10 More Cursed Magic Cards

If you missed the first installment, I'm part of a local friends' discord where we run a "cursed cube": an exploration of the rules of Magic through custom "cursed" cards that forsakes ideas like "new player experience" and "printability". I crave people thinking the things I do are cool and good, so I'm posting another ten cards from that cube today, in the hopes of Engagement.

Among other things, cursed cards are a love letter to Magic's storied history and rules. They're also an aggressive wondering of what Magic could look like if it didn't need to be marketed or sold or intended for a large enough group of people. This is a vision of magic with transgressive mechanics, sharp in-jokes, and neopronouns in oracle text-- things that don't sell packs in a short enough time span for Wizards to okay.

In case it's not clear, there are custom cards here. If you are contractually bound to avoid custom cards, leave.

...

Let's just jump in.

1. Creatures you control get +1/+1 and antimonarchism

 Utopian Vision 3GU 

Sorcery 

If you control no Nobles, draw a card for each type among creatures you control.

flavor text is that terry pratchett quote. you know the one

"Diverse creature types matter" as an archetype is a fun concept. The thing is, when the cards are being designed for a constructed format (or, in the case of cursed cube, benefit from satisfying the illusion of belonging in a constructed format) the design always has to work around changelings. There are ways to deal with this-- Ikoria cared about non-Humans, Zendikar Rising used party and thus created wording for "largest number of creatures with unique types" that doesn't sound like a programmer wrote it. This is another construction.

The flavor color pie here is funny, too-- Simic is the most likely to take "diversity is our strength" at face value (by contrast, I think Orzhov, outside of its Ravnican guild interpretation, might quibble and "okay but are you implying you wouldn't like marginalized folks if it weren't profitable?")

Technically, though, "Draw 254 cards" isn't that busted of an effect-- in most decks, I'd rather draw, like, 3 There are jank combos, though-- I feel like if I were designing this for a set in the style of Modern Horizons, I might price it more aggressively, but make it "Destroy all Nobles, then...". I hate Laboratory Maniac effects with a burning passion, but I smile at the idea of indestructible changeling combos with Labman.

2. Taxation without board state representation

 Tax Evasion (no mana cost)

(black) Instant

If you control two or more Swamps, you may cast this spell by paying {0}.

Add {B}{B}{B}. Spend this mana only to pay for the effects of spells and abilities your opponents control.

Tax fraud is just funny as a concept.

One thing I keep asking about this is whether it's a bend/break. The naive response would be "It's fine, black gets fast mana, and abilities are allowed to get more efficient when they're situational." To which I say: A spell for {B} that destroys target creature with flying uses all black effects, and doesn't really combine them in the obviously breaky style of "Create a guy with deathtouch that fights target creature", but is clearly a break, in the same way that Rosewater argues that Path to Exile is a break based on its efficiency.

In this case, I'm leaning on the side of break, but I'm conflicted. The bottom line, to me, is that you shouldn't be splashing black because you want to force your thing through counterspells. On the other hand, though, a lot of the effects this card stops are white, making this a sort of subtle color hate in the same way that blue's enemies frequently get "This spell can't be countered". And in the same vein of "Every color should get card advantage, but only blue's should be board-agnostic", it can be argued that every color should get stack interaction, but only blue's can be general and unconditional. Perhaps the more interesting argument to have than "Is this a break in current pie?" would be "Is this better for the game as an implied addition to the pie?".

The thing that's stopped me from changing it outright? The flavor. The greatness at any cost color doesn't have time for your silly little tithes.

3. If there's anything a werewolf hates, it's bad flavor text

Collared 2W
Enchantment-- Aura

Enchant creature

Enchanted creature has summoning sickness. (It can't attack, block, or {T} unless it has haste.)

If enchanted creature would transform, turn it facedown instead.

If there's anything a werewolf hates, it's a collar. Especially Avacyn's collar, the symbol of her church, which is attended by the Cathars, such as Thalia. While everyday pooches would be halted in their pawprint tracks by an ordinary collar, the werewolves of Innistrad, the plane we're on, are much fiercer, due to their supernatural strength brought by the full moon. These collars are made from silver by Avacyn herself. This is not unlike the talents of her sisters Sigarda, Liesa, Bruna, and Gisela-- although the last few of those won't be making any more werewolf collars anytime soon. Because Avacyn killed the one and the other two were melded together into Brisela, that is. Which is not good. In that, it's bad. Painfully bad.

