Have you ever heard of Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokemon? Even despite the fact that some Special Conditions are thought to be specific to certain card types, the game doesn't really flourish until you put Burned onto a Fighting-Type design, does it?
Exactly my point.
The difference between medicine and poison is in the dose.
We don't have to be talking about something that changes the face of the macrocosm entirely, it only changes the meta really. But then it opens up new things for the macrocosm.
You can read one of my explanations of Domain Influence here.
Hmmm thanks for the link. I read it but I still don't fully get what you're saying. I think using domain to define the term really makes it unclear. I thought it was about impacting the board state but I don't really understand how a removal spell can have unlimited domain influence in that case but a permanent only ever has a limited about. I know you said not to worry about the points but I can't grasp the rest of it so I'm trying to glean how you're thinking from the point values you describe.
As for your comparisons to Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh I played both games when I was younger but not seriously so I can't comment on them. The examples I was thinking of were Hearthstone which I used to play more recently being very magic like in giving different classes different abilities and being pretty consistent that Warlock didn't get damage to players or Priest didn't get great offensive weapons.
For another example Eternal when I stopped playing it also stuck to color pie pretty rigourously. Only certain colors got silence. Only certain colors got direct damage. Only certain colors had offensive weapons. But these games may be minorities and I just might not have played games that gave every color access to everything at least in small doses. But I'd agrue that kind of makes my point. To my understanding those are games that don't have flagship non rotating formats the way magic (EDH and Modern are arguably the two most important non draft formats of the last five years even moreso than standard) does so they can weather color pie breaks for flavor more easily because they will rotate out of the competitive format and not have a lasting impact beyond that. Magic can't afford those sort of color pie breaks because EDH is the main way people play, 1 minor break and it's a card people will play forever (see green decks running dismember for years as an example). But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on the importance of non rotating formats to those games.
I definitely was just wrong about Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh by the sound of it but the biggest digital card games as far as I can tell all follow magics pattern.
Haven't tested it because I don't support aristocrats as a theme but if you do it seems like a slam dunk to me. It doesn't gain you life when your creatures die but everything else about it is a massive upgrade on Blood Artist or Zulaport Cutthroat imo.
Thanks for this NotScottMescudi! Angel of Ruins seems insanely good. Definitely going to try and make space for it. Plague Engineer seems good but I'm not sure I want it with all my other ETB destroy creature creatures around. Bomat courier is excellent and I can hold heartedly second it as an option. A staple in my list.
Arcane Artisan is interesting but seems very slow to me. 3 mana and then needs to untap for another three mana investment to do anything. I'm willing to try it because I love those archetypes but I am not sold.
I'm going to go to bat for Court of Grace. I can understand skipping it if you don't like Monarch as a mechanic but otherwise the card is incredible. Especially if you support stax in white. Often the 4 drop I most want to see in a slower white deck.
I'm not an amateur designer—I have been doing this since 2007.
My experience with MTG go back to Odyssey/7th Edition.
My learning curve was incredibly quick.
It would help if the suggest things weren't biased and conditional, and failing to recognize the overhead and responsibility of the developer regarding the schematics demanded.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your jargon this answers none of my questions. I asked for a link to your domain influence idea because I don't understand it at all from what you've said here and you seem unwilling to explain it again. I asked for an example of a game that you felt allowed each different color/faction/whatever to impact all phases of the game and you haven't provided one. I mentioned that I was intrigued by the idea of all colors having abilities available as flavor of characters dictated and having the characters sorted into colors by flavor and you ignored that.
I don't see how asking you to either stick to the existing color pie or justify the theory behind your breaks of it is biased or conditional. I do respect it's hard to have novel ideas in a decades old game and your ingenuity is really interesting (@RowanAlpha this is why I'm interested in engaging despite all the jargon that is hard to understand and history) but when you post things publicly for feedback negative feedback is to be expected when you push boundaries. Especially since this doesn't allow black to deal with anything it couldn't before it's "printing" so the only boundary it's pushing is the color pie.
