I don't really have many ideas here. Demons and horrors are both too common in black, unless we did something weird and had demons of all different sizes, or mixed all the creatures with demons.

I can see black having lycanthropes, or gorgons. It could also be the underworld of the main plane, with more intelligent undead.

Personally, I'd rather stay away from undead if possible, but if everyone else is a fan I'm not going to argue. They do seem perfectly otherwordly.

I think stay away from zombies and vampires and other things black always gets, but I could see undead if they're done differently (eg. werewolves are sometimes seen as undead and sometimes not, although if Innistrad is doing horror we may want to avoid werewolves right on top of it). But yes, I like exploring other things first / as well. I'm curious what gorgons would be like.

Gotta admit: Not a big fan of undead as theme. When Alara came out, Wizards showcased 4 new exciting worlds, and one world filled with zombies. I couldn't really see how Grixis was much different from Urborg... it never really hit with me on a flavor level.

I'm a fan of gorgons... in fact Magic 20XX plays with Gorgon/Thrull as a tribe. But, plain old gorgons may be to normal for a fantasy setting. Perhaps we could play with a world inspired by ancient greece, in which the gorgons over-populated and took over? Add a bunch of greek nominclature and feel for the mytholigy, without going so far in as to start pulling out names or minotaurs? We can also go house on Greek philosphy from that time period, and really ramp the black sounding philosophy. Concepts like individual liberty, and market driven capitalism...

I like the greek theme much more than undead.

I like your idea, jmgariepy. I feel that it only fits with Alex's conception of the story, though, and not with mine. Similarly, my concept of Mono Green fits mostly with my concept, and doesn't really jive with Alex's. My point is that I've made a mistake in starting these color discussions before the story is set. We need to decide which direction to take so that we can cater to it, rather than coming up with ideas and hoping they fit with the overall scheme.

I think that the greek theme could be a black mini-plane.

Personally I'm not a fan of too much undead either, although there are a lot of players who like it. (Just not in the group of us designing this set, it seems :) )

Greek mythology could be fun if we can make it consistently black enough.

I'm intrigued by the decadant greek black gorgon theme; it would be a nice change for black to be cultural and decadant rather than anarchic and decadent.

A list of possible creature types: Gorgon (most prominent), minotaur (I think we can make them work), harpy, lamia?, cerberus, siren (can these work in black?), cyclops (giants), and hydras.

There's a lot of creatures that we can make work, but I'm not sure if we want to be trying that hard. Players see Minotaurs as red, and Hydras as green. If we made those creatures black, people's reaction would be "Okay. They're taking all the greek monsters and making them black. That's the theme for black in this block." But, I don't think that should be the mechanic, or even the flavor for black in this set.

But Harpies seem fine. Lamias are a little odd, because they were a Greek monster that you could find in Africa... but they're still Greek, so that should work. Cyclops seems fine. And, despite what I said about Minotaurs and Hydras, I don't think sirens scream blue to most Magic players. I'm not sure about 'cereberuses'. Cerberuses kind of bug me, since I have a hard time thinking of Cerberus of being anything but the multi-headed guardian of Hell that he is. But, I could dig a race of hounds that have three heads, that aren't called 'Cerberus'.

Though, this list is rather interesting. It's odd how many Greek monsters are female... It makes me want to make the entire line-up of monsters as females, even the cyclopses. Maybe with male human slaves for the purpose of reproduction? That sounds like a pretty awesome style guide to me.

I do find this funny, though, that for all the good work that's been going on in Black, we have still yet to find the mechanic...

I was just going down a list of creatures and putting down ones that COULD work, not necessarily those I felt NEEDED to work. For minotaur and hydra, for example, we could probably just have one of each at a high rarity, if at all.
As for a mechanic... how about this?
Pederasty (Whenever a creature with power lower than this creature's ETBs, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature.)

Kidding, kidding. I don't really know. What are Greeks known for? Philosophy, logic, myth, storytelling, democracy, gladiators, mathematics, architecture. There's more, I know, but there's a start.
I think I'm most intrigued by gladiators and architecture. Architecture could be fun to try. We could use fortifications. Or, since I don't think every color should have keywords, what if there were creatures that made land tokens when they ETBs? Like a minotaur that comes with a maze, or something. These could be few in number, but maybe tie into a (bizarre) theme of black caring about lands.
If the gorgons are enslaving everything, maybe a lot of their slaves are gladiators. I'm sure there's a mechanic that can represent this, even if it's just the Cyclops Gladiator ability. Are we allowed to make Gladiator a creature type, and make those cards that should be that type be it retroactively?

