MTG Salvation

Well, storm is not "coming back" as WotC claims, even though prowes is or surge are related mechanics. It is very good in a storm vombo deck, but the fact tha it only adds red, is not an instant and relies on having basically set up, makes it look OK to me. Modern Storm would probably play it, at least 2 bacause past in flames will get you the win there, but not this card alone and it only helps with the finish. I really lie the simplicity so I give it a 8/10 over all.

Mine:
Awake the Beast - 3 G
Instant
Destroy target Artifact or Enchantment, then
create a 3/3 green Beast creature token.

You may pay G rather than pay Awaken the
Beast's mana cost. If you do target opponent
creates a 3/3 green Beast creature token instead.

Hah repurposed Eyes of the Wisent huh

I quite enjoy the modality - either a flash 187 (is that term still used?) for 4 or a trade for 1. I consider both modes reasonably costed but maybe make the CC 2GG ?

Exultant Dialogue 1WW
Sorcery
Draw a card.
You gain 2 life for each card in your hand.
Target opponent gains 2 life for each card in their hand.

This is a cycle - a “pre-cantrip” then some kind of effect roughly scaling with hand size. I might try to make it more uniform but ehhh.

I'm mixed on this card. On the one hand it could be a game changer if you pull it while your opponent has little to no cards in hand to not benefit from the life gain part. On the other you could easily give them fuel to pop off themselves. I'd give a 6/10 due to possibility of it actually helping the opponent more then you.

Book of Sea Shanties 4
Artifact {R}
Creatures you control and Creature Spells you Cast are Pirates in addition to their other types.
Whenever a Non-token Pirate enters the battlefield, other pirates you control get +1/+1 till end of turn.


Also a Side note, the one thing that I would change of Call the Fleet, looking back at it, would be the mana cost from 3UB to 1UB. Also my cards ideas are mostly pirate/ pirate related due to that pirates are a "weak tribe."

Call The Fleet 3UB
Enchantment {R}
Creature spells you cast have "Raid - whenever this creature enters the Battlefield, if you attacked with a Creature this turn, you may search your library for a creature card with the same name as that creature, reveal it and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library."
Creatures you control get +1/+1 for each other creature with the same name as that creature.

Cool I think that it is good for boosting the "weakness" of the pirate tribe

Kinship sliver 1 colorless, 1 green
Creature - Sliver (rare)
all slivers have "you may remove any number of +1/+1 counters from this sliver, if you do create that many 1/1 colorless sliver creature tokens"

Perhaps templated more directly as;
All slivers you control have "Remove a +1/+1 from this creature: Create a 1/1 colorless sliver creature token"
You can just repeat it any number of times times. It was always a little weird with crypt rats
I think though it would be too easy to go infinite in combos. Anything that adds +1/+1 counter when it enters the battlefield would make infinite tokens. Just a sigil champion turns this into an infinite number of 2/2's

Gerda Äagesdotter, Archmage of the Unseen 1U
Legendary Creature - Human Wizard (R)
You may look at the top card of your library at any time.
Whenever you would shuffle your library, instead exile the top card of your library, then shuffle your library and put the exiled card on top of it.
T: Put the top card of your library on the bottom of your library.
1/2

An impressive card concept, and a hard act to follow! I think 1U is a little cheap but otherwise it’s good.

Wisdom-marked Elder 4GGWW
Creature - Elemental
Convoke
Lifelink, Double Strike
* has base power and toughness equal to the number of cards in your hand.
*/*

I hate the name but whatever

I think Wisdom Marked elder is fine power level wise, but a little over-costed even considering it has convoke. It’s maro power and toughness ability goes against the idea of emptying your hand in order to quickly convoke out a large creature. Another option is it keep it costed as it currently is and consider changing it’s ability so that it cares about the opponent’s (or even each player’s) hand and not just it’s controller’s hand, doing so would help encourage it’s controller to empty their hand out to cast it.

Hand Mine 1RU
Sorcery
Hand Mine deals 2 damage to any target.

