some Milling cards get the job done all by their lonesome. This is an attempt to get blue (or possibly black) to do some very occasional Mill. On the surface, the mechanic would seem bad. But if you played mono, and every card in your deck milled some cards from your opponenent, the result could be a very strong deck.
Linear Mechanic 6: Graveyard Recursion and Sacrifice
: Sacrifice a creature: Return target creature from your graveyard to your hand.
Creature - Insect Shaman When ~ enters the battlefield, draw a card.
2/2
This version of the card is probably far from good enough, but I slapped its mechanics together to show off how Graveyard Recursion, sacrifice engines and come into play abilities work well together. If a single color had the lion's share of these abilities, players would start to catch on.
Linear Mechanic 7: Life Gain
Creature - Elephant Cleric
Lifelink
Whenever you gain life, put a 1/1 White Elephant Soldier into play.
2/5
Life gain as a strategy is rarely a good idea, since it doesn't move you toward winning the game, just from not losing the game. Players have reacted very positively, though, to cards that say "When you gain life" or "If you have 30 or more life" or something along those lines. I'm pretty sure we can get more creative than that, as well.
I need to make a tour around the building, but I'll be thinking of some more I can add in the interim.
Linear Mechanic 8: Assemble the Doomsday Machine
: Deal 1 damage to target attacking creature. If you control a Wall, a Construct and a Soldier, instead deal 3 damage to target attacking creature.
Artifact Creature - Construct
2/2
A number of cards in Magic have asked you to assemble both parts, or all three parts (See Urza's Tower or Brothers Yamazaki.) If all those cards can only be found in one color...
Linear Mechanic 9: Combat Tactics
Creature - Goblin Warrior
~ gets +1/+1 for each tapped creature you control.
1/1
This could have included the word "Exalted" instead, or a number of other combat strategies.
Linear Mechanic 10: Creature Tokens Matter
Creature - Elf Ranger
When ~ enters the battlefield, put a 1/1 green Ferret token, and a 2/2 green Wolf token onto the battlefield.
Token creatures you control get +1/+1.
2/2
The temptation is to make a token tribe, like Saprolings matter, but it may blur the line too much between a tribal color and a token tribal color. Probably better to have a bunch of cards in one color like token creatures (or enchantments, or artifacts).
Linear Mechanic 11: Morph
Creature - Cat Soldier
Morph
First Strike
4/2
Once again, this assumes that all the morph creatures are in one color.
Really, I'm just scratching the surface here. The majority of Linear design, I suppose, is saying "something matters" that normally doesn't matter as much in a normal magic game.
/me edits the cardset options to make creating new cards open to everyone.
I like the idea of each colour having a mechanic that has some self-synergy, which is a nice subtle way of encouraging monocolour without being harsh about it. I think jmgariepy's ideas have a lot of merit.
For discussing particular ones, I suggest we do go and create individual cards to discuss them.
What about the multicolour half of the set concept? Is it going to be possible to enable "multicolour" decks that would rather try to add another colour than add some monocolour cards?
I like the idea of multicolor, probably along with another theme (enchantments? tribal?). I'm not sure if I like the mono-vs-multi or not; I think it's an interesting idea, but don't want something that will divide the set into two in compatible subsets.
Ravnica had a few "pro-multi" or "pro-mono" cards, but only a few.
It seems to me, the idea of deliberately creating anti-synergies is a red herring. There's always room for some explicit disadvantages, but you normally want people to be able to put things together in creative ways if you want. Someone hopefully has more experience at this phase of design than me, but I think the way to think of it is, which combination of decks do you want to enable (especially in draft). Eg. Ravnica enabled color-pair decks, but you could also go heavily into one color or splash a third (or fourth). Lorwyn and Shadowmoor enabled tribal-based decks and color-based decks (?) but not very sharply at all.
Mono-vs-multi suggests to me you want rewards for playing multi (either for playing 2, or for playing multi in general) and rewards for playing mono (eg. very strong CCCCC creatures and linear mechanics).
The problem being, people will want to play mono for the reward, but multi decks inherently have more cards to choose from, which is why people play multi when they can, and you need at least some mana fixing. So how do you avoid all red decks being the same, because they all have to play the same mediocre common creatures in order to have enough cards?
This to me suggests:
Then you may be able to have distinct archetypes of a U/R deck, or a U deck or a U deck with a r splash, or a U/R/b deck, etc. Maybe.
Sorry about the cardset options! I had not realized that.