If you haven't seen DrJones's custom set Orobis, you should take a look. It combined themes of ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, and MC Escher. So labyrinths, patterns, creatures attacking walking on the walls (via the mechanic "sidewalk", which may be the best custom mechanic I've encountered), scarabs, minotaurs, and so on.

Greeks are known for gladiators, but I'm not sure the Greek mythological creatures are known for gladiators. But it could work. It's certainly fine to issue a small number of creature type errata as part of a set's release, to support newly introduced creature types. (Though the difference between a gladiator and a warrior is pretty small.)

My favourite name for a multiheaded dog: "Mastiff of the great divide"

No other real thoughts I'm afraid - Greek myth seems big on heroes and gods, and fairly low on "Evil nasty thingy" - most of the monsters aren't very black. There's room for a black hydra, though.

Aren't gladiators Roman? And fight works with the flavor, but not with black. Flavorfuly, I also can't see a giant building built in a swamp. In fact, other than gorgons, most stuff that screams "Greek" to me also screams white, red or blue. Wait-what if we focus on the underworld?

You're right, fight doesn't work with black, and you're probably also right that gladiators are more Roman... oops.
I'm fine with Black having a sort of underworld vibe, though we did say we wanted to stay away from that since it's so typical.
We also don't need to have black have a straight-up Greek-Roman feel. That culture is probably deep enough to be explored in its own set. We can just have some creative influences, like the creature types, to help drive our idea. Personally, I like the idea of the Gorgons holding the other creatures of the plane in thrall (though I'd rather not have humans anywhere but Aer). Does anyone else think that driving other creatures to make monuments to you is pretty black? Especially if you drive them to death?

I must have missed the part on the underworld. Also, I really like that idea. Maybe this:
Gorgon Slavedriver
Creature-Gorgon
Sacrifice a creature, :Add BB to your mana pool.
2/2

I only mean we wanted to stay away from the idea of black being related to undead. Those themes just run really close together in my head.
I like the slavedriver quite a bit, actually. We could have something like this, too:
Apthora Enslaver
Creature- Gorgon
At the beginning of your upkeep, gain control of target creature you don't control.
At the beginning of your end step, sacrifice a creature. Creatures you control but don't own get -1/-1.
3/3
Also, a reprint of Enslave would be quite nice.

An underworld theme may run a little counter to red, if we keep the concept of Devils running around in caves. But, I don't think that is clearly established anyways, and can be bumped off of red in favor of some sort of snow devils.

I don't think the 'Greek architecture in a swamp' is too impractical. Especially, if we include in the backstory that this continent wasn't always run by gorgons, but was an enlightened human settlement. Once the Gorgons took over, though, they had no respect for the land, demolished a number of aqueducts, let dams go into disrepair, and what was once well structured Floodplain, has devolved into a swamp that is sucking all the beautiful architecture into it. The gorgons probably don't see this as a problem, either. Better to spend money on yourself, and let nature do what nature will do.

I like the slavery theme, but we need to be careful not to walk on green's turf. Right now, green is turning other creatures into plants, then doing things with them. I think "and then gain control of them" will probably appear on only one card at this point, so there probably isn't a mechanical overlap.

Oh, also, can we make thes Gorgon Slavedriver up there say "Sacrifice a Human" instead of "Sacrifice a creature"? That solves two goals at the same time. It helps give black its linear mechanic, and helps establish black's identity as terrible people. Nobody complains when you do terrible things to a goblins or thrulls, but the idea of monsters treating humans like this... it feels very evil to me.

Also also: I like the idea of the Gladiator subtype, but it's probably true. While the Greeks had gladiators, it's the Romans that were well known for them. That's a shame, really.

I agree with Link that I'd rather not have humans anywhere but Aer. So making the slavedriver sacrifice a human is a bit dubious, because in their normal existence in their monoblack faction, they won't have any humans around.

