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Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-18 09:08:02)
Yay! Progress!
I responded to (((Tie in Ribbons))) before I noticed how much reading I had to do. In it, I pointed out the tricky spot that I'm stuck in... but... oh, I've got more reading to do. I'll be back in a second.
I'm cool for dropping this to 4cc (I assume we don't want 3cc, right? It seems better than Arrest to me...) but I don't know how to proceed with changing values of cards right now. The common slot is in a temporary harmonious balance. Pulling this out of 5cc... should I be shifting a card up from 4cc in the process?
I guess a better question than "Should this card cost less?" is "Can we give this card more value without killing the fundamental nature of the card." In this case, I don't see why a person can't get 3 1/1 creatures instead of two. That still seems common. It also balances the two sides... it's very possible that you'd rather have 3 1/1s than to stop an opponent's creature from attacking you.
I don't know what we're supposed to do with these card, or what my role is, going forward. I kind of imagined that when the full file is handed off, that it would be 'developments job' whoever would be in charge of that. As is becoming apparent right now, though, we'll be developing the commons while designing the uncommons. Am I supposed to be taking care of this? I think we need to have a conversation about this soon. For now, I'm just going to increase this card to 3 token creatures.
@Link: Tie in Ribbons and Day of Judgment is a bombo. If you sac the ribbons in response, your creatures die. If you don't, the ribbons goes to the graveyard. We could, however, turn this into a combo with a enters the graveyard trigger. Do you think that makes the card better/more interesting?
I don't know if I missed the discussion somewhere and now can't find it, but whatever happened to the "plants care about mana" mini-theme? Did it morph into caring about tapped lands, as on Rootsnapping Kudzu and Heavy Plant?
But, if we have a Day of Judgment variant, you don't feel like your "Pacifism" was wasted if you use it later. Then again, this costs MORE than Day of Judgement, so...
We could also give it Frost Titan hexproof instead of real hexproof.
I like the sweep idea, but what if, rather than go full-out with it, there was simply a cycle of creatures that returned lands to your hand as a cost? If there was a blue one, it would even disguise the fact that it was meant to hose blue's strategy.
I'm really sorry for my precipitous drop in involvement on this project. I'm still genuinely interested in contributing, but my semester at school has been surprisingly stressful and I haven't been able to focus on any projects. The cards I've been posting in my own sets just come from random thoughts during class.
That said, I'll really try to contribute more this summer, and/or make an attempt to replace my mind's random wandering with thoughts about this set.
Also, if I get a large block of hours, I'll try to put the commons into OCTGN and see how they go (but I really suck at computer stuff, so no promises).
I always thought it would be nice if flood was more interactive, and that it was a matter of "keeping up the pressure" rather than "find a flood card, ok, now hammer the opponent with islandwalk before they find an answer". (I enjoyed it, but I think I because the one game I played I drew disproportionately few and disproportionately mixed cards.)
I mused over a possible variants. One is that creatures have tapped-islandwalk. That way, in the early game, the opponent probably has to tap all their lands anyway, but in the mid-game and late-game, they can probably avoid doing so, but you can keep the pressure on by flooding more of their lands, and wondering if they'll dare tap out.
Another would be that each islandwalker requires a separate island. That would need a new ability, not just islandwalk, but again it would represent the trade-off of doing more as the game goes on.
It would obviously help if there were a way for other colours to remove flood counters, although I'm not sure if one per colour would be enough. Vitenka ingeniously suggested the Sweep ability word, which is hilarious, but actually seems relevant, because then it's not an all or nothing decision -- the blue deck has to decide whether to flood heavily now and gamble that the other deck won't be able to return ALL their flooded lands witout crippling their mana, or to save some flood cards for later.
Alternatively, an early suggestion was that there should be some inbuilt way of removing flood, eg. a mana payment to remove a flood counter. Possibly only one per turn, or an exponential cost to remove them? Or a temporary payment that suppressed the flood counter for a turn only? I don't think this is ever going to work -- having a pile of flooded lands is already a little messy, and having to remember extra rules not really written on the cards is confusing, but I mention it for completeness.
