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Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-14 22:39:31)
Provoke is a nice idea. I did always enjoy that mechanic. It could work in any colour but blue, really.
I'm not entirely sure we want to use one of our mechanic slots on provoke, but it's a good mechanic that could fit the set's needs.
Shadowmoor/Eventide had a lot of mono-color drafting going on. But that's because, if you played mono-color, you could play 40%+ of the cards in that environment. In this set, when you play mono, you probably won't have access to 20% of the cards because of the multicolor cards getting in the way.
That should be fine, though. It just means that if people are paying attention to their signals, there should only really be one mono per color at the table. If we build the set right, there should be plenty of options for those who are building two color decks. Even if their decks aren't as 'effecient'. For example, I mentioned Serpent of the Endless Sea, which would be a powerhouse in the mono-blue archtype we're sculpting (if we reprinted it, of course), but it would be fine in a Heavy Blue/Light White deck. Just not as powerful, but still plenty useful.
The real tough nut to crack is going to be the cards with casting costs like
. There's going to be an expectation to make more heavy color commitment cards, because... well, that's the point. That means we're going to have to work hard to give people the tools to solidify their mana bases, instead of smooth them over. That may be a tough fight, and it could keep happening. While people will want Rampant Growth in the set, it may be more appropriate to pack Nature's Lore.
Owch. You're right, this is a Rishadan Port, and I completely missed it. Admittedly this is a heck of a lot easier to kill than the Port was, but still.
Perhaps this concept could work without tapping that land. That does make it feel a little more green/less blue, but it's still specific to Islands.
But it's not a big problem if this specific idea has to die. The potential of flooding to be fun and interesting seems to have been demonstrated.
The instachantments like Ward of Lights were pretty poor. And their Oracle wording is really quite painful. On the other hand, cards that do one thing when cast as a sorcery and something else as an instant feel rather inelegant to me. Even Time Spiral block, explicitly messing with themes of time and speed, only had one uncommon cycle like that. I don't really like that mechanical effect.
If you've got an instant, I don't really want to have it tell me "But if you use me as an instant, you'll miss out".
I do quite like the "As long as all creatures you control are tapped" / "As long as you control no untapped creatures" effect. Amusingly, it also makes Twiddle a better combat trick.
I think Cascade was a mechanic that was nicely modular while fitting all five colours.
The Shadowmoor design team also took advantage of the way that persist was new to give persist to all five colours, and persist is fairly modular.
jmg: good point.
Yeah, cowboys.
LOL. Yeah, it's definitely that, but I don't know whether "when a player reads this" can be ported into normal magic or not :)
"When all creatures are tapped" seems good to me. I'm worried that it's too similar to normal red aggressive decks, and that something that gives a second wind would be more useful, but I think it's a good place to start.
If you had cards like the "Deal 2/Deal 4 instant", it might make more sense if you did have to control at least one tapped creature, but the wording for that is probably worse.
I think it depends how much flexibility the decks need; I was assuming that if you're trying to play all-mono or all-multi all tribes could do with some grey ogres to flesh out the middle of the deck, and to make one mono-red deck different to the next mono-red deck. But if we decide it doesn't, then yes, morph wouldn't help.
I'm not sure what archetypes we're looking at; I'm not strong at limited, but currently, even in a color-commitment-heavy block, I thought you would tend to have two-colour or one-colour-with-a-splash decks, which is quite a bit of variation, from each colour you can go into "that colour only", "that colour with a splash of one other" or "that colour equal with another colour". I assumed we'd want a similar amount of variety, which means we need something that can be different between mono-red decks. You can always play red with another colour or with mulicolor cards, even if many cards push you into mono-red, but I assumed it would be useful to have something which could be used in different ways.
Yeah, I definitely like this. Putting on an aura makes the "when this leaves the battlefield" a lot more relevant.
Also of note: This card can enchant and target the same creature, effectively flickering it.
I'm with you partway with this Camruth, but I think the flavor might be construed as the opposite of what you mean. You draw cards at the beginning of your turn. If you wanted to reward players for being too impatient to hold on to their instants or flash cards, then the reward should be given for playing instants on your turn. Otherwise, it actually sounds like a blue mechanic... being patient and waiting until the end of your opponent's turn.
The other tricky bit is that it isn't a linear ability. We could make a linear ability by making a bunch of cards that liked it when you cast flash/instant cards on your/your opponent's turn, though. It would need to be a high number of cards, though... unlike the fairie ability with a similar style in Lorwyn.
I get it from the point of view of it being a linear mechanic that could do well if there were 10 morph cards in one color. I mentioned white originally, but even the Gorgons might want to steal it.
But as a multicolor concept? It isn't fitting the current flavor of a race of people pretending to be gods. They would want to be seen wherever they go. And if we put this in multiple mono-colors, we lose a bit of "each color refuses to work with the other colors" identity which is, currently, the basis of the set.
