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Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-19 09:20:43)
I admit, I'm a little confused by my own design with this one. I wish I knew what I was thinking at the time...
I wonder if your opinion of the card would change if the card was above the curve. I took the liberty of changing +0/+2 to +3/+3. Does that make the card sound interesting, or does it just make it more obvious that it isn't worth it?
I made a terrible mistake. I checked Multiverse just before I went to bed. ;)
You'll have to excuse me Alex. I got to take off my Head Designer hat for a second here, because I can't help arguing.
Actually, I am talking about being weird for it's own sake. As designers, we throw that expression around to show people what their doing wrong with their design. What we're really saying is "Your design is too complicated, and only makes sense to you. You need to take a step back to reality, and show us some design that is relevant to us."
But weird for it's own sake can be elegant, and it can possess qualities of excellent design. The intimidate example I gave above was poor... I was just riffing. Later on, though, I realized that this example, however, would make a very interesting card:
Enchantment Creature
Uncommon
~ must be blocked by black and artifact creatures, if able.
2/2
The previous intimidate example was poor because it was unclear what sort of statement the designer was making. This one works much better in my opinion. It's more obvious what's going on... this is a reverse Severed Legion. The concepts are strong in White's color pie, and, while it stretches to do what it does, I don't think many people would question it... it would just take them a step back because they hadn't seen a card work quite like that.
That's the reason I lamented that Link and I "hadn't smashed the ball out of the park". The only way design like this works is if it is done well. If we go for middle of the road 'kinda weird', then we risk looking like a bunch of amateurs who are just throwing ideas at the wall but don't have an understanding of how to pull it all together. If, however, we can pull off weird, and do it consistently and well, it could be a really neat trick.
[Puts Head Designer Hat back on]
Okay, enough with the counter-argument. I just had to get that out of my system. The truth is that weird won't work if the rest of the designers aren't on board with it. But let's say we pull weird out of the equation. What we have left is "Enchantment creatures that often use temporarily exiling". Is this good enough? I wouldn't mind super-charging the temp. exile bit, but is there such a thing as "Too much O-Ring"? Is there another direction we can take white that we're bordering on, but not quite doing? How much weird do we need? A little? A lot? Should we be looking to Esper in Shards of Alara for some inspiration (I have to admit, for a bunch of enchantment creatures, many of them don't interact much with enchantments. Many of the Esper artifacts mentioned artifacts somewhere in it's text). There anything else I'm missing?
Thank God. I thought I was going crazy there for a second.
Ah, fortunately the rules don't quite work as you mention. So-called "state-triggered abilities" (which watch for a game state rather than a specific event) don't re-trigger until all instances of them have already left the stack.
I'm not sure weird for its own sake is a good idea. People have a mindspace for "intimidate" now. It sounds like you're saying "let's make as many of the white cards hard to understand as we can", and that doesn't sound like it'll make for a good play experience.
I don't think I like this. It only does anything with other white creatures; in a typical two-colour draft deck, if you draw this and all your blue creatures or red creatures, it won't do anything. Of course, it will do very little anyway; I assume it's a deliberately bad card.
It might be fractionally more interesting if it had flash? Or would that be too much extra complication?
I like this quite a lot. I do wonder if 3 tokens is a bit much for common... I note that Spectral Procession, Battle Screech and Lingering Souls have all been uncommon (and Icatian Town was rare! although not by modern standards). Combining a 3-token-maker (even if inefficient) with a removal spell is probably a windmill slam first pick. I think this would be plenty good enough at 2 tokens (either at
or probably even at 
).
I've been thinking about this. The odd part is the wording. "Whenever there are no other creatures in play, exile ~." Causes a game draw. Here, I'll explain this in BASIC terms:
10 Start
20 If "other creatures", Then Goto 50
30 Goto 10
40 Run Exile
50 End
Does "As long as there are no other creatures, exile ~" work? It's kind of odd. You don't really get to respond to that...
I'm not sure if exiling and coming back is a good idea, but I like it, it feels appropriately alien. I almost want to say "~ is phased out as long as you control no other creatures", although I don't recommend it :)
Pretty much. In fact 99% of the time was probably a liberal estimation. Edited.
Hey, speaking of making creatures feel a little alien and adding temporary exiling, how about this creature exiles itself and waits for another creature to enter the battlefield? It wouldn't feel so terrible to lose your creature, either... he'd just be waiting for later. That, and you could play the thing on round 1 and just let it sit there until you get another creature up.
I like this. But I think it doesn't need the first sentence. The sac trigger will do just as much in 99% of cases, won't it?
Okay, so we've got good shells for blue, green, black and red. It's time to take a look at White.
Beside both Link and my suggested card lists above, I've also found these three cards hiding in our files:
Oblivion Gust, Woven Life, Soulcapture Lance.