If a spell or an ability an opponent controls would make you reveal your hand, you may instead reveal and discard Hand Mine from your hand, If you do, counter that spell or ability and Hand Mine deals 5 damage to that spell or ability’s controller.


(I always kind of wanted a card like Guerrilla Tactics that could be triggered off specific discard like thoughtseize rather than random or “target player discards a card” discard effects).

Hand Mine has a bit of a problem in that it's too bad to cast it. Such a card needs to be more like Gaea's Blessing, where it's well worth casting while harshly punishing a mechanic if it would fall victim to it. Perhaps make it a conditional cantrip, where it has some way of being cast for one and drawing a card, so that it's sometimes a better Shock. Or just up the damage to 4 so it's a useful burn spell, albeit overcosted.

On the other side of the mill spectrum, have a bit of an odd mill idea:

Fleeting Insight 1UUB
Instant
Target player draws three cards, then discards four cards.

---

The balance on this is entirely spitballed, but the idea is that it mitigates all the "unfun" aspects of mill by framing it as disadvantageous hand replacement. It doesn't just cut you out of the game, it accelerates the clock to decking out and leaves you at card disadvantage without removing your ability to play outright. Control and combo decks that need high deck redundancy to function are screwed over by this, because they can't afford to discard four cards all that often (unless they get "lucky" with excess lands or something that would otherwise be dead weight, or have drawn in considerable excess), but against a more straightforward deck, it gives a chance to get something much better, without the opponent knowing. Especially if you're packing discard synergy like Madness costs.

So, good idea to make mill less painful to play against? Or is mill just inherently too bad for playing the game? This particular style of mill also helps combo decks by cashing in hand redundancy for deck fishing, which I think helps with the playability of the cards in general by making them usable when the counter-cards show up, but in a different context.

Some fun stuff going on here, dunno how to properly evaluate though. I do think it should maybe be a mana cheaper.

Pff come up with your own name and flavor 1GG
Legendary Creature - ??
Hexproof
2 , : Add WUBRG. Use this mana only to cast creature spells.
2/2

Simple but hey

The idea of a three-mana gain for creature spells is a bit dangerous, and the easy production of WUBRG means that a mostly-Golgari deck can get quickly out of hand with creatures like Chromanticore or Child of Alara. Setting aside the cheese of return-to-hand mixing with WUBRG generation, Hexproof makes this thing generally nasty with Bestow as a whole, letting you reliably cast Bestow in every color, especially Kestia, the Cultivator.

Basically, I think it's too powerful a color-fixer and ramper to excuse the presence of Hexproof when it obviously permits a deck full of powerful buffs, as it pays for itself the turn its out if you get it Haste and can spend the mana.

---

Opaline Umbra 1W
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant non-Aura Enchantment
Enchanted Enchantment becomes a White Creature with power and toughness equal to its converted mana cost, in addition to its other colors and types.
Totem Armor

---

The initial thought is simple: Single-target Opalescence as an Umbra. Can protect the enchantment from a piece of removal, and some high-cost Enchantments become good creatures. Can be used to bypass Devotion requirements on Gods, as well as set statlines on other Enchantment Creatures. The non-Aura clause is because of rules issues and my main thought for solving them being giving Bestow, which makes them sticky, sometimes beyond reason, and if they self-enchant and get the CMC P/T, then stuff like Yavimaya's Embrace turn into utterly absurd value swings. +10/+10, trample and creature stealing for 8? Turning into a 10/10 trampler when the stolen creature dies? The complexity of fixing that mess of interactions would need to be a card dedicated to that idea alone.

Seems like an interesting idea and I think it would work well, may I suggest though that you add “with base power and toughness equal to it’s converted mana cost” just to avoid confusion over what happens when someone enchants a Courser of Kruphix with this (it becomes a 3/3).

Inferno Pyre xxR
Sorcery
Delve
Inferno Pyre deals X damage to any target.
When Inferno Pyre is put into your graveyard from anywhere, exile your graveyard and Inferno Pyre deals X damage to you where X is equal to the number of cards exiled in this way.

