How can they be based on proven conventions when the fact stands that some people find a thrill in games that are complex?
This wouldn't be a thing if what you're saying was true.
I'm sorry, this is such a non response that it's hard for me to even know where to begin. That's not an accurate description of the point I an making or what the point of contention is.
I'll try to explain it again: this isn't about whether complexity is allowed. It would be meaningless to say complex games are bad because games aren't simply complex or simple. It's not even just a scale. Complexity is, fittingly, more complicated than that. There's different kinds of complexity and complexity can be implemented in different ways. Games that are just as complex can be more less or hurt by their complexity, more or less benefit from it.
The complexity presented by en garde and challenge is not just high but also not rewarding. Especially the choice between the different dice roll games. As I've said, it's just not an interesting choice and adds way too much text for little gain.
Just want to add that I said Pierce explicitly wouldn't be granted by equipment—not Disarm.
My mistake.
And in the scenario you initially suggested, the person destroys their own creature, so Pierce wouldn't go through, because the creature would no longer be on the battlefield for the effect to have any relevance. It doesn't matter if it's a delayed triggered ability—the target/choice/selection is no longer present.
What are you talking about? I wasn't talking about removing the target of pierce, I was talking about removing the creature with the pierce ability.
Kicker wasn't a totally defunct mechanic, but it's fundamental dynamics had some decent potential, but it was poorly implemented. If simply Kicker spells kept the kicker cost down to a single mana, many of them would have been much more efficient and adaptable. Say, doing almost the same thing for a single green or a single blue. That's great! That's efficient!
That would have severely limited the design space of the mechanic for no real gain.
You say this bit like you're describing something obviously bad, but the best part of kicker as a mechanic is the way cards can be played as two significantly different cards depending on the circumstances.
Early magic was full of wonky power levels. Kicker has seen much more recent use than the examples you cite. And this is all talking card-by-card execution and balancing not mechanical design.
This is literally the point where I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree. Mainly because your points of interest seemed to be based upon your personal preferences, and not aspects or conditions that would unconditionally affect everyone.
No, they are based on proven conventions of game design.
Saying that aspects like bookkeeping and math make games too tedious to be fun is effectively saying that games like Dungeons and Dragons and Yu-Gi-Oh! aren't fun. Some people don't mind—or actually find a thrill in games with higher levels of detail.
MtG already HAS bookkeeping and math. I'm not saying you can't have bookkeeping and math in your games, and that much should be patently obvious. Players enjoy games with detail that is rewarding. It's both about the sheer level of complexity, and how well executed the complex elements are.
With that being said, I don't think it's fair for any game developer to have to cater to the special needs (or low-functioning perception) of certain players. Those kinds of games simply aren't for them. And it should be a respected liberty that the game developer is able to cater to their target demographic with the fullest extent of their capabilities. Some game aspects may be simplified in good faith—but what you're basically suggesting is hard oppression upon the creative talents of the game developer. It's unjust—and suggestions like this should never be made—because they simply can't be won.
I'll repeat the point I made earlier that excess complexity isn't just a problem for newer players. Framing this issue as just catering to new players is both a warped understanding of how much difference there actually is in what new players and more experienced players enjoy and evading addressing the point of where the complexity ceiling lies for more experienced players. You can design your sets however you like, free of my 'oppression', but if you want to design sets that actually play well you're going to have to submit to certain standards beyond your specific personal vision.
Most fun mechanics might be ones that you can build around, but some mechanics also enable you to build more freely, and thus open up (or advance) the fullest extent of the development and its capabilities.
Some mechanics are less build around than others. Kicker doesn't have much to build around, for example, but yet it does still lend toward that with how it encourages more mana intensive decks, how most individual kicker cards are designed with specific archetypes in mind, and how they keep making cards that mechanically care about kicker just like with other such mechanics like cycling and adventures. What none of these mechanics do, is base their playability primarily on the metagame prevalence of other strategies. Landwalk, fear and intimidate all used to be evergreen mechanics that did this for color, but they were all gotten rid off partly because they are anti-mechanics that can be unfun for both the user and the recipient in deciding games based on what can feel like happenstance. Protection still exists because it is used specifically as a universal anti-synergy mechanic to put on individual sideboard oriented cards.
