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| Mechanics | Skeleton | Common Breakdown Ref | All commons for playtesting |
Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-14 22:39:32)
Yes, it's fantastic with Mind Spring or Sphinx's Revelation, or even just Concentrate, which turns into better than Urban Evolution. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in tournament ramp decks. But that's not bad - it's pretty cool.
It's also better than those if you use a different mass-card draw effect.
But not unreasonably so.
Ooh. Looks exciting, but actually it's pretty reasonable: it's a Sakura-Tribe Scout or Walking Atlas that can attack for 2 as well as using its ability. (Or Firebrand Ranger, but that was a bad card.)
Blue would do well to have a counterspell. Green could be an instant/sorcery: "Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature you control. That creature fights target white, blue, black, or red creature."
I think it makes sense to have one or the other. I would vote for enchantment digger, since it CAN do the "two of them recur each other" trick, but it can do other things as well, and seems simple enough for common. Although maybe it should be slightly smaller and at 4-mana -- it would be nice to have a greater chance of being able to cast the returned card sooner.
I think we trimmed the white skeleton for space, I hope some of the other cards in the set could fill the hole (especially if the lance moves to uncommon too).
ETA: Sorry, I seemed to have been very negative this afternoon. I just had time to post some comments, but not enough to design any cards, but I seemed to have just been disagreeing with everything suggested, sorry :)
Hm. My first instinct is that "C, D, E or F" is this set's equivalent of "non-black" or "non-artifact" or "non-human", and W/B often gets "tap/destroy target non-X", but G and R don't normally have target "everything except", since their spells tend be inherently limited by the target's toughness, and don't need an additional restriction. But I'm not sure I'm right.
We could certainly see if we think of any good cards along those lines -- if we want a cheaper-than-cancel counterspell, "counter target RGWB spell" would make sense.
Good question. Hm.
Hmm. I was wanting to create an uncommon blue variant on Aetherplasm or Metathran Aerostat, that puts a creature card from your hand onto the battlefield blocking something that's attacking you (as a sideways answer to fliers, since blue has the fewest common answers to fliers). Probably an instant for
to drop a creature of CMC X; like Flash was meant to work, but more interactive because of the combat requirement. On the one hand you can't get your Flamedance Warden out as an instant unless you can stop it taking combat damage; on the other hand this can provide blocking even when the creature couldn't normally block the attacker.
Problem is that starts feeling very similar to Flash Foliage, and I wonder if it'd be too similar to have them both as uncommons in the same set. What do people think?
I like this card. I also like Blinding Chanter. They suggest a cycle, though.
(Albeit one split across rarities; that sometimes happens, between common-and-uncommon or between rare-and-mythic). Can we come up with green, blue and red cards along those lines?
Red would most naturally burn a WUBG creature. One of its two common tap-themed burn spells Shock Variant and Violent Zephyr could turn into caring about colour, or we could make an uncommon that does.
Blue could easily have an uncommon counterspell for
or 
saying "Counter target WBRG [creature] spell". Or an uncommon creature with ETB bounce a WBRG creature.
Green could ETB fight a WUBR creature? That's five flavours of removal for the cycle, but that's okay given the mechanical flavour of it?
I think we should make a choice about playing-with-exile one way or the other. At the moment I'm leaning towards leaving it as a rather minor theme, and simplifying mentions of exile away from cards that don't need to do it. So that means turning this into
> When ~ dies, you may return another card named ~ from your graveyard to your hand.
Which I think is simple enough to be worth doing.
That said; I think the best candidate for the current empty common slot is indeed Enchantment Digger (either at 3/3 for 5 or at 2/2 for 3), and this is very similar.
In the intervening two years, 5-cost common removal spells have become much more the norm! Clearly we were just ahead of the game :P
However. Currently, this is the only Chain card at common. This seems like it should either be tweaked to have a couple more, or remove the keyword. And if we try to have just this mechanic on the card but non-keyworded, it seems very out of place in black. (I love the idea of sneaky sideways manafixing, but again, without the keyword it just looks like a strange ability in black.)
Yowch. I was just editing the skeleton and these numbers are really squeezed. I'd currently rather have 15 gold uncommons (that's two
and one 
), which leaves either 8 in each monocolour and no uncommon artifacts at all, or 7 in each monocolour and 5 uncommon artifacts.
I was counting the manacyclers. What I forgot to count, however, is that there's an black 'enchantress' for fortifications, and a looter in red. That brings us up to 8 in mono common, 5 of which are cyclers. Better than what I was giving it credit for, but could supply more support, too. If we kept those numbers in uncommon, it would probably be fine, though. Unlike Metalcraft or Landfall, Enlighten isn't the core mechanic of Aer... just one of 6.
"Practically no card draw in mono commons" - are you counting the manacyclers?
But, yes, I agree we want some more at uncommon. I don't think we need any "anti-ground" - flying creatures have a powerful advantage over ground creatures inherently due to flying's asymmetry.
I highly prefer the current version. It was just a suggestion.
Hmm. Black gets ETB Target player reveals their hand. Coercion a card, then coercion a gold card? I suppose this might not be worth really considering until we start asking for mono submissions.
Link does have a point with Doomseek, though. I doubt we have space for a cycle of Doomseekers and gold haters. Would a cycle of Doomseekers be better? Or do we really want to hammer on an anti-gold hate theme?
I play Devout Witness in Isamaru Commander. She's very good (Gatherer has her at 4.348). She would be less good if the activation cost
, 
though. I don't think unlimited Naturalizes are out of the question... just not at that activation cost.
I don't have a problem with leaving this card alone, but I think it's unfortunate that 'bud' has a hard time with spells like this. For example, we could also print a card like:
Sorcery
Creatures you control gain bud until end of turn.
Which, in theory, would mean that you get a number of +1/+1 counters equal to the number of creatures you cast this turn. But I'm not really sure how that timing works. I don't think works at all.
I've been thinking of changing Bud to say "As this creature enters the battlefield" as opposed to "When" like Devour does. It's very sad to see a 2/2 with bud get Shocked in response to the ability. And it would let us print a 0/0 with bud, if we wanted to do that.
None of that solves the timing with bud as a keyword, though, on etb creatures. Ah well. Focus on cards that work, as opposed to ones that don't, I suppose.
As an aside, cycles don't always need to be the same permanent type. I do think it's best if we had at least 5 creatures, but if we wanted to do a cylce of manacyclers, for example, we could toss one on a creature, and another on an instant...
But, you know, it's probably best to go over what we need before we talk about how we're going to design it. Enlighten needs cards that draw cards, so that should be a priority, I think. In fact, when we get to the uncommon mono-colored submissions, I'm going to hammer on this. There's practically no card draw in mono commons, which I think is fine, as long as we really push to make a lot of card drawing in uncommon. Makes the card draw cards chase in a draft. That works for me.
So, so far we need:
What else do we need? Are we interested in anti-ground, for example, or is that even necessary?
I don't think cycles are the same thing as slots. I feel fairly strongly that a set's slots should be balanced across colours and rarities: so if there's one rare blue-black card, there should be one rare black-red card, etc. But one could be an enchantment, another an instant, another a sorcery.
Keeping creatures vs noncreatures balanced isn't strictly required, but is often a good idea. But it wouldn't mean that the 5 noncreatures in Link's comment would be a "cycle" in any meaningful way; they'd just happen to be the only cards at their rarity-colour combination.
Sorry, I was too hasty. We should certainly have some cycles, probably a minimum of one in each rarity. But I'm worried that we end up turning all the multicolour into tight cycles and finding it doesn't work.