[Democracy: Bottom-up Set]: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to [Democracy: Bottom-up Set]: (Generated at 2026-08-11 16:58:00)
| [Democracy: Bottom-up Set]: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
Recent updates to [Democracy: Bottom-up Set]: (Generated at 2026-08-11 16:58:00)
only gnome will do the milling. other races will do different things (humans swap permanents, dwarf set things on fire, vampire bite people, etc.)
this is pretty wordy due to "CMC <= power" clause (and the cardname), hence uncommon.
That's a very nice white answer card. Making it common is... "very bold of you, minister" is the quote, I think?
Yeah, wow. So much you can do. It's like white's version of flicker. Mind... blown. I think that's a good thing.
Huh; fun. Probably-land-boost; but at the cost of sticking stuff into your opponents graveyard.
Wonder if this can be down-costed to
? It's not really good enough (reliable enough) for a 3-slot mana fixer.
Um wow; that's a lot of words. I hope that's fixable.
Ok, so it deals damage in the form of summoning cheap creatures from your opponents library. That's pretty cool.
Feels kinda ninja-like, and kinda "Increase creature's power" (but then, everything wants that
I'd suggest linking the size you can summon to the gnome's casting cost, instead of power - and removing about 75% of the words; but other than that a fun little mechanic.
Oh, and it's also milling on the sly?
But can we really fit 20 variants of this in? It'll be pretty beserk.
Hmmm. Nicely red keyword.
A fairly minor interaction unless the damage is quite severe though.
Unless you can only ignite your own stuff? Which feels a kinda forced interaction. And, well, crappy.
On the down-side... I'm really not sure how excited players would be by "Yay! It's a grizzly bears with a bolted on Psychic Venom!" Oh no, wait - it's not even that bad - it's half a Power Leak. I'm not absolutely certain that was the most reviled card in Magic, but it's gotta be in the top 20.
The fire-heart seems well received, though. Main reason: "The reminder text is also his flavour text." So maybe it's balanceable.
I dislike the amount of reminder text the ability needs, too. But that's plausibly fixable.
While I'm at it - WHY is that reminder text? It looks like something I'd write. If the card granting the ability goes away; sure - the blaze token stays, but the ability causing the land to know that blaze tokens cause damage is gone. Ah well.
I'm happy to be persuaded if we can find an exciting way to have such quests work and not be either broken or underwhelming. Magic does already have a few alt-win conditions; Door to Nothingness etc. Heck, Armageddon Clock is practically a quest implementation minigame.
But as currently proposed, victory-point quests don't feel right. And it feels odd to dislike mechanics on flavour grounds - but that's my main objection to the CRPG/MMO style quests suggested; they just feel uninterestingly mechanistic to me. Mechanics can be interesting, but "Count to 10" doesn't feel like it's enough.
No objection at all to the races, beyond sheer size of the task at hand.
Addressing "Raid boss", first major objection is the flavour. That's exactly what players would call it. Ugh. Next major objection is going to be meta-gamey. You aren't going to use the quest until you've got an answer to it in hand. Forced-to-play is hard to implement, and would turn away half the player base. (Red chaos players would be interested though)
On the upside? Yes, "Here's a big thing, let us now overcome it" is fine flavour. Kinda weird that one person sets it in motion, though. (Maybe a chaos-planes type of thing instead? Totally different game, though.)
Lastly, balance. Either the reward is small (and now we've got Dovescape instead of a quest) or it's large; and now it's likely to not be interactive with the other player - as unless you've got the answer ready you're not going to risk it.
If people vote for it, I'm up for the challenge of trying to come up with stuff that DOES work despite all those difficulties. I just don't see how.
Side comment: Kinda wondering why the people who did vote in support of quests aren't voting for the quest-forms they'd like.
this is supposed to done democratically. so if you have any suggestions, just post it and we can discuss and push it further or downvote it.
if so many people aren't satisfied with quests, then we can vote for another theme. quests with victory counters is actually a well-known mechanic in other CCGs and even in some custom sets here. i don't mind if we reroute to that direction instead of making only plain quest or ditching quests altogether.
as for my tribal X control ideas, i'm very satisfied with their integration. in particular control theme seems pretty interesting new territory, and
gnomes could have been a mainstay in official Wizards sets (as well 
dwarves). if no one else likes it, i can just create another personal set and move them there.
I know that I suggested and voted for "quests matter," but honestly I'm not at all inspired by it or interested in designing for it because in my mind it was hands in hand with victory counters. Plus the current direction of the flavor turns me off, so that's why I haven't really contributed any more.
if you mean "you" as in RPG designers around the world, then yes, "we" have different view of what kinds of quests can captivate an audience.
