BandaBox 3: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to BandaBox 3: (Generated at 2025-05-01 11:02:40)
| BandaBox 3: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Skeleton | Cycles | Skeleton ver. 2 | Ver. 2 Changes |
Recent updates to BandaBox 3: (Generated at 2025-05-01 11:02:40)
Oh, how you recognize a bottom-up card when you see one.
Pushed power-against-cost? Check. Does a lot of damage in aggro? Check. Could also serve as a finisher in a control deck if you protect it? Check.
But I do like that the colors, plus the ability, made him able to be related to Innistrad. Just imagine it as one of the red-white humans from Avacyn Restored that has a Restoration Angel following him. The card still feels like one mechanic put on top of the other, but at least it's a bit more cohesive.
I remember this guy's playtest name was Gyrfalcon Idol, a reference to Loyal Gyrfalcon, War Falcon and Glint Hawk Idol. For being so cute, I made a subtle reference in the flavor text that connects it to Artificial Signaler.
This was an attempt to give green more tools to reach threshold, as well as help its aggro decks. Both this and Desmera's Seer came out of that need.
This was inspired by Centaur's Herald, but the format had 3/3 Beast tokens, not Centaurs, so the flavor was changed to match. Which resulted in a cool-looking card referencing a card as famous as Thragtusk, plus the reference to Kalonia.
The Maze of Ith of the format, an idea also explored by Kor Haven.
Although there is no specification, this is a reference to the plane(s ) of Rabiah and the Sea of Sand.
During one pass, I noticed that a few undying creatures weren't played, as black's aggro was a bit lacking, so I tweaked some cards here and there.
One card to come out of that was the idea of an undying lord. Inspired by Flayer of the Hatebound, this card replaced Kokusho, the Evening Star. It is cool that, while he still leads very well in an aggro deck, he became a very fun build-around that can be used in more midrange-y decks as just a value creature that sometimes makes you win out of nowhere if you set up your deck with a heavy unearth or undying theme, or even picked up a Zombify or Nether Soul.
Gorael is an ancient sphinx that wanted her kind to be the only ones among Esper, as seen in Onyx Goblet.
She was designed to be the big
artifact creature, ready to serve as a normal control finisher, cheated with Master Transmuter or Ethersworn Zombie, or reanimated by a combo deck. She's also the only big hexproof creatures aside from the token put by Sigarda's Assistance, so, yes, she's pretty special.
Once the flying and built-in protection was decided, it was fun to reference the Goblet. But, of course, 1 life wouldn't do. Lifelink caused two things: it made the difference between attacking and using the ability much more prominent, and it also made the sphinx a better blocker when there was trouble.
If your opponent brings Gorael, you will probably be very afraid. On the board, she imposes as much as you expect from one the few sphinxes that survived Grixis's attack after the Conflux.
So, what you are seeing is a Cube draft format, but designed to be a bit towards what I like. A bit less than half of the cards are totally new, although many of these "new" cards are functional tweaks of existing cards. The point is to make a fun format, not necessarily to use my ideas or mechanics.
The format aims to be:
Representative of Magic. It includes many popular cards, so it still has an "I'm playing with historically powerful cards" like other Cubes, but even the new cards are reminiscent of the game as we know it, both modern and old-school. Going a bit deeper, if you look at the flavor of the cards, you'll find references to most of Magic's characters, sets and planes, from Chandra to Jhoira, from double-faced cards to affinity, from Zendikar to Terisiare.
Varied in the decks it supports. There has been a conscious effort to help players play "what they want". Each one, two and three color combination has at least two different kind of decks to play, plus some incentive for five colors or mostly colorless. The themes are also pretty wide, from modular cards with dredge here and there to dedicated artifact decks, plus at least three different combo decks. Finally, some cards here and there are fun-to-try one-ofs, and there are a few very tiny subthemes that can make the same deck drastically different.
Fun. This is the hard part. I had to balance the known powerful decks with the subtle and less-hard-to-build decks, the number of obviously powerful cards with hard-to-evaluate cards, and the decks that just play cool stuff with the decks that rely on synergy. I also made sure both heavily-monocolored cards and gold cards were splashy enough to make people commit to them. If this was done correctly, the format should be very fun to discover.
Although the format was made to have 17-card boosters, you can still get an idea of what one looks like with the flat booster function of Multiverse. Try it out!
After a lot of iterations, these guys ended up triggering if you controlled the appropiate type. They were mostly playable but not exciting, so I decided to juice them up a bit and take them down to two mana. They were fine, but they are, oh, so much pain against specific decks. Instead of checking a basic land, I added a one mana payment of the appropiate color.
They are still very interesting cards, and I'm eager to find out which are the best compared to the swords.
The green option no longer puts +1/+1 counters, but the neat interactions are pretty much the same in number.
To adjust the card in power, this became a choose one, with a less intensive cost and a cheaper flashback cost. It's still pretty good.
And in the end I did.
In the end, white lost its somewhat-conditional counterspell to numbers to a white/blue hybrid Remand that ended up being the original monoblue. I agree it would have been awesome.
But it did get Speaker of Faith.
In the end, "Emeria's Archangel" was, indeed, too similar to Emeria Angel. At least it's now clear that the Angel references Emeria the place and not Emeria the merfolk goddess associated with Emrakul.