Actually, to me at least, what we're doing here seems very similar to Shards of Alara. Creating 5 separate universes (in our case, 5 mono-colored universes. Shards had 5 three color universes) that would often be seen as incompatible, paired up against the possibility of a 5-color domain deck. Funny.
I do think that Jack's words of warning hold true, that the idea of creating anti-synergies for the sake of anti-synergy is dangerous. However, that's exactly how Alara block went down... all 5 shards had their own linear strategies, though, the majority of the cards, upon close examination, were just vanillaish mono-colored cards that could be thrown into any deck (not counting the all gold set, of course).
While I do think you could make the cards just care about multicolor, just care about monocolor, and some that don't care about either without building linear strategies in color, I must admit, I don't know why one would. After all, as a player, I'm not particularly interested in being rewarded for playing monocolor, or multicolor. That idea, after all, has been around since Alpha, and I've been playing for a very long time. Had this been all the set offered, and I had $4 to spend, I'd spend my four dollars on another set.
That's not really a big problem, though, since, if we build our set correctly, it would be roughly impossible to end up with just a mono v. multi theme. I admit, I've been jumping ahead to the next step, unexcited by the first and eager for to do what comes next.
But I do think that no having anti-synergy cards in the set might make some players angry. Think of the alternative. Let's say that the set included a lot of modular mechanics and cards with casting costs like
. As a player, wouldn't it be frustrating that you've got an excellent idea for a deck that needs a white card that has a heavy mono commitment, a blue card with a heavy mono commitment and a black card with a heavy mono commitment? If all the cards in the set worked well with all the other cards in the set, but their casting costs were restrictive, people would probably hate the set. However, if there was an interesting selecton of Vampires to choose from, some of which were costed 
and some of which were costed, 
, you probably wouldn't be so annoyed with the color commitment. You'd just be asking yourself "How dedicated am I to this Vampire Mechanic, and how far down the rabbit hole do I want to go?"
Had this all not appeared in Shards of Alara, I'd probably be a bit hesitant myself. But I kind of think that may have been one of the strongest designs for a set that Wizards put together. It certainly had a cohesive identity, and exciting cards. I don't see why we wouldn't want to mimic it.
We could make it different, flavorwise, from shards by having the multicolor be the norm and the monocolor be rebellions or something breaking out.
Here are what I see as possible linear mechanics for monocolor:
White-Lifegain, Tribal
Blue-Mill, Tribal
Black-Discard, Lifedrain, Tribal, Graveyard
Red-Burn, Tribal
Green-Ramp, Lifegain, Tribal, Graveyard
Out of interest, is it worth working out some roles for people? I know this is primarily a design site, but it might be nice if someone came up with a compelling back story for the world which we're developing here. Anyone with any creative writing streaks? (I'd be up for this bit, but I'd need an idea of what the world mechanics we're going for are)
I enjoy writing fantasy.
It doesn't seem like we really know what we are doing yet though.
I think an interesting set of linear mechanics would be:
White- Tribal
Blue- Mill
Black- Graveyard
Red- Burn
Green- Ramp/Fixing
Someone mentioned burn before as a linear mechanic. I said earlier "I don't think we need or want to explicitly theme red around burn, black around discard etc. Some of those cards and themes will come out naturally - recall how famously difficult red commons are to design - but I don't think we want to aim for them."
I'd in fact go further than that and say I don't see how we can avoid having some burn in red, and of course that won't differentiate the set from any other set. If you seriously want "burn" to be the red theme then you're going to need a heck of a lot of cards like Chandra's Spitfire and Blood Ogre, and even that won't differentiate the set's red from M12's. How are you proposing "burn" can be a linear mechanic deep enough to be the visibly outstanding theme for a colour?
Similar comments apply, but to a lesser extent, to black graveyard mechanics and green ramp/fixing mechanics.
I would suggest that we try and create some new mechanics here as well - if we're going for linear mechanics, lets try and develop some new linear mechanics. For example, my Rally mechanic is pretty linear.
Edit: in fact, as above, any mechanic can be made linear if it's reduced to one colour. My Augment mechanic for example could be restricted to blue.
Not any mechanics. Imprint, for example, is utterly modular: you're perfectly happy to have one single imprint card in your deck, and if you have one imprint card (say Panoptic Mirror) you're no more likely to want another one (say Clone Shell) than if you didn't have it. Morph has a minor benefit if you have lots of them, in that the opponent won't be able to use their previous knowledge of your deck this game, but not very much.
