Harry Potter and the Gathering of Magic: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Harry Potter and the Gathering of Magic: (Generated at 2025-09-04 22:10:16)
Page 1 - Older activity
Page 1 - Older activity
For reference to everyone who commented in 2020, this set was explicitly a Commander set, which I think some of you missed. Unicorn Blood is in Voldemort's deck which has a heavy graveyard/self-mill theme, which allowed this to gain a ton of life in playtests.
@Tahazzar: The Gnaw to the Bone comparison is a good point. This definitely reads way worse than that, and Gnaw wasn't overpowered or anything, it was a cornerstone of a fun deck. This comment is really the only one that makes me want to consider dropping the cost of Unicorn Blood.
@SecretInfiltrator: There is no second copy, this is a Commander card designed for a Commander deck. It's not designed to reanimate a creature, it's designed to keep you alive while you're doing your graveyard combo shenanigans and not impacting the board.
@Vitenka: I like the comment that it's more flavorful if the cost comes later instead of right away. I'll have to figure out if there's a clean way to adjust this card so it works like that, because that does sound more interesting.
@dude1818: Lifegain does suck, but they still keep making lifegain cards. It's an effect that exists, some people want it, I'm going to design some too. It serves a purpose in this deck, and people can always swap it out if they don't want to play with it. Also, 80 life on Healing Salve is a little ridiculous, something like 10-12 would be fine, and anyway, Ancestral Recall is OP so I'm not sure what use that comparison is.
Overall, from these 2020 comments, I wish I had redesigned this so it was a little cheaper and the cost came due later. I'm not going to kill the card or make it gain 80 life though.
Gaining life sucks. It doesn't do anything
Like, there was discussion on Maro's twitter(?) recently about how you could balance the rest of the boon cycle to match Ancestral Recall's power level, and it was determined that Healing Salve would have to gain you something like 80 life to be equivalent
Mmm. Assuming you can save it until later in the game when you have a full graveyard, it's going to gain you maybe 12 life? That's pretty reasonable for 4 mana I'd think. So I don't have any actual mechanical problem with this.
But, well, lifegain does always kinda suck.
Discarding your hand is also "pain now" rather than "pain later" which is what the card is thematically meant to be. The quote about it is something like "Those who drink unicorns blood will forever after lead a cursed half life"? So episde-3 comments aside, this should probably be a big boost now in return for a nasty downside later. Something like Unstable Mutation where the extra life decays away, perhaps? Or maybe something like Lich where you flat out lose the ability to draw cards in future. To keep with the grave theme, maybe something like an enchantment with "You cannot lose the game due to having no life. If you would draw a card; instead put it into the graveyard and gain 2 life"? Which is of course just begging you to try and find a good time to get rid of it.
How about discarding your hand for a Zombify effect. You still could tag a life gain/+1/+1 counter bonus for the discarded cards as some sort of reparation.
But if you get a card out of your graveyard for the cards you discard, that already seems like a better trade - especially since you obviously choose when to pull the trigger and always trade up.
And the messaging also becomes better: If you have this card to reanimate things, then the discarded cards immediately seem less like a "loss" and more as a "setup" for the second copy.
It's mainly pure life gain (not that good of a madness / graveyard enabler) so unless it's doing absurdly high amounts of that, it's most likely gonna suck hard. Maybe a tad better than Archangel's Light but still really bad looking. Pure life gain just generally isn't that useful. Like even if you gain some 20 off this, it's just "meh" pretty much. If you actually have to discard some useful stuff that you didn't want to bin for it, then it's just horrible.
Another card that comes to mind is Gnaw to the Bone that's limited to creature cards though it has flashback, costs less, and doesn't require discarding. Spring of Eternal Peace is really, really bad as well btw. Something like Chaplain's Blessing is kinda "ok-ish" but obviously doesn't see competitive play.
Yeah, Mark has briefly talked about working on it before
Huh. TIL there was an official Harry Potter CCG (not a surprise) made by Wizards (which was).
The commander need not have all of the colors of other cards, only its color identity must be a (not necessarily proper) superset of the color identity of the other cards in the text. For example, the card may have
somewhere in its text even if not in the mana cost. (See rule 903.4 and 903.5c.)
Yeah, I've since come around to the idea that self-milling should be costed as a benefit (at least in small amounts like this -- obviously Leveler is still a drawback).
It's quite possible that the Diadem only didn't feel game-breaking because there aren't really any ways to draw a lot of cards in this deck. There's Specialis Revelio and...that's kind of it. If I had playtested this in a normal blue deck with lots of card draw, it would probably have felt broken and warranted a change.
Thanks for switching the view. I'm working on hosting the images somewhere other than Photobucket, but it's a time-consuming process. I'll switch it back when I'm done.
It's a costing closer to mythic I believe (Note Alhammarret's Archive). As a rare, I wouldn't cost it anything under the cost of Honden of Seeing Winds. 4 mana, usually with some condition or multicolor is the minimum cost for a card that draws only one extra card per turn.
Maybe it could be something like "If you would draw a card or cards, instead scry 1/2, then draw those cards." (cf. Tomorrow, Azami's Familiar) or just simply "draw that many cards plus one".
Thought Reflection does seem overcosted, I'll give you that. It's costed around people who are doing crazy draw things with it, or using it to break the symmetry of looting etc. I can believe that this is fair in the context of its set.
