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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-05 13:34:56)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-05 13:34:56)
Too bad banding isn't just, like, "Creatures with banding may attack in a group with shared power and toughness."
Oh, hey, I forgot to add sacrificing. Yup, they should sacrifice if I don't want the ability to create indestructible attackers every turn. So that would be:
Icatian Phalanx
Creature - Human Soldier
Sacrifice Icatian Phalanx: Target creature gets +2/+0 until end of turn, and prevent all combat damage to target creature this turn. You may use this ability only before blockers are declared.
2/4
Hmm. It's a bit lumpy. And it doesn't do a good job of expressing that the Phalanx could probably take the hit in a band...
I don't know. I'm really starting to think that Psuedoband is the best idea. It does a good job of reminding you of what banding was, but doesn't bother trying to do much of anything. It just looks at all those rules and says 'nah'. I'd rather just have a bigger creature, thank you.
I wish I had some maple syrup, because I fear I'm going to be doing some tall stack waffling over here.
That seems about as reasonable as you'll get in Homelands Restored if you don't want two abilities.
However once you get to The Dark or Fallen Empires, you'll have to deal with creatures that actually have banding built in like Icatian Phalanx. How would you phrase the ability in those cases?
Splitting banding into two separate abilities is a good idea I didn't think of. It's going to look funny printed 7+ times on 7+ cards, though. I really was hoping for something I could keyword, but maybe that's not in the cards.
Hmm... maybe we could combine the two? Because both those abilities are present when a creature is banding, it could be:
, Tap an untapped Bird you control: Target creature gets +1/+0 until end of turn, and prevent all combat damage to target creature this turn. You may use this ability only before blockers are declared.
I could drop that last sentence. I just tossed it in there to get as close to the principals of banding as I could. This doesn't really allow you to do the opposite... chumping the other creature so you can keep a bird. But there's no version where I keep everything...
The reminder text does include banding as a blocker: "If any creatures with banding a player controls are blocking or being blocked by a creature, that player divides..."
I wonder whether you could give Soraya and Beast Walkers two abilities? Soraya the Falconer I think could have:
>
, Sacrifice a[n untapped] Bird: Target creature deals no combat damage this turn.
, Tap an untapped Bird you control: Target attacking creature gets +1/+1 UEOT.
>
That I think still works out as less words than the banding reminder text...
I'd go with breaking it up; give some creatures "Sacrifice ~: Target creature deals no damage this turn" which is, functionally, most of block-banding; and for the attack, I'd go with either granting fight to things, or making things un-blockable. So capturing most of what you can do with banding, without going to the complexity of it.
Heh. Yeah, this is an uphill battle, and one with no winning solution. Unfortunately, I'm trapped by the goals of my set, and by cards like Beast Walkers. Most of the other cards aren't giving me this sort of problem. I just happened to stumble into one of the greatest sinkholes that Magic design has to offer.
For reference purposes, here's banding's reminder text. It's a doozy:
Banding (Any creatures with banding, and up to one without, can attack in a band. Bands are blocked as a group. If any creatures with banding a player controls are blocking or being blocked by a creature, that player divides that creature's combat damage, not its controller, among any of the creatures it's being blocked by or is blocking.)
What's crazy is that that's not even the full extent of banding, since it doesn't include banding as a blocker. When you group block a creature, and at least one of them is a bander, you get to divide up how the creature deals combat damage among your creatures. And just to throw one absurd twist in this complication, this runs directly against how combat damage is assigned post Magic 2010 rules. You don't choose the order that creatures are assigned damage... you can fan it out. If you block a Grey Ogre with two Beast Walkers, you can spread the damage between the two and absorb it all, killing the Ogre and keeping your Walkers alive.
Man, it takes far too much energy to explain the mechanic. It's cool once you 'get it', but it sure doesn't grok easy.
For starters, I've come up with four possible solutions off the top of my head, though, I'm eager to hear others:
Haven't been people been trying to come up with a "better" banding for quite some time? It may be a doomed effort. It's not something that's likely appear in Magic 2016 (though neither is shroud, which appears in this set). I guess that shouldn't prevent you from trying, though. I'll be honest: I'm not even sure what banding does. I've never played with it, so I've never bothered to learn anything about it.
You know, I started this comment on the card Beast Walkers in my set Homelands Restored, but I wanted some opinions, and I was afraid I'd bury the conversation over there, with me adding 3 cards a day or so, so I moved it over here.
The problem: In Homelands Restored, I'm trying to 'fix' Homelands, specifically by balancing the power level, and making the mechanics look like they belong to modern magic. Cards should look like they could be reprinted in Magic 2016. That's impossible to do with some cards (Apocalypse Chime, for example), but I'm doing what I can.
That's the goal. The goal is not to design new cards to prove how clever I can be. I'm not going to use a fancy pair of suspenders, when a boring belt can keep the pants in place.
Banding, however, is proving to be a particularly tricky problem. It only pops up on Beast Walkers and Soraya the Falconer. But if I plan to do Fallen Empires Restored and The Dark Restored at some point, then I'm looking at seven cards with banding. Maybe more, if I decide to 'restore' more sets than that.