I was trying to figure out how a delve fireball might work where it could be somewhat balanced for constructed. The idea being that it has a drawback where self-mill decks like dredge would find it too dangerous to accidentally dredge into the graveyard.

Man this one probably requires a lot more thought than I'm going to give it to be honest.

The drawback feels very red. I think it really depends what your goals are. If the intent is to completely kill a self-mill strategy (assuming you succeed) I think this works fairly well at that - it would then remain interesting in an environment where you can find some other justification for it. If either the goal or the end result is that it's still worth it to put this in a self-mill deck, it would lead to a lot of no-fun games where the game is just a coin flip.

Normally I'd say that trying to make a drawback so severe that an otherwise broken card becomes "fair" is notoriously hard to make work, and there's usually a clever way around it. In this case I actually think it's possible that you could soften the drawback and it still wouldn't be out of this world broken. In order to OTK someone from 20, you have to mill about 35 cards which is a steep price. It might be more effective as efficient removal that can sometimes line up with other burn spells, but even then it's a pretty heavy investment and you never want to draw 2 of these.

This is probably a card that is impossible to balance without actual playtesting in specific environments, but after all of this rambling I think it's probably ok for it just to deal damage to you equal to the number of cards in GY, and not exile them.


--
Lizard Umbra R
Enchantment - Aura (C)
Enchant creature
Totem Armor (If enchanted permanent would be destroyed, instead remove all damage marked on it and destroy this Aura.)
Enchanted creature has haste.

Perfectly fair and quite functional. Not much more to say, honestly.

Okay card redux:

Quote from tiasian »

Pff come up with your own name and flavor 1G
Legendary Creature - ??
Hexproof
2 : Add 1 mana of any color. Use this mana only to cast creature spells. Put a ?? counter on Pff.
, remove three ?? counters from Pff: Add WUBRG. Use this mana only to cast creature spells.
2/2

This should work better, yeah?

Much better, needs a lot of Proliferate to get out of hand with needing three counters, and the smaller mana-fix means the turnaround on investment, which is 1 mana smaller though more flexible, is a lot higher at 6 for 2 instead of 2 for 3, and it can't self-fuel due to the creature spell clause. Still able to Voltron really hard with Bestow, but it takes longer to be doing it routinely, which is the important part for making it more able to be board-wiped as opposed to turn three Chromanticore, made a lot worse if you had another mana dork to get the necessary four mana to Bestow it and land dropped on curve, since you now have a 6/6 Flying First Strike Vigilance Trample Lifelink Hexproof creature on turn 3, ready to go face on turn 4, which spits out a 4/4 that just loses the Hexproof if it gets put down.

As it is now, great Good Stuff creature-commander, perhaps a Superfriends or aggro alternative to Morophon, the Boundless's late-game tribal counterpart, and works perfectly fine in Standard, especially in an environment with less Modern-grade duel-lands to make it less necessary, thanks to needing 6 total mana or a pile of Proliferate invested to get WUBRG. Likely better in the 99 with Jodah, Archmage Eternal, as a way to reliably get the alternate cost going.

Now, time for a repost from The Commander Game:

Mikhal, Forgotten Psyche 1W(U/B)(U/B)
Legendary Creature - Specter Wizard
Lifelink, Flying
Whenever Mikhal, Forgotten Psyche deals damage to a player, that player exiles a card in their hand.
Whenever an effect you control would cause an opponent to discard a card, you may pay 2WU and Exile it instead.
xWW, Exile a creature in your graveyard with power X or greater: Put an X/X White Thrull creature token with Lifelink into play.
xUB: Put an X/X Black Specter creature token with Flying into play with "when this creature enters the battlefield, Exile a Sorcery or Instant you control or in your graveyard with converted mana cost X. Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, that player discards a card and you may cast the exiled spell"
3/5
A pale shadow of his former self, but his killers have yet to suspect he hid his self in a lowly thrull.