Similarly, your augment mechanic as in Bloody Augmenter might not be very linear at all, if one augmenter grants flying, another grants shadow and another reach.
I'm not sure if I like putting a linear mechanic in each color, it seems it may be too restrictive, but I support throwing more ideas out; most often the good ideas come out of random ideas someone threw out while not being sure if it was a good idea or not :)
That said, I'm still thinking about the other suggested themes. What would make a good enchantment set? Basically, auras and global enchantments are cool, but normally come with card disadvantage since they need creatures to work. So work round the disadvantage while not making them feel like not-enchantments, and not making them too swingy. People have been trying to make enchantments better since the start of the game, but things like totem armor show they're finally doing it well (and I expect wizards to do an enchantment block eventually).
Things to do:
Ideas:
(I don't know if we'd do this, I know it's been done before, but I thought it was worth throwing out ideas and see if any seem interesting.)
Points taken. Scratch that then.
What is unfortunate, here, is that we can't do what Wizards did with Shards of Alara design. That is: Split up 5 groups, have them work on their own shards without contacting anyone, then coming back together to see how their shards work out. It seems here that what we want is uniqueness between all the parts (i.e., colors that refuse to work together). But, we can't help but talk about what the colors are doing as a group.
Shall I suggest we begin talking about individual colors, then, so that we can get a grasp on what they are looking like? Why don't we start with White. What mechanic would we like to see White employ? Is there some new mechanic that we would like to see White have? Can we use all of Jack's information in just one color and make White an enchantment color?
I really like the idea of white having enchantments, and focusing on one color at a time. Totem Armor flavorwise is also very White.
Added a bunch of cards as mechanics. Just listing what we've already talked about here. If I flew past your idea, my apologies, but there is a lot of stuff on this comment thread.
If we go for the monocolored being the invaders, we should consider their "tribes." This isn't to say that they have to be tribal; I'm talking from mainly a flavor POV. I think the monocolored creatures should be types that can be seen as stranger or less common, while the multicolored creature types can be more generic.
For example, I'm a big fan of having devils be a predominant red monocolor creature type, perhaps orcs as well. Elementals, in all colors, are probably an obvious choice as well. Goblins and humans would be the "normal" creatures that would appear on red multicolor/hybrid cards (though of course, humans would appear in all colors).
I also really like the idea of white caring about enchantments.
In fact, having white enchantment creatures might be a great otherworldly feel.
For more on this discussion, people may want to check out Monocolored Alien Invaders?. I gotta agree, though, if you want a feeling of Alieness, "Enchantment Creature" is a fine start.
We could do something like this for each color.
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/47
Sounds like an excellent plan - but only once we've got a bit more idea about what we're after.
Yup. We need mechanics first.
I'm going to make a "card" for each color and one for multicolor, where we can discuss possible mechanics in a semi-sorted fashion.
For what it's worth, we don't have to have one faction per colour. We could have the Lovecraftian horrors in both blue and black, for example. Magic worlds do tend to be a bit predictably five-factioned. But there's probably a good reason for that.
If we do have two colors come from one plane, we should do it twice. You know, for kids.
Actually, I have no idea why that seems right to me, but it does. Something to do with viewer expectation?
Oh, also L2i0n0k7 mentioned that we need to square away which story we're using. A planeswalker who gathers mana from 5 planes and it backfires by opening the multicolor world to 5 hostile realms, or a story of 5 imperial planes invading a new world that they've discovered.
Is it possible to tell both stories at the same time, or is that confusing? Two imperial two color worlds, and a simultaneous exploration of a green fungal world with terrible side effects? Possibly, the citizens of this plane got their hands on planar travel tech, and sought help, only to make things worse?
Oh, also, this all begs the question: What's the story? Because it looks like we're starting the block in the middle of the invasion. I'm cool with this. Magic has been having a trend of Invasion is Coming/Invasion is here/Someone Won. So I'm happy to see a block start out with us in the damn thick of it. But, as a writer, I got to point out that that means the invasion isn't the story. The block in three acts will probably be a story about something else entirely. In fact, this is kind of how you start a love story, of all things... or the plot to 1984, perhaps. I know we're very far away from determining that stuff, but I thought I'd throw that out there as food for thought.
It's not actually been stated whether we're creating a standalone oneoff set, or the large first set in a large-small-small block, or something else. I'm happy to assume we're aiming at a block, but it's worth stating.
