Otaria Forever: Comments

need to slot a fortification tutor into the white commons somewhere

playtest feedback:

• process hits the mark on flavour, but essence counters feel bolted-on and add a level of complexity and parasitism that detracts from the cards. starting to feel like the set has outgrown its original focus on counters, but that's hardly a bad thing
• i didnt make all the ETB/death trigger guys in BU only trigger on death, they were insanely OP
• treefolk thallids were way too strong, and having a bunch of plants on the field is actually really boring. but i do think that they flavour of having these wellsprings of life came off
• symbiotic triggers rarely happened
• colourless wasn't fast enough, relies a lot on hitting nullify triggers/borderlands
• white didn't get picked at all. no gamewinners, colonise was too parasitic & didn't have any real payoffs
• dull hulk was OP, will likely reduce P/T

new set title, i'm not really drawing on anything outside otaria save for benalia so might as well have the name reflect that. i prefer this one anyway, feels a bit sadder.

it'd be nice if white had some way for rewarding players who tap creatures but don't attack with them

it'd also be nice if white had blessing-type activated abilities on some cards. maybe i should replace wirewood relic with some sort of springleaf drum variant and go full born of the gods?

feedback from chat session

• BRC look a lot stronger than GWU, killing things works a lot better than things that take a while to realise their value
• consider counters instead of face down lands
• UG self-bounce could let GU protect against removal a bit, as well as improve forestfall and process synergies

What can GWU do to protect themselves?

• hexproof, being a big dude, regeneration, return from gyard to hand
• protection, prevention, redirection, indestructible, flickering
• self bounce, counter, flicker?, hexproof

­Lifespring Colossus and (((Soul of the Edge))) are very similar atm, not sure if i like or dislike this

removed all the mythics from the skeleton

this set won't get played enough to fluff around with rarer-than-rares, and i don't mind the throwback

changed Savage to Bloodshed

feels like a more linear depiction of what the mechanic is about, which is good because it's not simple

Just realized process should be sorcery speed or you could activate it several times before the creature loses its abilities.

yeah this is a fair point, but i want it to be available on opponents turns as well. guess i need a once per turn rider, the reminder text blob slowly grows

playtest preview pack: http://imgur.com/a/GJunR

set is locked until after testing

i made some edits in the MSE set that aren't reflected in this one, so i'll be making those

also i need to make some balance tweaks in light of saturday's test. chiefly:

• less cheap discard
• less cheap nullify
• less menace
• less haste
• harder saproling generation

/u/morlor (would be cool if this worked here) drafted the ecocide aggro deck uncontested and it was terrifying. nullify should probably only come in on spells at 3/4 CMC or higher, similar to what WotC did with morph in Khans. super-unfun having a land turned face down t2 when your opponent goes first

thinking about nullify

originally, i liked it because it was something that can help the colourless deck both offensively and as a way to develop your own mana base. but using it offensively is starting to seem really unpleasant, and ecocide makes using it for development unnecessary if you're in either or

getting rid of nullify would make it more difficult for to combine with , but stop unfun play for opponents

making nullify user-only would solve the latter without making the former problematic, but it makes the mechanic less interactive and decision-oriented

modelled as a user-only compulsory mechanic, nullify would place users in the position of being forced to turn some lands face down. this would potentially cause issues with ecocide castings later on, and therefore might require planning around spell sequencing

i can see a world where this is a good thing and a bad thing. which is more right?

the answer for now is to try it as-is at 3 CMC or higher and see if that makes it less oppressive enough and what it does to 's ability to play