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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-04-23 11:42:36)
Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-04-23 11:42:36)
About 3000 altogether? When each mono colour is about 4000, that seems pretty respectable to me. Consider that many sets will have about 50 in each colour and 0-10 gold cards total.
This is cool. I'm surprised there are so few gold cards honestly. Time to go all Alara Reborn up in here.
Awesome! I'm teaching at a band camp and have very little free time right now to contemplate this, but seeing the less popular options makes me want to design cards for them.
Yep, that's cards for which someone's selected "Multicolour" but the card cost doesn't indicate any other colours. Transguild Courier and variations on Intervention Pact would count, as would almost all the Design Challenges. I think there are also a couple of special-purpose (non-MtG) cardsets for which people have used the gold frame to indicate something, such as the Dominion card Army.
What does "Multicolour 307" at the top of the list indicate? There's obviously more than 307 gold/hybrid cards, so it can't be that. But I have a hard time believing we designed cards with no color in the casting cost, then selected 'multicolour' for the frame 307 times...
Oh, hold it... the Multiverse Challenges. That's close to 90 instances of that happening right there. Okay, maybe that isn't so weird after all...
I do find it interesting that just looking at monocolour cards, there are 150 more white than blue, 150 more blue than red, and 100 more red than green. You could attribute some of it to people filling in skeletons from the top down, but that wouldn't explain why there's more red than black.
Took me a while to get around to doing another data analysis run, but here's the results of Link's query: the number of cards created for each colour and colour combination.
Again, this is restricted to only cards that currently exist (haven't been deleted), because that data's easier for me to get at.
The most frequent colours, sorted by count:
All gold cards, sorted by count:
Smaller categories, sorted by category:
Tokens:
Miscellaneous and Weird:
(I think most of the Planes must have come out in the Misc/Unknown category, because there are actually 37 Planes on the site.)
i think it could work, but as always when dealing with tribal you should be aware of the poison principle. if you can make enough cards that work across multiple draft archetypes, i.e. they work for the creature type of your choice rather than creature type X, then you should be fine.
If N is positive, it gets boosted on your turn and shrunken on opponents' turns. If N is negative, vice versa. Multiple instances are cumulative If it has both positive and negative N, they may cancel out. Fits blue either way. damn crafty blue mages. Math teachers and students would love this.
Now what is acceptable for |N|? Most of the time it will be 1. And 2 or 3 is normal outer bound. Maybe a oddball rare or mythic may have N=10 or 20?
Looks good for red. Not sure about it in blue.
Combining the themes of chaos and tides, I present:
Drift N (This creature gets +N/+0 on your turn and -N/-0 on your opponents' turns.)
I really like Fallen Empires, and I like the idea of spinning off of it. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it being a whole block, though. Or, to be more precise, I think it would have made an awesome block back in 1995. But it seems like quite the challenge to retell the story, stretch it out and keep in relevant in 2015.
In my mind, this needs some sort of twist to keep the story fresh. If I was going to write a book about the novella of Fallen Empires, for example, I'd probably focus on one character who had to live through the ordeal. That way it didn't feel like we were retreading familiar ground. Or instead of zooming in, perhaps I'd zoom out and show that there were greater forces at work, with two hidden players fighting for dominance in the vacuum that Urza and Mishra left behind... maybe even spilling their fight into other early sets of the same time period, like Homelands and The Dark.
Those are just my opinions, though. I'm sure other people have other good ideas.
I am deeply and easily amused that I'm the only one at the same position on both lists XD
If I didn't have a tendency to go on hiatus for long periods, the gap might be larger.
Geez... you'd think the most prolific card creators would be fairly spread out near the top. But the difference between 1st and 3rd is only 43 cards? How weird...
Wow, Alex! I love statistics. Thank you for providing these, and thanks again for providing this site to us. It's one of my most cherished sites, even when I have long lapses in my contributions.
Could you show us how many cards have been created for each color and color combination, if that's not too hard?
I was doing some data analysis today, and I thought people might be interested in the results. I have a static backup of the whole database easily accessible for queries so I can get a lot more data on any other metric people would like.
But for starters, here are three statistics I thought were interesting:
Frequent Card Names
By far the most common card name is "", the empty string. Makes sense. After that come Forest, Mountain, Island, and then Plains and Swamp tied. Again, not especially surprising, though it's perhaps interesting that there are more basic Forests on Multiverse than any other basic land.
Anyway, then the most common card name after empty and basic land is: Giant Growth. Then comes a 4-way tie between "Elemental" (presumably mainly used on tokens), Naturalize and Pacifism (sensible staple common reprints), and... Ornithopter!
Most Prolific Card Creators
Here's a table of the users who've created the most cards, along with their number of cards created (only counting cards that still exist today):
Most Prolific Commenters
And here are the 15 top commenters, with their number of comments posted:
The site's been running for 3-and-a-half years now. Many thanks all for all the contributions: over 28000 cards right now, with over 35000 created ever; and over 48000 comments across the site's history!
