Code Geass: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Code Geass: (Generated at 2025-06-22 21:23:03)
The caster of the spell. It's meant to be that at casting time, when choosing targets you also choose which two will be dealing damage and which will be receiving it. I brainstormed a few wordings but they were all a bit tricky to combine with the "no colour shared among any two of the three" condition.
Who chooses which creatures deal the damage?
Huh. Yes, very nice idea. I like the name, I think "team-up" works better than alliance.
I am also worried a bit about grokking the card and about it potentially being too good creature kill, but the hurdle of having three different colour creatures at all is sufficiently large it's actually hard to use at all. Even if you have a deck full of artifact creatures.
I rediscovered the moment in episode 20 when Lelouch and Suzaku team up to take down the Chinese Federation base, and thought it'd be great to capture that on a card. There are a couple of great shots of the Gawain IFX-V301 and the Lancelot Z-01 zooming together through twin holes in the wall that'd make nice art for this card. Amusingly, the name Unlikely Alliance is taken by a bad old card so I need to use a synonym here.
Mechanically, this is a take on green's recent mechanic of one-sided fight, as in Monstrous Onslaught, Nature's Way, Clear Shot, Moonlight Hunt, Rabid Bite and Nissa's Judgment. It has the interesting aspect that the damage-dealing creatures don't both have to be yours, which was fairly important to the flavour. In fact, as currently worded none of them have to be yours, if the opponent's creature base is sufficiently diverse in colours. That's a bit of a bend of green's colour pie; it'd be better in red from that POV, but this set is going to be short of things for green to do and so I'd like to keep this green if I can.
It gets away with being cheaper than Blood Feud because it's only ever going to kill one creature.
Counter target target spell, if target target spell's target has counters?
Counter target spell unless its controller pays
for each target it has?
Avoid Fate? Heh; shame a card with that name cannot be a geass :)
There are a few times in the series when Static is used as a way to interfere with communication.
My first thought was this: a way to interfere with Geasses or tactical commands; effectively a tweak on Negate. It could alternatively be a Convolute or Mana Leak style effect.
I should probably point out that you could add a mana cost to the Gambit ability to cut down on the explosiveness. A single
goes a long way...
Jumping off of Jack's idea, and Vitenka's frustration... I think it would be kind of cool if the card worked like this:
"Search your library for a basic land card and put it on the battlefield tapped. You may gambit a creature this turn.
Gambit -- If a creature gambited this turn dies while attacking, you may cast ~ from your graveyard without paying its mana cost. Then exile it."
This way, even if you probably won't get Positional Gambit to go off on round 2, you can set it up to go off any time a creature is gambited with a future gambit card. I also changed "dies during combat" to "dies while attacking" since it would be a very rare situation for this to go off while blocking... best to not confuse players. I also figured you wouldn't want people to get around the gambit by Lightning Bolting their Wall of Spears that was Gambited as soon as combat opened.
I like this way. It fills in a lot of holes. It's also got two down-sides:
1.) It's explosive when multiple gambits are queued up. And/or it may make the attacking creature almost impossible to block. There are positives to this as well... but it may not be the type of effect you are going for.
2.) Positional Gambit, as it is written right now, can be tossed into any deck with at least some attacking creatures. It's rather modular. My version of the mechanic really encourages you to play with a lot of cards with Gambit. If linear mechanics aren't your thing, then maybe this isn't the right idea.
Hmm. I certainly originally imagined the Gambit cycle as being "I risk this piece - do you take it?". But I suppose it could also work as "I put some number of my pieces at risk - do you take any of them?" As you say, that's a different discussion to the issue of wordiness on this specific card.
I also wonder about "When you cast this, choose target creature" as a separate trigger, instead of "may choose target creature". But that's probably not simpler.
OTOH, does it need to be a particular creature, would it be too strong if it was any creature, or "any green creature"?
I'm not sure if this makes sense, but could Gambit be "You may choose target creature you control. When that creature dies during combat this turn you may cast ~ from your graveyard without paying its mana cost"? (Probably as keyword reminder text, but possible just as text.)
Avoiding repeating the effect, which might make it easier to parse if not shorter. Does that spoil any of the cycle?
Yeah, there's any number of keywords that could be done. For some reason Wizards haven't yet. Unfortunately keywording it this set wouldn't help much since keywords have to have reminder text the set they're introduced.
(Bizarrely, named actions as on Learned Fireball would help. But... no.)
This card would certainly be a red flag for wordiness, but I think it is actually OK at common because the comprehension complexity is very low, especially because the Gambit mechanic is identical across the cycle.
Keyword it? Explore for a tapped basic land. Gambit - Explore for another one.
