Lately, my interest in Magic has turned away from playing the game and more toward designing the game. Some of that is the sour taste WotC and its community constantly leave in my mouth, and some of that is rediscovering Pokemon battling and having a lot more fun than I ever had playing Arena ladder. Mostly, though, I think it's because I have cool friends that like designing cards and cubes and such with me, and that it's fun to design things in an already-made system without worrying about promoting them on Twitter.
Speaking of which, don't forget to comment and tell your friends! Every retweet is appr
And so naturally I return to ancient Google docs with custom sets on them, and think: Oh yeah. I should do this. Except it's been a while, so I should remake this from the ground up, even though it's not as bad as I expected.
So let's do it. I'm going to make a custom set. And I have a blog now, so you get to enjoy the experience with me. In between yelling about my friends' games or theory, I'll be sharing the developments I've made on this set!
Also, in case it isn't clear, there will be custom cards in here, and in this series generally. If you're currently employed at WotC, consider this the music playing you off. Also it's pretty heavily Magic content, so it probably won't interest you unless you're interested in Magic or you really like extrapolating from context clues.
Anyway! Let's go on a journey through time.
So imagine you're me. You're working on a random for-fun project, an "alt-cube" where you're imagining what a legacy cube might look like in an alternate universe where Magic was slightly different.
So you're sitting alone in a buffet (pre-pandemic-- I think DOM had just come out?) nibbling on spring rolls, thinking about how to make storm interact closer to the same axis as "normal" decks, and between thinking about limiting the ceiling of spells and thinking about permanents in storm and still digesting one of your classmates' poems... between all that, you have the juice to just start writing. And out pops this, fully formed and armored:
Stringsnap 2BB
Sorcery
Cacophony (When you cast this spell, copy it for each type among permanent spells you cast this turn.)
Create a 2/2 black Muse creature token.
The weight of so many souls entering the underworld, so heavy and rushed, severed the cords tying identity to body.
(That's a lie, actually, I've definitely revised this since, my Docs says so. But I doubt months of revisions are that interesting.)
This card is exciting to me (even though I'm not convinced it's perfect, or even an exciting cost-effect ratio). To me, it's very clearly from a certain plane, even though it doesn't exist. It's just oozing with, well, planefulness, in the same way that Spider Spawning is. Let's analyze the text line-by-line to see what we can tell about the set around it-- that is, assume this is a well-designed card in the set it's in, and see what we can get.
Stringsnap 2BB
Sorcery
This set seems slow and high-mana. Remember, you want to cast this along with other permanent spells. I'd imagine this set has Dominaria levels of durdling-- lots of creatures with square or toughness-leaning stats, lots of random noncreature proactive plays. It's not like aggressive decks bully this out of the format, though-- it's not a good matchup, but it's not like Stringsnap is useless if you haven't cast an artifact creature and an enchantment this turn.
I want to clarify the high-mana aspect, because it seems at odds with the fact that we need cheap permanents but actually isn't. Drawing lands is great, it's the not drawing spells that's bad. The thing about having random noncreature permanents at common (which, spoiler alert, we will want) is that there's less space than you'd think, because you want most commons to only do things when you're looking at them, so to speak. That means a lot of possibly-cheap permanents with activated abilities, meaning you can justify having lots of lands! Furthermore, one great use for artifacts is as mana rocks that can do something else when you're beyond needing mana rocks.
As an aside, this spell might be more interesting at 1BB. That doesn't change what I said, I'm just putting it out there.
Cacophony (When you cast this spell, copy it for each type among nonland permanents that entered the battlefield under your control this turn.)
The obvious: There are probably lots of artifacts and enchantments.
Probably some of those are creatures or Sagas. I imagine at least one cycle along the lines of the Vessel cycle from SOI. Also, again, there's gotta be defensive tools. It'll be sad if you're trying to cast three spells in a single turn, and I just kill you dead on turn 5. Equipment makes sense here, in that it allows aggro to be slow without losing, and consistently compete with a random 2/5 or whatever you're using to block, without invalidating it-- and, obviously, puts more artifacts in the system. Vehicles do something similar.
Also, I imagine there are ways to return artifacts and enchantments to
your hand-- maybe a cycle that returns itself to your hand for an
effect. There are reasons not to do that, though (close comparisons I
would make include fun, fair cards like Capsize and Sprout Swarm). Maybe a cycle that tutors for other members of the cycle? Hmm, design is hard.