I think it's fine to brainstorm the story and the mechanics simultaneously and see what good ideas come off.
I like the idea of one or two planes where two tribes come from; that seems more like real life and less like the suspiciously neat arrangements where everything comes in fives. Although currently it looks more like red, black and blue ALL want to be demons of different sorts, and white and green want to be enchantments and funguses respectively.
Might it be worth taking the story to a new "thread"? (((Story / Universe)))
Sorry, I completely forgot to look here for new comments. Thus I missed the bit about reducing the number of planes. I'd rather keep it at the original number: having the 6th multicolor faction is different enough from normal magic lines, I think. Besides, I like the idea of the monocolor planes having animosity toward each other.
I would also like to keep it to 5 mono planes.
Just re-read Jay Treat's entry for the GDS2. It seems very similar to what we are doing here, but mono is native.
Except that it has a completely different flavor, if I remember right, and we're going in a different mechanical direction except for Jack V's desire for morph, which Jay Treat also used for Muraganda.
I thought his idea also had hybrid rather than gold.
But yes, there are some similarities. I think that's fine. The sets will naturally acquire a lot of different implementations pretty quickly. The "only gold has flying", for example, is pretty new and eye-catching.
Yea, I just thought I would point it out.
I think that now would be a good time to do this. Let us start with Blue, since it seems most developed.
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/47
So, you're saying we should each design our own set of commons?
Yea. Then we could compare them and see what we all think should happen from there. We could do each monocolor, multicolor, and artifacts/lands.
Hm. I wasn't sure we were ready for something like that (wizards did it specifically for the core set), but it makes sense if monocolor is supposed to feel cohesive (like how they designed the shards separately) and I it's a good way to get suggestions from everyone, so yeah, I think it's a good idea.
(I'd still expect some significant differences, whether we have a secondary theme and what it is, but I think those would be sufficiently edifying in themselves.)
We can't easily shove those all on this one page, though; we'd need some sort of subpages.
I'm also cool with this, assuming people are mature enough to realize that out of the 10 or so cards they are designing, only two to zero would hit the set. But, I suppose that's going to happen no matter what we do. It seems like we're either going to make too many cards casually, or make too many cards in an ordered fashion... so why not go with the ordered fashion.
I'm going to set up a card called Blue Commons Submissions. We can discuss the whos, hows and how manys there.
Yeah. This is isn't so much "can you come up with 14 cool ideas" but "of the cool ideas everyone has made so far, and any more you think of, can you decide which ones go together well"?
I just thought of something. Maybe we could each make a skeleton for blue, decide which skeleton slots to use, and make cards for the slots. I'm good with either, what do you all think?
First, I apologize about this pedantic post. I go a little over in word count sometimes.
It seems we simmered down on this set since the crazy amount of activity in mid-late August. That level of activity couldn't last forever, but I'm a bit afeared that we might be running in the other direction, with Link and I making all the cards. Not that Link hasn't done an excellent job, mind you, but this thread was originally envisioned as a place for the community to make a set, not as a place for two designers to make a set, with occasional comments by passerbys.
The purpose of this post is not to guilt people. Trust me, I know that my job affords me more time to work on odd projects like this. I'm just trying to curb what could become a bad trend. I also, don't think it's laziness that slowed us down. I think a good chunk is before we were spitballing ideas, and that was something that everybody could be a part of. Now we're slotting commons onto a skeleton, and that requires a bit more dedication.
Even if the only communication on the set was just Link and I (which it definitely is not... I'm mentioning this for contrast), we would be having problems right now. That's because without a third party, we'd have a hard time agreeing on which cards should be in the skeleton and which cards shouldn't. I'm quite sure we could figure this out on our own... but we seem to be in this odd holding pattern where we can't argue it out directly, because there are other people involved, but we aren't getting many opinions from other people, so we can't move forward.
What I'm wondering is "can we design this set in a way that encourages more people to put in their two cents?" I don't think a rally speech for people to put in more time is a great idea. People put in the time that they have based upon their needs and their interests. Is there a way to either make the set design process easier, so that occasional contributors can make occasional contributions again? Or is there a way to somehow make the contribution process more fun?
Hum... I agree with what you said, I just can't think of how to go about it. We could make a card for each card slot, and have people link to the cards that could fill the slot. Then we would just need to agree on slots.
I have a few ideas, myself, but I don't want to extrapolate too much on them. I'm the one presenting the problem to the group, and it seems in bad taste to find a problem, then present a solution without getting outside ideas first. That way, the problem can be recognized and potentially solved without debating the problem and the solution at the same time.
