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| Mechanics | Skeleton | Common Breakdown Ref | All commons for playtesting |
Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-16 10:46:46)
What about Mind Bomb? It gives you a way to sacrifice a creature if you need to and acts as a scalable discard spell.
I like that "counts as multiple sacrifice" business. We have two fort wishes coming out of black, and two chain non-creature spells coming out as well. If someone makes the cards, I'll bump the offenders and put them in. If it takes some time, I'll make the cards myself. Not sure what we want for the two sorceries, though. It's, in theory, one expensive common creature kill, and one Mind Rot variation.
ROFL. But actually, temporary turn to stone would make a lot of flavour sense.
"She turned me to stone!" (Creature untaps. Everyone looks at it.) "...I got better..."
We didn't try anything with gorgons. Black gets tap effects, that might be a good common implementation of "turned to stone".
For sac - I'd like to suggest a creature that counts as multiple when sacrificed. Useful for those "As an additional cost, sacrifice X creatures..." type effects.
We still need to decide what to do about black, but I agree that uncommon is almost certainly a better place for this. I think we were right to put it at common when we were evaluating everything together, but I don't think there's any reason to keep it there.
I'm pushing to have this card, and the other fortification wish, moved to Uncommon. Discussions about Black's identity with fortifications aside, I think we got a lot of information about this card in testing through people's reluctance to play it. It's obviously good, but this is too much to think about at common. In theory, it's no more confusing than Mystical Teachings (which might be too confusing for common itself... but let's not go there), but Mystical Teachings didn't ask players to evaluate 10 cards of a completely new sub-type when it tutored. It should be easy to figure out if you want a Shock or a Mana Leak. Figuring out if you want one out of ten new fortifications, or just keep playing with what you got, will bring the game to a halt.
Agree with most of this. "When you sacrifice" doesn't bother me as much, since this mono set is the only time I'd advertise very linear mechanics, so it seems fine to me here. I totally see, though, why it would sit wrong with many people. Keeping a mix sounds sound.
"Black interacting with Forts": Yeah. We could always make the fortifications feel more black, but it's probably a bad plan. We may want to work with the natural strategy for fortifications that's been building. A lot of times, I've noticed that players find it more useful to pile all their fortifications on one land. Black is the color of parasitism and self-centeredness. We could reward players for the amount of fortifications they have on one land with a number of black cards... in other words, black wouldn't really have a mechanical tie to fortifications in this model... it just has a tie to using your stuff in a selfish manner, and the bonus stems from that. It would be similar in nature to the "demons get a bonus when they are alone" mechanic that pops up, most recently in Avacyn. Avacyn could have a number of mechanics that deal with the number of creatures in play... that's not new design space... it just happens to be dealing with the number of creatures black is dealing with right now. Black doesn't have a mechanical tie to creatures... it's just giving you a bonus in how you use them.
Oh weird. I assumed that there was either 5 artifacts or 5 non-basics set aside... though I should have validated that. 10 common fortifications, 3 uncommon ones is a bit odd. perhaps monocolor 8, gold 10, artifact 5? We could put 5 "mono-colored" fortifications in so that we indirectly have 9 monos. You know... something like "Fortify to a Plains", or "If ~ is attached to a Plains" with a substantial bonus.
So the options are: Each monocolour 7, gold 20; each monocolour 8, gold 15; each monocolour 9, gold 10?
Yeah, I think each mono probably does want at least 9, so that's best. Although I note the skeleton still doesn't have any uncommon artifact slots. Perhaps each monocolour 8, gold 12, artifact 3?
A few pieces of speculation:
So I think we can take design inspiration from chain, but may well end up just using the mechanic on a couple of cards but not giving it an ability word
Sacrificing stuff for profit is fun, I think we can use that. We want a balance between sacrifice outlets and sacrifice-me creatures, with a bit of token generation as well.
I'm not sure if we should have explicit "when you sacrifice" stuff (it works well on Pressed Centaur Clan) or "when this dies" effects that work better when you can control when they happen (which is more general). I think we want specific sacrifice-me stuff because that's not been done recently and plays well in our theme, but we want to make sure it's not too parastic. I think PCC is about right -- I was occasionally disappointed I didn't get the bonus when it died, but it would obviously be way too good if I did. We could have splashy rare creatures ("Enslaved demigod") that do something spectacular when they're sacrificed.
What I like about the fortifications flavour is black building up to a giant fortification over the course of the game. But that's hard to capture in mechanics.
The one game I played, the problem I had was I had too many fortifications and none of them dug be out of the hole that "my oppo has a bear or hill giant and I don't". I think that's natural (like equipment, fortifications naturally have a slightly higher set-up cost), but something to watch. And somehow to do that without making all the fortifications get snapped up by other colour drafters.
I wish I had more time to think about this. What you say sounds about right.
Hey, green? You suck at removal. You really really do.
