Cards With No Home: Recent Activity
| Cards With No Home: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics | Other non-themed cardsets | Skeleton |
Recent updates to Cards With No Home: (Generated at 2025-05-03 02:14:37)
I like this. I like that you made the cycling cost
, rather than 
, as I would have been tempted to do.
As the latest variation on Coastal Tower, how about some cycling lands? I always loved Drifting Meadow and Secluded Steppe. This is rather harder to cycle, but correspondingly better when you do get it into play; and like Secluded Steppe it cycles in precisely the circumstance you want to cycle it - when you already have both colours of mana.
It looks pretty good, but is it too good? Celestial Colonnade and its cycle (Creeping Tar Pit and friends) show you can get a pretty strong upside on an unconditionally ETBT dual these days.
It's true I was influenced by flavor, but I added the 'one counter at a time' policy specifically because cards like Mirrodin's Core bug the crud out of me. You don't need to keep charging it when it has 5 counters on it, but you still do, round after round, because who knows if you'll need it? Or you could say "Whatever. It's infinite now." But then you pretty much admitted that the mechanic isn't fun.
Can't untap works (better, I'd say, if it wasn't for the flavor tipping the balance), though I kind of forget things like that, and have a tendency to use a counter anyway.
I forgot about Jeweled Amulet... but you can see why I didn't want ion counters to be anywhere near this card... I probably would have accidentally redesigned Jeweled Amulet at that rate...
I don't know how it should be balanced, but I quite like the "one counter at a time" ability.
You know, this could be made much simpler just by taking away its normal untap ability.
:Add one mana of any colour to your mana pool. ~ does not untap as usual next turn.
While I understand that you can't fill a water-skin more than once at a time, the design seems to be unnecessarily wordy. This card reminded me of Jeweled Amulet. The discussion on the Ice Age version is highly relevant (including an ion counter version!).
Point taken. I forgot about Everflowing Chalice. This feels like article material to me, and you stopped me from making a big gaffe.
Signet of Barry's Land (and then some) has been seen not too long ago with Everflowing Chalice, for what that's worth.
I have him as an RSS feed, so I see everything :)
Very interesting thoughts. I'm inclined to ask MaRo on his Tumblr and see if he replies. (The latter being the hard part: that blog is so high-traffic it's hard to keep up.)
I've been thinking about this while trying to write something else, and I realized that the only way I'd stop thinking about this was if I stopped writing the thing I was supposed to be writing, and put these other thoughts here. :p
There's two possible thoughts that Wizards might have on the subject of signets. One is that they like 2 cost signets, but the pre-Planar Chaos iteration is too powerful. If that's the case, then Balothskin works fine. So wouldn't a signet that tapped for
straight up... since the original formula used to be "A signet is a relevant non-basic land pasted onto a 2-cost artifact". Both Balothskin and Barryland would be considered printable signets since they're worse than every playable non-basic land. You could even make a cycle out of Castle Sengir signets, since, if you were playing a three color deck, you were probably better off playing a basic land over Castle Sengir.
The more likely answer, however, (Since we haven't seen a signet after Time Spiral) is that anything that taps to add mana and costs 2 may be off limits... at least for now. If that's the case, then, Balothskin is out as well.
While we're on the subject, if I was a developer at R&D, I think I'd push to have no 2-cost signets either. Rampant Growth is supposed to be a reason to play green, which is supposed to be the color that accelerates you past your early game into your mid-game. If every color has a reasonable Rampant Growth alternative, then that's just one less reason to play green. It also leads to some very boring deck building decisions for control decks. When there aren't any signets, you have to decide which control cards you think are best to deal with the environment. That choice will constantly change as the environment progresses and the threats change. If you have access to two 2-cost signets, however, this slot becomes a blank. Every control player just plays 7x signets, ignores round 2 and jumps straight into the mid/late game. Sure, that's what control player want to do, and you want to give players tools to do the thing they enjoy doing... but not at the expense of redundant gameplay.
I could be wrong, but I think a
cost signet that just taps for 
(that's it. no other abilities) may be considered too good nowadays. Maybe not. I know the fact that this signet taps for colorless wouldn't matter for most mono-colored control decks... so it would be about as powerful as a Charcoal Diamond there. I could be wrong about all this, though. All I know is that Wizards doesn't think the Ravnica signets are fair anymore.
It's one ability away from just being Mirrodin's Core in artifact form. Can it afford to tap for
?
I was trying to find a good mechanic for a waterskin in New Phyrexia... either as an equipment, or as a general artifact for the player. The problem is that no matter where I went with the mechanic, the waterskin wanted to be filled and used later... and I couldn't come up with a reasonable way of doing that without using counters... and New Phyrexia can only use colored ion counters... and this card was a mess as soon as I added those colored ion counters...
It wasn't working out. There were a lot of good designs. I just couldn't use them. I figured I'd toss this into cards with no home, however, since I thought it was an interesting idea for a signet in a time when Azorius Signet is considered a mite too good.
Yeah, this is very elegant.
A potential problem with this mechanic is if the opponent just doesn't have anything to cast on turns 3 or 4. But that's fine for this particular case, I think, because this is an exceedingly Spider card: both literally and in Anthony Alongi's animal metaphors. This is a reaction to what the opponent's doing, so if they're not doing anything that needs 3 mana, well, I guess you don't need your big sneaky surprise reach blocker.
Nice; means you can't cast it without the downside actually mattering. And the flash means that you don't need to worry overmuch about not being able to drop it turn3 if you played first, as you can just do it in your opponents turn3 after their third land hits.
Also quite an interesting answer to the problem of manascrew - could be adapted to big creatures that can only hit if manascrew isn't going on.
Dude1818 recent design reminds me of my Jawas drinking Blue Milk deck from the old Star Wars CCG. I thought it would be neat to move the drawback into the cost of the card... otherwise, it isn't very different with what he's toying with.