Space: The Convergence: Comments

Space reach = SENSOR/S ? Space Haste = WARP ? others sound good.

Space haste was already depicted as Speed. See the original article at http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/391 which you can scour for terminology.

You may like to check out the Space Cube project: amongst their resources is a very comprehensive list of translations of game terms (that they've expanded from the original list), such as:

• Exile = Displace
• Prevent = Negate
• Landfall = Planetfall
• Level up = Upgrade
• Suspend = Stasis (time counters; suspended = in stasis)
• Kicker = Subsidiary (kicked = subsidized)

They even wrote a nifty translator, which claims that Aquila would have an ability "[-6]: Gain command of X target entities, where X is the number of cards in your supply as you activate this protocol". (EDIT: Aww, link seems to be dead. Here's the translation of terms though.)

Of course, I'm afraid I'm not going to create CSS versions of the Space frames. But I could modify my code so that the Planeswalker and Token frames trigger on whatever terms you decide are the translations of those words.

could you use faction instead of alignment for colour ? then multicolour would become Multifaction which sounds better than multialignment (and is shorter)?

I think battlefield sounds good as-is, and cast can become deploy.

I'm a little iffy about the setting, thematically. Are the players suppose to be warlords fighting IN space? Or are they more or less invading another's planet i.e. plane? If it's the latter, then Space: the Convergence can be done like Warhammer 40K, I believe, which would make it super awesome and give me more of a basis to go on. Thoughts?

Also, we need to come up with some races and/or species for Space. 'Human' and 'Alien' are kinda lackluster.

Maro once said that if they started over, Instant would actually be a supertype. so there would Instant Sorcery, Instant Creature, Instant Enchantment, etc. Flash keyword is no longer necessary.

For Space: TC, since we are in a sense starting over, we could borrow this idea. Instant as a supertype would be called Tactical in Space. Sorcery becomes Maneuver. Thus we have sorcery speed Maneuver, and instant speed Tactical Maneuver. We could also have Tactical Unit (flash creatures), Tactical Device (flash artifact), etc.

Other terms suggestions: cast a spell = issue an order put = deploy

I understand where Maro is coming from with that, but I've never really been a fan of the idea. For one thing, "Instant Creature" sounds bizarre, like something you'd make for breakfast. They'd have to think of a new name. For another, there is a bit of design space lost in removing Instant as its own card type.
I have to say, though, that in the S: TC context, Tactical Maneuver sounds pretty neat.

I'm pretty sure there's a perfect word for normal Magic, but it would take a few days with a thesaurus to tease it out. DnD uses 'Quickened', which sounds better, but has it's own faults. Personally, I don't have a problem with "Interrupt" if used as a sub-type maybe? "Sorcery - Interrupt" sounds fine. "Creature - Human Warrior Interrupt" does not, unfortunately.

For space, I'm not a fan of 'Tactical'. It doesn't really tell you anything. A tactical nuke isn't exactly a very fast nuke, for example. Perhaps 'Hyper' would do a better job? "Hyper Unit" and "Hyper Device" works equally for me.

I believe that Aura is the only subtype with rules attached.

basic land types.
equipment and fortifications (attachments in general) have collateral rules.

tactical nukes are supposed to be deployed in a moment's notice, as opposed to strategic nukes. (wikipedia) police tactical units are deployed to quell riots and other emergencies (wikipedia) both usages match perfectly for our purposes, that is, tactical orders are issued during quick and/or reactionary responses.

how is design space lost? for which is lost can also be gained. Maneuvers handle both tactical and nontactical. e.g. search for a Maneuver. same as Tactical itself. e.g. return a Tactical card in your graveyard to your hand. you can return a Tactical Unit or tactical devices.

Ah, I did not know that. I associate the word tactical with the word 'tactics'... something that normally takes time to establish. I went to Dictionary.com to get a better understanding of the word and ended up with this result:

Definition four: Expedient; calculated.

That... makes me scratch my head. Expedient sounds fast. Calculated sounds slow. What a weird word. It kind of means both fast and slow depending on the context. For example:

"When the enemy began to open fire, the captain made a tactical landing."

Compared to: "After months of deliberation, the Ouya development team made a tactical decision: Ignore the greater gaming community, and redouble their focus on casual game players and modders."

'Tactical Nukes' are an enigma of themselves. It never occurred to me that they were fast nukes, which they are. I always thought they were precision strike nukes... which they are. I guess what I'm saying is that 'tactical' has a lot of baggage strapped to it, as far as words go.

I think tactical would be a good choice, but I'd not noticed until jmg pointed it out it might also be confusing.

FWIW, I guess the distinction is something like "tactical vs non-tactical" makes tactical sound slow and deliberate, but "tactical vs strategic" makes tactical sound fast and incisive.

Dunno about "slow and deliberate" Versus "Completely unplanned" perhaps.

fixating and misunderstanding one of many definitions of a words doesn't disqualify the word. in fact, expedient doesn't imply how quickly something is done--another of your misunderstandings.

as long as it sounds smooth, is flavorful and generally grokkable. just like not all creature cards are actually creatures, not all enchantments are actually enchantments, not all instants sound instant.

Oh, I agree. I'm just saying that 'tactical' isn't grokable as 'fast'. It doesn't even mean 'fast', as far as the dictionary is concerned. There are some people grok 'tactical' as fast. That might be reason enough to promote a word as a keyword... I don't know.

Had it been the way things were, I probably wouldn't think too hard about it (knowing me, I'd pick up a dictionary and re-learn the word... but getting picky over the word wouldn't stop me from accepting it.) But since the discussion is "Should we use this word?" my reaction is "No. There's probably a better word out there to use." But it isn't like I'd get upset if tactical was used. It does the job.

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thanks for share

i like this post very much

Oh, louis vitton! You're so friendly!

sounds like a spambot

It is.

Uhm, okay, so what's the game plan here? That space project I linked did Vintage cube already pretty damn well. Is this to be just an alternative implementation of it? It's good and all I guess, but kinda "meh" from my perspective at least. It had a bunch of dedicated dudes working on it for years and that can be seen in the psd templates and flavor they have created there. I would be hard pressed to try to improve in any significant manner. I mean, it's well-trodden ground by this point.

Still, there lies much potential in "Magic with space paint". One simple set idea, both mechanically and flavorfully, would be to create a "standard legal" core set. Now, much of that would be playing around and with NWO, which is not everyone's cup of tea. Given that this assortment of cards is closest to a Vintage cube, another project to which the space setting would lend itself to well, would be to create custom preconstructed Commander decks.

Also, then there's concept of a scifi world in MTG, which Space the Converge is closely associated with. Perhaps the most prominent, would be "Netropolis". It has a collection of interesting ideas. Personally the "Upload a virus" phrase is the most evocative - one of those where the flavor and mechanics converge beautifully.

Recently, a mechanic called "overload" was showcased, which IMO would fit very nicely into a scifi setting.

There is no gameplan. Just tinkering around with these ideas. Those guys with their version of Space did a great job. I'm definitely going to borrow some of their ideas.

I'm designing this set with a much higher mana curve than MTG. Things produce more fuel (mana) and players can draw more cards than readily than what we're used to with MTG. This is to compensate for the fact that most of the Ship units in the game are extremely large and have a high CMC.

Cool. That sounds like (or at least similar to) the "Battlecruiser Magic" (very appropriately named in this case) concept that Rise of the Eldrazi set was designed to support.