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Recent updates to Multiverse Design Challenge: (Generated at 2025-05-15 17:02:20)
Profane, of Sacred vs. Profane
Challenge # 092
I did a return to Kamigawa with Sacred vs. Profane
Blasphemous Ronin and Honden of Nature's Reach
Challenge # 092 Return to Kamigawa, Sacred vs. Profane.
Grimacing Vampire renamed from Face of Fear
Challenge # 091 This is a reprint of Face of Fear
I assume that since the card is black, updating fear to intimidate makes no difference. I don't think the rarity matters, does it? I don't see this card being an uncommon today.
Sygg, River King
DD: Giants vs Dodgers
return set: More Lorwyn
For "Dual Decks: Urza vs. Mishra," I give you Urza, Artificer Prodigy. You figure out the return set!
Oh, and tell me if you think he's broken.
You don't activate "as a sorcery," you activate "any time you could cast a sorcery." Only in reminder text (like equip) is the first phrase used, but that doesn't count.
If you can activate an ability as if it were a sorcery, it doesn't become a sorcery in the process. Muffle doesn't become an activated ability, the way it's worded. That said... I think it could if you tossed the words 'though it was' and 'as you cast this spell'... which would be pretty interesting, if you ask me.
Why can't you Muffle a Muffle? It's an activated ability, not a spell.
Funny how this spell could have had Convoke written on it instead, and the effect would be the same. I'm sure the commons would have a much higher cost, though, similar to Ramosian Rally.
Also funny that Muffle won't counter Muffle, even though this spell is cast 'as though it were an activated ability'.
No, I think it means "
, Tap untapped blue creature you control, discard ~: Counter target activated ability." It basically makes the spell uncounterable by Counterspells (but not Stifles) by tapping a creature.
So... this wants things like Wildheart Invoker or Flamewave Invoker on the table? Or an animated Door to Nothingness, I suppose :)
I don't know, either. I kind of assume the Bolas deck is 35%-40% artifact creatures. Enough to get a taste for the potential this card could be. The teaser cards are supposed to be a tease for what's coming down the line, after all, not the point behind the duel decks.
On the subject of combining Alara abilities: I agree that you don't want to just put two abilities on the same card and call it a day (especially because Unearth/Devour is just painful to look at.) But I'm sure there's space to use the five themes and fuse them together in a way that only got hinted at toward the end when multicolor and cascade took the spotlight.
Return to Alara is a tricky nut to crack, to be honest. There's a lot of questionable branching paths to take that set down. All of them seem like poor choices for one reason or another. Focusing on the abilities is complexity creep. Wedge is a bit predictable, but also comes with... um... flavor complexity creep. More of the same is more of the same. I'm pretty sure there's a radically different approach from these three, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
I remembered it when I looked at all my entries. But, yeah, it's a weird experience when you see a Magic card you designed, don't recognize it, think about it for a little while as if it belonged to someone else, then scan down to notice it was your idea all along. I should have known better with this design, too. It's got me written all over it. Including the part where I was supposed to design a secretly broken card, but probably ended up designing a balanced/underpowered card.
Alara Reborn did include a cycle of five two-colour commons showing the overlap in adjacent shards. Ethercaste Knight was the most memorable, because its flavour perfectly shows how (some elements on) Bant would react to having Esper merged with them. Sigiled Behemoth, Gorger Wurm and Etherium Abomination are the other natural overlaps, because in all four of those cases despite featuring two shards' key mechanics, the card only needs one keyword mechanic. The problem was the Jund-Grixis overlap; they didn't think having both devour and unearth was sensible on a common (or perhaps any card; it's a bit of a trap). Their solution was Kathari Bomber, a common with Unearth but which merely works very well with devour.
That said, jmg is right that Wizards never went as far as combining mechanics from opposite shards, like devour and exalted, or unearth plus Naya. They didn't even have any artifact creatures with power >=5 in Alara Reborn.
Aaaanyway. I very much approve of the idea of a big Archenemy box of 4 precons, though I imagine it would have to be pretty hefty in cost.
This particular card... I'm not sure how well it'd play in a Nicol Bolas duel deck, actually. It only gets to burn the opponent at all if it gets to devour artifact creatures? So you need to have drawn some artifact creatures (from your 100-card deck?), and have them disposable enough that you're happy to treat them like a Simic Initiate?
Aww! Challenge 52 was awesome. It was like "Set a puzzle in the form of a Magic card".
And IIRC design generally take the view that if they don't need a generalisation on a concept, they don't do it if the set is interesting enough already. It's easy to think "hey, I had a great idea, coloured artifacts", but design refused to do them for years...
Cascade and the all-multicolor were considered to make the overall set complex enough not to do combinations? Not to mention that the length of the reminder text for devour and unearth makes combination hard (and on that criterion alone, this card should be a rare). They did put out one combination, but with cascade: Ardent Plea.
I do love the concept of Archenemy built sorta like Commander or Planechase, though.
Added Viashino Smeltblaster. Man, that was process to get one card. Fun, none the less.