Golgari Unearth

Disclaimer: This article contains custom card designs. If you are a Wizards of the Coast employee you have my full permission to use any designs or ideas within this article without my explicit written consent or prior knowledge, or without giving me any sort of credit. I love this game and I want to help it in any way I can.

 

Picking up where we left off; What if the Golgari had Unearth?

I started a contest to find out, and now I'm writing an article.

Unearth is basically Flashback for creatures as we know, but it offers considerably more versatility because of how many more things you can do with creatures.
Attack, block, sacrifice, equip, trigger, et cetera.

Unearth was pretty groovy the first time around, but I'm convinced that there's a lot more design space for it, especially were it to be bled into a new color.

As far as limited was concerned, Unearth gave you access to varying sizes of Ball Lightning variants; one free beefy swing. Kind of dull design space, but a necessary utility since limited is very much a big deal.

Plus if nothing else, we get an Unearth hydra. Hydras are cool.

 



 Another way to make use of Unearth is to consider that all Unearth creatures have haste by default. To me this would indicate that Unearth creatures with tap abilties would be a neat trick, but we didn't see much of that the first time around, which I consider to be a shame because of all the neat things you can do with that sort of functionality.

We didn't see many tappers the first time around because a lot of the higher level unearthers were built around enter the battlefield or leave the battlefield triggers, and I really can't blame them. The design space is so obvious, and with Magic mechanics, you generally want to go for the obvious designs first, because otherwise you'll have insufferable know-it-alls like me asking the designers "Why didn't you do this totally obvious thing?!"

 



One thing I am surprised never happened was that we never got any cards that gave you a bonus for unearthing them, which is to say that when you Unearthed them you got something you didn't the first time around.

 And finally, we didn't see much of things that were built around Unearth. Oh sure, there were a tad more than usual discard outlets at lower rarities, but nothing that called out Unearth explicitly. I'm surprised we didn't see the token "uncommon red enchantment that deals damage when you do a thing" or just *something* that would incentivize players to build unearth theme decks.

 



Whatever happens, I know that Unearth has enough resonance and design space that they'll definitely bring it back in the future, and I can't wait to see how my predictions pan out then!

What do you think about the possibilities of Unearth or how it would have fared for the Golgari?
Let me know and feel free to join my contest!

I don't have any clever wordplay for this; Absorb designs

Disclaimer: This article contains custom card designs. If you are a Wizards of the Coast employee you have my full permission to use any designs or ideas within this article without my explicit written consent or prior knowledge, or without giving me any sort of credit. I love this game and I want to help it in any way I can.

 

Picking up where we left off yesterday; What if Azorius had absorb?

 

I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. I've tried coming up with some designs and it's harder than I would have guessed. I'll give you a hint why; absorb is a lot more powerful than it reads. Every creature with it is effectively X toughness higher than usual 90% of the time, and this leads to costing them higher than the default.

 

Another quality about Absorb that makes it tricky to design for is that there's just not a whole heck of a lot you can do with it design wise.

"Creatures you control can take more damage". Woo, really pushing the boundaries there.
Yes, should they bring back absorb, a lot of it will be as limited workhorses (see how most of the Detain cards were very simple, straight forward effects).
I think there's primarily three tricks to using absorb in unique ways.

1. Absorb triggers (ie; do BLAH for each damage prevented this way)

2. Big damn numbers. This creature is going for a Order of the Stars sort of thing.

3. Giving you, the player, absorb. This can run the gamut from utility effects,

cantrips tacked on to other effects,

Or whatever this thing is.

What do you think can be accomplished with absorb?
Please let me know!
Or better yet, participate in the contest I'm hosting!
http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/29532921/Return_to_Ravnica,_returning_mechanics,_part_3_-_Absorb

A Splice of Life

Disclaimer: This article contains custom card designs. If you are a Wizards of the Coast employee you have my full permission to use any designs or ideas within this article without my explicit written consent or prior knowledge, or without giving me any sort of credit. I love this game and I want to help it in any way I can.

