New Mirrodin: Comments

Woah. Alex, there's some sort of bug when you make a new set. It says that you failed, and sends you back to the main page. Obviously, I tried doing this three times before noticing that they all really went through. I then went to delete two of them, but also got the "I'm afraid I can't do that for you Dave" message... and this time, it didn't go through. If you could delete the other "Pieces of Glorica" sets, I'd be appreciative.

While Mashup: the Gathering has been entaining, it can sure be trying. I'm not done making that set, but it's also clear that I'm about half-way through to making Alpha live, and, all the while, I'm being tossed around a bit too much by the hand of fate. I'm comfortable in my ability to continue working on it, so, while that pot is brewing, I might as well start working on another project.

I'm not sure what I want to do with Pieces of Glorica from a flavor perspective, and in fact, only have one major mechanic which I plan on employing. 5 different tokens, each one representing a color with the names "White Prism Token", "Blue Prism Token", "Black..." etc.

Here's a potential card idea:

Flylance
­
Creature - Spirit
Common
~ enters the battlefield with either a white or a blue prism token on it.
If ~ has a white prism token on it, it gains first strike.
If ~ has a blue prism token on it, it gains flying.

I talked about how I found it a shame that Sunburst was never put on colored spells. I could replicate that with prism tokens (though it may not be the best application. Don't know.)

Sunburst example
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Creature - Shade
~ enters the battlefield with a colored prism counter for each color of mana used to pay for it.
Intimidate
~ gets +1/+1 for each prism counter on it.

Well, it's an idea. More obvious ideas would be to make most of the non-basics and mana-stones all use prism counters as storage counters

Ruby/Emerald Mix
­
Artifact
~ enters the battlefield with two green prism counters and two red prism counters on it.
Remove a prism counter from ~, : Add a mana to your mana pool that shared a color with the prism counter removed.

As you can see, there are some problems with wordiness. The reason I put this mechanic forward is because if it doesn't take the spotlight, it should be thrown aside. A set that talks about counters having a color is fine if it happens so often that it becomes a part of the game. If it is a side mechanic, however, it becomes a confusing mechanic every time you encounter one of the 15 cards that happens to include it.

Now, I suppose, I have to come up with a reason for all these prisms, or whatever they are. Sometimes bottom-up design feels like starting an engine cold. You're constantly afraid of stall.

Ooh. D'oh. Yes, you're right, I broke new cardsets with the faster RC. (And it's not even as fast as I'd hoped, although it's certainly much better.) Should now be fixed.

As you can see by reading the title, I figured out the flavor of this set. Glornica is a hostile, unconquered plane. The group of Mirrodin Pilgrims who've stumbled upon it must deal with a new environment, strange sentient races that are still at a tribal stage of technology, and a land who's colors of mana are woven into each other. It's enough to make some of the refugees wonder if they would have been better off being compleated.

Your description sounds a lot like one of the GDS2 sets.

Really? I don't remember. Let me check the submissions.

Hmm... there's one that deals with something like a primitive planet, and I know another one dealt with a Hybrid vs. not Hybrid design. I don't think any of them pulled a Swiss Family Robinson as far as plot is concerned. What are you picking up on Link?

I could have sworn one of the submissions dealt with Venser taking refugees from Mirrodin to a primitive plane to live on... though maybe I'm fusing multiple things in my head.

You know, I'm going to take this as a complement because the idea, in itself, is intuitive. :D

Haha, go ahead. It certainly wasn't a criticism. :-)

I've got this odd problem I kind of stumbled into in design. The Glornican residents are all multi-colored. The Mirran residents are all mono-colored. But the Mirran residents are Legendary... so they can't be common. That means that all common (non-artifact) creatures in New Mirrodin will be multi-colored, and, consequently, almost all non-creature spells will be mono-colored to help balance out the 'factions'.

Strange. As I'm filling in the skeleton, I'm also noticing that I want to design random creatures, but without some sort of guide, I could be mucking up my own design with creatures I can't use. Okay. Time to roll my sleeves up and decide what I want to happen in the creature slots.

Each color has 17 card slots. I want aproximately 8 of those cards to be creatures. As for cycles, I'm keeping: ­

Well, hybrid does let you be big for absolute CMC (Watchwolf being the poster child); there's some primitive justification there.

I suggest one way to go would be to make it easy to be multicoloured. Doing that without providing mana colouring that would smash the environment for ever and ever sounds tricky though.

Tangled mana is a good one - but in one way leads to Eldrazi colourless. So back to the "Big for your cost" - perhaps stuff that limits the absolute amount of mana flying around, or rewards small cmc, to tempt people into the more difficult casting costs?

Last thought - gold cards reward stuff that counts coloured mana symbols. So a sweep mechanic, or something similar that says "For each (colour) creature you control/tap" would also give justification (All creatures want to count as green! And as blue! And as red! Mono creatures got out-evolved)

Final thought - CMC1 creatures could let you put at least SOME mono in the natives; or if you go for pure hybrid, gives you an 'in' to people wanting to use them.

Thinking about this, I might want to go back and look at the non-basic lands, and make it so you can only pull CD out of them. Not in a painful way, but in a sort of way that when you reflect upon it, you go "Oh, that's weird. I have to produce both colors in this block, or nothing at all." A bit hard, but probably doable.

I got no idea what to do about basic lands, though. Probably nothing. One can only push a theme so far. A strange sorcery or enchant land can help push the theme, though. Explosive Vegetation for two different basic lands untapped comes to mind. Not quite what I wanted to think about, but I should look into the land situation soon.

Another idea. I can add creatures that are one color, but are dependant on another color for survival to help support the theme.

Aqueus Beeble
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Creature - Beeble
~ gets +2/+2 as long as you control an Island
0/0

Hmmm...

Also thinking about putting flavor text on basic lands, which I find interesting that I've never heard of anyone do it before. Makes a lot of sense with New Mirrodin, since it allows us to look at Forrests and Mountains through the eyes of the explorers, and hopefully helps mitigate the "basic lands don't make sense in this world" problem.

have you considered putting together a quick summary of this set and how it interacts? wouldn't mind giving some feedback on the set as a whole but it's hard to figure out by going through the cardlist.

all good