Uh, why is your 8/8 stompy thing still 5/5? And why is it looking at my tapped 3/3 like that? That's the biggest creature in my deck!
Way to remind Prey Upon that green sucks at removal. :P
All right. Since no one seemed to have a problem with how my analysis of black's mechanics, I guess it's time to start talking about the uncommon slot.
We have had some talk in the Controlling Flood in the Uncommon Slot thread and I assume we're bound to have a CCCC cycle, and more of things that popped up in common. Besides this, does anyone have any specific goals that we should be looking for that were missed in common? Are there any ideas that we let sit by the wayside that people would like to see toyed with in uncommon?
Oh, and by the by the numbers seem a bit off to me. Right now each color in uncommon has 7 cards. Gold, though, has 20. In common, each color has 13 and gold has 20. I don't have a problem with the common slot... I just put them there for comparison. If we were to have the same percentages... The gold is about 23% the amount of common colored cards. To get that same percentage in the uncommon slot, gold would need to have 13 cards... which I know isn't a number divisible by 5. I suggest 10 cards.
Alright. We haven't seen any activity on this thread for 11 days, so I assume it's time to move on to Uncommon design while we work out the kinks in our commons. Before we do that, though, we have to settle what we want our Black to look like.
I like the black slave-driving fortification flavor. It works for me. But, I feel that we have to always be on alert to tighten the screws wherever we find them. It will always be a shaky flavor connection, and the biggest reason we're getting away with this is the fact that "nobody's done fortifications before, so no one can officially tell us that's not part of black's color pie."
If anyone has some more tangible advice than that, feel free to air it. If anyone wants to work with taking forts in another direction, you should talk now about it. I would suggest working with and around what we have already, though, as opposed to trying to get people to jump back to square one. Fighting momentum can be very difficult.
Let's compare to Golgari in Ravnica. In Ravnica, Golgari makes a bunch of chump creatures for you to sacrifice and a bunch of enter the battlefield and leave the battlefield creatures that get more value from their triggers than they do as creatures. That gives you a lot of creatures to sacrifice, but you still don't really want to sacrifice creatures. I mean, you're still tossing good 1/1s and 2/2s to effects.
Pressed Centaur Clan is built to be sacrificed. You only get full value out of him when you sacrifice him. Therefore, you want to be cruel to him. You want to crush him as soon as he hits the battlefield, and, if you have the Centaur Gang without a sacrifice outlet, you get a little sad. To me, that reads great. We want more of that. We want a lot more of that.
So moving forward, looking at black's needs, I'm aiming for a minor top-down fortification theme, and lots of "Sacrifice ME!" creatures with lots of sacrificing opportunities. Does this sound like a good plan?
added an "s" to pluralize "tokens"
We got this odd problem where we don't want to make a BR creature that has flying be comparable to other CC flyers, but we don't want to make it out-right unplayable. As it stands right now, its a pretty bad card, only made playable by the fact that BR rarely has a better option in the air. I'm not defending the 3 keywords... I just don't want to see something taken away from him and nothing given back.
Had Enlighten been more across the board, I'd probably say "That makes sense". As it is, though, it's only going to appear on, like 15 creatures or so? And only in multicolor? I don't think we need to give it the landfall treatment. I could be convinced otherwise.
Because of the story/flavor, all multicolor creatures have flying in this set. I don't know how this ended up with three abilities, though.
Oh, glad this went well!
Yeah, reducing the duplication in first strike (or other abilities) a little would be a good idea.
As pointed out on Tel Eria Guardian, this is very similar mechanically to Aeran Elf. I think I'm inclined to make this a Assault Zeppelid variant. Perhaps 4/2 trample flying?
Why does this have flying?
Haste: Red - 1st / Black - 2nd
First Strike: Red - 1st / Black 3rd
Flying: Red - 4th / Black 3rd
I don't really get why two colors that are either terrible at flying or merely so-so would combine to make a creature with all three of these abilities at Common.
Hmm, that's true. Viashino Scalewing, Loretower Warden, this. I note we've also got two flying+deathtouch - Follower of the Dark Cloud and Tel Koria Jailer - and two flying+vigilance - Essencecourt Sentinel and Aeran Elf. Those last two are similar enough that I feel one of them should change; I also agree one of the three first strikers should change as well.
Yeah, I was always very happy to draw this when I was playing white. It's naturally defensive, but it's a heck of a defender. The big strike against it (which I think is keeping it reasonable) is that to block anything with more than 1 toughness, it needs you to leave two creatures back - this and another creature to do the actual blocking.
Just because nobody's mentioned it on this thread, I'll point out the comparison to Chaos Warp.
I'm also unreasonably amused by the possibility of hitting Phage the Untouchable or some similar drawback-ETB-effect with this.
What if Enlighten was a keyword ability that did something like give +1/+1 until end of turn? Then cards could trigger off of being "enlightened" and could refer to other enlighten creatures... It's just an idea, though, because the current implementation has its own positives.