---

The idea meandered a lot around ways to be Specter Tribal with a reanimation theme, with the flavor text originally being intended to be implemented as a revives-as-Specter mechanic attached to the Thrulls, similar to but slower than Chainer, Dementia Master and in much nicer Commander colors. More specifically, the thought was an Orzhov fleshcrafter killed by a Dimir agent with identity-destroying mind magic, which is where Ravnica Specters come from in general. The flavor text line being that they'd known well enough how to hide away parts of souls, allowing them to avoid total loss of identity in the long run, so they very much know who they used to be... And nobody else does.

Ultimately, I decided to have any revival stuff be a matter of spending 6 mana on a 4/4 Flying Specter that'll cast Blood for Bones or something when it hits the enemy player, allowing for other spells if desired, but also being decidedly easier to stop since you could kill the specter, keep blocking it, counter the recast spell or whatever. Also means you're able to creature-flood in Esper Control, I suppose, though you have to match your spell costs and throw on two more mana. Adds a lot of extra timing complexity since the spells come out after damage is assigned, which is important for preventing the combat tricks from swinging things massively on a regular basis.

There’s a lot of text and I’m rather confused as to exactly what it does. I get that it’s hand exile plus token generation but I’d like it if you pared it down to what you consider most important. Likely you’ll have to go with one or the other.

Shrine to the World-Devourer 3
Artifact
2 : Add one mana of any color.
Sacrifice 2 permanents: Add CCC .
despite its name, there’s no Eldrazi involved lol

The big thing is that this is highly reliant on the environment, as it has no tap and is utterly generic costs. It's the next best thing to perfect color fixing, and allows you to ramp off of token generation. The non-rotating formats, to my knowledge, don't have any competitive token floods to fuel it for even more mana outside infinite combos that win the game already or are used to fuel more useful engines than just endless mana, restricting it to sacrificing your board to fund something else.

If there's good low-cost token generation, this gets broken. If there's a lot of recursion on permanents, this gets broken. If there's a lot of generic mana flying around and a wonderful toolbox environment, this gets broken for color-fixing. Basically, if the costs are trivialized, which has happened before (stick it alongside Urzatron and watch the toolbox fly), it turns into an enormously powerful engine for color consistency if you have a lot of generic mana, and an engine for that mana if you have a lot of permanents.

Actually an effect pruned from a card I posted in The Commander's Tools:

Exotic Tutor 2(U/R)(U/R)
Creature - Goblin Advisor
When Exotic Tutor comes into play, search your library for a card that does not share a name with any permanents you control, any cards in your hand or any cards in your graveyard, put that card into your hand, then shuffle your library.
2/2
Why bother trying the same thing twice?

---

It's a terrible creature, in terms of the vanilla test. In Commander, it's Diabolic Tutor on a stick in Izzit colors, and therefor separated from much of what could recur it unless you go three colors (and also the colors to make it as bad as possible to be a Sorcery or Instant). In non-singleton formats, it's a way to fetch cards you haven't seen yet, but cannot get redundant cards, making it good for Superfriends and combos, but incapable of getting you extras after counters or removal take away the first, unless it was by Exile.

This is such a quirky effect I’m not even sure what colors it fits in, if any single one. You forgot the “reveal it” clause btw.

??, Council of One 2GGUU
Legendary Creature - Hydra Sphinx
Flying, Trample
??, Council of One has bass power and toughness equal to twice the number of cards in your hand.
When ?? deals combat damage to a player, draw twice that many cards.
*/*

The reason I didn't have the tutored card revealed is because I templated off the black Tutors, which don't have that clause. Didn't realize that was a feature of black Tutors and not part of standard Tutor properties. And in general, tutor color is about what the color cares to get. The Red is in the pseudo-randomness of needing to get something you haven't accessed yet (burning through options), the Blue is in the emphasis on one-off solutions (the core of many of its victory conditions is such combos).

As for the currently-nameless Council of One, being Flying and Trample and draw-double-for-damage and P/T being twice the cards you have in hand means that it reliably draws through enormous chunks of your deck, while it easily gets ahold of enough to be a severe beater with being in Green (tutor-based ramp) and Blue (directly drawing). It's a very reliable three-turn win unless you've been topdecking or the enemy's running a huge amount of Flyers.

