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Recent updates to Multiverse Design Challenge: (Generated at 2025-05-16 12:07:02)
Oh, interesting idea.
Baseline import: Runeclaw Bear
Created monster: Bearplasm
For Challenge # 131, a monstrous horror based on an upgrade to Runeclaw Bear.
Welcome to day one of design for the new Magic set: Mungo Mungo! Mungo Mungo is a plane created by the planeswalker Korven Avtylavyo to be his personal hunting grounds. All manner of exotic animals were imported from other planes to populate Mungo Mungo, but over time Korven grew bored. For a hunter of his caliber, Mungo Mungo needed something far more dangerous than Wurms and Dragons. It would need true monsters, powerful enough to challenge a planeswalker. And if those monsters did not already exist, then Korven would need to find a way to make them...
That's all that's been decided upon so far. The story of Mungo Mungo is still being hashed out. For right now, though, the lead designer just wants two cards from each designer. One, a creature that was imported to Mungo Mungo, and two, the monster that was created using that animal as a baseline.
Oh, and feel free to work outside the box if you want. Not all of these creatures need to be Creatures. And if you want to make other cards instead of the two creature challenge for Mungo Mungo, knock yourself out.
Rolling Random gave me Goldmeadow Stalwart. I found it pretty hard to imagine an interesting alternate direction to evolve that. Then Chaoslace... I could have made a "red matters" cycle, but Chaoslace is so very bad, it'd feel bad to create a modern-power-level cycle of four other cards. Next card is Tuskguard Captain, but I don't think that's actually in a 5-card cycle - there are two or three white, one green, and one black.
Finally (after many intervening cards that aren't in cycles) I got Sapphire Leech. Um. Well, it is at least still above the curve, unlike some of its cycle (Jade Leech looks rather sad next to Deadbridge Goliath). What other directions can you take that in? Manipulating blue spell costs in various ways? 2/2 fliers with drawbacks?
New Benalia is the next one. Originally in a cycle of uncommon lands from Future Sight with "old mechanics" (Tolaria West, Dakmor Salvage, Keldon Megaliths, Llanowar Reborn), I could repurpose it as the white element in a cycle of scry-1 permanents. These are all pretty simple so I'm not bothering to create the cards for them...
, Enchantment. At the beginning of your upkeep, scry 1.
, Creature - Elf Shaman, 2/2. When ~ ETBs, scry 1.
, Creature - Lizard, 2/1. Whenever ~ attacks, scry 1.
, Creature - Zombie, 2/2. When ~ dies, scry 1.
: Add 
to your mana pool.
Land, When ~ ETBs, scry 1.
Two of these are reprints, and one is nearly so. Two of those are originally uncommons, but with scry at evergreen I think these could probably all be common now.
And now I'm giving up on rolling random and starting to look at sets to choose a card in a 5-card cycle instead.
Ooh. Both halves of the Skeet Shooting archetype on one card. That has been done once or twice before - Predator, Flagship comes to mind. I'm not sure if it counts as too easy, solving Johnny's puzzles for him. But the high activation costs here are sensible; it'd make sense to put this in a deck with Femeref Archers and Wind Dancer so you can combo it with either half, without needing to wait for 8 mana.
I got Torchling, so tried to start a different morphling cycle. I tried to go with "torch-" not "-ling" this time. So far I had Torch-snuffer :)
See Challenge # 130.
I prefer putting them on bottom. If you're mana screwed, at the very least you should still be able to attack.
Hm? No, till is mandatory (as written here), and skips past any lands.
"I'd hate for that to be the thing that screws you over."
What do you mean? I think the problem with countryside crusher is it's mandatory, so you can be cut off from lands for the whole game. I agree that should be a "just one card ever" sort of thing. But this isn't mandatory?
You mean, if you put the nonlands back but they're useless? That's disappointing, but I think it will be fairly rare if the cards treat till as a bonus, not a primary scry mechanic. Or that people will choose to mill lands they need? Surely it's obvious not to do that?
You could make it a stronger scry effect "put any number of lands into your graveyard and any number of spells on the bottom", but then it's better than scry, you can't have many "till 3" cards any more.