Of course, that is, assuming there is a problem in the first place ;)
I think it is a problem - or at least, it'd be nice if we could have the community involvement that we had a month ago. I've dropped out of involvement mainly because I wanted to take the time to create my view of the blue commons skeleton, and never got round to it; and perhaps because I didn't quite follow what was going on and which tasks were open. I hadn't actually realised that we were in the stage of filling slots in a skeleton; I think I'd be more able to participate in that.
I think what's part of the problem is that we don't have one specific person coordinating and exhorting people. It's interesting to watch the M13 project, where Jay is the lead designer and has delegated five people to head up the current stage with each colour. Jay is still the one reminding people what the current stage is, what their deadlines are, and what needs doing next. I don't think a Multiverse Community Set should be structured quite the same as the Goblin Artisans M13 project, but there's something there which we haven't got.
For the moment, I'd be up for doing some design, analysis, common-slotting or whatever needs doing, but I don't feel I've quite followed what's going on and what needs doing. So perhaps people could make a post with one or two key sentences in bold emphasising what current tasks we're inviting people to join in with?
To be honest, despite what jmgariepy said about us doing a lot of the submitting right now, I've felt that I haven't contributed a lot because I have so much homework and other things going on right now. That being said, I noticed that the activity on the set has slowed down, and I've been actively trying to find time to work on it...
I think our main issue is that, unlike M13, we're practically directionless. At least we know that we should start with commons, not like the community set on tappedout.net. One possible thing we should do is to each design commons for the colors, not necessarily trying to fit exactly into a skeleton. I mean, sure, we can have ideas about things that need to be in the commons, but I think designing for a skeleton is very restricting, especially in a block, where a lot of the cards need to be top-down. This view is supported here, which is an interesting thing to read in its own right. Once we design the commons, though, I'm sure we'll have a difficult time deciding which ones fit the set better...
Honestly, I wouldn't mind having someone be sort of "in charge," as long as that person wasn't a dictator. It could just be someone who says "Okay, design black cards next," or whatever.
Of course, that still leaves the problem of deciding whose submissions end up in the set. The white and blue commons, for example, are in a sort of limbo right now. I don't think that should be left up to one person, though. It's too bad we can't sit down together and decide, because discussing in person would be so much easier. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure we're rather far apart from each other...
Anyway, sorry for rambling. I didn't really present a solution, did I?
A bit of an off-track comment: When we get to playtesting (I'm being optimistic and saying when), can someone tell me how, exactly, that's done? I'm sorry to say that I don't really know. I have the ability to put the set into OCTGN,though, if that will help things. Then we can do sealed games and such, and possibly even play with each other.
So with the white and blue commons, what is the state precisely? Is it that we have a bunch of designs, more than we can fit, and we're waiting to somehow sort them out?
In which case I suggest some playtesting probably is what we need. There are a few ways to do this that I can think of:
You can print out some cards from the Visual Spoiler or a details page (use the "Printable" link at the top-right of each details page), then cut out the printouts and slip them into card sleeves in an existing sleeved deck.
You can export the set to plain text then import it into http://toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?ChrisHowlett/PyDraft, and then play over IM using PyDraft's shuffler to manage your deck.
It should also be possible to import the set to Wizard's Familiar, like the M13 guys are doing; Jay wrote a blog post about that here.
It looks like OCTGN might also be suitable. I have no idea what that would involve or be like.
Either way, I think the thing that WotC R&D would do at around this stage would be to do some very early playtests of these cards, to see which themes and cards seem to look like they'll be fun. (It's possible we might need a few more cards - pretty much "guesses" for what some uncommons and rares for the themes might look like - for the playtests to be interesting.)
All of these playtesting options are pretty high overhead, which is part of why I haven't done my Clockwork Wings draft yet. So we may benefit from discussing commons and assembling commons for the other colours so that we can have more colours available for initial playtesting.
Playtesting is... interesting. I'm not a fan of virtual Magic, and, I don't even have the right technology to participate. I own a CR-48... Google's computer. I love the thing, but it only has a web browser... that's the point. It's insanely fast, but it has limited functionality.
That being said, I do have a very open-minded group that gets together at my local game store on Thursday. They get together to play very casual formats, and often look to me to add some weirdness to their play experiences. I'm quite sure I could cut out and proxy some of these cards and report on play experience. Unfortunately, that play experience will all be filtered by me back on this site, as opposed to two designers working together. Unless someone on this thread lives in Southern New Hampshire and has Thursday afternoons off.
