Multiverse Design Challenge: Recent Activity
| Multiverse Design Challenge: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| All challenges | Upcoming Challenges | Make a new design challenge! | All challenges (text) |
Recent updates to Multiverse Design Challenge: (Generated at 2025-05-20 17:10:16)
That, and Magus of the Moon, which is sometimes a better card, and sometimes not. This deck, not.
Oh - Jack's comment makes me realise something, which is that this card provides Boney's only option for surprise countermagic. Counter Ball normally needs sorcery-speed investment as a warning to the opponent that some countering might happen. This card allows you to dump it in the bin at instant speed.
Blood Moon was reprinted in Core Sets a couple of times as a deliberate hoser option. And it does tend to hose tournament manabases to an excessive extent; most tournament decks will play 0 basic lands if they can get away with it.
It can, but it doesn't produce colourless so sideboard at best unless you're black. Preferably splash black, as it filters nicely.
I mean, ok, lots of these cards are so strong they could probably go in lots of different broken decks, and I want to avoid saying "I know how to beat boney: play boney!" :) But this one makes sense because as a land it can go in any deck easily.
Come to think of it, this is also anti woozle tech: being able to rename stuff in response to a "all things with the same name as" spell is a good threat against it.
Yeah, it definitely shores up a lot of stuff: having a mana-free non-spell way to get creatures on the board will easily win out in a long stall. And it works very well with mass-bounce and the time walk spell: anything you can't afford to cast immedaitely you can trade in for a creature to make a big swing in the extra turn.
Yeah, I thought this would massively help the consistency, (which is powerful in any deck), but not help this one specifically.
Come to think of it, it's a source of card advantage with Counter Ball -- discard the ball, return a creature, then use the counter ball from the graveyard.
Oh, it's evil and awesome - but not particularly in this deck; which isn't drawing a tonne of cards or recursing its own cards much.
Blood moon is from the dark! You don't get very much older than that. Certainly invasion isn't. And blood moon, even in the presence of the true dual lands, isn't always that great.
Yes, that's certainly a possibility. I also wanted some way to handle board sweeping and control decks in general. It's not really an important feature... just another brick in the wall.
Actually, the lack of EOT was an accident. This was just showing how even innocent cards can become aggregant when matched up with evil decks. Since I accidently made it permanent, though, I guess it stays permanent. Wizards has done that before on at least one card that they owned up to and errated after the fact (Oboro Envoy). I wouldn't be surprised if they made the error again, and decided it was better to let it just sit like that on the card, because the effect itself wasn't broken.
Funny thing is, while this card doesn't specifically add anything to the deck besides staying power, I consider this to be the most unrealistic of the cards in boney. It's just too good... I know Tortured Existence used to be a common, but it seems too comborific for today's standards. A lot of these cards are "reasonable, if you add a
to them." This might still be unreasonable, even if you added a 
to both activation costs. Ah, well. It flies under the radar in this challenge, I suppose.
Thank you Vitenka, by the way, of cleaning up my mess and linking all this to Challenge 037. It's appreciated.
Blood Moon is an excellent suggestion. Boney could move away from all the duals, but it would be very hard to cast the two
creatures, it would also cut into its specialty non-basic lands. Tsabo's Web also occurred to me, being an old answer to the same problem. The only real problem, as I can see, with these two cards is that if there are that many specialty non-basic lands in Boney, then there were probably a lot printed in Standard. You kind of hose a lot of strategies with Blood Moon. Still, Wizards did something similar when they banned the artifact lands, punishing every deck that used them, broken or not. Sometimes it's the right call.
The new "Elf" in Innistrad comes to mind as well. It isn't important, though. I realized how awesome having the Sunsinger in the same block as this madness was, more than I noticed how good the Sunsinger was at tackling boney. It isn't. It is nice to have kicking around, though, messing up boney's strategies. I must admit, though, that I forgot that it would be boosting your opponent's creatures. That's a bugger.