If it was one P/T per card, it'd be fine because then it's tripling, instead of quintupling, hand size for the P/T of the initial hand size. One damage gets through, draw two cards, this thing gets +4/+4. That's too fast a buildup, it has to be fully blocked every time or else it trivially becomes too large to stop. Get rid of Trample or Flying, it becomes reliably blockable, instead of needing to be able to handle its full power every single turn or needing that line in the air. Did I mention that Blue can give unblockable to one-off free-hit? For +4/+4 per damage dealt? Make it draw one, the growth slows to reasonable levels, it doesn't constantly overfill your hand and it still has a reliably useful baseline P/T.

Have a widened and differently-abusive Shadowborn Apostle:

Gravetender Apostle WB
Creature - Human Cleric (u)
A deck may have any number of creatures named Gravetender Apostle.

1WW, sacrifice X Human Clerics you control: Search your deck for an Angel or your Graveyard for a Human or Spirit with converted mana cost X, then put it onto the battlefield tapped.
1BB, sacrifice X Human Clerics you control: Search your deck for a Demon or your graveyard for a Zombie or Skeleton with converted mana cost X, then put it onto the battlefield tapped.
1/4

---
The fact it can recover humans from the graveyard is why I say differently abusive, because it can, with enough expense, recover a lot of nasty things, and there's some ways to fund it with tokens (Westvale Cult Leader being a big one). The higher mana costs are to respect the tutor and reanimation value, regardless of CMC, and it being any Human Cleric means you don't need to stack it indefinitely. The exact CMC match is to prevent over sacrificing for mass death triggers like Blood Artist. Or, more appropriately, Wayward Disciple.

It's also a useful creature, independently of the need to stack them like mad, because it has a good stat line for holding the board away from your face, and cheep enough to actually get there against aggro. As does the ability to sac any Human Clerics you have, not just the Apostles, their rule-of-4 bypass lets them be filler and more consistently gotten rather than being required for the ability, as you can instead sacrifice stuff like Banisher Priest to get to a game-winning Angel or Demon. And it lets you get Containment Priest and the like out of the way of your shenanigans, or sac now-dying Human Clerics to revive other cheap Human Clerics.

I feel that Gravetender Apostle has too much text for one card. Not that I think it’s abilities should be cut, but I do feel there should be a way to templet it better. Perhaps you could merge it’s activated ability into one ability that costs 1WB? Also I think you can afford to be a little less restrictive on the sacrifice requirement and make the card be able to sacrifice any cleric (or human, whichever you feel fits better), because requiring the sac fodder to be both human and a cleric could be a little too narrow for decks that might want this.

Apheron, the Mage Smasher 2RG
Legendary Creature - Cyclops Berserker
Haste, Trample
Dimensionally Anchored (While this creature is on the battlefield it cannot be exiled, returned to it’s owner’s hand or put into it’s owner’s library)
5/5

I was wondering if there ever would be an ability that’s like indestructible, but instead blanks other forms of removal. Where the creature can be destroyed or dealt lethal damage, but can’t be exiled, bounced or tucked.

So I’ve seen this effect thrown about before as a hypothetical. I’ve seen mention of ruling issues, but I’m not sure what the deal there is. Moving on, I think it’d be okay as s form of protection if not as good as Protection, Hexproof, or Indestructible. The card works as is but could maybe be pushed. I don’t think “Dimensionally Achored” works as a keyword name because Indestructible at 14 characters seems kind of the limit for name length.

Also, Morphic_Tide - tutors with restrictions on what they search for always reveal if they put the cards in hand or on top of the library to eliminate the potential for cheating. As a side note - I know it’s fun to drop long text in card ideas but you really ought to pare it back. I’ll demonstrate.

So card revision because I wasn’t satisfied with my earlier version.
??, Council of One 5GGUU
Legendary Creature - Hydra Sphinx
Flying, Vigilance
??, Council of One has bass power and toughness equal to three times the number of cards in your hand.
5 : Draw a card.
Many perspectives, one mind.
*/*

Most repeatable card draw is 4 mana on activated abilities but this effectively has a +3/+3 pump rider added on. Thus.