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!

Where the Wild Things Are, a review

Among the articles I read religiously are Mark Rosewater's "Making Magic" on Magic: the Gathering's home page, every Monday. As you may have noticed by now, I'm a design junky, so I eat that stuff up. But it's more than just design articles, it's almost like a journal. I seem to recall in one of his articles he made mention of one of the best ways to keep readers is to make them emotionally invested. Not in the column, but in the author. Let the reader know what you're like behind the pen, or in this case, the keyboard. Share your other interests and the like. So I'm going to do just that.

Within the last year, I've rediscovered the Magic that is the public library. Every week or so, I go there and check out a bunch of stuff, devour it, and go back for more. Admittedly, most of what I've been getting have been comics (in no small part because I've been trying to break into the tangled quagmire that are American comics), but sometimes I'll get something else. A research journal on animals, or a movie or some such.

Recently, I rented "Where the Wild Things Are". A movie adapted from the beloved Maurice Sendak book of the same name. The first thing that occured to me is that it was quite impressive that they adapted such a work into a full-length movie. The book was 10 sentences long. The movie is 104 minutes. Whaaaaaaat.

I can't really make a 1:1 comparisson with the book since it's been a very long time since I last read it, and I can't seem to find my own copy, but if memory serves. Kid makes a mess, gets in trouble and sent to his room, gets mad at mom for being a poopyhead, goes to have adventures with monsters, calms down, goes home to warm dinner, happy ending yay.

It's a book that can, and has, been interpreted in a number of ways. The book was somewhat ambiguous, never making it explicit whether or not the boy was imagining or actually want on an adventure. The movie is somewhat similar but greatly expanded. The movie has a very particular vision. That vision seems to be something to the effect of "Change (in particular, growing up) kind of sucks."

A boy named max is coping with things. His sister has moved on to middle school and spends more time with her friends than him, his mom has begun dating again, and always, he's growing up. He takes this as well as most children, which is to say, not as well. Whenever things become too much to bear, he dresses up like a wolf and runs amok.

After a particularly heinous tantrum where he bites his mother while she had a date over, he runs away from home, eventually ending up in the realm of the Wild Things. They seem big and frightening to him at first, being much larger than him and furry monsters besides, and at first they are scary, threatening to eat him, but he quickly spins some yarns about being a great warrior and the monsters make him their king. In particular he befriends Carol, who like him, is prone to 'wild rumpuses'.

At first things seem fine. The monsters are like him, all they want to do is have fun, but as time goes on it becomes apparent that there are issues under the surface; problems, strained relationships, tempers. It becomes a metaphor; Max trying to be a king to his ornery 'people' in much the same way his mother tried to curb his eccentricities, eventually coming terms with the fact that his mother does what she does because she loves him, not because she hates him and is trying to keep him from having fun.

What really struck me about the film is how not particularly child friendly some of the details were. Don't get me wrong! I liked the movie. It had a very distinctive aesthetic to it, the greys and browns of the foliage giving the movie an old world great outdoors look when things were good, and a somber depressed look during heavier scenes, which worked for what the movie was trying to do. It was wonderful seeing all of the characters I recognized from the book given voices, identities, and even names (when before I knew them as 'goat', 'bird', 'redhead', etc.). It wasn't even the scary scenes in the movie (regarding the aforementioned eating of Max and some other stuff I don't want to spoil), but rather some very heavy emotional content.

Basically, some of the monsters are very unhappy. Some of them have problems with each other or themselves and since they're basically children, they aren't entirely sure how to go about fixing them, usually making them worse and straining their relationships further. I can't help but wonder if my five year old self had seen this, what I would have thought, If I would have asked my parents "Why are the monsters so unhappy." I'm just not sure if this qualifies as a children's movie at times.

In the end, I enjoyed it for what it was (though I am easy to please) and I would recommend it to fans of the book, but I will say openly and fully it was not what I expected, or what it was presented as in the commercials. See it for yourself and let me know what you think!

Hairless Thoctar's game journal: Shadowmoor draft

Hey folks, I'm doing something different tonight.

This is going to be a gameplay journal of sorts. Me vomitting all over the page about a recent gameplay experience. I am to make these whenever I do something interesting playing Magic.