When pulling everything together, I like to pull down a few uncommons that have a chance of becoming commons. These two are here to be acknowledged:
Searing Skies, Vested Light.
So, the magic question is "What is the simple explanation for what white is doing?" Earlier in this thread, Link does a good breakdown of this:
So, what we want are "Alien enchantment-creatures and spells that often employ temporarily exiling, but are still clearly white commons." It also occurs to me, now, that we should think about making cards that interact with temporarily exiled cards... but that seems like uncommon and greater mechanic anyway.
Looking back at Link's and my submissions, I think we both dabbled in this idea, but neither of us really smashed the ball out of the park. I think, going forward, I'm going to take a good look at each card and ask "Can this card be weirder?" There's nothing wrong with Thread Gatherer, for example, because he fills a pre-stated role in our design skeleton (Okay... he could probably be a 4/1, just to mess with expectations), but my Weft Weaver, for example, 'just' has 'Protection from Multicolored'. That may have struck people as strange in 2005, but that's not as weird nowadays, and we should either aim to make it stranger, or cut it. Same with Link's Lightmare. A bit irregular, sure, but not odd. Odd would be something like "White and artifact creatures must block this creature". That's probably not what we want, either, but it gets people scratching their heads and turning the card upside down, and I think that's the effect we want. Opinions?
Circling the square is something pigeons do, though :)
And yes - blacks approach to impossible mathematical problems: a) Invent new mathematics. b) See Cthulhu. Invite him to come to tea. c) Go insaner. d) Kill the circle! e) And now it fits neatly into this square. If you cut its edges off. Procrustus would have made a great mathematician. f) Realise that the corners of the square allow the circle to escape through time itself!
I also thought about changing "Chain" to "Transcend" to make fun of the fact that pi is transcendental... the whole reason why you can't square the circle. But, the point of chain is flavor, and it isn't worth it for one goofy joke.
Flipped odd and even and changed the name to Square the Cirlce, which is an overdue change. Further proof that black will do anything to win... even recreate new mathematics to better fit its vision. ;)
But you can't circle the square either, if by "circling the square" you mean constructing a circle with the same area as a given square using only a compass and a straight edge :)
For that matter, I can believe black would sit around trying to square the circle, but it doesn't strike me as a colour that, when it discovers it's impossible with a compass and straight edge, wouldn't, well, redfine the problem a bit so it could cosntruct it :)
Too many 4cc creatures. Didn't want to make black's early game too defensive, so I made this a 2/1. Doesn't make me happy... but it can hang out in this slot for now.
Changed from Squire to 1/1 for
. We need a 1cc creature. Don't know why that bugs me so much, though.
But... But... But...! You can't square the circle!
Switched cc with Dread Gorgon because of manacycling, mentioned there.
Oh, hey, I forgot about manacycling. This card seemed a little simpler than Pressed Centaur Clan, so I made it the CCC and added manacycling. Jack's complaints on Cutwork Knight still rings true to me (putting manacycling on the CCCs), but I guess we should stick with it. I like manacycling, and want one in each color, but I'm not a fan of it clogging up any card with text. It really belongs on something where you don't have to process the first line of text. We'll have to look into this later. I feel that black is going to be jumbling around quite a bit.
Well, that's part of the problem, Jack. Right now we don't have the space for two separate cards. 13 slots isn't a lot to work with.
That being said, the instant speed fortification attacher now sacrifices creatures en-masse and that may be good enough. Still, I think I'd like to play this 'extreme' version before cutting back. It may go back to normal if we like sacrifice however... the more cards that care about sacrificing in black, the less they all have to go all nutso to get the job across.
It's possible that at common this should be too separate cards: one fairly strong card with sacrifice in the cost, and another that gains a temporary effect from sacrifice, just for the complexity aspect.
In terms of strength, I tend to agree with both. It looks horrible at first glance: too strong for common, but with too big a drawback. But we should definitely try it, because several colours get giant commons sometimes, and "giant common that requires you to sac" is very black, and if it plays well, we've gone a long way to fleshing out our theme.
I think it could easily be pseudo-shroud or pseudo-hexproof. If wizards are sticking with "hexproof" as a standard, I'm not sure if non-keyword effects should match it or not.
Development-wise, I think it could easily be either: I think hexproof is easier to grok because it does what you'd hope, but I think a 4/1 semi-targetable is plenty strong enough for black common already.
OTOH, I think Rotting Fensnake and similar usually ended up trading with a chump blocker, rather than hit with a spell, so from that POV it wouldn't matter.
Magic's got room for more than one of those. Retromancer did it, anything with shroud effectively does it, and there are things like Goblin Brawler that come out and explicitly say "No".