I do like the idea of Gorgons enslaving other races, though. Perhaps the slaves are ratmen, minotaurs, imps, that kind of thing. Driving them to build monuments is a nice touch.

Oooh, yeah. I really like the theme in red at the moment with the devils and the yetis... can we not change that? I think black is doing find without adding a true underworld vibe. I mean, it can feel dark and evil without that.

I was inspired during my boring classes today, and I'll shortly be posting several ideas shortly, with themes involving slavery and architecture.

No humans. No problem. But I still think calling out one creature type to be called a peon, then constantly and cruelly grinding that creature under the heel of your boot makes a good linear mechanic, which can some time be striking, and maybe a little funny.

Thrulls and Homonoculuses are the traditional creatures that do this, but obviously don't work in Gorgon-land. In my mind, the nobler the creature once was, the better the contrast. Hmm... unfortunately "Noble Greek Monster" is not a very common phrase. Dryads maybe? Those would be some really odd black dryads. Satyrs would be my next choice. Really, satyrs should probably be red, what with the wanting sex all the time and what not. But I think we could make snivelling black oppressed satyrs that are a touch sympathetic and treated terribly by Gorgon overladies.

We're still short a real mechanic. Maybe we can make a sacrifice theme work: there's been done a lot, but maybe there's room for more.

I don't think we specifically need a "sacrifice an X"; that's been done a lot. If we simply have "sacrifice a creature" cards and "put two X tokens into play" I think people will get the idea.

It doesn't fit the theme entirely but how about sacrifices that care about the size of the creature for a mechanic? Then there's some benefit to sacrificing your centaurs and behemoths as well as your 0/1 thrulls?

Edit: Or maybe to play up the "slavery" theme have creatures that use other creatures as a cost in various ways: both sacrifice, return to hand, tap, untap, etc.

Crud. I'm certain I did my take on black. In fact I know that we argued about a lot of cards, but for some reason a lot of that is missing in Black Commons Submissions. I made a post there to address that.

I agree that sacrifice has been overdone, and, to a lesser extent, so hasn't 'when a creature goes to the graveyard'. It makes sense for that to be a part of the flavor of what we're doing, but not 'the' major mechanic. I like the flavor of subjugation over extermination... the fact that the Gorgons have no intent of sacrificing valuable slaves would help to separate us from other sets. We'll probably need to work backwards and rehit this colors commons after we make the uncommons.

There's a lot of talk over Evoke - is there any way we could make the black mechanic Evoke? I'd like for some of the creatues I made in ~Stop~ to actually be used...

­Ender of Days "Shrivel"

Can you explain how that might apply flavorfully to the current black mix?
...Actually, having a mechanic where creatures evoked other creatures would be amazing slave flavor.

I tried out the "evoking other creatures" mechanic on Gorgon Slaver, but it's very wordy. If there is a cleaner implementation of it, I think it would be very nice. However, I was contemplating the word "chain," and I came up with two mechanics. The first one I don't like, but I figured I'd toss it out there anyway.

Chain (As you cast this spell, you may cast another creature spell with converted mana cost less than this spell. If you do, that spell costs less to cast.} (See Gorgon Hierarch.)

As you can see, it has too much potential to be broken, and it doesn't quite fit the slave flavor other than that creatures are dragging other creatures with them.
My second thought came from actually chaining creatures to each other.

Chain (You may have this creature enter the battlefield chained to target creature. If you do, that creature gets +1/+1. When that creature dies, sacrifice this creature.) (See Chained Satyr.)

All of the mechanics that I think of have a lot of words, which makes me sad. I wish I could come up with a good way to convey a sense of bondage and slavery.

Really needs a unifying theme at least, if not a mechanic.

Currently it seems to be "Not small, but not huge either, creatures. Oh and fiddly removal, but every colour gets that in this set."

Well, the point was to throw a lot of things against the wall, and have people test black and see what they liked and didn't like. So far, however, it seems that no one has tested Mono-Black. Is that right? I think the fortifications scared off Alex/Jack's group, and I've been fooling around with multi-color.

Last week we didn't try fortifications at all. This time I made a black+fort deck to try out, although we only played a couple of games.

V: was there anything that you thought did work well? There were some cards I was fairly happy with, but I can't really decide.

I wanted to try fortifications in the mono decks, but we didn't have time to add them before the games started. I think several monocolour decks will like a fort or two, hopefully different ones.

