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Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-16 05:45:51)
Perhaps it is too strong. But, ironically, many players will read this version and think it is worse in every way than a Mountain, forgetting about Multi-color.
Personally, I think it is kind of balanced. It is better if you have Multicolor spells, and worse if you have activated abilities. The real problem to me is a type of power creep, not because the card is more powerful, but because cards of this nature provide people with exactly the resources they need for the decks they are playing. Of course, to some extent, the same could be said of just about any card. This is a custom set, after all, we shouldn't restrict ourselves too much on 'vision of the future of the game'.
Um... wow. That seems quite a scary proposition.
Alara Reborn was only playable in limited because it had four cycles of manafixing or cards usable with a single colour: Fieldmist Borderpost, Sanctum Plowbeast, Glassdust Hulk and Bant Sojourners. That's four cycles of gold cards, 20 gold commons, which spent much of their time in Limited not being used as gold cards at all. I think we definitely don't want to go that far.
But we do have the privilege of using colourless fixing - common lands and signets - alongside the monocolour cards. Hmm... perhaps we could take the gold numbers up a bit.
I definitely don't think we want it up near 50% of the commons though.
Yeah, if we were going to do that, it might be fairer if it were an activated rather than static ability, otherwise it would be a bit much :)
I like tricky. Tricky forces you to be awesome.
Haha, Jack's version would utterly hose a graft deck! :P But yes, I like this idea.
I love the idea. Either implementation is good. I think I prefer jmgariepy's, because it's always painful to have lands which you can't tap at all; Ancient Ziggurat hit that occasionally, but was good enough to be worth it.
I do worry if jmgariepy's version is superior to Mountain in almost every case. The only place it isn't as good as Mountain is in activated abilities: you can't activate Firebreathing or cycle Forgotten Cave with either version.
It may be that jmgariepy's version would need ETBT adding, which would be a pity. I'd be up for playtesting without ETBT and seeing how they go.
+1/+1 counters are pretty backwards-compatible too. There are more cards that interact with +1/+1 counters on other creatures than with spore counters on other creatures.
I enjoyed the Simic Graft creatures, Aquastrand Spider and Helium Squirter and the rest. I particularly liked Cytoplast Manipulator who encouraged you to graft onto opponents' creatures; Hunter of Eyeblights had a similar effect. It sounds like a fun flavour to continue with green in this set, although I see one problem: both of those cards were in green/X factions, and were in the nongreen colour. I think this is because there's not many actions on opponents' creatures that green is allowed to get in the colour pie. Recent core sets have offered Arachnus Web and Entangling Vines, but it still might be tricky.
Yeah, that's a good example.
Or maybe, "can't be the target of spells or abilities your opponents control" after all so you can put it on your opponents' creatures if you like :)
I think we should stick to green infecting non-land permanents, probably just creatures; if so, I think either implementation would be fine, but I'm interested in the idea that green gives +1/+1 counters, both to your creatures and the opponent's, which grant various effects or remove various effects...
Yeah, I originally had "to play red spells", but I thought it was unfair that an otherwise red land couldn't let you pay firebreathing. (It could say "or activated abilities of red permanents") But maybe you're right, and that overcomplicated it.
I'm not sure if this wants to tap for
as well -- that basically removes the drawback, since you can get 
to pay for red or 
to pay for 
and also get any color to play red multicolor cards.
Yeah that is tricky. The cards would be more backwards compatible if they used spore counters instead. It's also funny that those spore/+1/+1 counters are doing roughly the same thing as the flood counters in blue. I didn't think of that.
My fist thought was "We should keep them +1/+1 counters to differentiate from flood counters" but now I'm not sure. There is thought process in my head that goes "Well, they're already linked mechanically. Why don't we make them closer together instead, and embrace it as opposed to trying to hide it." I don't know. I do know that there is great flavor in the idea of "Now you have spore counters, so I suppose you must be a fungus, as well."
Edit: But, on third thought, there aren't ever as many creatures in play as there are lands. Spreading the spore counters around isn't going to be as fun, if there are only 3 creatures. Maybe +1/+1 is better, if for no other reason, than for their repeatability.
I like your suggestion Jack, but it reads a little weird. I figure it's because you wanted to be able to use the land to activate abilities... but I would think that this would do the trick as well:
: Add 
to your mana pool.