//

Anyway-- about the flavor text for CW13: Cynthia proposed the following:

"Octavia looked up at the silver disk that gave her power, and down at the silver disk that took it away."

I don't think the reader necessarily gets that the silver disks are the moon and collar-- I know the art is there, too, and I'm sure they'll do a great job, but you know not everybody cares about the art. Spikes, am I right? I was thinking, what if we added a line? Something like "That is, the moon and her collar." I think the tropes should carry it from there. Let me know what you think.

Cheers!

Mark

Wow, remember when Ancient Grudge was the most heavy-handed Magic flavor writing in the public eye? WotS Forsaken is best known for its bi-erasure, but I really think that overshadowed lines like "something the two of them shared in that great chemical mix-- arcing between them like one of Ral Zarek's lightning bolts".

Anyway, this is the first card in the cube intended to have double-facedness purely for flavor text purposes. I think that's funnier than using a really small font.

Also, "summoning sickness" isn't defined in the non-cursed rules, but it's not a terribly difficult change. At least to me, using the words "summoning sickness" makes a card that usually compares unfavorably to Bound in Gold seems more powerful than it is. Makes me grin a leonin grin.

4. just a normal card don't mind me

Daydreaming UU
Enchantment-- Aura

Enchant tapped creature

You control enchanted creature.

This one's self-explanatory once you get the joke, and I don't have much else to say, so I'll present it as a puzzle-- why does this spell get to be significantly cheaper than the five-mana Enthralling Hold? (If you get stuck, the answer is found in CR303.4c.)

5. Sorry I'm late, I was avoiding the Hydras

First District Legionary WW
2/1 Creature-- Loxodon Soldier

Mentor, protection from creatures with earlier timestamp

Is this wording better or worse than the equivalent "protection from creatures that entered the battlefield before it"? Who can say? I like the charm of using an unnecessary technical word in cursed cube.

This is my spin on the classic "white low-drop with ability that makes it an okay topdeck". It should almost certainly not be able to block, or gain the protection through an activated ability, or something. But it dies to Bolt or a topdecked 3/3, and it seems like a fun card to push, so I want to playtest with the card as-is just for science. It's hard to evaluate, even if my intuition is that its real good.

6. A contemplation of the hyperreal

Just An Old Wives' Tale W
Instant

Exile target nonland, nontoken permanent. It becomes foretold. Its foretell cost is equal to its mana cost.

The most cursed part about this is that, unless I missed something, it requires literally no rules revisions to fit into black-bordered Magic. It isn't even unclear. It is a fiction that rivals the fictitiousness innate to reality. It is Borges' map that blends seamlessly into the territory it maps, a hyperreality. It breaks the color pie more offensively than the rules, by a wide margin.

Perhaps it is just an old wives' tale. Perhaps the grains of truth therein come from abundant seeds.

7. LEGACY IS RIUNED!!! !!!!!!1!!!!

Spell Gobble {sU}{sU}
Instant

({sU} is sacrifice mana. It can be paid for with {U} or by sacrificing an Island or blue permanent.)

Counter target instant, sorcery, or planeswalker spell unless its controller pays {3}.

Nothing to say here, other than fixed phyrexian mana being the Mel-baitiest Melbait, rivaling only sorcery-speed counterspells and WUBRG planeswalkers.

I like this one, though, even if it's """spiky""". "Sac an untapped island, counter most noncreature spells" seems admittedly pretty strong, especially with modality, but the modes of "super conditional Negate", "really awful Abjure", or "the most painful Daze of your life" sound okay. I also like how, unlike phyrexian mana, you have to at least pretend you're respecting the color pie to cast this.

Originally this was without the tax, though. Imagine not having that knob to turn.

8. Colossal Deadmeme

Colossal Dread 4BB
Sorcery

Target opponent chooses a creature they control. That creature gets -6/-6 until end of turn. If its toughness is negative, its controller loses life equal to the magnitude of that toughness.

hehe dreadmaw

At heart, I'm a designer of boring old commons and uncommons, which sometimes clashes with cursedcube's tendency to do complicated shenanigans. I let myself indulge in boring commons because when you're making a cube of 300+ custom cards, you sometimes want one that only takes one read.