Alright. We haven't seen any activity on this thread for 11 days, so I assume it's time to move on to Uncommon design while we work out the kinks in our commons. Before we do that, though, we have to settle what we want our Black to look like.

­

I wish I had more time to think about this. What you say sounds about right.

A few pieces of speculation:

• I think the chain variants we had were nice mechanics, but probably just on the wrong cards
• However, I'm not sure we can sustain the chain mechanic = chain gang feel.

• So I think we can take design inspiration from chain, but may well end up just using the mechanic on a couple of cards but not giving it an ability word

• Sacrificing stuff for profit is fun, I think we can use that. We want a balance between sacrifice outlets and sacrifice-me creatures, with a bit of token generation as well.

• I'm not sure if we should have explicit "when you sacrifice" stuff (it works well on Pressed Centaur Clan) or "when this dies" effects that work better when you can control when they happen (which is more general). I think we want specific sacrifice-me stuff because that's not been done recently and plays well in our theme, but we want to make sure it's not too parastic. I think PCC is about right -- I was occasionally disappointed I didn't get the bonus when it died, but it would obviously be way too good if I did. We could have splashy rare creatures ("Enslaved demigod") that do something spectacular when they're sacrificed.

• What I like about the fortifications flavour is black building up to a giant fortification over the course of the game. But that's hard to capture in mechanics.

• The one game I played, the problem I had was I had too many fortifications and none of them dug be out of the hole that "my oppo has a bear or hill giant and I don't". I think that's natural (like equipment, fortifications naturally have a slightly higher set-up cost), but something to watch. And somehow to do that without making all the fortifications get snapped up by other colour drafters.

• We've a bunch of different ways black can interact with fortifications, but we need to focus on something, but I'm not sure what.

Agree with most of this. "When you sacrifice" doesn't bother me as much, since this mono set is the only time I'd advertise very linear mechanics, so it seems fine to me here. I totally see, though, why it would sit wrong with many people. Keeping a mix sounds sound.

"Black interacting with Forts": Yeah. We could always make the fortifications feel more black, but it's probably a bad plan. We may want to work with the natural strategy for fortifications that's been building. A lot of times, I've noticed that players find it more useful to pile all their fortifications on one land. Black is the color of parasitism and self-centeredness. We could reward players for the amount of fortifications they have on one land with a number of black cards... in other words, black wouldn't really have a mechanical tie to fortifications in this model... it just has a tie to using your stuff in a selfish manner, and the bonus stems from that. It would be similar in nature to the "demons get a bonus when they are alone" mechanic that pops up, most recently in Avacyn. Avacyn could have a number of mechanics that deal with the number of creatures in play... that's not new design space... it just happens to be dealing with the number of creatures black is dealing with right now. Black doesn't have a mechanical tie to creatures... it's just giving you a bonus in how you use them.

We didn't try anything with gorgons. Black gets tap effects, that might be a good common implementation of "turned to stone".

For sac - I'd like to suggest a creature that counts as multiple when sacrificed. Useful for those "As an additional cost, sacrifice X creatures..." type effects.

"She turned me to stone!" (Creature untaps. Everyone looks at it.) "...I got better..."

ROFL. But actually, temporary turn to stone would make a lot of flavour sense.

I like that "counts as multiple sacrifice" business. We have two fort wishes coming out of black, and two chain non-creature spells coming out as well. If someone makes the cards, I'll bump the offenders and put them in. If it takes some time, I'll make the cards myself. Not sure what we want for the two sorceries, though. It's, in theory, one expensive common creature kill, and one Mind Rot variation.

What about Mind Bomb? It gives you a way to sacrifice a creature if you need to and acts as a scalable discard spell.

I realized this comment was more appropriate on Mindbomb's comments, so I's deleted it.

I went to the drawing board on Vitenka's "counts as two sacrifices" idea, and drew a blank. It sounds great in theory, but I have no idea how you'd use the rules to deal with that. Most times, like on Nantuko Husk, you sacrifice one at a time, making it even trickier to work there. I'd talk about -1/-1 counters, but that's where (((Pressed Centaur Gang))) came from, and it ended up where it is because we're trying to avoid counters where they aren't needed. Hmmm..