Community Set: Recent Activity
| Community Set: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics | Skeleton | Common Breakdown Ref | All commons for playtesting |
Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-14 14:25:53)
The last card added is more of a semantic concept, but is definately worth discussing. Rourke mentioned this twice, but I think we're so focused the mechanics that we walked past this flavor point. Still, this may significantly alter what type of mechanics we use. Also, is this supposed to be 5 aliens? Do they all work together to invade, specializing in various parts? Or is this like the Kree/Skrull war in Marvel Comics, where two (five) aliens are fighting each other, and Earth is caught in the middle?
Really, I'm just piling through some of the mono v. multicolor ideas that people had, in case anyone has more to say about an individual one.
I really like the idea of white having enchantments, and focusing on one color at a time. Totem Armor flavorwise is also very White.
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?
Points taken. Scratch that then.
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.)
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 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.
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 think an interesting set of linear mechanics would be:
White- Tribal
Blue- Mill
Black- Graveyard
Red- Burn
Green- Ramp/Fixing
It doesn't seem like we really know what we are doing yet though.