I have the opponent choose the creature because I don't want the pattern of "Colossal Dread, burn you out" to occur with no counterplay, but now that I'm looking at it for the first time since last September I wonder if just hitting their biggest guy is better.

HEADS UP: These last two entries have math jokes, and a lot of numbers generally.

 

9. Number Theory 101

Denominate 1B
Tribal Instant-- Nerd

If target creature's power is greater than its toughness, it gets -X/-0 until end of turn, where X is its toughness. Otherwise, if its toughness is greater than its power, it gets -0/-X until end of turn, where X is its power. Then, if its power and toughness are positive and not equal, repeat this process.

Example: I have a 3/7, you cast Denominate. It becomes a 3/4, then a 3/1, then a 2/1, then a 1/1, then the spell is done.

There's a lot of math in this batch, and it's partially because of Strixhaven having a lot of math cards. As a mathematician, I have opinions on this. I can't be too annoyed at the color pie handling-- even though there's math to be found in all five colors, and most mathematicians I know have a relationship to math that's somewhere on a spectrum from azorius to grixis, in the context of STX it's understandable and expressive to say that Simic is the math colors.

What's profoundly unacceptable in 2021 is to make a card called "Golden Ratio" that has nothing to do with the mathematical concept. Boo! If Gwent can make a mechanic that subtly rewards you for knowing Fibonacci numbers so can we!

Anyway, the card. Absent of serious funny business, this process always terminates, and results in its stats both being the greatest common divisor of the creature's starting power and toughness. This is a corollary of Euclid's Algorithm.

There's plenty of funny business, though! To the card's credit, though, a lot of seeming edge cases work as you expect-- for example, if you cast this on a 1/2 with an anthem effect in play, it will work the same as casting it on a 2/3. The real corner case is if the power and toughness of the targeted creature are switched through another effect-- if you don't see why the word "positive" is on there, that's why. (The difference, for the rules-inclined, is that power-and-toughness switching happens in sublayer 7d, after stat addition and subtraction in 7c.)

This process always terminates under normal conditions, but unfortunately there are multiple effects in the cube that can switch the order of the layers, which can cause this process to keep looping. While fractions are fine, the card also breaks if it has, say, pi power. Literally can't win 'em all. If I really wanted to prevent those cases, I might make turn it into a spell that does only one step of the algorithm, but with a buyback or replicate effect.

The thing is, though, if I'm worried about a combo between this card and something that reorders the layers, that's not this card's fault.

10. Number Theory 401

Four-Square Theorem 4BB 

Tribal Sorcery-- Nerd 

Each player distributes X -1/-1 counters among creatures they control, where X is their life total. For each creature they control, a perfect square number of -1/-1 counters must be placed on that creature in this way if able.

I wish there were a more elegant way to express "perfect square" in this context, because the math in this card is super under-the-hood otherwise.

Anyway, this is cool because it looks like a busted board wipe-- if the opponent is at 20, that's 20 -1/-1 counters on their guys! Doesn't that kill their whole board?

Well, no. For example, if the opponent has a random 0/1 Goat, and they're at 16 life, placing 16 counters on their scape-Goat is a completely valid option, since 16 is a perfect square (as is the amount they're putting on their other guys, 0). Similarly, if they're at 17, placing 16 on their goat and 1 on a random other guy works. 15 would be worse for them-- there's no way to express 15 as the sum of three or fewer perfect squares, so no matter what they do, they'll have to place counters on at least four guys using 15 = 9 + 4 + 1 + 1. They have other options if they have a large board (e.g. 15 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 1 + 1 + 1) but they aren't appetizing.

The natural question is what the best life totals are! Luckily, a guy named Joseph-Louis Lagrange proved something relevant, presumably in the pursuit of winning in custom Magic (very popular in 19th century France). His theorem states, in part, that every positive integer is expressible as the sum of no more than four perfect squares. Basically, a player will never be forced to put counters on more than four of their guys.