Disarm is one such mechanic. There actually is nothing about Disarm that it can't be built around, but the inherent intention for it isn't to be built around. It exists as something built around the overworld of the game itself—and thus seeks to perfect the equilibrium and balance of its elements and their interactivity. It opens up interactivity and creates new interactivity. It is this interactivity that is one of the primary driving forces of the game and its fun. It enables players to do more—that's fun to them. Although you might not see anything that you can do with it.
Again, Disarm is a perfectly good type of effect to have, it's just not one you want very much of in one set. We just don't see this type of mechanic in MtG, or Hearthstone, or Faeria or any number of other cardgames. You hardly seen many anti-creature mechanics (e.g. deathtouch, wither) and they are the most common and most important cardtype to these sorts of games and always get lots of interaction. You don't need to push a creature theme; there's always a creature theme. There's never going to be an archetype of creature focused decks to counter, but the same cannot be said for auras and equipment.
EDIT: An another note on anti-creature mechanics is that these mechanics often appear on creatures themselves, necessarily making it hard for them to in any way counter creature based decks as an archetype, which is not true for disarm (in fact, you've stated you don't intend to even put it on a single aura or equipment.
Just want to note that in the scenario you presented, the effect of Pierce wouldn't resolve, because the creature would no longer be on the battlefield for it to have any relevancy when it resolves.
Pierce, as written, is a delayed trigger ability, like Flickerwisp. Delayed triggered abilities exist independently of the card that produces them. Once Pierce is triggered, it will take affect regardless of what happens to the creature with Pierce. That's why Flickerwisp can bring the creature back even if Flickerwisp dies before the end of turn, which the gatherer rulings confirm if you must know.
8/1/2008 The exiled card will return to the battlefield at the beginning of the end step even if Flickerwisp is no longer on the battlefield.
The game could really use this, as it enables regeneration (a beloved mechanic) and protection (yet another—suggestively endangered) to see new life.
Specific interactions with an abandoned evergreen mechanic and a mechanic relegated to sideboarded oriented cards don't help any of these mechanics.
Having a mechanic that gave creatures a buff when they fought a creature with banding would 'breathe new life' into banding, but that wouldn't make either of those mechanics okay (not that protection isn't okay, by the way).
It also enables development to ease up on hardremoval that take away interactivity, and can effectively reduce abilities like regeneration to nothing (not fun).
Development doesn't ease up on hard removal because it doesn't have enough good alternative, it does so because such cards are good for the game. Kill spells *are* interactive after all, because they can be countered, they can be worked around with death triggers and reanimation, they can be negated by -protection abilities on creatures and instant buffs and auras, they can be forcefully discarded from the hand or library, they can be locked out by cost increasing effects and effects that stop instant speed casting, they can be punished with certain triggered abilities like Bonecrusher Giant, and more.
On the topic of complexity, what exactly do you think is over-complicated about it? You're making it out to be an equation of some kind. It's right along the same lines as clash. Did you think that was over-complicated? I didn't find it all that special or interactive, but it wasn't poorly received either.
You may have noticed I already cited the comparison to Clash as a bad thing. Clash is a slightly complex mechanic because it requires you to know what converted mana cost means (a term which new players often get confused by) and is somewhat wordy with multiple effects going on. That's not the reason Clash is considered to be a design failure, but Challenge, and especially En Garde, is much more complicated than Clash. Clash has one straightforward mode, Challenge has three separate modes that you choose between. The amount of extra words that adds alone is huge. As I said before, you're not going to be able to fit En Garde onto a card with all the relevant reminder text, so you'd have to leave some of it out. That means you've just added a major comprehension complexity barrier to newer players who won't have any idea what it does when they see the cards, and a memory issue for everyone in remembering exactly what it does. En Garde compounds this with *another* modal option, which also brings with it board complexity in deciding blocks or determining the outcome of ability loss and how that it interacts with layering— something which most players don't fully understand.
And THEN we get to the reason why Clash was considered a design failure— which is that players just didn't find it fun. As I said before, this sort of random effect is mostly relegated to silver border unsets and rarely does it see print in standard sets. It just doesn't play that well in MtG. Games like Hearthstone have more random effects because they have less inherent randomness of the draw with you drawing only minions (creatures) and spells, gaining mana automatically and having the hero power for extra consistency, and yet still Hearthstone has shied away from straight dice roll effects, preferring to hide its randomness more behind random card selection from known card pools. Players don't particularly like effects that sometimes just whiff, basically.