I don't know if this 'solves' our organization issues, but early playtesting is a good first step. I suppose the next question is, "While we are looking to playtest the current blue/white submissions, what is our plan going forward for Green, Black and Red? Is asking people to make a skeleton the best idea? Is working on the skeleton together a better plan? Do we hand the skeleton to one person and say 'get 'er done'? Should we take a more hollistic approach, make some cards, accept feedback, then make more cards? And if we think that may be a best approach, should we wait to see what happens with the U/W playtesting before moving forward?"
On a separate side note, Link and Rourke, I know you may look at your posts and feel like you didn't say anything, but really, that whole lot of nothing is very useful. It tells us, for one thing, people are reading, and are trying to be helpful.. they just don't know how yet. It also helps move the conversation forward. Good writing requires continuous writing. It needs to build off of something.
From what I know, they test the commons by themselves. That's what they did for the GDS2, at least. So, if I'm going to make an OCTGN set for playtesting, should I just pop all of our blue and white commons in there, then put all of the blue commons in one deck and all of the white in another?
By the way, what I do with OCTGN is put all of the cards into Magic Set Editor, then export it with the OCTGN export template and make it into an OCTGN set file. You then have the option to make decks or play sealed games, like other free Magic programs, I think. I just use OCTGN because I like the way it looks. But I have no problem trying Wizard's Familiar.
If anyone can point me at the format specifications for MSE, OCTGN and/or Wizard's Familiar, I'll write Multiverse export options for those formats. It'd be great to be able to export to MSE.
Sorry, I don't know anything about that. :(
I agree the most immediate thing to do is probably play-testing of some form, just to see which of the themes are fun to play with. I think we've done a pretty excellent job at pulling in good ideas from quite a lot of people into a set (which naturally provides a sort of structure-level design, in contrast to how easy it is for a single designer to fall into the trap of designing too many single cards at first), and have made significant progress towards the idea of several tribes with a distinct identity but work together as a set. However, I think we're definitely at the point where we have some rough skeletons and a lot of cool card ideas where we need to try some of it out and see, rather than pin ourselves down to a specific skeleton.
It seems the most plausible routes for playtesting are:
(a) with one of the online tools, where we can try with each other (b) in real life, with anyone you can persuade to play locally :)
I'm not sure what format playtesting should actually take. I think the most obvious thing to do first is what the judges did in GDS and take all the commons from one colour and make a deck (perhaps 2 of each, plus 20 land?, even though that's not a standard deck size) and play it against something. (Or even just goldfish it against a deck you have handy or against nothing.)
I think we want to test interactions between colours too (eg. see recent Latest Developments article on how wizards development look for an unnoficial number of archetypes, typiclaly of each color pair -- we decided we want each mono color to be a major archetype, and dedicated Aer decks, but there will probably need to be some mixed decks too), but testing the "fungus idea" and the "all tapped" idea to see how they work is probably first -- I expect that to give lots of good ideas, and to revamp the skeleton.
I'd be happy to try some in-person playtesting, assuming I can get together with Alex or other amenable local magic players, but I don't know if I'll have time this week.
I think what someone mentioned up thread, of having an official-unofficial coordinator for each color (and for multicolor) may help. That would be someone to explicitly solicit feedback, and direct people to "what to do next" in that color. I don't want that to "five people design a color each" -- I'd be happy if that person designed none of that color, just used common sense to solicit and OK suggestions for skeletons, skeleton changes, card designs, changes to card designs, etc. That may help smooth out the yo-yos of productivity as different people have time free.
(I'd be happy to take that for, well, any color -- I like them all :))
Being an arbiter for a color without directly designing cards for it is a funny solution, and, sounds like a good idea to me. When we do this again, I would recommend that's what we do from the start (well, after figuring out what we wanted to do in the first place).
Instituting that model right now may be a little trickier, but if other people are on board, I'd be game. We may want to see what happens when people come back with "playtest reports"... I don't know. I know that I'll be getting together with my group on Thursday and pushing this on them, though.
I've already designed my own versions (though obviously incomplete) for white, blue, black, and red, and I'm half done with multicolor, because I figured we'd all design commons for each color and then post them and talk about them. I've only posted my white and blue on here, though.
Anyway, I guess I'm saying that if we playtest, we should have commons for each color already, and if we do the arbiter thing, I don't think I'd like to do it (or that I would be good at it).
