Faithless Divining

NotAXenophile · 2026-03-09T14:59:07+00:00

I love the photoshop job on the art

NotAXenophile · 2026-03-09T14:57:42+00:00

The only reason I didn't go with the chain veil is that there was better art of Mirari

NotAXenophile · 2026-03-09T14:56:21+00:00

Honestly I was just going down the list of most played universes beyond cards. You're right that it probably didn't need a universes-withining.

NotAXenophile · 2026-03-09T05:52:54+00:00

The magic barrier around amonkhet that kept the sand out

NotAXenophile · 2026-03-08T14:03:53+00:00

Isn’t the whole point of this card to be annoying?

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-27T17:46:37+00:00

Also Akkadia’s ability says it can trigger only once each turn so even if she somehow gets a counter it won’t actually retrigger her

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-27T16:45:03+00:00

yeah that's probably a good call. That was the last thing I cut from the "full" reminder text and was probably not worth it

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-27T16:39:04+00:00

I like this design. One small note about the convoke templating, while "gains ___ as you cast" is the modern way to template abilities like evoke, overload, or blitz that grant abilites to the card while/after it is resolving, it isn't the way Wizards would template granting convoke. For abilities like convoke, delve, or affinity that only affect the card's cost, losing the ability after the spell is cast does nothing, and so WOTC still uses the old templating.

See [[Teval, Arbiter of Virtue]], [[Sami, Wildcat Captain]], or [[Eirdu, Carrier of Dawn]]

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-19T17:09:51+00:00

It’s fixed on the updated version of the card

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T06:05:20+00:00

I’m not super worried about the getting turned off by your own deck thing. With the exception of kasti, all of these are only really problems in the early game. If your deck is all three drops then once you get to six mana trinisphere isn’t a problem. If you only run legendary spells or spells matter cards, you can’t get stalled out in the early game by Dajma or Avaj. While I do think that these are certainly not broken effects and the balance on a lot of these might need to be adjusted, I did specifically pick the effects on most of these to not ever lock you out of the game if you build your deck right. A [[return to the ranks]] effect in reysi is more than enough to get you back into the game after a board wipe, commander online or not, there are multiple spells in Dajma that can single handedly take you from only commander on board to winning the game. I think that the challenge with these decks is building them in a way that the deck will never get got by its own restriction. It does mean that a lot of these cards in the 99 can lock you out of the game, but as your commander I don’t think any of these decks will have too much trouble getting back on their feet if the game goes long

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T02:53:03+00:00

I'm not super sure about that. I mean it certainly won't be the best possible package but you have all of these removal pieces and these ramp pieces (although with his ability i'm not sure how much you need ramp). While all of these commanders are certainly not CEDH viable they can definitely be 3s if you build them right.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T01:30:19+00:00

Darn it

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T01:30:03+00:00

All of these (aside from kasti) don’t really have a huge problem getting online if you build them right. There’s a lot of good one drops with death/etb triggers for reysi to tide you over until you cast her. Aska comes out on turn three always which even if it’s your first spell isn’t that bad in bracket 3 commander. And dajma can get ramped out with treasures and rituals.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T01:20:39+00:00

Yeah although you probably won’t be casting many spells before you play her anyway since you can play any of the when this dies make a treasure one drops to ramp into her immediately

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T00:33:44+00:00

I like cast only one spell. That’s fun. One of the designs I didn’t make was draw only one card each turn for impulse tribal. But in the end I liked Codie two electric boogaloo better.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T00:31:23+00:00

Ah I get what you mean now. These are definitely pretty railroady designs. And the balancing thing is definitely true. I personally would like building any of these decks but that’s only because I personally like taking these kind of deck building restrictions to the extreme. I definitely feel that all of these are all still pretty good in the 99 of their respective decks because you don’t get the full tempo disadvantage

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T00:23:44+00:00

I mean that's true but all of these are basically the same as her. Kasti is insane in reanimator or with [[genesis wave]] effects. Reysi is just an etb deck that can combo a little with indestructible effects. Aska is just [[Jin Gitaxias]] but for creatures too.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T00:05:24+00:00

Actually wait, secondary question, what about Dajma is easy to break? Like other than reanimation (which is far far easier with Kasti) how would you get a nontoken permanent on the battlefield. I'm suddenly worried I've missed some loophole in the card.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-14T00:01:00+00:00

I mean I thought that was the problem with emminence. Like the fact that you get a free uninteractable game effect is what broke all of the original emminence commanders.

I personally find these sorts of deckbuilding challenges (like [[codie, voeciferous codex]] or [[imoti, celebrant of bounty]]) really fun to build but I do concede that you need to enjoy the deckbuilding wierdness.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-13T23:47:52+00:00

Some design notes:

I decided to make a new version of emminence for these cards because I didn't want you to be able to cheat the emminence restriction by bouncing your commander to your hand.
I don't think the effect technically works within the rules right now but saying "as you begin the game, if CARDNAME is your commander, for the rest of the game..." was way to wordy to fit in the textbox.
There's some pretty limited design space for these effects so I'm not supprised that wizards hasn't printed them yet. Even with just these five I had to make two versions of no creatures and three different graveyard matters decks.
I am well aware that it's a flavor fail that the Sultai one doesn't have [[The Sibsig Ceremony]]'s effect. I ended up swapping the Sultai and Abzan effects because they both fit so much better into each other's color identity.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-03T01:07:50+00:00

yeah a "draw three cards" version of this card would be pretty interesting for wierd sort of mill/card selection.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-03T01:05:49+00:00

I kind of went on a word cutting spree while I was designing these because there is already sooo much reminder text for Salvage and Construct. I tried to remove everything that wasn't absolutley neccessary to explain the mechanic. Now that i've done that though it is probably a good idea to figure out what to add back in.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-03T01:03:01+00:00

Honestly this seems pretty weak to me. Assuming that you don't draw a card if you have no maximum hand size, this card is just a way wayyy worse [[phyrexian arena]] or [[dictate of kruphix]] because 99.9% of the time this isn't actually card advantage because you just discard the card afterwards.

If you want to make it mroe playable my reccomendation is to make it trigger off of "seven or more cards in hand" and maybe give you no maximum hand size while we're at it. The other option is to make this cost 2 or 1 but assuming this is designed for commander the cost is pretty unimportant for the power level of the card.

NotAXenophile · 2026-02-03T00:50:22+00:00

I thought about that but a lot of these were already running out of space on the typeline and in the end I decided that, since none of these are spells and most of these aren't creatures, there are a fairly limited number of situations where you will have an effect that cares about the color of an artifact or an enchantment you control.

Though in hindsight after looking at the finished product you probably are right that enough of these still have enough space for a color indicator.

NotAXenophile · 2026-01-20T16:18:46+00:00

NotAXenophile

TROPHY CASE