"Complexity isn't just about comprehension." // Well—what is it about then? This is just an empty authoritative statement because you didn't even explain yourself. If I'm not mistaken, you wanted complexity to be about comprehensive (or to contour to comprehension)—am I right? Because your central argument was that comprehension is being impeded upon by complexity.
If we can just make one clear point about this, what is so complex about the set of three mini games that challenge your luck is based around?
My central argument was that "excess complexity... makes gameplay tedious, exhausting and distracts from the fun of the game by occupying your time with bookkeeping, memory exercises and math". That's not just about comprehension. There's also all the mental processing of in-game decisions. Making half of all instants and sorceries into Charms wouldn't increase comprehension difficulty if they just had simple effects as choices, but it would make the game worse anyway because it would flood the game with too many choices that would start to become tedious and less rewarding the more you encountered them. That's what En Garde and Challenge are— excessive choices that are going to become tedious and unrewarding. Especially when the choices for challenge are hardly different at all in any meaningful sense. If you're going to do a wordy, random mechanic, at least just pick one way of rolling the die. This is not a choice players are going to care about or enjoy making. I already find it tedious just reading the effect, let alone playing it.
And when I say complexity isn't just about comprehension, that's not to say En Garde and Challenge don't have any problems on that front. The sheer wordiness of it is going to make it harder to understand, it gives more room for people to get confused, and when you're not even going to be able to fit all the text on a single card, many players are definitely going to have some difficulty comprehending it when the cards don't actually explain how it works. And that's going to add to the decision making headache when you try and remember what the options where mid-game when planning out your turn (except the choice is pretty meaningless so player's will end up just picking one mode and doing that every time but that won't apply when players first encounter the mechanic and assume, wrongfully, that their choice is important).
Ah, I almost forgot that most well known of set mechanics "destroy all islands". Wait, no, that's an individual card effect and not comparable to an entire set mechanic like Disarm, the difference between the two being my entire point of argument. Positive mechanics like Constellation, or Landfall, or Affinity, are fun mechanics because they are fun to build a deck around. They want to be mechanics because they volume is important to building decks around them. An anti mechanic like Disarm can't have a deck built around it. They are dependant on what you're opponent is playing. Volume of disarm cards doesn't really help with anything, you don't need many of them in a deck to successfully counter another strategy, it's the volume of the mechanics that disarm counters that matters. And most players prefer building decks around a theme for value than metagaming with a counter-strategy, because building around a theme is a fun creative puzzle that's core to the magic experience while metagame counterplay is a smaller piece of it, and one that's most appreciated by specifically experienced competitive players, and because most players prefer doing something cool and powerful themselves to stopping their opponent from doing things (which is why counterspells are somewhat disliked). That's why anti effects like Disarm make good individual card designs, but not good set mechanics.
"Are you referring just to my comments on Silhouette here?" // No, it was also Enforcer, and a number of other empty opposing suggestions. feelsbadman
Silhouette is a complex rules issue. I said Enforcer doesn't work in the sense that I don't think it serves any clear purpose to the set as a mechanic and you would have difficulty making enough cards that actually make good use of it— like what happened with Skulk.
I am really on the ropes about Pierce. I do understand the feel-bad aspect of it not dealing damage to invoke the piercing effect. But on the flip-side of this, in addition to force majeure (if you come face to face with it—it WILL break you through); the effect currently has the ability to pierce through the likes ofprotection, which opens up interactivity and creates a new and unique check and balance to the game. What this would mean for protection, would be that it could be implemented more freely and excessively, with there now being a soft-lock check against it (an interactive, time-lapsed, fighting chance against it). It protects them from being killed, but fairly and equally takes it toll on them as it should.
It does leave a bit of a loophole in the perceptive logic that creatures are piercing other creatures without dealing damage to them. And this is why I am very on the ropes about it. The eyes do adjust though for me, and the longer I think it over, the more I see the grander beauty in it, although it forces a stretch upon my imagination.
I don't think either of the reasons you cite in favour of the blocking trigger are as relevant as the odd flavour and somewhat counter-intuitiveness of it not being connected to damage. Imagine you block with a Pierce creature and your opponent Murders it; the Pierce effect would still go through even though the creature never got to fight and is dead when the effect takes place. I could see basing it off blocking if it played better that way, but given it's not going to matter most of the time and when it does it's more likely to feel weird if the effect goes through than bad if it doesn't.