.... you have a very different idea of the meaning of quest to me.
well, i didn't vote for quests because it doesn't fit my play style. but if you guys want quests to be the major theme (it did get the most votes) then it should be made more exciting. and to me, that mean things like raids, defeating raid bosses, sending your party to fight enemies.
i guess my vote would be:
I was hoping for someone to come up with some form of quests that inspires me. As it is... they're all kinda blegh.
Basic quests, as done in Zendikar, I guess.
control theme is mostly uncharted territory in the color pie. for example, can white search 2 plains and put them into play by giving opponent a 3/3 horse? can blue swap control of an island and an opponent's land? actually i just found out there are already blue cards that do that. so i think this is a good idea for this theme, but more prevalent.
red/blue/black can exile opponents library and cast their cards. each color can steal different card types from the grave.
raid quests give your opponent a boss creature, which when defeated gives you huge bonus.
in tribal topic, i gave ideas for how each race interacts with control theme. humans make trades, like in my intro paragraph. gnome exchange and steal ideas, vaguely. vampire steal creatures. dwarf plant bombs at opponent. elves rob graves.
Hmm. Only two votes? Well, I'll extend things till the end of today (Tuesday) but that's the final deadline.
Oh, ok; you're suggesting making a set about twice the size I was expecting. That explains that, then.
Still seems pretty complex, but possible.
Yep, so half the set is practically done. It's just pretty much fill in the blanks by the numbers. Now we can spend more time and attention on the other themes of the set. Which by the way I've already taken all of them into account when thinking up the tribal plan. That is, of the 112 creatures you estimated, there is plenty of room for morph creatures, questing creatures, and control-themed creatures.
To elaborate. We have 20 race x class combinations. We can reserve 2 commons, 2 uncommons, and 1 rare for each of those combinations, for a total of about 100 tribal cards. (Actually rares and mythics can be dual class; maybe even uncommons, too. But can dismiss that for now.)
We need about 50-70 creatures at common. We can assign 2 creatures for each of the 20 combinations. So 40 spaces taken up. So we still have room for 10-30 non-tribal creatures, such as beasts, spiders, rats, goblins, etc. at common.
Same for uncommon, where we reserve 2 each for the major race x class combinations. So between commons and uncommons, each RxC combination can have 4 cards: 3 for the other 3 themes and 1 left for anything, including lords. BTW we don't need a lord for every combination. We just need a lord for each race and a lord for each class--so 11 lords max. Some cards can be lords for two tribes at once, thus taking up even fewer cards.
Compare the latest large sets and number of creatures in them:
The blocks with the most creatures were both tribal. Lorwyn had to support 8 races, but this is more like Innistrad's 5 races. So if we aim for 100 cards for the major races, there's still room for about 46 other creatures in the set. If we have to, we could trim down the quota of creatures to Alara's amount. Remember a big set has about 250 cards. That still leaves 100-120 non creature cards. That should be plenty of room for quests and spellmorphs etc. Also remember that these tribal cards can embody quests, morphs and control themes, so they're not stealing slots away from these themes.
Each of those examples needs at least 3 cards to be a thing that players can see, rather than just appearing to be a coincidence.
That's 20 types of card, eight of which have two things to demonstrate - that's 84 creatures right there. Just how big a set are we creating?
Oh, and then you want these to be tribal? So we'd want at a couple of lord for each type - 112.
Primarily; I meant the bad pun. But yes, I'm suggesting "Questor" as a class. (Or, well blegh, probably that is the best word.) and tribal stuff for it.
how is that complex? everything is laid out in nice lists. you just have to make the cards/cycles according to the skeleton.
of course you can't fit it in one set. that's why wizards makes three sets per block. even in the first set, there should be around 120-150 creatures. i don't know how you can fill them haphazardly; you have to have a plan or blueprint. divided by 5 thats 24-30 cards per race. then divided by 4 classes per race, that's 6-8 cards per class per race. when you sort by race and/or class, the differences should be clear when you make tribal decks. so that a human cleric deck is not the same as a dwarf cleric deck, or vampire cleric deck, or elf cleric deck, or a mixed cleric deck.
what do you mean quest as a tribe? you mean creatures that feel like quests? Jack V proposed that in Community Questant. but that's more related to questing than tribes. certainly there can be a cycle or 3 of these.
Aye, that sounds like we'd need more than one set to get across.
I probably should avoid the pun - but can 'quest' be a tribe? (Questing Elf, Questing Dwarf etc.)
I vote for: plain quests, but if we can work morph into it, then so much the better. Also, rename the Expedition/Ascension tiers.
I don't want to be a downer but that sounds reasonably complex to get across clearly.