What I need is a simple solution that could appear on cards in Magic 2016, features as much of banding as could be considered reasonable, but also didn't try to be clever about it. Ideally, someone reading the card should say "Oh, that makes sense.", "That seems pretty obvious." or, best case scenario (which I don't expect here.) "Oh. I thought that's how it worked in the first place. Weird." All that, and it needs to be repeatable, since it's bound to appear on 7+ cards
Any suggestions?
About 3000 altogether? When each mono colour is about 4000, that seems pretty respectable to me. Consider that many sets will have about 50 in each colour and 0-10 gold cards total.
This is cool. I'm surprised there are so few gold cards honestly. Time to go all Alara Reborn up in here.
Awesome! I'm teaching at a band camp and have very little free time right now to contemplate this, but seeing the less popular options makes me want to design cards for them.
Yep, that's cards for which someone's selected "Multicolour" but the card cost doesn't indicate any other colours. Transguild Courier and variations on Intervention Pact would count, as would almost all the Design Challenges. I think there are also a couple of special-purpose (non-MtG) cardsets for which people have used the gold frame to indicate something, such as the Dominion card Army.
What does "Multicolour 307" at the top of the list indicate? There's obviously more than 307 gold/hybrid cards, so it can't be that. But I have a hard time believing we designed cards with no color in the casting cost, then selected 'multicolour' for the frame 307 times...
Oh, hold it... the Multiverse Challenges. That's close to 90 instances of that happening right there. Okay, maybe that isn't so weird after all...
I do find it interesting that just looking at monocolour cards, there are 150 more white than blue, 150 more blue than red, and 100 more red than green. You could attribute some of it to people filling in skeletons from the top down, but that wouldn't explain why there's more red than black.
Took me a while to get around to doing another data analysis run, but here's the results of Link's query: the number of cards created for each colour and colour combination.
Again, this is restricted to only cards that currently exist (haven't been deleted), because that data's easier for me to get at.
The most frequent colours, sorted by count:
All gold cards, sorted by count:
Smaller categories, sorted by category:
Tokens:
Miscellaneous and Weird:
(I think most of the Planes must have come out in the Misc/Unknown category, because there are actually 37 Planes on the site.)
i think it could work, but as always when dealing with tribal you should be aware of the poison principle. if you can make enough cards that work across multiple draft archetypes, i.e. they work for the creature type of your choice rather than creature type X, then you should be fine.
If N is positive, it gets boosted on your turn and shrunken on opponents' turns. If N is negative, vice versa. Multiple instances are cumulative If it has both positive and negative N, they may cancel out. Fits blue either way. damn crafty blue mages. Math teachers and students would love this.
Now what is acceptable for |N|? Most of the time it will be 1. And 2 or 3 is normal outer bound. Maybe a oddball rare or mythic may have N=10 or 20?
Looks good for red. Not sure about it in blue.
Combining the themes of chaos and tides, I present:
Drift N (This creature gets +N/+0 on your turn and -N/-0 on your opponents' turns.)
I really like Fallen Empires, and I like the idea of spinning off of it. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it being a whole block, though. Or, to be more precise, I think it would have made an awesome block back in 1995. But it seems like quite the challenge to retell the story, stretch it out and keep in relevant in 2015.
In my mind, this needs some sort of twist to keep the story fresh. If I was going to write a book about the novella of Fallen Empires, for example, I'd probably focus on one character who had to live through the ordeal. That way it didn't feel like we were retreading familiar ground. Or instead of zooming in, perhaps I'd zoom out and show that there were greater forces at work, with two hidden players fighting for dominance in the vacuum that Urza and Mishra left behind... maybe even spilling their fight into other early sets of the same time period, like Homelands and The Dark.
Those are just my opinions, though. I'm sure other people have other good ideas.
I am deeply and easily amused that I'm the only one at the same position on both lists XD
If I didn't have a tendency to go on hiatus for long periods, the gap might be larger.
Geez... you'd think the most prolific card creators would be fairly spread out near the top. But the difference between 1st and 3rd is only 43 cards? How weird...
Wow, Alex! I love statistics. Thank you for providing these, and thanks again for providing this site to us. It's one of my most cherished sites, even when I have long lapses in my contributions.
Could you show us how many cards have been created for each color and color combination, if that's not too hard?
I was doing some data analysis today, and I thought people might be interested in the results. I have a static backup of the whole database easily accessible for queries so I can get a lot more data on any other metric people would like.
But for starters, here are three statistics I thought were interesting:
Frequent Card Names
By far the most common card name is "", the empty string. Makes sense. After that come Forest, Mountain, Island, and then Plains and Swamp tied. Again, not especially surprising, though it's perhaps interesting that there are more basic Forests on Multiverse than any other basic land.
Anyway, then the most common card name after empty and basic land is: Giant Growth. Then comes a 4-way tie between "Elemental" (presumably mainly used on tokens), Naturalize and Pacifism (sensible staple common reprints), and... Ornithopter!
Most Prolific Card Creators
Here's a table of the users who've created the most cards, along with their number of cards created (only counting cards that still exist today):
Most Prolific Commenters
And here are the 15 top commenters, with their number of comments posted:
The site's been running for 3-and-a-half years now. Many thanks all for all the contributions: over 28000 cards right now, with over 35000 created ever; and over 48000 comments across the site's history!