It can.. but some things are harder to bolt on than others. A while new combat mechanic would likely be either parasitic or require a LOT of reworking old stuff.
Not impossible, but difficult.
Magic is generic and open-ended enough that it can incorporate any idea. It's just that combat is not as exciting and deep as it could be.
As for designing a new TCG, a couple of ideas have floated in my mind. Actually surprised nobody has taken up on those genres. One of them is really popular as computer video games; the other is really popular in pop culture. Now that you spurred me on, I might try to come up with some basic rules and even test cards.
PS I have created a 5-suit poker game for Android and it's really addictive. Now I'm trying to force that idea onto a CCG.
I'm sorry that I missed seeing this! Congratulations!
From what I remember of my group's experience of L5R, it composed of nothing but giant ground stalls. I wasn't a fan. Maybe it got better over time, or we were just unlucky with the cards we chose to run. Maybe not.
I agree, it's a problem. That said, I think most of the problem disappears if you add "This creature can attack" and "This creature can block" as keywords, instead of assume that all creatures can do it... and infrequently include both keywords on the same creature. That way, if there's a groundstall, it's mostly the players' fault for building their decks with tons of defenders. If you went with this route, fight would probably pop up more often as a third choice, and 'hide' would probably start to creep on cards that actively avoided fighting.
Games would naturally be faster, which is what you want? Depends, I suppose. The truth is, Magic was never intended to be a multi-player game. The whole groundstall thing has more to do with taking a two-player game and opening it up to more players. Somethings going to give.
Honestly, it sounds more like you should be interested in designing a new TCG than trying to force all of your ideas into Magic.
L5R sounds like the Taunt mechanic I made for Magic. it's a minigame like clash.
other games have defense, but it's only magic where players complain about them being unfun. netrunner, the corporation can only build defense, not offense. guardians, shadowfist, units attack and defend the terrains/sites back and forth without any feeling of facing an insurmountable stalled state.
there needs to be more avenues of attack, not just "i attack you. block?". then on the opposite side, any blocker can block any attacker (notwithstanding abilities). that's why attacking is disadvantaged in Magic and hence defensive cards are unpopular.
yes spatial division and placement of units would be the most obvious idea. where and how you place units, and how to break through or find holes in such an arrangement of units.
another idea is ordering and pairing up combatants. this adds more elements of surprise, bluffing and reading opponents mind. guardians, each player chooses a unit from the stack, and compare the units. do this until one or both stacks have run out. (it should be noted that in guardians, units are always face down except revealed this way in combat. after combat they face down again. hence surprise and bluff and good memory.)
these are some of the things i want to do with Terrains. creatures fight over control of these terrains. there are benefits to controlling and destroying terrains, but not crucial to overall path to victory. that is, you can still go for the throat and attack the player directly. just like you can ignore planeswalkers.
L5R system is: Players secretly opt to add cards from their hand, to add to their combat value. Once someone declines, combat happens - high value wins, loser (or both if a draw) dies; cards bid in are discarded. There's instant-equivalent too; of course. It's not really that complex.
Players bemoan a stalled state because, well, it's a stall. They can look at the state, see it's not worth them attacking; and the opponent can see the same thing. Done well, it leads to tension - done badly it leads to repeated turns of doing nothing.
So there's maybe room to improve that.
Though - It tends to stall most other games too - that's kinda the point of a defence - you want to stop your opponent :)
The system as it is is kinda in the middle, complexity-wise.
One thing players usually want is a way to target which creature gets attacked. But then, they also want to b able to decide which creatures jump in the way and block.
Maybe explicit rows of creatures - with range? So you have to break through, and nearby creatures can come to defence but if you can catch a attacker on their own, you can smack them down?
Something like, umm, wyvern, maybe? (Which borrowed heavily from Stratego)
well they are unique playstyles. something like Wildfire would be interesting.
standard's continually unbalanced metagame can be attributed to a myriad issues:
I don't think the prison and land destruction are really archetypes you should aim to include.
Hmm. There are a few big challenges that occur. One is that Wizards are always telling us that their development team can't fully predict the metagame in Standard - and that's with 90% of the set being designed for Limited. I think it'll be impossible to have every card viable in constructed at the same time. But it might be just about possible to design a set of cards all of which have the potential to be seen in constructed.
I also think it'd be preferable if every colour was able to participate in multiple archetypes; all of them might be asking too much.
I'd also hazard a guess that one of the key things to manage will be the quality of the dual lands. Some of the most control-dominated metagames I recall were powered by shocklands, or Reflecting Pool plus Vivid lands. I think if the manafixing is too good, that usually enables control more than other archetypes.