I do think self-milling is generally a (small) benefit and should be costed as such, though.
Alternatively, host the images somewhere else...
I switched the default view for now.
Please pay 400 $ to photobucket or change the default view to mockup.
It's not a Break Open because it can target your own morphs; Break Open can only target opponents' morphs. It's an easy distinction to miss. Wolfsbane lets you bypass the morph cost of one of your own morphs by paying
instead. Also, as you mention, it lets you threaten a bunch of shenanigans as you wish while tapped out.
Another casualty of the restrictive limits I placed on myself. Harry's deck had four colors to the Death Eaters' three, so there wasn't room for artifact creatures. I moved all of them to the Death Eaters' deck, even the poor Flying Ford Anglia. I liked the design so much that I couldn't bring myself to scrap it, so I just left it in.
As a justification, the car did become a wild thing of the forbidden forest, and the Forbidden Forest is in the Death Eaters' deck...
It is intentional. There was no cleaner way to word "2 life for each card you discard, plus 1 life for each card in your discard pile that was already there before you just discarded."
You're exaggerating how bad it is. It's a mana cheaper than Spring of Eternal Peace and two mana cheaper than Feudkiller's Verdict, and in this 100-card deck with self-milling, it can often net a lot more than 8 or 10 life.
And yes, I recognize the hypocrisy with costing this card considering the environment it's in while not doing so for Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw. If I remember correctly, this card started life one or two mana cheaper and let you discard any number of cards, rather than forcing you to discard your whole hand. But in playtesting I found that this card racked up a crazy amount of life, and it was always a no-brainer to cast because you could just refuse to discard if your hand was good. I increased the cost to 4 to compensate for the high numbers I was seeing, and then ended up requiring you to discard your whole hand to make it more of a trade-off to play. Sometimes you can't afford to drink the blood right away and have to wait until you can cast your good cards first.
Plus, it's more flavorful that way. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price -- you can't just choose not to live but a half-life, a cursed life.
That's...a really good point actually. I never considered that. I think I'll update the card next time I get the chance. Thanks!
Thanks! I too love Surreal Memoir! It was a centerpiece of my favorite Mnemonic Wall/Vent Sentinel/Staggershock ROE limited deck. Not exactly creatureless, but all-walls is close enough, right? :)
We're not overly fond of land destruction, no, but I thought one in each singleton deck was fine. I actually prefer land destruction in three- to five-color environments to punish good stuff decks from being too greedy with their mana bases. In a mono- or two-color format it's usually only good for stunting the opponent's growth and preventing them from being able to cast anything on time, which is just depressing.
I think the best use of land destruction is to destroy your five-color opponent's one white source out of seven lands so they have to get creative and rely on their other four colors, not to destroy your mono-green opponent's third forest on turn three so they can't ever catch up to you.
shrug Just my opinion on LD though. I know a lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to their lands being destroyed and hate LD altogether. I just think it has a place in limited situations.
Would you believe I originally designed this at
and 
? (Another example of me consistently undervaluing repeatable card draw.) Early playtesting quickly showed that was ridiculous, and I upped it to 
and 
. When that still proved to be ridiculous, it became (what I thought at the time was crazy-high) 
and 
, where it was still playable but felt fair.
I learned a lot about developing repeatable card draw engines from this card.
I wanted the founders' artifacts to be good, but yeah, in retrospect, this is kind of ridiculous. One problem was that I consistently overvalued self-milling as a drawback. My line of thinking was that self-milling is generally bad for you, so it should reduce the cost, and if you're playing a 100-card deck that doesn't really care about mill and/or a graveyard-themed deck that can actually use it for value (and this deck is both), well, that's just synergy and good deckbuilding and doesn't need to be accounted for in the cost. I also think I consistently undervalued repeatable card draw and believed Thought Reflection was overcosted.
That said, I've played with these decks a lot, and the Diadem has never really felt broken or overpowered, so...maybe it's an appropriate mythic? Splashy and shocking but not actually game-breaking.
Yeah, this one was pretty much a slam dunk. I was going to design an owl card for Hedwig and give it scry anyway...but this card already existed, so why not?
Thanks for the praise, Alex! I just discovered your comments -- I don't check this set very often anymore since it didn't get any comments when I first put it up.
Looks overcosted, for a Break Open/Backslide. But I suppose... ooh, it can sit on the table, threatening to turn up any of your morphs even when you're tapped out? OK, that's pretty cool actually.
This looks like it's in the wrong deck? I'd've expected this to be on Harry's side, not the Death Eaters'.
It's a funny card, anyway, as it should be :)
Is it intentional that this double-counts the discard cards? I guess it must be. It looks like the kind of card I wouldn't want to cast even so. A lot worse than Spring of Eternal Peace. It's like Feudkiller's Verdict that comes with One with Nothing rather than a 5/5.
I might have expected this to be "any number of target noncreature cards" rather than "all"? Restocking your favourite cards in Gaea's Blessing/Stream of Consciousness style seems more fun than getting a nonselective Reminisce.
I love this design. They reliably give you unpredictable cool stuff; very flavourful :) Reminds me of Surreal Memoir, which is the centrepiece of a creatureless deck I'm quite fond of. Charmbreaker Devils too, in fact, though I guess that post-dates this set's construction.