ETA: Obviously, "care about number of islands" is good answer if it works; if we could think of effects that counted islands, but in reality the first one or two mattered the most, that would probably work well, but if some cards are "at least one" and some cards are "N" it may get confusing.
Having played with it once, the "land and any fortification" seems much, much more sensible than "fortification and any land". OTOH, that way this can't kill Terrain Warping Beacon.
This kind of poly-activated-ability turns out to be way too strong and board-complicating for common. We decided to just add
to the ability.
This is currently a weird holdover: it feels like it mistakenly drifted over from red. I wonder if perhaps we don't need a mechanical theme for the plant cards.
This was sadly really fiddly to keep re-calculating. I think it can stay in the set but should be uncommon.
This was fun and interesting. It very much encourages one strategy, but it does give a decent-sized reward for that strategy.
This plays quite interesting and fun. It's not that strong, but that's fine because Seismic Strike is.
Vitenka thinks this is stupidly good - better than Ball Lightning. He might have a point.
Good solid common. Turns on pretty easily in a blue deck, making blue feel like the aggro-beef colour.
Good solid common. Efficient but burnable.
This was unsurprisingly popular in the first playtest, but didn't seem overpowered.
Terrifying card. MVP of the monoblue deck, along with Serpent of the Endless Sea. Might be probably okay at 2/2 islandwalk hexproof if we want to keep that pair of abilities.
This is actually really good. It's the early flood that turns on most of the blue deck. Could perhaps be 1/2 to make people less likely to play it unless they want the flood.
This worked nicely in the playtest.
I like this. qqzm doesn't.
This is basically a 5-mana Pacifism. It feels a bit bad paying 5 mana for a Pacifism, but it's still playable. It'll be very rare for this to be on something bad enough that you want to sac it.
This is now good. Plays well, seems about right cost-wise.
The problem with "discard a card, then draw a card", is that it has very high syntactic complexity for a common. New players will inevitably misinterpret it as "trading one card for another", the intuitive understanding, and fail to draw when they have no cards in hand.
When I heard the announcement, I thought Wizards was going to do "discard a card, then if you do, draw a card".
That admittedly sucks, but is very much in flavor for red. It's essentially embracing randomness, trading a known quantity for an unknown one. Blue, on the other hand, gets to draw, mull over strategic implications, then discard the crap card.
I'd like to share this thing I've been mulling over for some time regarding red's design space:
Chaos vs Randomness: Red's design Space
The biggest find from initial playtesting is that the blue commons are madly strong. There can be a little tension waiting to see if they get a flood card, but there are enough of them that they happen, and at that point suddenly it's a terrifying aggro-control deck with two good counterspells, a good removal spell, and some ludicrous attackers. Serpent of the Endless Sea is terrifying in a monocolour deck; Glistening Kraken is also terrifyingly good. At least the other islandwalkers can be shot or Runearrow Archered.
Part of the problem may be that the commons all want you to jump through one hoop, it's the same hoop for each of them, and it stays jumped. None of the other colours have any way to un-Flood lands (apart from Creeping Mold and the red LD if it does that), and even then just one more flood turns all the blue cards on again.
It might help if we did have some cards that care about number of Islands the opponent controls, although I recall we discussed that and decided against it. Perhaps at uncommon?
JackV brought four monocolour playtest decks of commons to GamesEvening. The basic themes were pretty fun, but the balance of the commons was massively off. Some of the cards were naturally more or less useful in mono-on-mono matchups, but several of the cards either just mustn't be common or need numbers massively tweaking. Blue was way more powerful than the others - I'll elaborate on why on Blue Commons Submissions.
The games not involving mono-blue were generally interesting and quite fun. The set feels very rough around the edges and unpolished though (accurately enough).
I'll post a lot of comments on the individual cards now...