A single veto probably shoots down the Arbiter plan, since there appears to be exactly 5 people who regularly comment on this set. That seems fine to me too. We'll see what playtesting brings about. Maybe I'll toss some extra cards in the file just so we can round out the numbers on the off colors. Nothing permanent, just for a sense of what we're getting at.
I'll probably make entires for black and red commons, and then put mine in.
Also, we would need six people to be arbitrate, since multicolor is its own sect.
Well, I figured we could do something different with Multi, but yes, it is roughly it's own color.
Ah! You've beaten me to the punch Link! Time to roll up the sleeves and give people more options. I think I'm just going to add cards to the file, as opposed to making a full skeleton. That being said, these cards are intended to work within a skeleton frame.
We seem to have fallen off in productivity.
Mmm, yes. My printer was offline for a little while, and I have yet to be able to make proxies to play with. That being said, I'm not even sure how I would do it. With most Multiverse sets, one can just print directly from the visual spoiler. This set, though, doesn't have a visual spoiler to look at, though, because no cards are in the skeleton. There are just 100 or so individual card pages.
Other than that, we have a bunch of green cards to throw together and see what works, some artifacts and some gold. That assumes that we're doing this the right way, and everything is going according to plan. I'd bring up the whole "are we doing this right" argument again, but it seems like unneccessary timing. We only one color and multi to get through before we can step back and decide how we did, so we might as well do that. I'll come back and add some green, either later today, or tommorrow.
Well, the visual spoiler is set to only show cards with "Active" set. There are a couple of ways to get them all to appear for printing; either uncheck that cardset option (although that'll get us all the cards like Mono Blue as well), or create a details page with a bunch of cardname embeddings like
((Aurora Soother))").Oops, I didn't realize I wasn't signed in when I commented.
I try to finish the gold cards I started and put them on here later today. Maybe I'll try to work up some greens, but I'm just not really inspired to make green cards, and I've already looked over jmgariepy's and been tainted.
I have that effect on people. :P
Sorry for my drop in productivity, everyone. I've been absolutely swamped by homework.
I just assume that this project will take longer than it appeared at first. We've got a good understanding of the sorts of things we'd like to see, and a lot of material to build off of.
My big regret is that I have a lot of time when I'm at work to add to Multiverse, but little free time outside of work, since I keep myself so busy with extracurricular projects. I should have had these cards printed and quasi-tested by now, but I'm just behind. I'll have to put in some extra effort on Monday/Tuesday to get these out... assuming we have power, then. Giant trees got taken down with heavy snow in New Hampshire yesterday.
Okay... something really weird has gone on here.
White and Blue Common Submission seems to be unnaffected, but there's a lot of comments that have been cut out of Red, Black and Multicolor... including my suggestions for a line up. Green Commons Submissions doesn't even exist. The card isn't there. Search "Common" in the search bar if you don't believe me. I have no idea where it went.
It's not a major problem, since the cards are here in the file, and we can reconstruct what people were thinking through the individual submissions. It is a bit... weird.
Yesterday I noticed some comments I saw weren't showing up in "recent changes". It seems there's a problem with... something?
@Jack: I think there may be a bug in my new "speedier" recent changes display where some items can fall into a gap between pages 1 and 2. I'll look into it.
EDIT: Yes, there was. It's fixed now.
@jmg: I also had thought we should have more of those, and I had definitely thought there was more discussion of the fungus nature of green. I'm not sure what I can do... I'll look to see if I can find anything in a backup of the database. ...Hmm, no, my backups are somewhat constrained by Heroku's free plan: I have one from a week or two ago, and one from July. There's only two logs of cards being deleted from this set: once yesterday, and once in mid-September by rourke. I doubt rourke would have just randomly deleted the Green Commons Submissions page, but I agree it's not there. There are 8 logs of comment deletions, but they're all by me, jmg or link.
Was there ever a Green Commons Submissions card? I don't even remember it.
@Link: I'm pretty sure there was. If you search through green commons for this set, you'll see that both you and I designed enough cards to put together a 14 card submission. That should be notice enough.
Huh. Alright, I believe you. :)
Unfortunately, I'm having internet issues at my apartment, and I don't know when they'll be resolved. I might not be able to keep up with everything once I go back there (in a few minutes), but I'll try to post everything I come up with when my internet is functional again.