: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool. Use this mana only to cast red spells.
Which also make the land more universally useful.
Since we're already using an alternate type of counters in blue, I think +1/+1 counters would be best so we don't have to come up with something new. I like the idea of the +1/+1 counters being flavored as spores that infect other creatures. I sort of want to do something like slivers/ graft with the +1/+1 counters, where something happens to creatures with the +1/+1 counters on them.
As a though, we could have a weird flavor in green where something negative happens to creatures with +1/+1 counters on them.
I like the idea of fungus. I think there's room for interesting effects in turning things into fungus, even if that's not what every card does.
I've not played with the thallid mechanic: do we want spore counters or not? several funguses have a connection to +1/+1 counters, that would be an alternative? Do we want "make saproling"? I'm not bothered by that, and we have one vote against, but it's traditional. Or do we want neither, and other ways of granting fungus-hood (enchantments, "fungus counters", etc)
Alex: Thanks, I knew I'd seen that breakdown but I'd forgotten it was there.
After thinking it over, my instinct is still for a much higher proportion of multicolor (up to half the colored commons, somewhere between a normal set and Alara Reborn). If we want people to draft multicolor as an archetype, it seems more fun to have multiple possible multicolor archetypes, with cards that can also be used to fill out a mono deck if necessary.
But I'm not at all sure I'm thinking of this the right way.
Thanks.
Something else to think of is I just remembered Alara Reborn's Jhessian Zombies (and maybe other cycling cycles), in addition to its borderposts. I didn't like the creatures much, as they felt like a mediocre creature with a good rampant growth mode tacked on, rather than a good mana fixing spell with a creature tacked on, which would have felt a lot better. But it was a way to get extra mana fixing into the set without using two common cycles solely for mana-fixing.
But two cycles (or even more) of mana-fixing at common is probably good if people want to habitually draft multicolor.
I'm not sure if we want fixing for heavily mono-color or not. On the one hand, it will help people cast those spells. On the other hand, the price for playing multicolor is you have to spend draft and deck slots on mana fixing. But if you want to play heavy color commitment monocolor you always can play lots of mountains, and the price you pay is finding it a lot harder to splash other colored cards, or in playing more mediocre creatures which fit your mana base. If we provide lands which help you get RRRRR, that helps by providing another way of doing it (by splashing a color, and having a mono-color mana-fixer). That's probably good, but as it's not needed to play that archetype, perhaps have mono-color-fixing lands at uncommon (combined with, or instread as, the tribe-mechanic lands). If the same lands provide multi- and mono- fixing, that makes more options, but it also means that whichever side they're more useful for may end up drafting all of them and leave the other side left out (?)
Edit: although, come to think of it, a land that lets you cast G spells in a RRRRRR deck and a land that lets you cast RRRRRR spells in a RRRRRG deck perform much the same function, so maybe either is fine.
I really like that idea. It fills 3/4 of Alex's points, and doesn't go counter to monocolor, even if it doesn't help.
This is an ever so weird idea, but for ideas what about:
Mountain of the Paruns
: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool. Use this mana only to play costs with 
in.
That makes it automatic to splash multicolor cards in a red deck, but doesn't facilitate splashing other monocolor cards. And in a BR / RG multicolor deck it gives you any color you need with no drawback, but doesn't help you play a 2- or 3- color deck made up of mono cards at all.
Yeah, I like a cycle of these. The "if you control no untapped creatures" land, the enchantment land, the fungus counter land.
I've played quite a bit with Krosan Verge. I like it, but it has a hefty cost to it. It only taps for colourless until you get to three land, and then you need to spend basically an entire turn digging out the land. I guess it'd be good for control decks, but really bad for aggro decks.
The ETBT always felt like an unnecessary kick while you're down, given the restrictions I mention above, which is why I thought to remove it; but we could leave it in. I guess that further discourages aggro decks from using it.
Perhaps as an alternative we could find a middle ground between Krosan Verge and Bant Panorama:
: Add 
.
, 
, Sac ~: Search a Forest or Plains card onto the battlefield tapped.
, 
, Sac ~: Search up to two Forest and/or Plains cards onto the battlefield tapped.
Yea, I just thought I would point it out.