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Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-19 11:03:59)
Banding makes me frown.
What else were pseudo-greek cultures famous for? Early maths. I don't think this one can be printed, but maybe something with similar flavour?
See comment on Harsh Taskmaster
A probably controvertial suggestion for capturing the "chained together" flavour.
I never played when banding was first printed, but it seems like the rules for what happens once creatures are in a band is fairly intuitive, but the rules for what constituted a band were weird. Hence specifying that explicitly, instead of just saying "banding"...
What about the more-universal effect of "Fortified land has "At the beginning of the end step, this land deals 1 damage to you.""
Just about conceivably you might want to use this, in cases like Mammoth Support Beams. But I think it's fine to make people work for this. I also agree this sadly shouldn't be common.
Hahaha! But watch out for Piqued Fires!
"if this is my opponents 2 drop, and then having seen my hand they hit my next three creatures with it... I'm not going to be happy; or able to do anything about it."
Yeah, but lots and lots of cards are broken if you draw four of them in your opening hand :)
"this is at least as good as 'opponent discards TWO cards' which costs a bit more than this."
I agree with Alex that if you can pick off the creature your opponent was about to play, this could be very very annoying, so the cost/rarity/effect may well need tweaking a bit. But I'm not sure the cost is inherently too little: Mind Rot is the archetypal "2B. Common. Discard two." If you play this for 2B you get to steal a 2-drop, which is probably better than mind rot, but not lots better. You can play it for 1B, but very often you'll miss a one-drop and the spell will be wasted, or get a weak 1-drop.
Mmm, yeah, probably actually useful to keep them missing drops behind the curve; but then that's kinda a black thing anyway.
And black historically got "Make your opponent cast spells" rather than blue..
I like it - but it needs something doing to it; because right now, if this is my opponents 2 drop, and then having seen my hand they hit my next three creatures with it... I'm not going to be happy; or able to do anything about it.
(And were I to worship at the altar of card advantage; this is at least as good as 'opponent discards TWO cards' which costs a bit more than this.
Nice idea. Sadly works best if you've got more mana than the opponent, which will usually mean if they're manascrewed. But nice idea nonetheless.
This is very similar to Derivative sculptor, but a lot more controvertial. Fortifying multiple lands would be possible for fortifications, since the lands usually just stay on your side of the battlefield. (It would be confusing if one land were animated by a non-fortification ability, but that's hopefully rare.)
I don't know if it could work, but it would make fortifications noticeably different to equipment, which is probably good. If we did go down that road, I'm not sure if the answer would be an ability like this, or an ability of a fortification to fortify muliple non-fortified lands, or a change to the rules so all fortifications could do it.
(If fortifications could be built successively over multiple lands, it could be one way Black's brass herald could matter more.)
(The intent of the card was that each time you tap it you can add one more land, but lands don't fall off unless you fortify the land to something else in the usual way. But I don't know if that's correct, maybe just "fortify to two" is sufficiently interesting?)
Another variant that could make a small number of fortifications more relevant without making each more powerful itself. Again, I don't expect the templating or sizes to be right, and I'm not sure the two abilities should be together on the same card, but I'm interested whether the idea is helpful.
The templating is wrong (I'm not sure if replacement effects can be used in costs), and the creature types and CMC P/T are all random, just focus on the idea.
The idea is, a creature like this can be used to cheapen "sacrifice a creature" costs on fortifications. I considered having a slavemaster grant this ability to another creature, but decided this was the simpler implementation, we can always do slavemaster variants as well. If there are enough "sacrifice a creature" fortifications, and enough creatures like this, the link could emerge naturally.
It's similar to persist -- in fact, the right answer might be to bring persist back instead of thinking of a variant. Currently the difference is, firstly, we can be more liberal with this as it only cares about sacrifice, not death, and secondly, it can be worked to death three times, not just twice.
OK, I've been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of possibly-common fortifications design. They may never be as versatile as equipment, but I think we've enough ideas we can rely on having enough cards for this set (whether that's just three, which are produced solely on tokens, or whether we have ten common fortifications).
Q1. Do we want fortifications in the set, even if the black connection doesn't work out?
I think this is 50/50. I think our fortification designs are nice, and go well in this set, but other than the black connection aren't necessary. So I'm definitely very happy to put them in, but if we're squeezed for space, I'd be happy to punt them en mass to some future set someone designs that would make good use of them.
Q2. If we have them, how many do we need?
If we have them at all, we probably need enough that it doesn't look odd to have introduced them. I would say a minimum is about a dozen on all rarities -- that's what rebound had, and that seems a reasonable example of a "small" keyword. There could be fewer, but there's no reason to be.
However, jmg's right that if we expect them to be drafted with black, we need enough per pack that that's plausible. There was a discussion elsewhere, and I'm not sure of the answer. The possibilities seem to be:
ii. Have enough that players playing black can hope to draft at least one (for searching/wishing).
iii. Have enough that players playing black can hope to draft enough to naturally draw one along with a relevant black creature?
I'm not sure, what do people think?
Q3 Now we have fortifications, what's the best way of capturing black's "slaves make fortifications" mini-theme? (I think the flavour was what was interesting.) (I agree we probably want another one or two mini-themes as well or instead.)
The trouble is, the ideal flavour would have black working the slaves to death, ie. "sacrifice a creature: wish/search/put otb/attach", but that's only worthwhile if the fortifications have a cost or equip much worse than "sacrifice a creature". I like the flavour of fortifications that are really hard to build, but then they have to be powerful to be worth playing, and then they're not really common. What's the best combination of fortifications that can be played by any colour, and yet having black jump through a hoop to get them is still a worthwhile investment?
Inspired by link's comment of looking for mechanics that represent a slavery theme, without worrying about an overall mechanical identity yet.
Hm, that makes it less relevant in constructed, by avoiding the "Everyone plays Inkmoth Nexus" syndrome. Which is probably a good thing. Unless having this around might encourage people to avoid Inkmoth Nexus, which would be even more of a good thing... hmm.
I just tacked on lifelink. I'm not sold on that. I suppose any relevant keyword, though, would make this a rare. Odd. Probably a good thing, too, since this won't always work.
By the by, I just realized that this secretly works in mono-blue. Oh, crud! It doesn't! It asks for the name of the land, not the type... and I was proud of that... Oh well, guess this will have to ask for land type so it doesn't confuse "everyone get an island" blue.
That sounds about right. A look at wikipedia, and what I remember from reading Bernard Cornwell :) suggests the relevant types of projectile are:
All that existed in Napoleonic wars.
The explosive shell is the only one that's really dangerous at low velocity.
So if you were aiming at flying creatures, I'm not sure, but it seems you'd never hit them with roundshot, if they're close enough grapeshot would be just as devestating as on infantry, shrapnel (which could plausibly be called grape in fantasy) would work similarly but less well at a distance, and an explosive shell would be ideal (just get it anywhere near and hope for the best, I think you could calculate the height you wanted it to explode closely enough), but be high technology for a fantasy world.
It's not clear to me what "grapeshot catapult" is. I don't know whether or not you could give graveshot sufficiently lethal velocity with a catapult -- I guess you give more than enough energy , if your catapult is built to hurl giant rocks, but I don't know if it could be fast enough.
But Grapeshot Catapult to me suggests this isn't a devestating explosion (else it would be three damage once, rather than one damage every time), but rather, hurling a lot of grapeshot with a catapult at too long a range and hoping for the best -- that it might do some damage if you get a lucky ball, but not more than that. (I imagine the name was chosen for flavour rather than military accuracy :))