And yeah; this is NICE mana ramp. It's kinda a shame the gambit is almost never going to pay off. I guess sometimes you'll want that 9th land?
adding "you may"
As mentioned on Recon Squadron. White occasionally gets to search out Plains: see Safewright Quest, Knight of the White Orchid, Endless Horizons. Decadence is a mana-hungry mechanic, so I think it'd be natural for white to get a card like this. (By comparison, Extort in Gatecrash was also a
mana-hungry mechanic, and black got Crypt Ghast.)
Artwork would be Cornelia, most likely. Could be several of the other Britannian royalty though, as they're all pretty expansionist really.
I suppose this design has the downside of being a shuffle every turn. Hm.
An alternative to Palace Gardener as the gold uncommon for the (Green-white archetype).
The difficulty with this archetype is that white really doesn't ramp. Green is the mana producer, white is the mana consumer. But the one kind of ramp white does get occasionally is searching out Plains, as on Knight of the White Orchid, and putting them into your hand. I could see one of those working in this set. (White never gets more than one of those per set.)
Not sure whether the white ramp effect should go on an explicitly
card like this, or just something monowhite to let you use it in 
Decadence as well. Probably the latter, come to think of it. This card design is also too close to Custodians of Nippon, so all told, I'm probably not going to go with this one. I'll leave it here though anyway as it is moderately interesting.
Reprint of Vault Skyward. It's the kind of manoeuvre that assorted characters perform in and out of mechs, especially Suzaku.
Suggests that an awesome combat trick reprint for the set would be Brainstorm :) Or a tweak on it, since I think Brainstorm is a bit better than development tend to want in Standard.
For the (Green-blue archetype).
A candidate for the gold uncommon for the (Green-blue archetype), if the theme ends up being cantrips.
Cards that do work, timing-wise, with this: Informational Gambit (partly), Geass to Inform, Lloyd Asplund, Aggressive Urge, Taizō Kirihara
Cards that don't work with this: Informational Gambit (partly), Prepare for Infiltration
Not quite sure what the flavour should be.
A variation on Orim's Chant/Silence. I could optionally add a clause like Orim's Chant's "can't attack" as well. The moment in the series this represents are kinda mid-combat, so "can't attack" isn't required for the flavour, but it could be added if we want it.
My intent is that it'll mainly serve as a pre-emptive anti-combat-tricks ward. Or at least "play all your combat tricks now, cause you can't do them later this turn."
Heehee! Wizards have just printed Leave in the Dust, word-for-word and number-for-number identical to this :)
Also Take into Custody is exactly Geass to Forget but even cheaper (and obviously not a Geass).
How about one counts geass in play; for good-stuff, and the other protects against geass?
Geass is the set's means.
Love "Do the goal" and blue's reply to it :)
I was thinking "can't sac" on a creature, not just an enchantment, so it was less absolute, but also, less niche. But that's an idea for this card, not for hole filling.
Maybe add a few others? Can't sac, can't pay life? Can't discard? Would any of that matter without being too strong?
Thinking it through, maybe it's something like this.
Black: "Ends justify the means" is a central black tenet. Black is all about efficiency, selfishness and ruthlessness. There are some exceptions (eg. YOUR means trump OTHER PEOPLE'S ends :))
White: White is very conflicted. White is about the community, about systems, about having principles and sticking to them. That's not so much "means over ends" as there are LOTS of ends and white is torn between them. Every white paladin facing down a hostage situation is weighing up "keep my word, so people trust it in future" vs "save the innocent in front of me" vs "dispense justice, so fewer people take hostages in future" etc etc. Other colours conveniently "forget" about things that aren't in front of your face. White doesn't have that luxury. Sometimes your immediate end is sacrificed on the alter of the means of a HIGHER end. If you're lucky, a worthwhile one. Sometimes not.
Green: What are these "ends" of what you speak? I do what comes naturally to me, and accept the consequences.
Red: What are these "means" of which you speak? Why would you put, like, extra steps between me and my goal? DO THE GOAL. That's the point. Stop overthinking everything!
Blue: I don't believe there's a one size fits all answer to this question, but if it helps, I'm absolutely definitely going to overthink everything.
@dude: Yeah, I asked it simultaneously of MaRo, /r/ColorPie and here :)
I think black/white makes the most sense. There is an argument for white/white, which would be quite interesting, but in terms of set balance it works better if the rare noncreature slots are taken by two different colours :)
Mmm, "Players may not sacrifice creatures" would be great for Ends Don't Justify the Means if the set had a significant theme of sacrificing creatures. But it doesn't, really; the closest thing is the old abandoned design for the Material Gambit cycle. As it is, hosing one specific card isn't really playable, even with a cantrip.
I was going to say "what a coincidence, I just saw this answer on MaRo's blog," but when I went to grab the url I saw that you were the one who asked. I would unequivocally agree with that being B/W.