We might just have to agree to disagree on some of the other points here. Particularly the likeness of this world and other worlds in MTG.
I don't know much about your world or it's themes. But I want to hear the pitch. How will it stand out before I've seen all the detail? What's the obvious centrepiece features of this world and what makes them exciting?
I'm not really seeing the similarities. I think you meant Mercadia and not Dominaria. But even Mercadia was more Middle Eastern—and not very Euro Renaissance. Even Ravinca would be closer than either of those two—with the society development concept it runs.
Still—an immensely far cry. We're talking about an untouched, well-developed, organized world. Magic is like a footnote to them. They're all about aristocratic material world. Politics and social matters, and solving things with their minds and bare hands, before resorting to magic. Not really sure what else to tell you here. Even at first thought, I don't think of this world anything like the others. It's way more neat and polished, and does away with unnecessary or excessive fantasy elements. Which is especially good for the MTG Universe as a whole, because it provides contrast to what is already available. It's actually entirely the opposite—as it intends to be almost nothing like anything that currently exists. But is a much more serious, strict, iron-clad world.
Ok, so your world is also low in magic like Kaladesh. That's interesting.
I really loathe the memory-issue argument. Arguing about memory issues for MTG is just lol-worthy. If you have memory problems, then you're just going to want to find a different game altogether. Same is true for saying a new concept is too complex. It's way too late in the game for any of that. Point of no return. Unless a concept is truly mind-bending (which none of these are) then it's going to fit in just find (especially in that it provides new interactivity for the game). This interactivity breeds one of the fun factors of a fantasy game.
That's really not a productive attitude toward game design. Facing the problem of growing complexity over time and just giving up is not an answer. You can't just let complexity spiral out of control because 'MtG is a complex game'.
Complexity is not just a barrier to entry for new players. Excess complexity ruins gameplay for everyone. It makes gameplay tedious, exhausting and distracts from the fun of the game by occupying your time with bookkeeping, memory exercises and math. Complexity isn't just about comprehension. And games should only be as complex as they need to give them the best gameplay, and not add in complexity just because they can.
I updated Disarm if you check the other posts. I just didn't update the original post so there would be reference as to what the original version looked like. If it did any less, it would be nearly useless. It simply strives to have enough utility so that it's not. This is a equipment/aura heavy development, so it should see great potential here. The current version also has utility with other sets, as it effectively puts a dampener on devotion.
Pushing an aura and equipment theme only to counter it with a whole anti-auras and equipment mechanic is not going to lead to the best gameplay. The stronger you make the auras and equipment theme, the stronger Disarm will become, the stronger Disarm becomes, the weaker the auras and equipment becomes, the weaker Disarm becomes, and so on. You're pitting your themes directly against each other and it's going to get in the way of either theme working out very well. There's a reason we don't see anti-artifact mechanics even in artifact sets where they would be relevant. Anti-themes are best left to individual cards.
I wanted Pierce the wording composure for Pierce to present the functionality of the mechanic gracefully. It has more command and presence about it triggering of blocking and being blocked. It speaks on fathoms of proficiency. This is a keyword that elaborate finesse. It's not to be abused, or thrown haphazardly around. Rapier equipment don't grant Pierce—for example. It is an action of prowess. It is the man that makes the sword, not the sword that makes the man. I'm not against it working with damage or combat damage, but the majesty of the concept takes a strong kneel then.
I don't see how triggering of blocking and being blocked better represents finesse than combat damage. But since pierce is representing fighting, the fact that it doesn't require the creature to successfully fight to work is odd to me.
I noticed you didn't actually explain why a function or concept doesn't work. You just gave an empty statement, but didn't describe any real significant details of how it's illogical, malfunction, improficient, or counter-productive. This really makes it hard for me to explain myself, when I don't really know what you think is going wrong here.
Are you referring just to my comments on Silhouette here?
I will say that if the rules say something, and then another developer is presenting something else, the Golden Rule would be a great starting reference. This would really take the simplest adjustment, and I really don't even begin to see the fuss in this one. Limiting face-down cards to creatures only is like crippling yourself as a developer. You need as much design space available to open as possible. This is simply beginning to open some unopened space.
It's a rules issue. I don't really know all the detail. You can read up on the rules yourself if you want to try to understand it.
