Zaberoth: Comments

This is a very good set you've put together here. The mechanics seem to be very well thought out; the themes of knowledge and madness come across well through the mechanics; it looks like it'll play well and be fun. Even the costings seem very sensible, and there are a bunch of nice touches like good use of reprints and functional reprints, finding a lot of sensible simple commons that are suitable for common, and so on. I'm really impressed.

What are you doing to playtest the set?

Sorry for getting back to you so late, Alex - we've been really busy with other things for the last two weeks or so.

We're still waiting on playtesting until we're finished with the entire set. Currently we're missing about twenty cards (you'll notice green is particularly understaffed). Once we wrap those up, we'll make the set public and put up MWS and NetDraft files. Sealed will be the easiest for our particular group to test, as we don't have eight people to actually simulate drafts with, but maybe someone out there will be willing to try drafting for us?

Thanks for all the feedback. Glad you like the set.

I'd be willing to try to join you for a NetDraft, if the timings work out.

...Aaand I've just noticed that this cardset is meant to be private. Oops. Sorry. My mod powerz allow me to view private cardsets, but I generally try to avoid doing so, out of respect for the authors' wishes. Looks like I managed to miss that this set was private when I was looking at it earlier. Sorry about that!

Don't worry about it - the only reason the set is temporarily private is that it's not finished. As soon as the 229th card is added we'll be going public with it. In the meantime, I don't mind you having advance preview powers. :P

I agree with Alex, this is a very nicely done set. I've spent about an hour reading all of your cards (sorry for so many comments!). In fact, exiling is a major theme of my set as well.

I also have a question with dementia. It reminds me a lot of Szadek, Lord of Secrets. The wordy for the ability seems a bit strange. The way I would put it would be "If this creature would deal damage to a player, instead that player exiles that many cards from the top of his or her library," which I obviously got from Szadek.

I really like psyche, but am puzzled by what happens when you control multiple permanents with it. Do you only put the counter on one of them? The only templating issue I have with the ability is that it should be, in part, "you may exile that card instead".

Dementia is worded as it is so that the damage is still dealt, similar to infect. Your wording was one we tried early on in development, but as a replacement effect it just creates some annoying rules questions and issues (we can't really print a Nightmare with lifelink, etc.).

Psyche, on the other hand, is a simple replacement effect. If you have multiple permanents with psyche, you choose which one's effect you want to have replace the draw, so you only get one counter on one permanent.

Thanks for the comments, I read and consider all of them.

Zaberoth is now updated through build (1.11).

Incidentally, I'm going to try my best to tie future changes to version numbers.

Making major overhauls once again:

• Psyche has been functionally changed to "Whenever you draw a card, you may exile that card from your hand. If you do, put a psyche counter on this." This should be fine given the precedent Miracles have set (in fact, it’s almost cleaner since you don’t have to worry about it unless you control a permanent with psyche), and it fixes the problem of exiling cards you wanted to draw. Furthermore, it replaces the conundrum of "strict card disadvantage" with an even more skill-testing conundrum of "knowing whether the card you draw is better than a psyche counter."

• Cutting and adding many, many cards as appropriate to try and introduce more draft archetypes into the set. Some of these may be flavor/faction-based (G/W Eltis or W/x Saranis, perhaps) or just color/mechanic-based (B/R dementia aggro, U/R psyche?), but in any case I would like there to be clearer draft strategies than seemed to be available in build series 1 (which was still a little grounded in mechanics).

• Centaurs replaced with humans; Zaberoth’s race make-up is now humans vs. illusions, nightmares, wildlife, and Malishar’s kingdom (demon/zombies/skeletons). This change is intended to more evoke an apocalyptic setting (with no fantasy humanoid races) a la Innistrad

• Minor goal: remove/replace boring filler uncommon/rares

Changes will be made starting with the version number 2.01.

Yo.

As of version 2.02, Zaberoth has undergone its revisions and is once again a complete Limited set.

If anyone is still interested, comments are still very much appreciated.

One more wave of changes! Mostly involving green. Apparently I just can't leave decent enough alone.