My main issue comes down to this you say giving Black counterspells can wean it off discard. I think that intent is misguided and makes the game worse and I don't know why you think weaning off discard is a good thing. To me having black preemptively attack the hand and belatedly attack the board makes for an interesting contrast with blue with attacks as spells are cast or bounces them later. Makes for at least 3 different cool play patterns depending on if you are U, UB, or B.
P.S. Rowan didn't call you an amateur, rowan called you an auteur.
An auteur is an artist, usually a film director, who applies a highly centralized and subjective control to many aspects of a collaborative creative work; in other words, a person equivalent to an author of a novel or a play.
Okay so you just are insisting that you know best then. You want to create new things to be unique to colors but you don't want to conform to the established color pie. I mean that's just kind of silly but um you do you I guess. Still interesed in a link to your explanation of domain influence or an example of a game you think balances it across colors/factions/races or whatever well.
Edit: that came off as super harsh but I just don't know what to do with you saying it's healthy for me to design things unique to colors but not to follow the established precedent of what is unique to each color. If you believed that they shouldn't have unique identities beyond flavor and whatever abilities suited the flavor of a card I could accept that as a philosphy but I'm at a loss with what I am understanding as your theory.
You won't likely run into that issue, because multicolors don't simply do thing 'more efficiently', they do things with bonus to them (utility or power)
It's not the efficiency but the bonus that preserves interest in multicolor. Undermine >> Absorb
NOte that in development schematic, you're always going to be adding unique bits to certain colors, which once again provides interest to each individual color, where the bonus for multicolor becomes a centerpiece.
I think the concept you're suggest, mind you, involves using various monocolor cards to creature a pseudo-multicolor deck. With that said, nothing is lost but everything gained in the science I understand and have explained.
On point 1 I think you misunderstood me. I was referring to multicolor decks not multicolor cards. My point was that if Black can do everything to various degrees of efficency then what is the draw to play multiple colors. And that is for efficient/powerful cards.
On number 2 if every color can do everything then what bonuses can being multicolor provide other than efficiency? Yes Undermine and Absorb give bonuses specific to their colors but in your world where every color can do everything they aren't abilities that could never be on a card together without being multicolored. Your vision of color pie bleed invalidates that sort of classically cool design.
I'm not really sure I understand point 3. You said you don't believe in effect separation but are talking about giving unique effects to the colors to provide interest. So I'm obviously missing something here. You want new mechanics to be able to be unique to colors but not the existing ones?
And do you have an explanation for your philosophy you can link because I'm not talking about creating a pseudo multicolored deck. I'm saying that if a color can impact every part of the game you will just play one color because it makes your mana base incredibly reliable and efficient. Never needing to worry about missing a color and being able to play utility lands like Karakas, Castle Vantress, or Hive of the Eye Tyrant is very valuable. Mono color decks are cool and exciting and should exist but it's good for the game that they have glaring weakness by only being in one color and not having access to every tool in magic. The trade off for perfect mana needs to be significant in my opinion. I'd be curious if you can also provide a real world example of a game you think has "good domain influence" because it seems to me that games are really based on forcing you to make choices and being unable to do everything without significant sacrifices.
Okay then let me run you through a hypothetical scenario then. Let's say we go with your ideas and every color can do everything just at various efficiencies. So you say that everyone can counter spells but blue does it best, everyone can discard but black does it best, everyone can deal direct damage but red does it best, etc. Now you are only going into multiple colors because you want a particular set of efficient cards rather than any type of particular ability that your first color didn't have access to.
Which so far is fine that's basically how competitive play already works because you already are only playing the most efficient cards.
Where you run into problems with your style of design is if you miss on making a colors answers less efficient then you can end up with a parade of single color control decks that don't have the usual draw back of inefficient mana making them inconsistent. Similarly with midrange decks. Usuauly they want to have efficient answers around a few powerful threats. If you miss in this style of design it's really easy to end up with consistent single color decks that can do everything they need to do in a format.
And if that happens it can become very monotonous. If you have a solved meta game it's already bad. If it's solved and doesn't have the game to game variety from mana inconsistency due to multiple colors you have a 5 alarm fire.