In general, changing the rules just to allow new design space is fine, but it shouldn't be done lightly. There's a lot of design space you can access by making the rules ever more obtuse and complicated. That's not going to make the game more fun to play.
Why is this not in the Custom Set Creation subforum?
The concept for this set feels a little too close to Dominaria, the Bant Shard of Alara, and Eldraine for me. What will there be to differentiate it from those sets beyond nuanced details?
There seems to be a bit more of an early modern feel (you do say it's 'more developed'), but that's not something we haven't seen before, as it's also true for Fiora and Innistrad, and might not be enough anyway. The moral/ethical philosophy part is kind of interesting though, maybe if you expanded it out to be a broader thematic/stylistic element that could work.
Mechanics review
Pierce (Whenever this creature blocks or becomes blocked by a creature, put a -1/-1 counter on that creature at the end of combat.)
Feels wrong to me that this works based on blocking not based on damage or combat damage.
It's a bit of an odd combination between Bushido and Wither. I'm not sure whether it will play that well. Seems like quite a bit too specific of an effect to be a great workhorse mechanic but it's just not exciting enough to be a splashy or quirky one. That said, playtesting is king. so maybe this proves itself to play better than it reads to me.
Disarm (Whenever this creature blocks or becomes blocked by a creature, detach all equipments and Auras attached to that creature if its combined power and toughness is less than this creature's own.)
Full Form
Disarm (Whenever this creature blocks or becomes blocked by a creature, detach all equipments and Auras attached to that creature and remove all counters from it, except negative counters, if its combined power and toughness is less than this creature's own.)
This is wordy, swingy, metagame and situationally specific, and even more complex ruleswise than it first looks. I'm not sure if you want either effect, especially the second one, on a one-off card design, let alone a whole mechanic. It's neat flavour, but it just doesn't work as a mechanic. A simplified version of this effect à la Corrosive Ooze and Treefolk Mystic could easily work on a card or two (I don't think the p/t condition is worth the extra text, the effect is situational enough already).
Enforcer (This creature can't be destroyed by other creatures with a combined power and toughness less than this creature's own.)
This is another oddly specific effect that isn't very splashy or quirky either. Maybe on a one-off card. I just don't see this doing enough work for the set to warrant being a mechanic, and I have less hope that it could maybe prove itself in playtesting than with Pierce.
En Garde (Whenever this creature attacks or taps to activate an ability, challenge your opponent. If you win, you may have any creature block it this turn if able or have any creature lose all abilities until end of turn.)
and
To challenge your opponent, each player flips a coin and calls it until one player calls it right and the other player calls it wrong.
To challenge your opponent, each player rolls a twenty sided die. Then, the player that rolls the higher number wins.
To challenge your opponent, have that player call high or low, then that player rolls a 20 sided dice. If the result of the roll is 11~20, then it's high. If the result of the roll is 1~10, then it's low. If that player called it right, then he or she wins the challenge.
Challenge already looks more than complex enough on its own. Nesting it within the mechanic of En Garde is way over the top even for a set aimed at more experienced players. You're literally going to run out of space to put this on cards, which means your going to have to rely on an exterior play aid or something to remind players what it does, and that seems very desperate just to save a mechanic that also gives off serious Clash vibes which don't bode well for its playability *and* has a complex 'lose abilities' effect. Frankly, En Garde reads like a good mechanic from an entirely different game slapped into MtG where it doesn't really belong. MtG as a game already has randomness in the form of the draw, so it just doesn't want this much randomness added to it. There's a reason dice rolling has been restricted to Un sets. It's got some neat casual fun elements and the flavour is good as with your other mechanics, but I don't see this mechanic working in a million years.
Silhouette [cost] (You may cast this face down as a 0/1 creature for 1. Turn it face up at anytime by paying its silhouette cost.)
Free Form
Silhouette [cost] (Anytime you could cast a sorcery, you may play this card face down as an enchantment. Turn it face up at anytime for its silhouette cost.)
Unfortunately, the rules strictly define any face down card on the battlefield as a 2/2 creature, so Silhouette doesn't work. Reworking the rules to make silhouette work would be problematic.
Perhaps you could have Silhouette exile cards face down and then cast them from exile though. That might actually work quite well.
I'm sorry, this is such a non response that it's hard for me to even know where to begin. That's not an accurate description of the point I an making or what the point of contention is.