The most obvious comparison to cacophony is storm. There are big differences, though. First of all, cacophony has an upper limit. This has the problem of people not wanting to cast it unless they've "maximized" it, but at the same time it solves an issue with storm, which is that in a lot of games you're allowed to just sit there and wait until you can count to 10. Also, in storm, if you could choose where to cast your spells you'd always add them to your most impactful spell's storm count. Spells are less fungible with cacophony-- you can't dump a hand full of creatures to make a bunch of muses. This means that you're casting spells more often.
Also, after the storm, you have a board. If you kill your opponent with your cacophony spell immediately, you're not using that resource of a board. So assuming card balance stays constant, you want to cast cacophony earlier and more often than storm.
Create a 2/2 black Muse creature token.
Well, that's cooler than a zombie, huh? These muses are black because in Magic, black mana represents the individual. In contrast to a red muse (passionate!), blue muse (the source of thoughts!), green muse (natural! intuitive!), or white muse (these are clearly a type of spirit!) we're choosing to emphasize the individuality and trueness-to-self of these (ironically identical) muses.
I kind of want this set to be about art now? That seems sick. The closest we have to a set about art is Kaladesh, I think, which is an artifacts set. Other mechanics that make me think of art include Sagas (which have in-universe art as the card art), which have already been shown to be a great fit.
Incidentally, one theme that I'll have to consciously try not to push in this set is "really wordy cards". Activated abilities and sagas and such tend to up the word count of the set.
The weight of so many souls entering the underworld at once, heavy and rushed, severed the cords tying identity to body.
Honestly all I have to say about this flavor text, other than "I'm proud of it", is "Wow, I bet this card was a gravestorm variant at some point".
Oh, wait, there's one more thing: It looks like at some point on this plane there was a tragedy so big that the muses were born. That's interesting, and possibly an interesting thing to make art about (although I don't really like the idea of saying "yeah, yeah, there was a tragedy, and the only purpose I have for it in the story is that it inspires people", because I hate when people do that in real life). Honestly, it seems fun to just keep it vague, too, if that's what I end up doing.
So here's what we have. I'm calling this plane Mimea, because it's about art, from the word "mimesis".
- Mimea is a slow, combat-light set. Aggro looks to chip in early-game and utilize either burn or equipment late, whereas shades of control either look to utilize their board full of permanents or go off in a big storm turn while using their cheap enchantments to keep people away until then. I think it ended up less mana-heavy than I thought, but still it seems very sinky.
- Mimea has a noncreature permanents theme. There are artifacts and enchantments at high frequencies, and the tools to interact with them. There are lots of cheap spells-- which, honestly, is a personal preference of mine, I love decks like Rogues or Arcanist that grind using cheap spells. (Again, "cheap spells" and "durdly with lots of mana" have a tension, but they inherently contradict less than one thinks-- if you have experience with Dimir Rogues mirrors you know this.)
- Mimea is about art, and the people who make it. Honestly, just based on personal preference, I don't want a big plot where Jace Beleren has to save people from the muse-eaters or whatever. I think the conflict in this set is just art discourse, and the fighting doesn't even represent fighting, it represents discourse.
- Mimea is about Muses, too-- manifestations of pure "self", whatever that means.
Sick!
One last thing: My goal here is not to exactly imitate a WotC set. I'll keep the structure of packs about the same, just because it's a common language between Magic players that works well enough, but I see no need to add "constructed cards", for example. It's nice if my cards offer the illusion of being printable in a hypothetical standard, but I'm not going to add Dream Trawlers or Weathered Runestones to maintain that illusion.
Similarly, I feel no need to make my plane "marketable" or "friendly to new players". Some, but not all aspects that go into those (e.g. "a clear concept" and "clear card text") are virtues that I'll mostly strive for anyway, so that doesn't actually mean that much.
Some practical things that do change: I'll only have planeswalkers if I think they improve the limited environment, rares will be lower-power across the board, I may or may not have a mythic rare slot, there won't be random flavor text about how Elesh Norn is brainwashing the neoclassicists or whatever, I'll allow a teensy bit more complexity at uncommon and rare especially, I'll only reprint stuff that I feel improves the limited environment, no random cards that are useless in every deck. Some of those are actionable, some are pretty reasonable goals, you know how it is.
See y'all! Next time on Mimea: I talk about the mechanical and flavorful color pie, how we're going to use it, and why "Izzet is the creative color" is not very useful on the plane about creativity! Also, in the far future: we revisit cacophony, and try out variations in search of the best possible foundation for the set!
No comments:
Post a Comment