Second having all colors do everything doesn't create any sort of balance. It just destroys it. You go from a world where you play red for direct damage, green for ramp, blue for counters, black for discard, and white for catch all answers like Oblivion Ring. Now you can just play whichever color has your win condition of choice and answers in your same color. If it turns out the best win condition and answers are in the same color then you have a problem like I described above. I think that is a much worse system then choosing your win conditions and then choosing secondary colors to round out your initial colors weaknesses that impact your gameplan.
In development schematics, this opens up for a meta that weans away from the discard.
This is something that WotC doesn't want to do though. Like Rowan said a strength of the game is that the different colors do different things well. Black can efficently answer any card type preemptively with discard and can reactively answer most card types inefficiently with removal. Providing it with another axis of interaction gives it too many avenues relative to other colors.
As for Heaven Bound I have a few problems. First I don't see the flavor of the mechanics matching the card name. Binding a creature to the battlefield and turning them into a "wasteland" is a pretty odd idea of heaven. Second desiging single target removal that ignores hexproof is a bad idea in my book. We already have answers to hexproof in terms of "all creature" spells or "sacrifice a creature" spells. Making a traditional removal spell that ignores the ability that avoids single target removal is just bad design imo. Invalidating rules text on your opponents cards is generally an unfun design and should be used sparingly and on narrow cards like Stony Silence, Pithing Needle, Torpor Orb, and rest in peace. Cards that don't do anything on their own so you're not invalidating your opponents deck and advancing your strategy at the same time.
It's quite possible I am entirely wrong about how good cradle is, I've never cubed with it because I don't love non fixing lands that don't provide utility. It's definitely very strong and I don't have experience with it. Was more trying to make my point about the weaker green mana dorks, which is off topic anyway.
In an unpowered legacy cube, green ramp might be the best archetype (depending on how hard you support parasitic reanimator cards).. so it missing this peice is not a nail in the coffin for it by any stretch.
I realize this is not the place for this at all but at this stage is the green hyper ramp package as parasitic as any other archetype? Taking the green section of the MTGO legacy cube for example it has an absolute ton of cards that won't see play in any archetype except for Green ramp with a small splash. Obviously the best dorks go into any deck but the lower end ones that only tap for G? I don't think that's too far off reanimator on the parasitic scale. Obviously not on the level of dedicated storm cards but not completely flexible either.
On that note I'd run Cradle if you wanted to support hyper ramp and run Treetop if you didn't.
Going to revive this because I have been noticing a similar sort of thing with my cube. I don't have a problem with all in archetypes but I don't want just supported archetypes and aggro to be all that's viable.
So with all the recent talk about drafting on rails I want to make 3+ color good stuff a little more viable in my cube. I don't want to go too far because I really enjoy my key archetypes (Storm, reanimator, stax, and blink) but they don't overlap a ton. Supporting aggro is also of course a must to keep balance in the cube and punish greed. But now I've gone so far down that path that greed is basically dead. We don't really feel drafting on rails too keenly but we definitely feel like you can't just draft a tap out pile and compete.
So I'm looking at changes to try and bring back flexible control piles. One step is going to be taking out the pathways I have. While they are perfect for streamlined two color builds and I love them for that they are really bad for splashes. Second the Wildfire package is getting cut. It is entirely uncompetitive with anything but the piles and is by far the worst stax option in the cube. It's slow, weak, and just not played. I also think I want to try to make my green section less interested in playing 13+ forests but I'm not really sure how to go about that because the heavy green Rofellos, Nissa, GGG fatty package is so successful. Lastly I think I need to cut archtype support back a little bit. Storm is fun and we want it but in 360 with Underworld breach existing does it need Birgi or dark ritual? Does stax need Tangle Wire? Does flicker need reveillark? I don't know the answers but I'm going to try and find out.
I don't want to go all the way to the stone ages here but I do want the good stuff decks to be a bit more viable because part of what makes limited great is those decks without a super coherent plan just competing with each other on the board.