The real judge calls happen when you want to place 7 counters, but your opponent has just two guys. (The only way to make 7 is 4 + 1 + 1 + 1.) At the time of writing, the rules don't know what to do with that "if able"! However, the card implies an update to the rules to the game, and the most obvious one mirrors the existing rules for combat requirements (i.e. the stuff that makes "~ attacks each turn if able" work). If that's the case, you satisfy as many requirements as possible-- so if you're placing 7 counters on two guys, placing 1 + 6 or 4 + 3 is fine. Sounds like a headache, though-- as the unofficial rules manager for the cursed cube, and as someone who absolutely will be writing up mock CR changes to accommodate these cards, I'd appreciate your support in this trying time.

But Natalie Libre! How do I support you in this trying time?

That's all folks! What was your favorite cursed card? Tell me in the comments or on Twitter! Even a simple "thanks i hate Demonimate, nice work" in the comments is super appreciated.

If this inspired thoughts or cards from you tell me-- it'll make my week! Until next time!

10 Custom Magic Cards from my Cursed Cube

I don't play Magic much anymore, strictly speaking, but I spend a lot of time designing for it. Specifically, I make custom cards for a project with some friends we call the cursed cube. The concept is simple-- do things that are technically possible in black-border (i.e. unambiguous, don't require dexterity, etc.) but that should never be printed in a black-border Magic set.

I've adapted cards from the cursed cube into games. In fact, Catalyst started as a Magic variant, and became a card game when I got sick of trying to fix it with cursed cards.

The cursed cube is my love letter to what I love about Magic: making your own stuff to draft with friends, the labyrinth of under-the-hood rules, and a rich history of design failure with footprints you, too, can follow. I hope you enjoy, too.

Also, in case it's not clear: WotC folks, beat it. Not just because there are custom cards here, but because your eyes will burn.

1. A Simic Monstrosity

Simic Shenanigans 2UG

Instant

Merge two nonland permanents that share a controller until end of turn. Until end of turn, that permanent has all abilities of each card or token that represents it. (You choose which permanent is on top.)

This was the first card in the cursed cube. For those who don't know, "merging" is the thing that happens when you play a mutate spell-- it's the process that actually lets you put one card on top of the other.

(Note for nerds: The second line of text may seem unnecessary-- isn't that what merging does? It turns out that it's the mutate ability, not merge, that gives the mutated permanent the abilities of the cards below it. Yeah, I'm surprised too, but it's right there in Rule 721.2a.)

(Edit: Another note for bigger nerds: "Until end of turn, the resulting permanent becomes mutated" is an better second sentence, with upsides like working how you expect mutated permanents to work with copying. Thanks to Jay Dragon for commentary which led to this!)

I like this card as a thought exercise-- how many uses for it can you find? If you still actually play Magic, instead of just making cards and thinking about it, how often would having Simic Shenanigans in your hand win the game?

I also like this card as establishing what this cube is about: stuff you could do in black-border, or that you could do in black-border with trivial rules adjustments, but wouldn't even think about doing because it's obnoxious and clever for no reason.

2. A Rhapsody In Blue

Blue Doom Blade (Blume Blade) 1U

Instant

Put an islandhome counter on target creature.

This was another early card. It spawned a cycle of colorshifted iconic removal spells (including a white Prey Upon that started a subgame and a red Nekertaal that made an extra combat phase)-- but none were as elegant as using a deprecated mechanic to suggest the "non-blue" that would be in a proper blue Doom Blade. It's a pretty egregious break, but if vintage cube is anything to go by, a few cards being extremely disrespectful of the color pie is okay.

This is my proudest design in the cube.

 3. Word Choice Matters, Kids!

Called Shot 1UR 

Sorcery

Scry 1, draw a card, then discard a card. If you do, ~ deals damage equal to the discarded card's converted mana cost to target creature.

Ohnoverload 3UR (If you cast this spell for its Ohnoverload cost, replace each instance of "if" in its text with "when".)

What? How can the difference between "if" vs "when" matter?

Here's the deal: If you cast it without the ohnoverload, you will choose the target as you cast the spell, because that's what you do when you cast a spell. That means that you have to choose which creature you're targeting before you see the new card from Called Shot. In other words, you don't have full information about what you'll be able to discard when you choose what to target.

If you cast it with ohnoverload, the "When you do" signals that the second sentence is what's called a reflexive triggered ability, as seen on cards like Hypothesizzle. This means that the "When you do" part triggers after you're done with scry-draw-discard process. In other words, if the top cards of your deck are lands, you won't try to target a big dude hoping that you draw into something big.