Return to Ravnica has been pretty cool so far, I think there is consensus on that. The familiar sights and sounds and smells (yes, smells.). A set can never recapture the essence of what made Ravnica, Ravnica, but I think they're doing a darn good job trying.
The design sensability this time around isn't "Gold matters", its "Ravnica matters".
Many of the designs play off of familiar city tropes, or build off of the identities of the guilds rather than simply being powerful or interesting 2-color gold cards, and I think that RtR is better off for it, plus it helps to distinguish itself from Ravnica classic.

One way they're accomplishing this is to give each Guild an all new mechanic for each Guild. Last time the mechanics were built around color synergies, this time each one is tailor made to that Guild.

While these new mechanics are, scientifically speaking, totes bitching, I saw an interesting opportunity raised in one of Making Magic's mailbag articles. In it, Mark was asked that if each guild received a returning mechanic instead what would it be.
This is the list we're working with:
Azorius-absorb
Orzhov-morbid
Dimir-Morph
Izzet-Splice onto instant
Rakdos-Wither
Golgari-Unearth
Gruul-Frenzy
Boros-Battle Cry
Selesnya-Affinity for Creatures
Simic-Proliferate

Naturally, I took this as a challenge.

I hosted a contest on the Magic forums this week, and I came up with some more designs on my own.

Splice has a lot of opportunities in that it isn't restricted by things such as particular strategy or focus. All you need is an instant.
This lends itself like combat tricks:

Powerful utility effects

 

Limited workhorses

 

Weird "what will you do with me" effects

And poweerful splashy rares


What sort of things would you like to Splice onto Instant?

Mayael's Army

Have you heard about Commander (colloquially; Elder Dragon Highlander)?

It's a pretty cool format.

You pick a legendary creature, and then you build a deck around that creature. Seems simple enough, but the format has a couple of caveats that help distinguish it from most other preconstructed formats.
1. The decks have 100 cards. Not 100 minimum, not 100 maximum. 100
2. The decks are singleton, meaning no two cards other than basic lands can share a name.
3. All of the cards have to share your general's color identity, which is all of the colors in its casting cost or any color symbols in its textbox.
4. Each player starts with 40 life.

All of these details combine to make Commander a slower, haymaker driven format. A lot of players lock to the format because they only need one card as opposed to the usual four-ofs in most other formats, and the format is slow enough to allow players to reliably cast big splashy spells that are too expensive to be reliable in other formats.

ITS FAAAAAAAAAANTASTIC

I heard about the format shortly after I started playing Magic (around the time Shards of Alara came out), but due to my legendary laziness, I didn't get around to building my own deck until this past summer.

As the article title may clue you in, I chose a personal favorite of mine and one of the first legendary creatures I ever saw; Mayael the Anima.

Something that has endeared me to Mayael is that attacking with creatures is generally less practical in the format that going off with some one hit kill combos, so Mayael tends to be less reliant on pricey format staples than other strategies.

Nonetheless, the format isn't nearly as widespread as say, standard, so a fear of mine is that even with the singleton nature of the format, that playing the same strategy over and over will get old.
So I've started using an interesting deckbuilding exercise I first heard about on Commandercast.
It was in regards to a Zur the Enchanter deck, but the strategy translates well to what I'm doing.
Basically, Zur has a well-earned reputation as a "that guy" deck ("that guy" translating to "you dirty rotten motherf-") so to make things more interesting, the pilot would choose his enchantments at random before each game. He had a pile of assorted enchantments he favored, and he would pick a bunch of them at random and shuffled them into his deck before each game.
Some games he would "go off" and just destroy everyone, others he would play cutesy, inoffensive stuff like Pacifism. There was no way to tell!

So, as you can guess, replace "enchantments with converted mana cost 3 or less" with "creatures with power 5 or greater" and that';s basically what I started doing, and its been a blast so far.

Some times I plop in a limited workhorse like Archangel, other games something oppressive like Iona, Shield of Emeria would come out to play.

If you play EDH and you find yourself getting bored with your deck, I recommend you to try this strategy out!