Oblivion Ring and its ilk have some funny interactions with timing that we'll have to be careful of. If I move enchant this on a 1/1 I control, then sacrifice the 1/1 with the enter the battlefield ability on the stack, I'll be able to exile the creature forever. It's true! It's true!
Already exists. It's called Stone-Cold Basilisk. Lololol.
So, we're saying "Enchantment Creature - Archer"? I can dig that. I think that would give the art team (Ha Ha!) a chance to go wild.
I like the idea, but it's too cheap for common. I know many players weren't around when Rishadan Port was wrecking tournaments, but... it wasn't fun. Tapping your opponent's lands used to happen all the time in the early days of Magic (I've been seeing a lot of it in Mashup: The Gathering) but doesn't really happen too often nowadays for the same reason that land destruction is rarely a viable strategy. I do think we have room for cards that tap the opponent's lands, but they shouldn't be this early in the game (I mean, this low a casting cost), and they probably shouldn't be tournament worthy.
I kinda like the idea of using Fateseal (though not too heavily) toimply the sanity gnawing unnaturalness of the blue invaders.
Unfortunately, what Alex is talking about is called "The Golden Rule of Magic". I'm pretty sure we can't butt heads with a golden rule.
You could however just say that something is blocked. Or have your creature give another creature "
: This creature is blocking target creature".
May I suggest Provoke? Or at the very least "This creature must be blocked"? If the monocolor tribes can't block the multicolor tribe, maybe they can force the multicolor tribe to block them. Also, we were talking about grappling hooks and what not before... this feels like grappling hooks.
How about Flash - If you cast this as an instant....bad/limiting effect
So if you cast it in your main phases it sticks around but any other time you cast it it dies/exiles/does bad things to you/etc (flavoured as Red being to impatient to wait for the Portals/whatever is letting them invade to stabilise before rushing through
Instead of red having Sorceries and Instants like "normal" magic, those effects could all be on creatures (with Flash on the 'Instants'). Bodies could be minimal in most cases where the 'spell' is powerful.
Lightning Wisp,
Creature - ????? [1/1]
Flash
If you cast ~ as an Instant, it deals 3 damage to target creature or player. Then sacrifice it.
Plays into aggressive Red nicely. (kinda like a variation on Evoke) Even if Flash hasn't really been a Red Mechanic before. Or we could just use a variation on Evoke (Invoke?) that lets you use the ability at Instant speed.
I think we might be able to get away with a Rare Black Minotaur. It would evoke Greekness, but at the same time, show off that it is an exception to the rule. The ability on that creature would need to be very flavor driven, though.
I'm envisioning a Serpent of the Endless Sea reprint that gets first picked consitantly...
1). I may have just readvocated something I advocated previously. Checking... yup I did. I still think this is a good idea, even if we blasted by it yesterday.
2). I templated it wrong, though. If we were to have a Deal 2/Deal 4 instant, that card would have to read "As long as you control no untapped creatures", like the Prophecy "no untapped lands" worked. I admit, that's annoying wording. But that allows it do something when there aren't any creatures to begin with. We could get around this by only using this terminology on creatures, so that you always have a creature, and you can go back to the normal way of saying it. That is, assuming white doesn't start using a mechanic that turns creatures into enchantments...
Whenever all creatures you control are attacking? Or maybe, whenever all creatures you control are tapped, so activated abilities still work? I kind of like the all-in aspect of "gunning for it" red. It's not hard to imagine cards like:
Red Rabble Rouser
Creature - Human Berserker
Common
Haste
As long as all creature you control are tapped, they get +1/+0.
2/2
That seems very exciting to me. Maybe we're not supposesed to make everyone happy with these abilities. If you were leary about mono-red and its aggresive tendencies, maybe you shouldn't be playing it, and leave this color to players who really, really like to attack.
I'm not sure about the Green Control Magic effect, but I do like the quasi-graft influence going on here. Instead of turning the creatures green, though, can we have the text read that those creatures become Fungus? Same functional mechanic, more what we were going for.
It is possible that graft was a bit too goofy in it's execution. Having cards that added +1/+1 counters and/or gave creatures with +1/+1 counters a benefit sounds solid, without a bunch of extra baggage (activating the ability, or moving counters around when creatures came into play). Plus, it's a mechanic without a keyword. Via the concervation of keywords dictate, I consider that good.
I don't know what we want to use here as a second mechanic. I just want to keep the reminder going that we probably want it to be modular. Abilities like Sunburst make a lot of sense thematically, but only really work with multicolor.
I admit, that's easier said than done. Creating modular mechanics for an expressly multicolor guild is a daunting prospect. I have noticed that, so far, there doesn't seem to be any one mechanic that screams "I'm a 5-color mechanic."