(For the rules-savvy-- you do, in fact, choose targets after choosing whether to pay alternate costs like ohnoverload; that's how the original overload mechanic is able to function.)

This is a great cursed-cube card because, while this could technically be printed in a black-border set, the Magic judges are already tired from understanding the novellas WotC writes these days, and I wouldn't want to put explaining this on their plate.

Incidentally, I don't know if it could even be printed these days regardless of its complexity because of translation issues. Magic cards in all languages are presumably able to unambiguously form a reflexive triggered ability, but I'm not sure whether they do so in a way that a text-modifying ability can change. There goes my GDS4 submission.

4. This Is How I Use My Math Degree

Deathessence Noble 1BB

2/1 Creature-- Vampire Noble

Tithe (Spells targeting this creature cost 2 more life to cast.)

For each natural number n, ~ has "Sacrifice n creatures: Add {B}. Activate only once each turn."

For the math-haters in the audience, this card has "Sacrifice a creature: Add {B}", and "Sacrifice 2 creatures: Add {B}", and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Anyway. There are multiple cursedcube variants of the mechanic that WotC released as ward, most of which are pretty non-cursed. Tithe is one of those.

I think this is a funny card. It changes the kind of infinite combos you can do, it provides interesting choices regarding whether to squeeze more out of your guys this turn or save them as fodder for the next. It's a great example of what Magic could do if it stuck to its roots of a bunch of math PhDs messing around.

The downside, if you can call it that, is the hypothetical Arena interface. That's also true of Teshar combo, though, so who cares?

5. Old Meme

They Were Cake All Along! 2WW

Sorcery

Destroy all creatures. Each opponent may create any number of Food tokens.

We like arbitrarily large numbers here in cursed cube. The mathematician in me loves the sort of mini epsilon-delta proof that cards like this can sometimes make. I'm not totally confident this is a well-designed constructed card. In a cube, though, I think it's at least worth the playtest, especially since in a limited environment giving your opponent an emblem with "{2}: You gain 3 life" will greatly affect your deckbuilding, since you can't count on a random Flickerwisp beating down, You don't have a constructed-level array of tools to work with, which is what makes the restriction fun rather than "The same, but your opponent loses 150% slower"

It can't be implemented on any computer program that runs Magic that I know of, but you know. You win some, you lose some.

6. gun

Leyline of the Gun 2CC

Artifact-- Equipment

If this card is in your opening hand, you may begin the game with it on the battlefield.

Equipped creature gets +1/+1.

Equip {2}

I don't have enough experience with affinity-style decks to know if a "free" artifact with these drawbacks is too good-- it seems worse than Memnite, since it doesn't... really help you win the game? In an Equipment-matters style deck it has some potential to create noncharacteristic games, but not getting the cast triggers means it doesn't really slot into, say, Sram Os.

However, it is unique in that it is 4 CMC of artifact cardboard that can be played for free. As you might imagine from a custom cube, there are a fair few pod variants, so getting high-CMC blank cardboard into play can be good if it's the right types. The lesson? Even in a meme cube, always design for context! Even though this looks like just a funny read, it's actually worth the playtest.

7. She wears short skirts, I wear totem armor

Taylor, Swiftest Spear R

1/2 Legendary Creature-- Human Monk

Haste

Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, put a "Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, put a prowess counter on this creature" counter on this creature.

The point of this card is not to be played. It is to be assessed.

See, it has a very obvious point of comparison-- Monastery Swiftspear, an iconic and powerful red aggressive card. At first glance, Taylor is significantly worse. If you cast two spells with Monastery Swiftspear, it's done 2 damage; if you cast two spells with Taylor it... just got prowess? Not great.

It scales better, though. Specifically, it scales triangularly if you can cast the spells in the same turn as each other. And it'll persist as a threat, too (one friend thought a Taylor EDH deck would be fun for this reason-- he had big dreams of using other spells from the cube to cast six spells in a turn, giving the monk double-digit amounts of prowess in one fell swoop!). Now you can start imagining how Taylor could be better sometimes. Maybe not in modern, but in cube...

It's a fun puzzle! And if you get bored, you can even just play it!

