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Recent updates to Community Set: (Generated at 2025-12-19 12:47:44)
I don't think it breaks anything to make this one land untap a lot more than normal. I think it'll sometimes be useful, but not often enough to make it need to be uncommon.
Wording is tricky: at the moment as a triggered ability, this accelerates you by one mana because you can tap the land within that main phase in response to the trigger. If it were phrased more like Seedborn Muse then it wouldn't work that way, but there isn't much precedent for "automatic" untapping of things in phases/steps other than the untap step.
I considered variants on the now-iconic "becomes a 0/4 wall creature". Fortifications should usually be walls for flavour, but if there's too many defenders, the board will clog up. This is my attempt to make a wall that can attack.
Obviously a hard-to-kill 3/3 may not be common, but we're looking for any fortifications that might be, and I think this might be.
This uses the same "sacrfice a creature". That's also relevant because it means you're less likely to attack with this, then equip it to another land to block with (which is fun, but more complicated). And you might plausibly have a 1/1 or 2/2 you're happy to upgrade, even at the loss of one net creature.
I wasn't sure about the defender restriction. I thought it made sense it was sometimes a defender, for flavour, but often could attack, so it didn't just promote board stalls. But I'm not sure what the condition should be.
If we want slavemasters, then 2-3 black creatures that are the equivalent of Brass Squire sound sensible.
I agree with Jack's point that most "Fortified land has '
: Do foo'" fortifications don't need to be fortifications. Doing other things to the fortified land could work at common though: Slipstream Highway.
I think normal mana costs should be the default fortify cost. Perhaps most of the animate-y fortifications could have other fortify costs, but I fear those shouldn't be common. I think most fortify costs should be mana.
Turning fortified land into an artifact doesn't actually help as much as you think. If someone has a Shatter, they'd normally rather point it at the Fortification itself, rather than the fortified land.
Mmmm.. That IS a good argument.
Of course, what you really want is to draw a WWW of the cycle. So I'm now tempted to suggest the ability be changed to shuffle the card in, before you draw. Except that's too fiddly.
Silly thing is, of course, that if the card was just Cycling:
; people in that situation would (possibly regretfully) cycle it anyway; the extra mana can be safely thrown away.
But it won't FEEL that way. Evil.
The costs here are very approximate. The ideas I wanted to get feedback on are:
Turning the fortified land into a creature makes sense because then it's more vulnerable. Does it similarly makes sense to try fortifications that turn lands into other permanent types that can be destroyed?
This has a mana fortify cost, but that's very rarely going to matter more than once. "Equip sacrifice a creature" made sense, but may possibly be too harsh to use on all fortifications. Can normal mana costs work, or do they just not feel fortification-y? How about sacrifice a land (or "when they becomes unequipped, sacrifice fortified land"), can that ever be made to feel flavour? Is there any other "sacrifice an X" that could work?
Jack sez: "Fun pro: Yay, awesome! Fun con: ^&*%!"
Yeah, that's pretty much the entire argument in a nutshell. :D
I think I agree with your sentiment, but I wasn't sure if it was strategy versus fun, I think putting manacycling on WWW has pros and cons for both.
Strategy pro: you have to decide when it's worth splashing a WWW creature when you might otherwise not be able to. Strategy con: if WWW are strong AND cycle, they're almost ALWAYS good to have, so there's no skill.
Fun pro: Yay, awesome! Fun con: ^&*%! The only good card in my hand is WWW and I only have 2WW available. I know, I'll cycle it for mana, no, wait, THEN IT'S WASTED BECAUSE ALL MY OTHER SPELLS I CAN PLAY WITH WW SO I DON'T NEED IT. TIMMY HATE PARADOX, TIMMY SMASH PUNY GAME DESIGNERS GRRAAAAAAAAH! :)
I'm happy for it to be fun, but I'm worried that it might not be, and maybe the manacycling should be on some other cycle of cards (I'm not sure which). It may turn out not to matter, but curently it seems like the manacycling (as opposed to cycling) may only matter if you have two WWW creatures, or you've got a WWW and WW creature and only one plains?