In this case, I drafted Shadowmoor with four other guys at my local game shop.

This is cool to me for a number of reasons.
1. I rarely get to play limited formats that are no longer relevant.
2. This was highly nostalgic for me. I got into Magic just after Shards of Alara was released, so most of my friend's casual decks at the time consisted of janky piles of Shadowmoor/Eventide cards.

I'll spoil the ending of this story by telling you straight up, I didn't do well. I think I may have come in last place. We planned to do Round Robin (each participant plays each other participant once, the winner is the player with the best overall score) and have one player sit out each round because we had odd numbers.
We quit after three rounds because, God only knows why, we didn't play with timers as we might at an more official event. Thus the games went far longer than they needed to, and it got late in a hurry.

Like I said I didn't do so hot. I was highly unfamiliar with the format and its ins and outs. I forced my picks too hard and didn't pick up much removal.

My first pick: Wilt-Leaf Liege.
My second pick: Spectral Procession.
My third pick: Wilf-Leaf Cavaliers.

With picks like those, and play skills like mine, I thought it was a sign. "You must play green-white. NO EXCEPTIONS." So I did just that. I almost exclusively picked cards that were green-white when available, to try to make the most of my fantastic first few picks.

Now shadowmoor is an interesting set. The flexibility of hybrid mana spells allows to more easily than in most settings draft a three color deck. However the color-matters or basic land-matters effects of a lot of card incentivize you to play few colors. Its a nice bit of tension that allows for some interesting archetypes (or at least I suspect as much, I wouldn't know, I'm terrible at Magic :P )

I ended up with a very top-heavy green-white deck.
No three drops. A bunch of four drops. A number of 6 or higher drops. Only two Last Breaths to act as my removal.
Can you tell that I had no idea what I was doing?

I will say though, that despite my craptasticity, I managed to pull of the coolest thing I've done in Magic limited I can recall.

I managed to assemble the following boardstate.
Kithkin Rabble with power greater than six (thanks to my procession).
Mossbridge Troll (a personal favorite than mine).
Pale Wayfarer (which I very nearly cut for having too many high cost creatures).

On my turn, I declare Troll and Rabble as attackers.
In response to my attack tap Rabble (who has vigilance, mind you) and Wayfarer to give Troll +20/+20. In response to that, use my open mana to use Wayfarer's untap ability to give Troll protection from my opponent's most relevant color.

Like a boss.

I did have to attack three times to get it to stick because he had a high life total (damned Last Breaths...) and two colors of creatures, but eventually I did secure a very dynamic victory.

Felt good man.

What's the most dramatic victory you've gotten in limited?

Someone else's bad luck

Wowsers, it's been a while since my last post. Sorry about that.
School's gotten back in swing for me, and I've become a lot more active on the Wizards forums. Also, that Planeswalker creation contest I'd been participating in eventually started dying down, so I kind of lost the desire to keep writing about it.

But I've found a new thing to offset all that. The You Make the Card Forum, a place to show off your designs and get critiques for them, and do likewise for others.

A regular feature of that forum are contests; there's usually at least one daily. The host of the contest picks some sort of theme, and everyone tries their best to make an interesting card to that theme.
I've taken a shine to doing these contests.

My latest contest:


Black miracles

As you may recall, Miracles are one of the new mechanics featured in Avacyn Restored. They allow you to cast powerful effects for a fraction of the normal cost when you draw that card the first time in a turn. Lead designer Mark Rosewater has been trying to get this effect in the game since at least Tempest block (October 1997!).

The miracle cards tended to end up of one of two categories, in my eyes. The first were utility effects; stuff that color does all the time, but at significantly lower costs. Hallowed Burial for 1 mana, Evacuation for 2 mana, and so on.

The second are nostalgia cards. Cards that mimic popular, powerful cards of ages old. Time Walk, Decree of Justice, Wheel of Fortune.

 
These cards are the most exciting because they give newer players a very powerful taste of yesteryear, and they let older players relive some seriously good nostalgia. Good times all around.

In Avacyn Restored, for flavor reasons, these cards weren't allowed in black. Understandable, but I really want to see what Black is capable of doing in this design space, and I don't think I'm the only one.

I'd love to hear what you have to say on the subject and feel free to drop by the forums to join in the fun.