I think a big way to make draft less on rails is to have 3+ color good stuff be viable but not over powered. But striking that balance is really hard. My early idea is to make green less intrigued in being near mono green and to slightly lessen my archtype support like breathe discussed in his last post. Having the weakest redundant enablers just wheel automatically and provides that on rails feeling. If the weaker enablers can go into a goodstuff pile then they're less likely to wheel and more likely for a fun draft experience not just a fun game experience.
But the problem I've run into is I don't know how to support good stuff piles in a high powered archetype environment. It's hard to keep with up a good stax deck or a good storm deck if you're just trying to play good stuff on curve.
So with all the recent talk about drafting on rails I want to make 3+ color good stuff a little more viable in my cube. I don't want to go too far because I really enjoy my key archetypes (Storm, reanimator, stax, and blink) but they don't overlap a ton. Supporting aggro is also of course a must to keep balance in the cube and punish greed. But now I've gone so far down that path that greed is basically dead. We don't really feel drafting on rails too keenly but we definitely feel like you can't just draft a tap out pile and compete.
So I'm looking at changes to try and bring back flexible control piles. One step is going to be taking out the pathways I have. While they are perfect for streamlined two color builds and I love them for that they are really bad for splashes. Second the Wildfire package is getting cut. It is entirely uncompetitive with anything but the piles and is by far the worst stax option in the cube. It's slow, weak, and just not played. I also think I want to try to make my green section less interested in playing 13+ forests but I'm not really sure how to go about that because the heavy green Rofellos, Nissa, GGG fatty package is so successful. Lastly I think I need to cut archtype support back a little bit. Storm is fun and we want it but in 360 with Underworld breach existing does it need Birgi or dark ritual? Does stax need Tangle Wire? Does flicker need reveillark? I don't know the answers but I'm going to try and find out.
I don't want to go all the way to the stone ages here but I do want the good stuff decks to be a bit more viable because part of what makes limited great is those decks without a super coherent plan just competing with each other on the board.
Not optimistic about Jadar, the white adversary, and Augur but wanted to give them a test. Pit fighter and Adeline feel pretty likely to stick at this point. Bloodthirsty Adversary has overperformed in a very limited amount of testing. I really wanted Jadar to stick because we love ophiomancer but I'm not currently optimistic.
Cathartic Pyre, Fateful Absence, and Suspicious Stowaway are on the watch list for me. I had forgotten I'd cut Looter il kor in the stowaway spoiler thread.
Hmmm thanks for the link. I read it but I still don't fully get what you're saying. I think using domain to define the term really makes it unclear. I thought it was about impacting the board state but I don't really understand how a removal spell can have unlimited domain influence in that case but a permanent only ever has a limited about. I know you said not to worry about the points but I can't grasp the rest of it so I'm trying to glean how you're thinking from the point values you describe.
As for your comparisons to Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh I played both games when I was younger but not seriously so I can't comment on them. The examples I was thinking of were Hearthstone which I used to play more recently being very magic like in giving different classes different abilities and being pretty consistent that Warlock didn't get damage to players or Priest didn't get great offensive weapons.
For another example Eternal when I stopped playing it also stuck to color pie pretty rigourously. Only certain colors got silence. Only certain colors got direct damage. Only certain colors had offensive weapons. But these games may be minorities and I just might not have played games that gave every color access to everything at least in small doses. But I'd agrue that kind of makes my point. To my understanding those are games that don't have flagship non rotating formats the way magic (EDH and Modern are arguably the two most important non draft formats of the last five years even moreso than standard) does so they can weather color pie breaks for flavor more easily because they will rotate out of the competitive format and not have a lasting impact beyond that. Magic can't afford those sort of color pie breaks because EDH is the main way people play, 1 minor break and it's a card people will play forever (see green decks running dismember for years as an example). But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on the importance of non rotating formats to those games.
I definitely was just wrong about Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh by the sound of it but the biggest digital card games as far as I can tell all follow magics pattern.
Arcane Artisan is interesting but seems very slow to me. 3 mana and then needs to untap for another three mana investment to do anything. I'm willing to try it because I love those archetypes but I am not sold.