That all seems reasonable to me.
I agrere "equip: sacrifice a creature" or some other hard-to-repeat cost makes sense. What I'd really like is to see a way a harsh equip cost like that could tie-in flavourwise with black. Eg. if all/most of the fortify costs were "sacrifice an X", and black gave you token creatures or bypassed the equip cost, that might capture the slavery effect, but the flavour isn't perfect as we'd hoped to have more slavemasters and fewer slaves.
I agree we could do colour-aligned fortifications; ideally they could be used by C and by black (however black uses fortifications), then black will probably get lucky and pick some fortification up late, but not always the same "weaker" one.
I was thinking of other ideas; I don't think any is complete, but I'll post a couple of them. I do hope we can come up with 5-10 decent common ideas (if you assume that each individual card doesn't have to justify the complexity of fortifications as a whole), I just wasn't sure.
I had been thinking a bit on fortifications and what we need to see, but didn't want to talk about it for fear of it mucking up the conversation on Fortifications Slot?. That seems to be over with, now, so onto the tricky work.
Ideally, I want to see as many weird and offbeat ideas as I can, though (and I know how impossible I'm making this sound) I want to see them be commons as well. I do think this is hard, but I also think we can come up with 10 commons between the lot of us. Some thoughts:
I'll be adding my own designs to the mix later, but it's probably best if I step back and let the team hack at this before I influence other people too much. Currently, I'm tossing around the idea of making a Design Challenge out of making a few fortifications so that we can build off the crazier ideas that come out of that... but maybe it's best to keep it in house for the next couple of days to see what we can do.
I get what you're getting at, Jack, with not desiring to put the manacycling on the CCC cards. That bugs me, too, and I removed it from my argument to not draw attention. The problem is that this is a 'strategy vs. fun' argument. On one hand, it makes people's inner Melvins and Spikes happy that you have to invest to get your CCC spells to work. It also makes your inner Melvin and Spike happier if you manacycle a spashable card to set up a CCC card. Unfortunately, while that may make many players feel better when they sleep at night, it won't make the play experience better. It is possible that we'll frustrate the crap out of players by taking the best toys in our set (the CCCs) and putting them on too dangerous a precipice. Do you draft one? Well you'll probably lose because your deck won't come together. Don't draft one? Well you'll probably lose to someone who did draft it, and his deck came together. With that extreme looming over us, I'll happily lean on the side of fun.
We've some ideas for fortifications, and a discussion about how they should be slotted into the skeleton, but I wanted to talk about what fortifications should look like themselves. I was never sure it would be possible to design fortifications, but I'd like to if we can, and I like the flavour of black building them with slaves (if it works out mechanically).
The trouble for me is that I think fortifications should have some reason to be fortifications. That is, if most of them just say "Fortified land has
: blah" or "whenever fortified land is tapped, do blah", they're very little different to a normal artifact with "
, 
: blah". That's ok some of the time, but if they're all like that, I think it makes it questionable to embrace a new card type.
There's several designs of fortifications I like in the cardlist, but I'm worried that I've seen essentially none that say to me "this is a common fortification" the way "equipped creature gets +2/+0 and blah" does for equipment.
What troubles me is that it only feels like the equip matters if it matters which land it's on, and I can think of a few ways to do that, but none of them seem very good.
One way to do that would be to have a fortification which interacts with powerful non-basic lands, but that doesn't work well because firstly, this set shouldn't have many complicated lands, and secondly, complicated lands are plenty powerful already due to minimal land destruction being played, so the idea of fortifying them as well is rarely better than simply playing another copy.
Another idea would be to have lots of cheap land destruction in the set, so fortifying lands that makes them hexproof or indestructible matters. But that's a bad idea because cheap land destruction can totally blow up multicolor mana bases and make the game no fun to play.