Reminds me of Information Dealer, but less board-state-dependent. More potent, of course, because you can cycle past cards that block you. 4 mana seems a good cost here; it might even need to be a little higher.
I'm not sure about a 3/3 for
, but that's a minor detail.
I followed Alex's idea of a random card and my first was Soaring Seacliff. Hm, like jmg I didn't want another cycle of lands, but I followed the same out and made a different sort of cycle.
Duck Hunter, Touch the Heavens, Dragonise, Night of the Vampire, a cycle of "flying UEOT" cards.
I love the flavour of duck hunter :)
Of course, we wouldn't usually have a cycle of cards which fulfil different roles, even quite loose cycles aren't usually five different card types, they're usually "some blue spell" not "some card for a blue deck".
I also should have made one a colour-aligned artifact so the land wasn't the only colourless card, but I couldn't think of a good effect.
Actually, I really like your parenthetical suggestion. It may be kind of a crazy combo with cards like Jeweled Spirit(?!)... but that could be seen as a plus.
As for putting the cards back... I'd hate for that to be the thing that screws you over. There's probably a reason why there's only been one Countryside Crusher. It's not that putting the card back on top of the library isn't a good mechanic, it just probably can't fit on 20 cards in the same set. But it's quite possible that my version can't either. Humpf.
Yeah, very cute.
Interesting idea.
How about till "Look at the top three cards of your library. Put any number of lands from them into your graveyard and the rest back in any order"? That was it has an immediate purpose. And true, it's never a drawback, but I don't think the drawback aspect of till-1 is a great idea anyway, I think it won't come up enough to change costings much, but will feel arbitrary if it does cause you to lose.
(And you could always add "This gets +1/+1 UEOT whenever a land is put into your graveyard" to individual cards.)
I wanted to do something different, so I tried Alex's idea of getting a random cycle and ended up with Terravore. Ufda.
My first response was to keep rolling, since I wasn't interested in making yet another cycle of Llurgoyfs. But then I realized that I could pivot this cycle around "Creatures that care about the number of lands in your graveyard" and thought that might make for an interesting set. So I cooked up Villein Hordist, Consumate Digger, Trifle Collector And Vashdu Survivilist.
See Challenge # 130.
If we're going to have a set with a theme that builds off of lands being in the graveyard, then we probably need a keyword mechanic that plays into this. I made till because it seemed like the simplest way to fill the graveyard with lands without requiring sacrifice or discard. Unfortunately, the reminder text runs long. I'm assuming this would do well in early design, but would eventually be replaced by a better idea later on as the set develops.
Oh, and I wouldn't put attack or defend triggers on common till creatures. Not NWO. Probably just "Till 1", and only activates at beginning of combat or upkeep. Since this is a rare, though, we can get more dramatic.
See Challenge # 130. This card doesn't feed into the other cards in the cycle. It just seemed like a cute flavor tweak for the cycle's world, exiling the land to get at the creatures buried beneath.
See Challenge # 130. Till could be in all five colors, but it might be cut down to just three colors. If I had to choose, I would probably go with W/G/R as the colors for till for flavor reasons (which is kind of funny, considering that blue and black are the colors that add cards to graveyards. But till is always used on yourself... I'm not sure. The idea of dumping your lands in your own graveyard just feels RGW to me.)
Till benefits, however, from manipulating the library so there's a land on top when you till. So I made this card that both feeds off of and feeds into tillers. I also kept the activation relatively high. It would be annoying if an opponent used this every turn...
See Challenge # 130. Nothing too special here. Just supporting the themes on the other cards.
It could be made rare. Personally, I think COP:Red could have been a rare from the start. I got a thing against stacking 5 hate cards in the rare slots... but maybe we can assume there's a heavy color changing theme in the set?
:D This is awesome in every way except the rarity, unfortunately.
I kind of gave in when I chose this for decagon. regular polyhedra was what I was thinking too... but finding a red one that looked liked fantasy art was too much of a challenge.
I assume any artist tasked with this card would have returned something completely different anyway. This is red we're talking about... it would probably be very irregular...