I'm going to go to bat for Court of Grace. I can understand skipping it if you don't like Monarch as a mechanic but otherwise the card is incredible. Especially if you support stax in white. Often the 4 drop I most want to see in a slower white deck.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your jargon this answers none of my questions. I asked for a link to your domain influence idea because I don't understand it at all from what you've said here and you seem unwilling to explain it again. I asked for an example of a game that you felt allowed each different color/faction/whatever to impact all phases of the game and you haven't provided one. I mentioned that I was intrigued by the idea of all colors having abilities available as flavor of characters dictated and having the characters sorted into colors by flavor and you ignored that.
I don't see how asking you to either stick to the existing color pie or justify the theory behind your breaks of it is biased or conditional. I do respect it's hard to have novel ideas in a decades old game and your ingenuity is really interesting (@RowanAlpha this is why I'm interested in engaging despite all the jargon that is hard to understand and history) but when you post things publicly for feedback negative feedback is to be expected when you push boundaries. Especially since this doesn't allow black to deal with anything it couldn't before it's "printing" so the only boundary it's pushing is the color pie.
My main issue comes down to this you say giving Black counterspells can wean it off discard. I think that intent is misguided and makes the game worse and I don't know why you think weaning off discard is a good thing. To me having black preemptively attack the hand and belatedly attack the board makes for an interesting contrast with blue with attacks as spells are cast or bounces them later. Makes for at least 3 different cool play patterns depending on if you are U, UB, or B.
P.S. Rowan didn't call you an amateur, rowan called you an auteur.
Edit: that came off as super harsh but I just don't know what to do with you saying it's healthy for me to design things unique to colors but not to follow the established precedent of what is unique to each color. If you believed that they shouldn't have unique identities beyond flavor and whatever abilities suited the flavor of a card I could accept that as a philosphy but I'm at a loss with what I am understanding as your theory.
On point 1 I think you misunderstood me. I was referring to multicolor decks not multicolor cards. My point was that if Black can do everything to various degrees of efficency then what is the draw to play multiple colors. And that is for efficient/powerful cards.
On number 2 if every color can do everything then what bonuses can being multicolor provide other than efficiency? Yes Undermine and Absorb give bonuses specific to their colors but in your world where every color can do everything they aren't abilities that could never be on a card together without being multicolored. Your vision of color pie bleed invalidates that sort of classically cool design.
I'm not really sure I understand point 3. You said you don't believe in effect separation but are talking about giving unique effects to the colors to provide interest. So I'm obviously missing something here. You want new mechanics to be able to be unique to colors but not the existing ones?
And do you have an explanation for your philosophy you can link because I'm not talking about creating a pseudo multicolored deck. I'm saying that if a color can impact every part of the game you will just play one color because it makes your mana base incredibly reliable and efficient. Never needing to worry about missing a color and being able to play utility lands like Karakas, Castle Vantress, or Hive of the Eye Tyrant is very valuable. Mono color decks are cool and exciting and should exist but it's good for the game that they have glaring weakness by only being in one color and not having access to every tool in magic. The trade off for perfect mana needs to be significant in my opinion. I'd be curious if you can also provide a real world example of a game you think has "good domain influence" because it seems to me that games are really based on forcing you to make choices and being unable to do everything without significant sacrifices.
Which so far is fine that's basically how competitive play already works because you already are only playing the most efficient cards.
Where you run into problems with your style of design is if you miss on making a colors answers less efficient then you can end up with a parade of single color control decks that don't have the usual draw back of inefficient mana making them inconsistent. Similarly with midrange decks. Usuauly they want to have efficient answers around a few powerful threats. If you miss in this style of design it's really easy to end up with consistent single color decks that can do everything they need to do in a format.
And if that happens it can become very monotonous. If you have a solved meta game it's already bad. If it's solved and doesn't have the game to game variety from mana inconsistency due to multiple colors you have a 5 alarm fire.
Second having all colors do everything doesn't create any sort of balance. It just destroys it. You go from a world where you play red for direct damage, green for ramp, blue for counters, black for discard, and white for catch all answers like Oblivion Ring. Now you can just play whichever color has your win condition of choice and answers in your same color. If it turns out the best win condition and answers are in the same color then you have a problem like I described above. I think that is a much worse system then choosing your win conditions and then choosing secondary colors to round out your initial colors weaknesses that impact your gameplan.
