Name That Card: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Name That Card: (Generated at 2025-06-29 12:35:14)
| Name That Card: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
Recent updates to Name That Card: (Generated at 2025-06-29 12:35:14)
Leonin Donor
Creature -- Cat Cleric
Defender
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Voting is up! Click here to vote on your favorite name!
These aren't coming out with the flavour I expected, but it's the flavour I found :)
Unlikely Friend
Creature - Faerie Witch
Gift -- You may have ~ ETB tapped. If you do, gain 2 life.
Name: Holy Barrier
Creature Type: Wall
Mechanic: Stall
Wall of Berries
Creature - Plant Wall
Harvest -- You may have ~ ETB tapped. If you do, gain 2 life.
OK, that's a bit white, but red and black can harvest, either like spring harvest festival stuff, or like souls :) I tried to choose a word that would make sense on either something being harvested or someone doing the harvesting.
A cute little mechanic for common I've been thinking of. This card trades a potential round of blocking for a small boon. But what is the ability, creature type, and the name of the card?
Note: I think it's safe to imagine that this mechanic would probably end up on Red cards (because it has an interesting interaction with Haste) and Black cards (since etb tapped is already a black thing). It also seems reasonable in Blue or Green, and there's actually a good argument to spread this keyword among the colors since you wouldn't want to stuff a draft archetype with too many of these. I'm Just throwing that out there before people start giving the keyword mechanic names like "Divinity" or "Community" or something along those lines.
Congratulations Jack! And I'll see you all again on (((NTC #076)))!
Voting is up! Click here to choose your favorite card name!
Foolish Magic
This is homage to Tarot major arcana.
Relate your life as equivalent to your age. Less life, younger age; more life, older age.
The Fool represents the tabula rasa of a newborn. Since babies are able and willing to learn at much faster rate than adults. Thus 'twould cost more for adults to relearn, retrain.
I don't think "equal to life" version is better than the "draw 4" version, I think it needs to be some hybrid to be attractive throughout. Maybe "cost X, draw X, X = life total/3?" or something, although I'm not sure that really works.
I find it amazing that I did not think of that option. XD
Edit: Though, I'm pretty sure I did, because that's the direction I came from. I just came across 'draw 4 cards', liked the dynamic of a tipping point, and promptly forgot where I came from.
When I first read it, I thought it was "draw X cards". That would make it niche but less dead at X>5 (but sadly less good at X<3).
People are evaluating this for suicide, but it's a reasonable card for W/B or maybe U/B control as well. The idea behind those decks is to let your opponent waste energy knocking you down to maybe three life, then stabilizing and locking the board. Being able to draw four cards for cheap in the late mid-game is ideal for what that deck is trying to do. Alternatively, any good combo deck that just needs the one round to go off after they got pummeled for three rounds would find this card useful. And if your opponent isn't beating you down when you're playing combo, you probably already won.
That said, I keep thinking to myself that maybe I should have added "Cycling
" to this card. I feel like Black is supposed to have painful to work around cards, but this one might be too painful. As I noticed, when writing the worst cards according to Gatherer article, the cards that people really didn't like were cards that stacked one drawback on top of another. This card almost feels like that. You get to 5 life, and it's a reasonable spell, but that doesn't feel like that was good enough, considering this card is as dead as a Rhystic Syphon, in the wrong conditions.
Or Contemplate Mortality
Yeah, I really don't know competitive formats! And I know vintage and legacy less well. I agree that's a more likely home for it. But I'm still not sure it would be worthwhile. Death's Shadow you can play when you have ~10 life and then it will get better if you sacrifice your life after. NTC75 you can only really play for an advantage once you're already down to three life or so, and even then it uses all your mana up, so you don't have a chance to play something that will actually win. But I'm really bad at interpreting older formats, usually something unexpected is good! :)
I don't know a lot about magic anymore, but if Death's Shadow is a good card (IIRC it was/is one of the best modern/vintage decks?), shouldn't this also be?
From my understanding, older formats are basically blitz mode, where it doesn't matter if your life total is low, because there isnt really a concept of chip damage, as the best decks are optimized enough to kill you on turn two, if not on turn one sometimes.
In standard, I think this would be even stronger, since even if it's a powerful effect, it doesn't really win you the game like death's shadow might, so probably wouldn't even fit into a self-harm deck in older formats.
TLDR: Seems overpowered, but I like it TBH.
As for a name, what about Perilous Investigation and it could be a Dimir-flavored card, since they are the multiverse's equivalent of a spy noir film.
Another cool name with a similar theme could be Treacherous Realization!
