Conversation: Recent Activity
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| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-04 02:28:03)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-04 02:28:03)
what changes to card frame affects this site though? most of the changes affect physical cards , not online cards. you don't even use the bottom part to add set and copyright info.
my main argument against 8th ed frames is the low contrast makes sorting much harder than before, and harder to identify from afar or when scaled down. this has a huge effect on usability and ergonomics. this time it's even getting worse.
When 8th Edition and Mirrodin came out, loads of people found the modern card frames horrible, non-fantasy, dull and so on. But it'd be pretty odd if when creating this site I'd stuck to the 7th Edition card frames. At least, it would have been a deliberate statement that I wouldn't want to make.
In general people are usually very sceptical of any significant change in Magic (as in most other areas of life). Some of those changes turn out to have been for the better; there's always some people who prefer it the old way, but deliberately hanging on to the old way when the world has moved on would mark me as some kind of neophobe or seem to be making a statement that I Disagree With Wizards On This.
So I probably will make the change. Just not as a particularly high priority. (Sorry I haven't been able to make many Multiverse fixes recently, by the way. I've been busy prototyping board games that are on their way too publication. And, y'know, having a baby.)
Well one good thing to consider adding is the set information (and maybe card number) at the bottom of the card.
I agree. Not to mention I find the new look quite ugly :D
Merry winter solstice holiday of your choosing. That is, unless you going full on hipster with me, and celebrate the Feast of Saint Stephen.
"Christmas is too commercial. We like to celebrate a little holiday about the first Christian martyr. You've probably never heard of it. sniff."
If that's the case, then no holiday cheer for you. May I suggest the Roman Holiday of Saturnalia instead?
Merry new happy!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!
Part of the problem with Legendary is that, after a few cute tricks dealing with how they get sacrificed, there really isn't much to work with, design-wise. It's just a toggle switch, in the same way that you can write any word after the type em dash, and call it a theme. "All Legendary creatures get +2/+2" seems like a cool ability. But there's only so many times you can keep going to that well. "Target Legendary creature gets first strike." "Whenever a Legendary creature does X." etc., etc. Do that enough times, and you end up with a boring set. Or, in other words, you end up with Kamigawa.
That's not to say one can't get innovative with the Legendary design. It's just important to see the missteps for what they are. Personally, I think you could go rather far with a keyword mechanic that triggered off Legendary. That way, you can keep reinforcing how important Legendary creatures are, without constantly reinventing the Legendary bonus (and without constantly boring players with repetition of the word 'Legendary', since that will be in the reminder text.)
Instead of looking to Innistrad, I'd look to Coldsnap, and the use of Snow-Covered Lands. Over there, they proved that a special sheet can be used to have a real effect on the game... though, any player could play an off-color Snow land, and Snow lands are hard to get rid of, so maybe they aren't the great example I want them to be. I think the Snow theme worked perfectly for Coldsnap, but that required one special sheet worth of cards that any player could use, and a smattering of other permanents that produced snow in the regular line-up. In order to make a set that's 'about' Legendary permanents, you'd probably need a special sheet, a number of rares, plus numerous uncommons that dipped into theme. Otherwise, you might be able to insure that each player can get 3 Legendaries, on average, in their draft pool... but you can't guarantee those Legendaries will be castable...
well for uniform distribution, you just have to decide which rarity to follow and there's the number of unique cards you need. rares are about 1/60 in big set, so 60 unique cards. uncommons 1/20, so 20 uniques; commons 1/10. we can forget mythics' rate of 1 in 120.
also my numbers above are off because i didn't search correctly. there were only 20 and 13 DFCs in Innistrad and Dark Ascension, respectively.
they don't have to replace basic lands in the pack. it could be one of the common slots.
uniform distribution has the benefit of lower chance of getting the same card twice. however, is that a good thing? why can't two players pick their own copy of the same legend, or the same player picking multiples of the same legend (e.g. to get a better chance of drawing it in a game)?
also, it would be more interesting to design legends of varying rarities. simple ones like Isamaru can be common, and then there are crazy, cool ones that deserve to be rare or mythic.
Uh? Yes, I know about Innistrad's double-rare packs (and Planar Chaos's ones too), but I was responding to a comment in which I thought you indicated a preference for a uniform distribution, a flat rarity scheme: You wrote " all legends are evenly distributed, no common legends."
thats not how probability and rarity works. you can have 36 unique cards and have them show up at different rates. hence common, uncommon, and rare DFCs. otoh time spiral used uniform distribution for 121 cards. then each card is equally rare, with 1/121 chance to get any given card. basically they had same rarity as mythics do now.
so first you figure out which distribution model to use. from there you find out how many unique cards to make and at what rarity.
part of the appeal with openig innistrad packs was a higher chance to open 2 rares and/or mythics (foil makes it 3) in a single pack.
I'm also amused that these will show up as basic ;)
If there aren't a lot of them then at one per booster, you'll be seeing some of them quite a lot. Suppose there are 22; then you'll be seeing any given legend with about the frequency of any given uncommon. 36 may be about the sweet spot so they're present in every booster but not overwhelming... but that's still 36 legendary creatures that you need to make distinct not just from each other but also from your other rare cards.