This is something that WotC doesn't want to do though. Like Rowan said a strength of the game is that the different colors do different things well. Black can efficently answer any card type preemptively with discard and can reactively answer most card types inefficiently with removal. Providing it with another axis of interaction gives it too many avenues relative to other colors.
As for Heaven Bound I have a few problems. First I don't see the flavor of the mechanics matching the card name. Binding a creature to the battlefield and turning them into a "wasteland" is a pretty odd idea of heaven. Second desiging single target removal that ignores hexproof is a bad idea in my book. We already have answers to hexproof in terms of "all creature" spells or "sacrifice a creature" spells. Making a traditional removal spell that ignores the ability that avoids single target removal is just bad design imo. Invalidating rules text on your opponents cards is generally an unfun design and should be used sparingly and on narrow cards like Stony Silence, Pithing Needle, Torpor Orb, and rest in peace. Cards that don't do anything on their own so you're not invalidating your opponents deck and advancing your strategy at the same time.
I realize this is not the place for this at all but at this stage is the green hyper ramp package as parasitic as any other archetype? Taking the green section of the MTGO legacy cube for example it has an absolute ton of cards that won't see play in any archetype except for Green ramp with a small splash. Obviously the best dorks go into any deck but the lower end ones that only tap for G? I don't think that's too far off reanimator on the parasitic scale. Obviously not on the level of dedicated storm cards but not completely flexible either.
On that note I'd run Cradle if you wanted to support hyper ramp and run Treetop if you didn't.
So I'm looking at changes to try and bring back flexible control piles. One step is going to be taking out the pathways I have. While they are perfect for streamlined two color builds and I love them for that they are really bad for splashes. Second the Wildfire package is getting cut. It is entirely uncompetitive with anything but the piles and is by far the worst stax option in the cube. It's slow, weak, and just not played. I also think I want to try to make my green section less interested in playing 13+ forests but I'm not really sure how to go about that because the heavy green Rofellos, Nissa, GGG fatty package is so successful. Lastly I think I need to cut archtype support back a little bit. Storm is fun and we want it but in 360 with Underworld breach existing does it need Birgi or dark ritual? Does stax need Tangle Wire? Does flicker need reveillark? I don't know the answers but I'm going to try and find out.
I don't want to go all the way to the stone ages here but I do want the good stuff decks to be a bit more viable because part of what makes limited great is those decks without a super coherent plan just competing with each other on the board.
But the problem I've run into is I don't know how to support good stuff piles in a high powered archetype environment. It's hard to keep with up a good stax deck or a good storm deck if you're just trying to play good stuff on curve.
So I'm looking at changes to try and bring back flexible control piles. One step is going to be taking out the pathways I have. While they are perfect for streamlined two color builds and I love them for that they are really bad for splashes. Second the Wildfire package is getting cut. It is entirely uncompetitive with anything but the piles and is by far the worst stax option in the cube. It's slow, weak, and just not played. I also think I want to try to make my green section less interested in playing 13+ forests but I'm not really sure how to go about that because the heavy green Rofellos, Nissa, GGG fatty package is so successful. Lastly I think I need to cut archtype support back a little bit. Storm is fun and we want it but in 360 with Underworld breach existing does it need Birgi or dark ritual? Does stax need Tangle Wire? Does flicker need reveillark? I don't know the answers but I'm going to try and find out.
I don't want to go all the way to the stone ages here but I do want the good stuff decks to be a bit more viable because part of what makes limited great is those decks without a super coherent plan just competing with each other on the board.
Not optimistic about Jadar, the white adversary, and Augur but wanted to give them a test. Pit fighter and Adeline feel pretty likely to stick at this point. Bloodthirsty Adversary has overperformed in a very limited amount of testing. I really wanted Jadar to stick because we love ophiomancer but I'm not currently optimistic.
Cathartic Pyre, Fateful Absence, and Suspicious Stowaway are on the watch list for me. I had forgotten I'd cut Looter il kor in the stowaway spoiler thread.