The fortification which seems best and possibly common to me is the "becomes a 0/4 wall creature" because that's useful, but not overpowering, and it matters what land it's on, because the land can be killed.
That leads me to wonder if maybe many fortifications should make wall creatures (probably with some other ability such as player-damage, or animating). Becoming a wall seems thematic, and it makes the land matter, since you can afford to have one or two lands die but not too many. But it's still problematic because too many Walls will make the set too prone to limited board stalls, and too many non-walls will be too complicated for common and make fortifications just feel like creatures. (A high equip cost -- especially if it's black's sacrifice a creature -- could make a creature-fortification a fair-ish trade.)
Another possibility is one I suggested before but didn't like as much, which is to have a small number of fairly solid designs, as tokens, and have black create them (or alternatively fiddle the rarity so they appear often enough, but maybe you only need one or two to make it relevant to your deck). I don't really like that idea, but it's another possibility if we don't feel we have enough variation in designs.
So, do people agree with my suggest design constraints, or do you think it's ok if fortifications don't really matter what land they're on?
Do you think any other of the designs we have (or you can come up with now) are good for common fortifications?
I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I'm worried that I like the idea of fortifications, but they may not actually work well as a theme. Do you think we're ok to proceed with fortifications as a theme, or do we need to throw some more ideas around first?
I quite like coloured artifacts, but agree that there should usually be a reason for them, and that fortifications would preferably be traditional colourless artifacts.
If they are coloured, wouldn't they need to be almost all black, if we're enabling a mono-black deck to draft them? I think it'd be difficult to turn an appreciable number of black commons into fortifications.
I agree with jmg that you'd need quite a lot of fortifications to let it be an (even minor) black theme, although I don't know exactly how many "lots" would be.
It's a good point that if we also hived off mono mana fixing to a manacycling cycle, we could rescue the common land slot for fortifications or something else. (Especially as monocolored fixing can always be improved by making your deck more full of the relevant basic land.)
Although when we're doubling up on functionality by putting mana fixing on another card, the other card shouldn't be something which is too highly drafted, else no-one will be able to get the mana fixing.
Similarly wrt not making fortifications too high in power level at common, although I don't think we need to power them down, just not push them incredibly aggressively. For instance, we may want to emphasise "quite useful, but quite high cost and/or equip" in order to make the black sac to wish/attach more relevant.
I agree monocolor manacycling is a good idea.
I don't think it'll be hard to template it. (I think it makes sense to spell out the mana you get. I'd probably prefer that in reminder text, so it's clear you get the mana and a card, but any of the other options are probably fine. You could even say "Cycling 3. When you cycle this, add WW to your mana pool", although that's much much much less pretty, so lets not.)
I'm not sure if it should be on WWW creatures or not. On the one hand, that gives WWW creatures something to do if you don't draw the right lands. But on the other hand, surely WWW creatures are exactly what you'd like to cast with the cycling ability. And I'm worried that putting the "heavy color commitment" and the "manafixing" on the same card means there's no interesting tactical decision whether to go for power, diversity or consistency -- if the WWW card is strong and also color-fixing, you want it whatever you deck is.
ETA: SM, hm, you're right, manacycling is often better (and sometimes worse) than cycling
, is that too good considering cycling is usually 
?
The way action keywords work, yes you do. You can't just append an action to a keyword.
Does this even need a separate keyword? "Cycling -
, add 
to your mana pool." Though that would let you use it as cycling 
if you didn't care about the manafixing.
I think it should be the latter, so that other cards can have "Manacycling
- 
" (if it's multicolor) or "Manacycling 
- 
" (to help the allied colors, perhaps?).
Although, it could just be "Manacycling
(
, Discard this card: Add two mana in any combination of this card's colors to your mana pool. Draw a card.)".
Excellent suggestion. I think I agree with everything you've said here.
