Dorado: Front Page

A small set in what I plan to be five different small sets, each showcasing a plane without access to a single color of mana. Dorado is a plane without green mana, which manifested itself into a plane entirely built on a single concept - capitalism. Not "survival of the fittest" capitalism, but moustache-twirling, "let's exploit as many people as we can and profit from it" capitalism.

Therefore, this set revolves around Gold - generating gold, spending gold, having gold, and the effects that happen alongside that. Since it's difficult to build a draftable (ish) set around 4 colors of mana, I've split it into 4 distinct playstyles, which illustrate the conflicts of the plane. They are:

WU vs. BR - Corporations vs. Consumers

UR vs. WB - Scientists vs. Workers

As political and heavy-handed as that sounds, I'm not aiming for the tone of the set to be serious at all - my vision for the creative part of the set is to be a mix of current Spanish and Central American urban culture for the world, with a touch of overexaggerated consumerism as the source of conflict.

There are a couple of themes of the set:

Gold tokens - Everything generates gold, but U and B generate the most gold. W and R have the most ways to spend it.

Capitalist - A pseudoability word that provides alternate effects for spells and creatures if you spend artifact mana (mana generated by an artifact, usually gold) to cast it.

Buyback - A perfect mechanic for a set about gaining money and spending money, right? It has the added bonus of having something extra to do with all of that gold you're generating.

That's all the mechanics I believe the set has room for! There are some other themes that don't have pseudoability words to define them, but they're more of color combination-specific themes. The ones I have right now are:

WUb - Artifact Control

WUr - Artifact Creatures

WB - Artifact Lifedrain

UBw - Merchant Tribal

BR - Artifact Sacrifice Aggro

UR - Buyback Control

Since green is missing, some aspects of the game are deliberately missing or lacking to illustrate the fact that the plane is devoid of green mana. Natural, nonsentient creature types are completely eliminated - instead, many of the nonsentient creatures take the form of artifact creatures. Natural forces other than electricity are very few and far between - most of the weather in Dorado is auctioned on a weekly basis, and decided by the highest bidder. Enchantments are missing completely - instead, the plane's mages choose to imbue magical energies within artifacts and sell them off as toys or weapons, as it's more profitable that way.

First draft of the set is finished. Looking for input on card designs and slowly refining some of the color themes of the set. EDIT: Expanding the size of the set a bit - want to make it more variable like conspiracy draft, so adding 5 commons per color, 2 new uncommons, and a handful of rares.

Updated on 11 Oct 2015 by Mal