While my internet is working, I want to suggest something: What if the first set isn't about the creatures of the Gloaming attacking Aer, but instead about Aer discovering the Gloaming? In this scenario, Aer is an observer of the conflict between the five monocolor lands, and is just discovering where they've been drawing their mana from. The conflict between Aer and the Gloaming doesn't truly start until the second set. This allows us to make it feel more like the focus of the block, though in basic shape, it will resemble the story of the Scars of Mirrodin block.
Mark Rosewater just wrote his Nuts & Bolts article for this year. This one builds on his previous three by talking about how to structure and design uncommons and rares for the needs of a set. Like the previous Nuts & Bolts articles, this one is absolute gold for those of us trying to design a cardset (rather than just a few cards), and essential reading for any of us working on this Community Set.
Ladies and Gentlemen! The provisional common slots in the Community set are filled (barring some shenanigans from Jack. I don't know if he wants to move a few things around before claiming he is 'done').
I assume that the next step is to have someone print these up, make 5 mono-colored decks (two of each card, and maybe one of each Fortification?) and play them against each other. Not for power-level, but just to make sure that what we have is fun (though, some comments about power-level don't hurt). Then, after that, making 3 tri-colored decks, perhaps, and running those into the mix?
I'm thinking of giving a 2 week hiatus where I don't bug anybody about uncommon design, and we see if anybody gives us a heads-up during that time on how the playtesting went. I'll try to remember to do some work before next Thursday, when my league normally meets, and throwing this at them. Sound good?
(Also, has anyone else noticed that we've generated 2114 comments on this set? Jeez. There's also enough cards kicking around to call this a large set for the heck of it.
By the by, if you don't think you'll playtest, you still should hit the 'random booster' button a few times to see how your expectations align to the first few random 11 commons that you see.)
Oh, hey, I just followed my own advice and found out that the Gold cards aren't 'active'. I'm a bit tired to take care of that now, but I'll hit it tomorrow. Just be aware they aren't on right now.
JackV brought four monocolour playtest decks of commons to GamesEvening. The basic themes were pretty fun, but the balance of the commons was massively off. Some of the cards were naturally more or less useful in mono-on-mono matchups, but several of the cards either just mustn't be common or need numbers massively tweaking. Blue was way more powerful than the others - I'll elaborate on why on Blue Commons Submissions.
The games not involving mono-blue were generally interesting and quite fun. The set feels very rough around the edges and unpolished though (accurately enough).
I'll post a lot of comments on the individual cards now...
I'm really sorry for my precipitous drop in involvement on this project. I'm still genuinely interested in contributing, but my semester at school has been surprisingly stressful and I haven't been able to focus on any projects. The cards I've been posting in my own sets just come from random thoughts during class.
That said, I'll really try to contribute more this summer, and/or make an attempt to replace my mind's random wandering with thoughts about this set.
Also, if I get a large block of hours, I'll try to put the commons into OCTGN and see how they go (but I really suck at computer stuff, so no promises).
Yay! Progress!
I responded to (((Tie in Ribbons))) before I noticed how much reading I had to do. In it, I pointed out the tricky spot that I'm stuck in... but... oh, I've got more reading to do. I'll be back in a second.
I suckered a friend of mine to help me print up 4x common sheets and put some decks together (Hi Tom, if you're reading this, and thank you). Tomorrow, my league gets together, and I'll be able to get some more feedback. So far, there's only three decks: W-U-G and U-B-R (with one of each fortification), in an attempt to get some feedback on multicolor, and a Mono-White deck for contrast (with the anti-flying cards sporting 3x, and the rest of the cards on 2x duty).
We did get a chance to play one quick game of the two 3 color decks in before I had to run to work. The good: Manacycling is great. Enlighten + Manacycling is awesome. The bad: A lot of vanilla creatures. Tom didn't seem too distracted by this, since every card was new to him. But these CD flying bears and Manacyclers can be a bit unexciting. That's probably fine, assuming three color decks with a heavy gold concentration doesn't pop up that much in limited.
Oh, cool, that sounds awesome.
We certainly had lots of ideas for gold commons we didn't use, so we can easily spice up the vanillas if we want. But let's not rush to do so, you're right, most decks will have a lot going on anyway.
Hahahaha. I would never have predicted that in this community set, with the six different groups pulling in different directions, one problem we'd have would be too many (french) vanilla creatures!
That is indeed interesting. I agree that I don't think we need to act on it immediately, but we should certainly take care to avoid them in uncommon (no need for Tower Gargoyle with all the manacyclers etc).
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