Moment of Death
Is an interesting mechanic. I'm not sure how good the card is -- obviously it's outstanding if you can bypass 0 costs or if you're playing a deck that relies on staying at a low life cost, but it's unusable any other time, if you cast it you'll probably be dead before you can cast any of the cards you drew.
Might be nicer if it got affordable below 10 life or similar, maybe making the mana value equal to your life total all the time to avoid cascade, but I don't know if that works with the mechanic concept
Welcome back to Name That Card! I thought about theming this card with diamonds, but that would have been a top down design, and it would have encouraged everyone to use 'diamond words' in the name. It's tough constantly doing bottom up design!
Anyhow, I wanted to keep digging into the mechanic we stumbled across last week. My intention was to make a common version, but I thought this was more interesting, so I stuck with this. Problem: I think this card is broken. It's a better card to cascade into than Ancestral Vision, and that's probably not a good sign. But let's pretend it isn't broken. What's its name?
Edited to an X spell, despite my protestations. ;)
Froggychum wins this week with Quantum Flames.
See everybody in (((NTC #075))) for the diamond anniversary card!
Oh, man, thank you Alex with the deep pull for Spoils of War. Seeing we have a model to work with, I'll probably be switching this over to an X spell shortly. Weird aside: I did think of making the casting cost be an asterisk like how the power/toughness works with Nightmare to ensure it did what I wanted it to do. But I figured that would simply look too weird.
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The way this is currently phrased it always has mana value 0. (And mana cost
.) It will be affected by additional costs, like Lightning Axe or Ajani's Presence whose mana cost and value never changes, or Fireball, whose mana cost includes the X but not the extra bit that used to be templated as Y.
I think Vitenka's template nearly works. The weird old example to follow is Spoils of War, so I think this would have to actually be
X is the number of creatures on the battlefield as you cast this spell.
As long as you control a Mountain, ~ deals X damage to each creature and opponent.
...Oh, and you want a name? How about something evoking densely packed people... "Overcrowding", or... Clear the Crowds.
Vitenka's X example is theoretically viable. Originally, I thought you might need extra words to stop players from paying more or less than
, but rule 107.3a says "If a spell or activated ability has a mana cost, alternative cost, additional cost, and/or activation cost with an 
, [-X], or X in it, and the value of X isn’t defined by the text of that spell or ability, the controller of that spell or ability chooses and announces the value of X..." which infers that the value of X can be set by the card, and the caster can't choose a different number 'just cause'.
There's a weird wiggle going on with making this an X spell. Between casting the spell, and the spell's resolution, the number of creatures on the battlefield might change. With the X version, you lock in the cost and damage when you cast the spell. With my version, you look at the creatures on the battlefield when this spell resolves, count them up, then do your damage.
Unlike the usual X spell, that means this card doesn't have a mana value of
everywhere but the stack. If there are ten creatures on the battlefield, you probably won't cascade into it. Though a lucky Erratic Explosion could hit for 10 damage. Likewise, if there are five creatures on the battlefield, and an opponent sacrifices their creature, they may now counter this spell with a Thoughtbind. Also, if your opponent is at exactly three life, and there are no creatures on the battlefield, you can cast this spell for 
, then while it's on the stack, cast Scatter the Seeds in response.
Since I wasn't sure that
could be set by the card without an unintuitive sentence popping up, and because I thought it was more pleasing if it cared about how much damage it was dealing when the spell resolves, as opposed to when you cast it, I used 
. But there are so many strange corner cases with mana costs that adjust on the fly, that I'm guessing Wizards would probably stick with X. I can see a lot of mechanics built around "Count up a thing. That's the spell's cost.", and if I was in development, I'd probably argue for X just so I could see a common version of the spell at some point.
X is the number of creatures in play.
~ deals X damage to each creature and opponent.
Ignite Souls
I feel like there must be a way of retemplating this so it costs XR or similar without changing the real cost, but I can't immediately see what that would be
Reasoning: 'Mountain' made me think of Planes of Mountain and Seas, but that's hilariously already a plane in MTG, and I don't recall there being any alchemists. So, new plane idea is 'Kunlun' another mythological location.
Also since this card scaled so beautifully (great job JM!) i was inspired to interpret it as a 'mathematically perfect fire' which seemed hard to fit into the setting until I remembered there are six elements in Asian lore (chinese, im 99% sure but not certain), of which fire is indeed one.
Art could be a beautiful but outlandish countryside (which would be probably be the whole art direction for the set) being scorched by eerily-geometric cubes or spheres of flame. I'm sure there's a nice angle where you could invoke a sense of dread while also showing the balls/cubes of fire becoming larger as they spread from ground zero.