Name That Card: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Name That Card: (Generated at 2025-06-28 22:34:03)
| Name That Card: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
Recent updates to Name That Card: (Generated at 2025-06-28 22:34:03)
Ugh. So this is built on top of a lot of rules experimenting and a nasty broken interaction? Well, I guess that's why flavour exists, to try and provide an actual hook to understand a card by.
Well; this is primarily a way of forcing a couple of discards. And cmc3 'discard two cards' is a perfectly good sorcery. Plenty of terms available for that.
And it can summon a couple of creatures. Card and creatures? I immediately blink to hippie-the-spectre. But that's not quite the flavour here. Actually, the flavour of "Cares about hand size" mostly comes from Kamigawa of all places. Which means a bazillion one-of crazy spirits with no unifying theme. (And even that set preferred 'cards in graveyard' to represent 'cards not in hand') ... magic hates subtraction. But! We can find something similar in The Rack - and even more similar in Rackling. An eminently forgettable little creature type, though. Still - we may have our flavour. You're summoning the services of a horrible construct to tear things out of your opponents mind. And if you pay enough, they might stick around. Some kind of netherworldly contract.
Need something that's two bites of the cherry - and what with already messing with minds; we immediately come to the imagery of mirrors. And the legend of Bloody Mary follows this thought. (See Ursula Vernon for the best horrific take on that)
Combine the two - and Hypnotic Split is the spell; a Construct is what this summons. And the art is someone being half pulled through a mirror, their mirror self blending into a puppet of blades.
Welcome back! Here's a fun thing about kicker: It doesn't matter how you're casting a spell with kicker; you can kick that spell by paying the kicker cost when you cast the spell. If you put Into the Roil into an Isochron Scepter, you can pay the kicker to draw a card every time you activate the Scepter and cast the Roil.
That's what we're intentionally abusing with this Kicker/Rebound amalgam. If you cast NTC #046 with only four swamps up, you can only force your opponent to discard a card... this round. Next round, when you untap, you cast #046 without paying its mana cost, and can then choose to pay the kicker, getting a bonus creature in the exchange (but if you have seven mana, feel free to just go for the gusto twice.)
Originally this made a 6/6 token and I waffled on the kicker costing
. But I definitely wanted the "Mind Rot split over two turns", and didn't want to increase the base cost above 
. So I made the creature smaller so that some players could feel better about casting this spell on round three. As a 5/5 with -1/-1 counters, you probably won't be getting much of a benefit from hitting the kicker in the early game. Hopefully that helps players feel better about firing this spell on round 3 if they got no better plays.
But what is this card's name? And also, what's the creature type?
I'd like to thank my life-sustaining oxygen for this victory
Unbound Anomaly picks it up this week. Good job, Froggychum. Though, considering how creature type naming conventions work, I was looking forward to fetching Mercenary Cadre with Cateran Slaver. ;)
See everybody in (((NTC #046)))!
Polling is up! Click here to vote on your favorite answer!
I tried a few experiments with different combination of five abilities, like looking for abilities from five allyy pairs or enemy pairs, but it didn't look very different. I guess some keywords show up in a lot of colours and some colours don't have many keywords.
I wonder if you could find something recognisably five-colour with "five common mechanics" if you include non-keyword mechanics like "exile until". But it would probably just end up as "unsummon target non-black flying creature with power 4 or more and toughness 4 or less" which isn't how colour overlaps are supposed to work :)
Ah! I missed Chromaticore! I thought the idea was too obvious to have not been done by now. Still surprised there isn't a clean one, but not that surprised.
Also, I noticed that your type line was missing race, Alex. But I admit that it would be absurd to make this a 'Creature - Elf Cleric Goblin Rogue Dwarf Warrior Merfolk Wizard'. ;)
I had the same idea, Alex, but I like your name and typeline better.
Does Chromanticore not count as "a WUBRG creature with five evergreen keyword abilities, each matched to a different color"?
Maybe I've been playing too much of my Tazri "(Ain't No Party Like A) Cleric Party" brawl deck. But I want this to be a bunch of different adventurers all supporting each other. So it's Band of Misfits, Creature - Cleric Rogue Warrior Wizard. Leaving people to argue among themselves which party members supply which abilities ;)
Unbound Anomaly
Creature - Elemental Horror
Captain Scalefang
Creature - Merfolk Vampire Dinosaur Pirate
Art: Something like Davey Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean, but instead of zombie, vampire, and instead of squid, something crocodile-y merfolk-y
Ok, maybe not :) I looked for a reason to be five colours, and ixalan had the smallest number of tribes that could possibly justify it
Child of Chaos (Elemental)
Mercenary Cadre
Given Horde of Notions I think 4/4 is fair here.
I admit, I could not figure out a fair p/t for this. It might be 5/5 or even 6/6. Creature creep sometimes escapes me.
If it bothers anyone, just presume the p/t is higher. Keep in mind, though, that I made this uncommon. It's supposed to be a reasonable choice in draft.
Akroma, the Overcosted
(less facetious answer coming later, maybe)
Welcome back to NTC #045! This week we have an entry which I'm kind of surprised doesn't exist yet (that I can think of.) A WUBRG creature with five evergreen keyword abilities, each matched to a different color.
That said, finding five evergreen keywords that play well off of each other can be tricky. Two forms of evasion, for example, may be acceptable. But I personally don't find the redundancy exciting. A creature with flying, trample, and menace is just a creature that is less and less likely to be blocked.
Oddly, in the end I ended up with a creature with no evasion. Just a prickly mess that's going to ruin someone's day if it's reinforced with just a smattering of creature destruction backup. But to get there, I had to let a number of keywords rely off of secondary colors. In color order:
White supplies first strike.
Blue supplies hexproof.
Black supplies lifelink.
Red supplies haste.
Green supplies vigilance.
It's kind of weird. Blue, black, and green are not the first color we think of when we think of those keywords. But it works, it isn't really stretching, and I think more people will be thinking about this as a package anyways than as the sum of its parts.
But what is this creature's name (and creature type?)
:happy dance:
Jack's name of 'Switched Orders' was tied for first, but I acted as tiebreaking vote and gave it to Froggychum this week.
See you all in (((NTC #045)))!
The polls are open. Vote for your favorite name here!
Commandeer Initiative
A different flavour: Chasm of Isolation
Art shows Nahiri opening up a canyon around a barbarian encampment.
And yeah, rebound is an awesome mechanic, and this cost seems fine. I think this might actually be at least playable in Limited... though it's interesting that of course it'd be rather stronger if you could get the effects in the other order. Of course then it's just Sleep.
@Jack V: "If it rebounded, instead" would also solve another problem I had when designing this card. If NTC #044 is cast some other way than from your hand or exile, then nothing happens. For example, if I was to cast Snapcaster Mage then cast #044 from the graveyard, it would just blank. Wouldn't even rebound. So sad.
I figured it wasn't worth fixing the corner case. But I wouldn't mind patching it up with a natural expression. I'll wait until after the challenge is over, though, to prevent confusing contestants.
Rearranging what Froggychum had, what about Dual Maneuver