It's challenging. But, hey, that's why we make custom cardsets, right? For the challenge of it? So yeah, go for it. I think it'll be tough to make it work, but not impossible.
just because they get their own sheet, doesnt mean there are a lot of them. innistrad had only 36 dfc and dark ascension 22. if these were same numbersr for legends, it's still more than the average set, but not overwhelming.
you still only get 1 common legend per pack (not discussing foils). you may get duplicate for some legends, but not that often. more likely you'll get different legends, so you get to see them duke it out.
i did say this followed the innistrad model instead of time spiral. looking back, this may be the better model. all legends are evenly distributed, no common legends. so the chances of seeing a particular legends is even less frequent. and you pack more unique legends per sheet and per set.
Mmm, that's true. There was a certain "Huh, that's a legend?" quality to it. Not helped by "I'd much rather run some random uncommon instead".
Another problem with Kamigawa block was that, although the theme wasn't at common, it was also trying to be themed around a mechanic inherently about uniqueness. Kamigawa block had a lot of "forgettable" legends. Loads of rare kami that blend into one another. It diminished what it means to be a legend because the legends couldn't all be exciting and eye-opening.
This would still be a problem under this proposal.
If there are a lot of them.. how are they legendary?
"Oh great, ANOTHER ..." really isn't the feeling you want from a legend. The game-play of having the legend super-type is, after all, entirely downside.
Oh, stupid me. The obvious solution is to have the legend sheet be really really large, so that although you are guaranteed a legend (making the theme common) any given legend is still rare.
I never thought 'because we can' was a bad excuse to do anything. It's a bad excuse to keep doing something, true. But I've often found 'because we can' often leads to 'why didn't we do this before?'
That said, I don't disagree. I don't have a particular desire to see colored lands. I'm certainly open to monkeying around with the idea or reflecting on other people's designs on the subject. In the end, though, I wouldn't put any of that design in a set unless I was positive a tipping point was achieved, and some excellent and new space was being explored. My example doesn't do that. If I kept pushing, I could get there, maybe. It's a lot more effort than I'd be willing to put in, though.
that still doesn't tell me
why it should be colored
what is gained from being colored
besides the usual "because we can".
that said, i guess most of you missed my recent cards Petrified Forest and Dangerwood Grove. yes it's a bold mash of a new (sub)type on a colored land. the latter is justified by the cost and abilities. the former because it just makes flavor sense. and hopefully grokkable way to merge two long-runningly craved design ideas that never made and may never make it to official cards.
nevertheless the coloredness of this new design is not critical or even useful. it's merely incidental due to the new way of playing these lands.
Is it possible to agree with a bunch of different simultaneous points? I agree with all of you. Weird.
I think part of the problem is that we're taking this from a bottom-up perspective: "We have colored lands. Now what do we do with them?" The correct answer to that question is throw them in the trash; we don't need them. I'm sure colored lands can be a part of the game, dripping with flavor and all that... but the only way that's going to make any sense is if we happened to stumble upon it from a top down point of view: "These lands feel a lot like enchantments. What if we gave them a color?"
That said, I'm going to try my hand at bottom-up. How about something like this?:
Icecrack Sheaf
: Add 
to your mana pool.
: Counter target Red or Green activated ability.
Color - Blue
Land
~ enters the battlefield tapped.
Discard ~ from your hand,
Any set that featured these would have to have enough effects so that the color mattered. But you could save some in-set room by printing most of the colored effects on the lands themselves. That gives us two reasons for colored lands: 1). Flavor, since the lands feel like they could have been instants. And, 2). color is how these lands interact. They must be colored, or they need different abilities.
amuseum's "didn't spend colored mana" point doesn't really hold. There are plenty of cards whose colour don't correspond to the mana paid for them: Ghostfire, Transguild Courier, Intervention Pact, Withengar Unbound, and of course Dryad Arbor. Vitenka reminds me of cards like Rupture Spire that are effectively lands with mana costs. So Magic has done lands with colour, and lands "with mana costs", but shied away from lands with an actual real mana cost (and colour derived from it).
The rules would need significant updates to allow lands to have mana costs. The cards would need reminder text to indicate whether paying the mana cost was "as well as" the land drop (Rupture Spire) or instead of it (Fieldmist Borderpost, Petrified Forest).
However, I definitely agree with amuseum's questioning of what the point is in doing this. I think the game would almost certainly be better served by keeping the divide between lands (cost a land drop) and other permanent types (cost mana) as clear-cut as possible.
Well, that's sort of the question here, yes. Mechanically; you don't actually NEED anything beyond the sorcery and a lot of rules test. But flavourfully, lands provide a lovely natural separation: These cards make mana, and the rest use it.
So maybe that's the answer. If you want to give them the "Consumes mana" background - lands that do NOT provide mana, but instead consume it for effect. Such lands have typically been shied away from as "But it's not really a land now"; and that's got some meat in it. But a land with the coloured frame? Well, that's obviously not quite land. The difficulty then, of course, is how it differs from an enchantment or artifact; other than by being hard to kill.
So what? I should ask you that. So what is the point of the desire for colored lands? What is so great about them? What groundbreaking gameplay can be achieved by their presence? Is there a hole that only they can fill, if there were such a hole?
Apples are fruit because they contain seeds within their flesh.
Or, to put it another way - yes; that's true. So what? The question is about making coloured lands. I guess you bring up a point, it makes it easy to have lands that have a casting cost. Magic has avoided that, to try and keep lands and artifacts and enchantments distinct (and as Alex points out, kinda failed whenever they've stretched it - though I do remember HORRIBLY misplaying a deck that has those 'lands' in, because I saw the casting cost and mulliganned.)
Ignoring the tech needed to make it happen - maybe costly lands is worth thinking about? I mean heck, it opens up kicker land...
They're not colored because they're not spells. You didn't spend colored mana to play it.