Also, it must be said-- Ikoria was heaven for this cube. It brought mutate and changes to the lethal damage SBAs, but above all it gave us keyword counters-- which, in the cursed cube, have evolved into ability counters.

8. "Stax Is Good For The Game," I shout to the empty casual edh table

Rule of Law But Worse 2W

Enchantment

Players can only cast spells whose converted mana cost is of the same parity as the number of lands on the battlefield.

"Parity" means "oddness or evenness". 2 and 6 have the same parity, 1 and 8 have different parity. One good property of parity is that whenever you add or subtract 1 from a number, you change its parity.

I like this card because it makes the "Are you sandbagging a land" minigame really, really weird, since your opponent can always change the parity of lands in play! It also allows a way of interacting that every deck, regardless of wincon, has access to. (Unless you're not playing lands in service of some shenanigan, in which case you've consensually forfeited your ability to interact with your opponent's stuff, and also you're a big doofus.)

It also exemplifies the big flaw in landfall-- fiddly, often cumbersome trigger-counting that's often "your opponent loses, but sloooowly and just barely non-deterministically"-- but if I made nothing but bangers, WotC might fear me and strike me for copyright. Besides, cubes are meant to be iterated on, and if this card gets iterated out of the cube I'll still have the laughs I got from making it.

9. Repetition Legitimizes

Again // Again // Again 2R // 2R // 2R

Sorcery // Sorcery // Sorcery

Cascade // Cascade // Cascade

Fuse

If it's not clear, this is a triple split card, where all the spells are "Again", a 2R sorcery with cascade and no other text. The spell also has Fuse (which, in this world, means you can cast any number of "halves" of the card). It does work how you think (i.e. you can cast a 6RRR sorcery with cascade, cascade, cascade).

I'm putting this here because so far, all my love letters to MtG's rules have been complicated piles of text that, quite frankly, nobody should understand. This one, though? This is a love letter that anyone can read, and have fun playing. Again and again.

10. sigh

Pink Power Ranger Suit 3

2/2 Artifact-- Powersuit

First strike

~ enters the battlefield tapped.

T: Add {R} or {W}.

3: Until the end of your next turn, Powersuits you control become artifact creatures with voltronbanding. (Before blockers are declared, you may have any number of attacking creatures with voltronbanding become Equipment artifacts with "Equipped creature gains the other abilities of this artifact and gets +X/+Y, where X/Y is this artifact's power and toughness" until end of combat. Attach those creatures to an attacking creatures you control.)

There's a cycle of power ranger suits. Why wouldn't there be.

I've been advertising the cursed cube as a wonderful love letter to Magic's arcane rules, a place of creativity and celebration. However, in reality, it is mostly longwinded banding jokes . I thought, as a parting curse, I'd give you a glimpse of that.

Weapons and Variety (a Weekend Workshop solve)

 Yesterday I posted the following prompt to Twitter:

In your friend's game, to do the basic "attack" move, the attacker rolls Xd6 (X depends on weapon size, skill, etc). For each 4+, they choose an effect from a list in their playbook. They complain that weapons feel the same, and small ones are useless. Can you help?

The responses were real good. The most common one by far was a tuning of "well, separate the playbooks by weapon", but they were far from uninteresting, and it was far from the only response. You can see all the responses here.

I've had a day to think about it, so I wanted to write what I would do, and my answer doesn't fit in a thread of any reasonable size. If my thing resembles your answer and I don't explicitly talk about it, I swear I'm not plagiarizing you, we just both thought an idea was good.

First, establish what it means to have your weapon outside of combat. Kazumi's very good answer touches on this. Their argument, which I take here, is that, rather than try the weapons such that they're equally good at hitting things, we should attempt to construct situations where the worse weapons shine. I'll reword that slightly: People pick weapons because they have an idea of what it looks like to use them. Let's let them do so.

If you have a dagger, you want to stab people in the back, right? So let's do that: if you've set up the perfect situation, you can backstab people, no rolls no shenanigans. Similarly, if you pick a shield, you probably find a theme of protection resonant-- so let's say it makes people feel safe around you. I'm picking up PbtA/FitD vibes, so let's say you can roll the Act Under Fire equivalent for them.