I'll try to explain it again: this isn't about whether complexity is allowed. It would be meaningless to say complex games are bad because games aren't simply complex or simple. It's not even just a scale. Complexity is, fittingly, more complicated than that. There's different kinds of complexity and complexity can be implemented in different ways. Games that are just as complex can be more less or hurt by their complexity, more or less benefit from it.
The complexity presented by en garde and challenge is not just high but also not rewarding. Especially the choice between the different dice roll games. As I've said, it's just not an interesting choice and adds way too much text for little gain.
My mistake.
What are you talking about? I wasn't talking about removing the target of pierce, I was talking about removing the creature with the pierce ability.
That would have severely limited the design space of the mechanic for no real gain.
You say this bit like you're describing something obviously bad, but the best part of kicker as a mechanic is the way cards can be played as two significantly different cards depending on the circumstances.
Early magic was full of wonky power levels. Kicker has seen much more recent use than the examples you cite. And this is all talking card-by-card execution and balancing not mechanical design.
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice
No, they are based on proven conventions of game design.
MtG already HAS bookkeeping and math. I'm not saying you can't have bookkeeping and math in your games, and that much should be patently obvious. Players enjoy games with detail that is rewarding. It's both about the sheer level of complexity, and how well executed the complex elements are.
I'll repeat the point I made earlier that excess complexity isn't just a problem for newer players. Framing this issue as just catering to new players is both a warped understanding of how much difference there actually is in what new players and more experienced players enjoy and evading addressing the point of where the complexity ceiling lies for more experienced players. You can design your sets however you like, free of my 'oppression', but if you want to design sets that actually play well you're going to have to submit to certain standards beyond your specific personal vision.
Some mechanics are less build around than others. Kicker doesn't have much to build around, for example, but yet it does still lend toward that with how it encourages more mana intensive decks, how most individual kicker cards are designed with specific archetypes in mind, and how they keep making cards that mechanically care about kicker just like with other such mechanics like cycling and adventures. What none of these mechanics do, is base their playability primarily on the metagame prevalence of other strategies. Landwalk, fear and intimidate all used to be evergreen mechanics that did this for color, but they were all gotten rid off partly because they are anti-mechanics that can be unfun for both the user and the recipient in deciding games based on what can feel like happenstance. Protection still exists because it is used specifically as a universal anti-synergy mechanic to put on individual sideboard oriented cards.
Again, Disarm is a perfectly good type of effect to have, it's just not one you want very much of in one set. We just don't see this type of mechanic in MtG, or Hearthstone, or Faeria or any number of other cardgames. You hardly seen many anti-creature mechanics (e.g. deathtouch, wither) and they are the most common and most important cardtype to these sorts of games and always get lots of interaction. You don't need to push a creature theme; there's always a creature theme. There's never going to be an archetype of creature focused decks to counter, but the same cannot be said for auras and equipment.
EDIT: An another note on anti-creature mechanics is that these mechanics often appear on creatures themselves, necessarily making it hard for them to in any way counter creature based decks as an archetype, which is not true for disarm (in fact, you've stated you don't intend to even put it on a single aura or equipment.
Pierce, as written, is a delayed trigger ability, like Flickerwisp. Delayed triggered abilities exist independently of the card that produces them. Once Pierce is triggered, it will take affect regardless of what happens to the creature with Pierce. That's why Flickerwisp can bring the creature back even if Flickerwisp dies before the end of turn, which the gatherer rulings confirm if you must know.
8/1/2008 The exiled card will return to the battlefield at the beginning of the end step even if Flickerwisp is no longer on the battlefield.
Specific interactions with an abandoned evergreen mechanic and a mechanic relegated to sideboarded oriented cards don't help any of these mechanics.
Having a mechanic that gave creatures a buff when they fought a creature with banding would 'breathe new life' into banding, but that wouldn't make either of those mechanics okay (not that protection isn't okay, by the way).
Development doesn't ease up on hard removal because it doesn't have enough good alternative, it does so because such cards are good for the game. Kill spells *are* interactive after all, because they can be countered, they can be worked around with death triggers and reanimation, they can be negated by -protection abilities on creatures and instant buffs and auras, they can be forcefully discarded from the hand or library, they can be locked out by cost increasing effects and effects that stop instant speed casting, they can be punished with certain triggered abilities like Bonecrusher Giant, and more.