My only problem is how to template the ability. I can't think of a sufficiently succinct way to phrase it so that it automatically gives two mana of the same colour on a monocolour card, but two mana of different colours on gold cards. It might have to be "Manacycling
", with the 
implicit as it is in morph; or if that's too problematic, even "Manacycling 
- 
", which is pretty horrible.
But none of this should dissuade us from making the ability. Let templating worry about that bit.
An example of mono-colored manacycling. It seems most appropriate, to me, to put them on the CCC cards. That way those cards can continue to be powerful draws to going mono-colored, but don't shaft you if the deck you draft doesn't do the thing you want it to do. Also, this gives us the ability to give these commons more 'power' without making them broken when matched against other common creatures.
Alex expressed some concern that 10 manacyclers may be a bit much at common, but I don't think so. This set may not be Alara block, but we aren't too far off. Alara had 15 commons that help fix mana bases (plus the occasional elf). If we had 10 manacyclers, we would also have 15 cards that help fix manabases, but 10 of them wouldn't be permanent solutions. That sounds about right to me.
Ooh, I really like the idea of monocolour manacyclers. In fact, given the set's predilection for intensive single-coloured-mana costs, they seem like an absolute given. I wonder if 10 would be too many at common, or whether the monocolour ones would need to be uncommon? We should take this discussion to a sample card anyway.
The simple mana bases idea is interesting. I can see the validity in Link's arguments.
Oh, one more idea that isn't really connected to Fortifications but I'm going to put it here anyways: What if we didn't print a non-basic land in this set? We'd be saying something like "the land is very pure here. You can only tap for exactly one colored mana."
That would do three things. The first would be to make numerous non-land ways of smoothing over mana curves (which mana cycling and signets have been doing. We can also put a manacycler in each mono color as well. Something like "
: Add 
to your mana pool. Draw a card.")
It would also keep land bases in front of players very simple, which would be a large boon for Fortifications. If you don't have to monkey with what lands are doing what to produce which mana, it isn't going to bother you as much when you have to monkey which lands are fortified for what effects.
It also makes it so that we can put more fortifications in each commonality, and let a lot of those fortifications do what a lot of designs will make fortifications do: Smooth over mana curves.
(@Alex: I didn't get any duplicate cards, just multiple 'tricks' in one pack. That's normal for Magic. I assume that Multiverse can never get a print run feel that normal Magic has because... well... you'd have to find out how print runs work for every possible number of cards among various rarities. That sounds too hard to bother with. :p)
The colored fortifications don't bother me, but there will be a lot of people asking "Why did you do that?" and we won't have a very good answer for them. Sounds like a trap.
I don't know if having something stick out is strictly a bad thing. In fact, I think that if you have an interesting talking point about your set, that's good. Obviously, you've got to be careful with this practice. Urza's Saga, for example, is often thought of as the Artifact set, when, in reality, it was themed around enchantments. But the set had a lot of really good artifacts, so that's what people focused on.
Or, to put it another way, I don't think the Flip cards from Kamigawa take away from the themes of Kamigawa. Same thing with the split cards in Invasion or traps in Zendikar. It's just an interesting aside that eats up complexity and theme points... but if it doesn't come close to matching the quantity or the quality of the themes of the set, you're probably fine, and better off for it.
5 common lands and 5 common signets may be asking for too much. In a minor sense, having a bunch of colorless fortifications might help people's mana curves better than getting them to splash a not on color card and play a bad non-basic land anyway. I would suggest 1 extra common land or artifact, however. The rough equivalent of Terramorphic Expanse... though the Manacyclers might do the job better anyways.
So, my better guess is that fortifications is gobbling up one colored card per color and the common basic lands slot. Does anyone have a problem with this? While I do think that Alex's word of warning isn't unwarranted, I think we won't know how much it detracts from the set until we do it. We can always go back and remove a bunch of fortifications later if we don't like what's going on.
Then we have yucky ewwy coloured artifacts...