If you have a big ol' axe, you're communicating to the table that you want to have a lot of combat scenes, right? So let's say you can't conceal the axe, ever, in any situation-- you leave it at home or you send a signal to everybody at the dinner party or whatever that you like to cause problems on purpose. And so on, and so forth.

There might be multiple options for each weapon, or these might actually be class traits, or it could just be the one thing. I don't know enough about my hypothetical friend's game to have a preference.

Anyway, this is good, but it only half-solves the problem. So far we've let people use weapons in the situations they want to. However, within actual combat, the weapons feel samey. Worse, they feel like strictly better and worse versions of each other entirely.

This may seem fine to you-- after all, the player gets to make a trade-off between combat abilities and other abilities! I have a story in response: Back when I played more Magic, I did a bunch drafts with my then-girlfriend. The variant we did was pretty feast-or-famine, and it led to a lot of matchups that were fun, but lopsided. Despite this, the only time anybody ever conceded mid-match was when we went for the same strategy (storm) but one of us, by sheer luck, did it better. Players like being weaker than their friends or adversaries; very few like being strictly or basically objectively weaker.

Anyway-- we have a dice pool, which is a canvas that allows for a lot of expression. The most obvious way I can think of to proceed is this:

• Different weapons use d4, d6, or d8 dice. Daggers and such are d4s, big dumb swords are d8s, for "that's what they are in D&D" reasons more than anything else.
• We already have a "Choose one for each 4+" picklist, so let's keep that as is. This is generic stuff like "Impress, dismay, or frighten" or "Do 1-harm" or "Defend a position" or whatever.
• Weapons also have another stat called EDGE. Edge is the maximum number of picklist options you can choose by roling 4+. Flavorfully it represents like, potential backstabbery ability. Large-die weapons have Edge around 2 or 3, small-die ones have more.
  
• Finally, each weapon has "combos" that trigger on patterns in the numbers. For example, a d4-based dagger might have an additional effect when you roll triples or when you roll a 1, 2, 3, and 4. An enchanted d8-based mace might have a boring damage-boosting effect if you rolled an 8, and it might start whispering to you if you roll double 1s. Stuff like that.
  
• To actually attack, roll some number of your weapon's dice (derived from your skill and the fictional position and whatnot). For each 4+, choose one option from the picklist, up to a maximum of MAX. Then, check to see if you rolled any combos, and apply those.

The benefits of this system off the top of my head:

• The daggers and whatever feel weaker, but they do feel cool and distinct, and if a player says "I want a dagger that can actually pull its weight in combat", the table has the tools to make that happen.
• The players who have signaled that they want to be better at combat (i.e. the big-die weapons) have more consistent success. It's real easy to roll 4+ on d8s, actually.
  
• But those high-die players are still doing cool things-- it's not like 5e and whatnot where you have a fighter with "Deal d6 damage. Special ability (1/day): Deal 2d6 damage".
  
• Similarly, it's real easy to make a weapon enchanted, or really old, or poorly-made, or if you wanna break out the d10s really big. Furthermore, all those enchantments will feel different, because caring about rolling 1s vs saving dice vs anything else you do with the dice pool feel different in a really tactile way.
  
• Edge lets you kind of give people whatever buffs you want. That's its main function-- your marginal skill increases from "high" to "really high", your weapon becomes more consistent as opposed to end-the-world powerful.
• This system generalizes nicely to non-weapon combat actions. Remember, we kept the picklist of generic combat goodstuff intact, free for the "throw sand at your enemy" move or an improvised "drop down from the chandelier" move to use.
  
• I used a lot of words, but the stat block for a weapon isn't that big? Die size, edge, like two combos, an out-of-combat effect. Boom. If you wanna go really rules-light you could probably ditch the edge and just promise to be very judicious about giving people skill buffs.

There are downsides, too, but I'm kinda sleepy, and also I'd really need to see this played in a broader context of game to verify them. That's the kind of impartial reporting you've come to expect from Natalie Libre Bigstuffedcat.

Anyway, if I have a broader design point to wrap this up, it's that dice pools are real expressive. They let you differentiate things in a way that feels more tactile and fundamental to me than, say, swapping out picklists in a BoB game. They're like a really intimidating synthesizer with a thousand knobs and settings that theoretically can imitate any instrument in existence, and several not in existence. My benediction to you is to turn those knobs more.