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice
You may have noticed I already cited the comparison to Clash as a bad thing. Clash is a slightly complex mechanic because it requires you to know what converted mana cost means (a term which new players often get confused by) and is somewhat wordy with multiple effects going on. That's not the reason Clash is considered to be a design failure, but Challenge, and especially En Garde, is much more complicated than Clash. Clash has one straightforward mode, Challenge has three separate modes that you choose between. The amount of extra words that adds alone is huge. As I said before, you're not going to be able to fit En Garde onto a card with all the relevant reminder text, so you'd have to leave some of it out. That means you've just added a major comprehension complexity barrier to newer players who won't have any idea what it does when they see the cards, and a memory issue for everyone in remembering exactly what it does. En Garde compounds this with *another* modal option, which also brings with it board complexity in deciding blocks or determining the outcome of ability loss and how that it interacts with layering— something which most players don't fully understand.
And THEN we get to the reason why Clash was considered a design failure— which is that players just didn't find it fun. As I said before, this sort of random effect is mostly relegated to silver border unsets and rarely does it see print in standard sets. It just doesn't play that well in MtG. Games like Hearthstone have more random effects because they have less inherent randomness of the draw with you drawing only minions (creatures) and spells, gaining mana automatically and having the hero power for extra consistency, and yet still Hearthstone has shied away from straight dice roll effects, preferring to hide its randomness more behind random card selection from known card pools. Players don't particularly like effects that sometimes just whiff, basically.
My central argument was that "excess complexity... makes gameplay tedious, exhausting and distracts from the fun of the game by occupying your time with bookkeeping, memory exercises and math". That's not just about comprehension. There's also all the mental processing of in-game decisions. Making half of all instants and sorceries into Charms wouldn't increase comprehension difficulty if they just had simple effects as choices, but it would make the game worse anyway because it would flood the game with too many choices that would start to become tedious and less rewarding the more you encountered them. That's what En Garde and Challenge are— excessive choices that are going to become tedious and unrewarding. Especially when the choices for challenge are hardly different at all in any meaningful sense. If you're going to do a wordy, random mechanic, at least just pick one way of rolling the die. This is not a choice players are going to care about or enjoy making. I already find it tedious just reading the effect, let alone playing it.
And when I say complexity isn't just about comprehension, that's not to say En Garde and Challenge don't have any problems on that front. The sheer wordiness of it is going to make it harder to understand, it gives more room for people to get confused, and when you're not even going to be able to fit all the text on a single card, many players are definitely going to have some difficulty comprehending it when the cards don't actually explain how it works. And that's going to add to the decision making headache when you try and remember what the options where mid-game when planning out your turn (except the choice is pretty meaningless so player's will end up just picking one mode and doing that every time but that won't apply when players first encounter the mechanic and assume, wrongfully, that their choice is important).
Ah, I almost forgot that most well known of set mechanics "destroy all islands". Wait, no, that's an individual card effect and not comparable to an entire set mechanic like Disarm, the difference between the two being my entire point of argument. Positive mechanics like Constellation, or Landfall, or Affinity, are fun mechanics because they are fun to build a deck around. They want to be mechanics because they volume is important to building decks around them. An anti mechanic like Disarm can't have a deck built around it. They are dependant on what you're opponent is playing. Volume of disarm cards doesn't really help with anything, you don't need many of them in a deck to successfully counter another strategy, it's the volume of the mechanics that disarm counters that matters. And most players prefer building decks around a theme for value than metagaming with a counter-strategy, because building around a theme is a fun creative puzzle that's core to the magic experience while metagame counterplay is a smaller piece of it, and one that's most appreciated by specifically experienced competitive players, and because most players prefer doing something cool and powerful themselves to stopping their opponent from doing things (which is why counterspells are somewhat disliked). That's why anti effects like Disarm make good individual card designs, but not good set mechanics.
Silhouette is a complex rules issue. I said Enforcer doesn't work in the sense that I don't think it serves any clear purpose to the set as a mechanic and you would have difficulty making enough cards that actually make good use of it— like what happened with Skulk.
I don't think either of the reasons you cite in favour of the blocking trigger are as relevant as the odd flavour and somewhat counter-intuitiveness of it not being connected to damage. Imagine you block with a Pierce creature and your opponent Murders it; the Pierce effect would still go through even though the creature never got to fight and is dead when the effect takes place. I could see basing it off blocking if it played better that way, but given it's not going to matter most of the time and when it does it's more likely to feel weird if the effect goes through than bad if it doesn't.