Gideon's Lawkeeper may be a better creature comparison, since that's less likely to block, and is 1 cheaper but has summonning sickness. And this can't block but isn't vulnerable to creature removal.
So, um, I guess "Roughly in line with the top end of recent creature tappers. Probably too annoying for printing it to be a good idea" :)
I'm not convinced by Cylian Sunsinger. It means that if the Woozle's out, you have Overrun on a stick, sure... without trample, at the cost of 3 mana in fiddly colours, and to all your opponent's creatures too. And it's massively hosed by Epitaph Scriber and Fen of Lies. "In response to the Sunsinger ability, change its name, so that all creatures with the name Abu Ja'far get +3/+3." I mean, okay, a Stonewood Invoker still isn't awful, but the mana is very fiddly.
Also that tricolour activated ability makes me definitely doubt that the Sunsinger is Core Set-appropriate. Activations like that feel like they've only been in the middle sets of gold blocks like Planeshift and Conflux.
As for your ideal sequence of t1 elf, t2 Sunsinger+elf, t3 removal+activate... I don't know what kind of "Elves" you're hoping to run that cost 1 mana and can let you spend
plus cast a removal spell that'll take out a Woozle on turn 3 while still attacking with them. One can be Noble Hierarch, sortof, but then you don't get the extra +3/+3...
Also great with Echoing Decay or Echoing Truth even with no Woozles in sight. The same applies to Fen of Lies, and that one you can store up several turns in a row. The boney deck is a nice web of evil synergies.
Quite a step up on Scepter of Dominance. Oh, except that can hit any permanent... A reasonable step up on Trip Noose, then. Or alternatively, a noncreature version of Master Decoy / Rathi Trapper. Either way, it's going to get just as irritating as an Icy Manipulator and come down a lot sooner. "Mean" is right.
Going through adding Challenge37 marks to all the cards, this deck is more subtle than it looks. And it looks pretty darn subtle already. Very fun challenge.
Part of Challenge # 037 I'm not sure how this helps the deck, honestly. You don't have a huge number of ways to return creatures to hand...
Oh, as part of the All the World finisher? Clear the board (with, like, the whole rest of the deck), draw back your graveyard with that, feed them all into this, take your extra turn and swarm in for the win.
Part of Challenge # 037 Woozle evasion, can also function as a replacement woozle if yours is stuck in traffic. Is the lack of UEOT deliberate? Probably, since it's a fairly weak effect under normal conditions. I have NO clue how the layering works though. "I changed it with this, the woozle changes it, I change it with this again... head explodey"
I'm not really sure how much this adds. I guess it's part of the staying power; and as long as you leave at least one counterpot in your graveyard you're ok.
Part of Challenge # 037
Part of Challenge # 037 Interesting bombo with All the World though. You'd really like to use that to return it to get extra uses, but doing that it's not available to exile as a threat any more.
Part of Challenge # 037 Tapstick of doom. Mean.
Part of Challenge # 037 Oh! Heh, I missed this in my reading the deck a second time; treating it as just another way to cheaply target stuff. (Which it is, but.) It's an evil woozle evader!
Part of Challenge # 037 This is seriously evil as a means of maintaining tempo. Your opponent just has to keep a couple of land untapped once this hits the table.
Hah; now I have another elegant solution.
Blood Moon. Boney Control has no basic land ;)
Ok, assuming the existence of that and the opponent is smart enough to run swamp and island instead of duals, the basic theory is that most of the problem is the opponent being able to avoid all his stuff getting hit too - and it's the lands doing this. Blood moon largely fixes the woozle, by making it symmetric and relying on red being better aggro. Cowardice is still a problem, but he's only running one of that, and anyway, I can play RW or RG and have some enchantment removal if it's only the one card I'm worried about. Some Shatter to take care of the tapstick and or the counterpot and bobs your uncle. Flavour with goblins and dragons to taste.
One card fix, and not tricolour evil either. (Though I still like Grip of Chaos as an answer to Cowardice.)