Soradyne Laboratories v1.2: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Soradyne Laboratories v1.2: (Generated at 2025-08-18 12:09:51)
Goddammit. After ALL OF THIS, Houlding’s initial resubmission is probably the most effective card in a limited environment. I dislike having two static abilities and one activated (like teeth scraping on a chalkboard), but they describe an effective outdoorsman better than any other combination of standard green abilities.
I love the Protection from (animal type) concept though, and I could even see it being a pretty standard ability for green commons in the long run — it’s not nearly as deep an ability as Protection from a color, and makes for a nice, narrow "utility" creature. You know, like Midnight Duelist. This just isn’t the right time or place for it; we’ve already got Viper Wrangler who has Protection from Snakes, and that one is almost purely about flavor, since there are very few opportunities for snakes in SOR. Protection from Beasts would be great on a Grizzly Adams-type dude, but there just aren’t enough Beasts here to matter either.
Honestly? Thirty words need to make me laugh loudly, or cackle in glee, or boggle my opponent, or.. well, do SOMETHING of note in the game. Annoying interaction (reach over and pick a card) isn't worth it; in my opinion this card would just be better without evidence at all. The flavour text is great without the dilution.
(It's also pretty damn good - adding an almost certain 1 damage on death to an evasive 1-drop is just cruel)
I don't know what else to suggest for evidence. Clash is more red's thing (and that's too wordy, too)
Until I have a better freebie effect in red that reflects the concept of suspicion, yes, I do.
I'm not opposed to trying other tricks for red Evidence. We've bounced the idea around several times, and nothing has ever struck a better chord than this. Yet. Show me the right effect and I'm there.
Do you really think:
Evidence — When this card is put into your graveyard, target player reveals a card at random from their hand. If they reveal a non-land card, this card deals 1 damage to them.
Is worth 30 words?
I've also found the Visual Spoiler, and even te booster feature, to significantly distort what the actual volume of text comes out to on a printed card. Yes, a lot of my cards have more flavor text than they probably need, and that crams things up too, but in printing my mock cards, I found again and again that at the point size Real Live Magic Cards are printed at, my copy fits on all of them. The on-screen representation can't replicate the template, type, kerning, leading, ligatures and so on that make text fit so nicely in a printed page. No fault of Alex’s program; it’s just not necessary online.
Counterpoint!
I've read the "keep the copy short on commons" mantra in a number of different articles from a number of the R&D crew. I've also read that that's one that has a much stricter adherence in Core sets than in "Expert" sets.
Take, for example, Landfall. Very simple concept, takes 10 words all by itself just to set up what happens after the land hits the table. That's not including any other abilities that creature might have before the Landfall. Plenty of common creatures got that. Allies are even wordier; the least wordy common, Hada Freeblade has 21 words of text. Halimar Excavator is 38 words long.
Then we get to Soulbond, the Louie Anderson of Common-Safe Abilities (morbidly obese and wants to be your BFF). This here monster, including reminder text, is FORTY WORDS LONG, and that's before we even get to what the Wonder Twins' form will be. Gleek just shat all over the controls of Wonder Woman's invisible jet.
There's a common factor with all of these tubbies though: they all happen enough throughout the set that the volume of text effectively melts away as shorthand once you've seen two or three of them. Landfall? Oh, yeah, play a land and it does something. Allies? They do everything the other allies do, like Sliver hemorrhoids. Soulbond? Buddy system.
I believe Evidence is like that, and possibly moreso. They all start the same way—“it goes in the bin and something happens”—and within colors they all end the same way as well—“the white one always gains life.” Or, in a big creepy bass, It puts the lotion in the basket, And then it gets the hose.
If there's anyplace that the Evidence cards truly overindulge, it's when I put flavor text on them as well. I don't feel bad about that either though; they help set up the premise for the value of information in Debronia.
Just putting this note here because it's a clear offender: a quick scan of your visual spoiler suggests that your average word count is crazy high, with Evidence playing a big part in that. And you're even leaving out the "from anywhere" on every trigger.
There's no easy way to calculate word count, but I believe Forsythe has mentioned that they aim for an average of 13-15 words per Common and begrudgingly made an exception for Scry's appearance in M11 which made an average of like 17. A lot of your cards are simple designs (like this) that are burdened with fricking paragraphs that say "sometimes you'll deal 1 damage to a dude".
I can see your point; in my head, what you're describing is why my suggestion made sense, as the controlling player is first forced to put the Reporter into the fray, and secondly, you can only take advantage of the token production by leaving it in battle. But you're right, players will undoubtedly be overeager to use their unblocked Reporter as a Feint and then feel betrayed when the trigger no longer functions.
Without playtesting of my own, I can't really gauge why this would be significantly more dangerous than the aforementioned Sphinx (or in the realm of Hero of Bladehold), though it is abundantly obvious that the removal in Soradyne is like 30 notches below that of Shards. Of course, Shards had some of the most hyper-efficient removal the game has over seen, with Path to Exile, Terminate, Maelstrom Pulse, and Agony Warp all seeing significant cross-format play.
Scratch that last note. The Crossblighted Outrider had gotten first strike.
Minor adjustment. Checking for a land in the top three was far too consistent.
Adjusted feint cost to minimize splash usage.
Had to switch from mountain walk to first strike. With other edits, red had no common first strikers, and blue already had an islandwalking 1/1 evidence dude.
In any other set, I'd say that was probably the right call, but we're dealing with Feint here.
Say I'm attacking with the Thoptigraph Reporter and you choose not to block it. I decide to Feint in a spell using the Reporter as the carrier for it. Now he's removed from combat when the spell is cast, but he's no longer attacking, so the ability doesn't trigger. Big bummer, especially after all that setup.
But the beauty of having the scouts anchored in white and green is that green has a bunch of feint cards, and feint cards encourage you to attack with anything you've got available. So really, if you've built your deck to work with this guy, he's probably attacking at least once. I faced him in testing, and at 4/4, he was worth attacking with every time.
So the concern that he'll sit back and watch while his flying monkeys do his bidding isn't really the part that worries me, it's that he gets so damn many of them so quickly.
I think you might be better off going back to two tokens but giving it an intervening if-clause:
"Whenever a spell is played during combat, if CARDNAME is attacking, put two 1/1 colorless Thopter artifact creature tokens with flying onto the battlefield."
That way you'd ensure that the controlling player can't just chill and let this guy and his thopters hang back and churn out more thopters. Plus it would make a little more sense in terms of flavor, as the scout/reporter is presumably a war-time journalist. It'd be a little more comparable to Sharding Sphinx in that regard as well.