I don't know much about your world or it's themes. But I want to hear the pitch. How will it stand out before I've seen all the detail? What's the obvious centrepiece features of this world and what makes them exciting?
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice
Ok, so your world is also low in magic like Kaladesh. That's interesting.
That's really not a productive attitude toward game design. Facing the problem of growing complexity over time and just giving up is not an answer. You can't just let complexity spiral out of control because 'MtG is a complex game'.
Complexity is not just a barrier to entry for new players. Excess complexity ruins gameplay for everyone. It makes gameplay tedious, exhausting and distracts from the fun of the game by occupying your time with bookkeeping, memory exercises and math. Complexity isn't just about comprehension. And games should only be as complex as they need to give them the best gameplay, and not add in complexity just because they can.
Pushing an aura and equipment theme only to counter it with a whole anti-auras and equipment mechanic is not going to lead to the best gameplay. The stronger you make the auras and equipment theme, the stronger Disarm will become, the stronger Disarm becomes, the weaker the auras and equipment becomes, the weaker Disarm becomes, and so on. You're pitting your themes directly against each other and it's going to get in the way of either theme working out very well. There's a reason we don't see anti-artifact mechanics even in artifact sets where they would be relevant. Anti-themes are best left to individual cards.
I don't see how triggering of blocking and being blocked better represents finesse than combat damage. But since pierce is representing fighting, the fact that it doesn't require the creature to successfully fight to work is odd to me.
Are you referring just to my comments on Silhouette here?
It's a rules issue. I don't really know all the detail. You can read up on the rules yourself if you want to try to understand it.
In general, changing the rules just to allow new design space is fine, but it shouldn't be done lightly. There's a lot of design space you can access by making the rules ever more obtuse and complicated. That's not going to make the game more fun to play.
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice
The concept for this set feels a little too close to Dominaria, the Bant Shard of Alara, and Eldraine for me. What will there be to differentiate it from those sets beyond nuanced details?
There seems to be a bit more of an early modern feel (you do say it's 'more developed'), but that's not something we haven't seen before, as it's also true for Fiora and Innistrad, and might not be enough anyway. The moral/ethical philosophy part is kind of interesting though, maybe if you expanded it out to be a broader thematic/stylistic element that could work.
Mechanics review
Feels wrong to me that this works based on blocking not based on damage or combat damage.
It's a bit of an odd combination between Bushido and Wither. I'm not sure whether it will play that well. Seems like quite a bit too specific of an effect to be a great workhorse mechanic but it's just not exciting enough to be a splashy or quirky one. That said, playtesting is king. so maybe this proves itself to play better than it reads to me.
This is wordy, swingy, metagame and situationally specific, and even more complex ruleswise than it first looks. I'm not sure if you want either effect, especially the second one, on a one-off card design, let alone a whole mechanic. It's neat flavour, but it just doesn't work as a mechanic. A simplified version of this effect à la Corrosive Ooze and Treefolk Mystic could easily work on a card or two (I don't think the p/t condition is worth the extra text, the effect is situational enough already).
This is another oddly specific effect that isn't very splashy or quirky either. Maybe on a one-off card. I just don't see this doing enough work for the set to warrant being a mechanic, and I have less hope that it could maybe prove itself in playtesting than with Pierce.
and
Challenge already looks more than complex enough on its own. Nesting it within the mechanic of En Garde is way over the top even for a set aimed at more experienced players. You're literally going to run out of space to put this on cards, which means your going to have to rely on an exterior play aid or something to remind players what it does, and that seems very desperate just to save a mechanic that also gives off serious Clash vibes which don't bode well for its playability *and* has a complex 'lose abilities' effect. Frankly, En Garde reads like a good mechanic from an entirely different game slapped into MtG where it doesn't really belong. MtG as a game already has randomness in the form of the draw, so it just doesn't want this much randomness added to it. There's a reason dice rolling has been restricted to Un sets. It's got some neat casual fun elements and the flavour is good as with your other mechanics, but I don't see this mechanic working in a million years.
Unfortunately, the rules strictly define any face down card on the battlefield as a 2/2 creature, so Silhouette doesn't work. Reworking the rules to make silhouette work would be problematic.
Perhaps you could have Silhouette exile cards face down and then cast them from exile though. That might actually work quite well.
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice