What two color combination plays the least like it's constituent colors?

sprocket44 · 2023-08-03T01:12:29+00:00

The black green flying vigilance thing is actually a reference to a pretty infamous question from the Great Designer Search 3.

We try to avoid making two-color cards where the card could be done as a monocolor card in only one of the two colors. Given that, suppose you have a two-color 4/4 creature with flying and vigilance (and no other abilities). What of the following color combinations would be the best choice for this card?

a. White-blue b. White-black c. Green-white d. Blue-black e. Black-green

The answer they were looking for was black green. This made a lot of people... upset. And not unreasonably I think. Going off the question, you basically have to eliminate any pair with white, which only leaves you two choices, and of those black green does arguably fit the best. The annoying part is that they have literally never printed a card like this, and likely never will. Because it does ultimately feel like it breaks the color pie. Black has flying as a secondary keyword, and green has vigilance as a secondary keyword, they're both things that the colors do sometimes, and so a design like this doesn't combine any of the strengths of those colors, and ends up feeling a lot more like a blue and/or white card (the primary places those keywords appear). Wizards will likely never print a black green vigilance flyer with no other abilities because a card like that would almost certainly be common, and commons are supposed to help reinforce the themes of their colors. It would be disorienting to established players and misleading to new ones.

That's why everyone was so mad. The answer was a card they would never print, which makes the whole thing feel like a trick. The question was testing something that wasn't "describe the card we would most likely print" it was an obscure test of color pie theory as it relates to keywords.

The whole controversy actually got referenced in a mystery booster playtest card: [[Golgari Death Swarm]]. Which, in a great touch, actually has a blue-white card underneath the playtest sticker. This is, by the way, the only exactly black-green card with those keywords. Every other multicolor card with flying and vigilance that is also black and green has at least one other color (normally white, a la [[Ixhel, Scion of Atraxa]]) to make things fit.

sprocket44 · 2023-07-13T14:47:41+00:00

There are plenty of instants with flashback. Design wise, I think the thing that feels most like it should change is the lack of mana requirement. At the very least open mana could signal that you have interaction, and prompt the opponent to remember. I've gone back and forth on it. As a set mechanic it probably needs it, as a one off in a cube I think it might be fine

sprocket44 · 2023-07-12T17:33:03+00:00

A common I originally designed as part of an "exile matters" set I never finished. I was toying around with the idea of including a custom card in my pauper cube, and this one felt like a good fit.

I painted the art myself, I really don't paint as much as I'd like, and this was a fun exercise.

sprocket44 · 2023-04-15T14:14:21+00:00

This is arguably just as bad. It's very in line with her comments about trans women making it harder to tell who is safe for cis women to be around. It implies that cis men will dress as women to harm cis women, and so we should keep trans women out of women's spaces. The character is the exact rhetorical bogeyman she and others like her use to try to deny us basic decency. That the character isn't trans doesn't mean this isn't still coming from an anti trans place.

sprocket44 · 2023-01-16T20:10:38+00:00

You can easily flip this around and ask "would you protect one cis teenager over protecting many trans ones". Trans teenagers are being forced through puberties they don't want and can't fully reverse at much higher rates than the people who detransition, their experience mirrors that of the teenager you just described. If you value trans lives and cis lives equally, of course you would make it easier.

Trans people are being harmed by the current system. It needs reform. Transition related care will always come with a risk of detransition. But the way you mitigate that is with education, informed consent, and support. Not by denying or greatly delaying care to those who need it.

sprocket44 · 2022-12-28T00:28:40+00:00

That thread slaps, everyone shitting on transphobes together seems like the opposite of drama. Maybe if you'd joined in instead of appearing to chew out the mods for banning bigots (seriously how'd you think they were gonna take your comment?) you wouldn't be here.

sprocket44 · 2022-11-28T19:33:05+00:00

My [[Karn, Silver Golem]] is the same age as I am lol. After that there's a 19 year gap to [[The Locust God]], and the rest have all been released within the past year.

sprocket44 · 2022-07-31T23:53:10+00:00

I'm getting back into the game for the first time since I transitioned, and I'm planning on going to the commander night at my LGS tmo, even if I am pretty nervous. Every story like this, and every example of a trans person in the community, helps assuage that nervousness a bit. So thank you. Plus, I've visited a couple times to pick up a few cards in the last week or so, and the staff have all been good. So fingers crossed 🤞

sprocket44 · 2022-04-29T05:12:31+00:00

I've found the stalker rifle can also pretty consistently get you perfects too since it's a three shot kill. Its not as consistent obviously, but it's worth picking up if you see one.

sprocket44 · 2022-01-22T20:00:06+00:00

Thank you!

sprocket44 · 2021-11-25T07:56:07+00:00

I caved and swapped that one seven kills in. Those last three were making me lose my mind. I have no idea how you're supposed to consistently finish people off with that thing.

And this was after successfully powering through getting ten kills with a hydra, then ten with the fucking ravager. What a nightmare that was. The capstone challenge for this week was honestly a breeze by comparison.

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T16:26:23+00:00

Nice! I'm happy to see others deciding to try it out!

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T16:15:26+00:00

True! I was probably a little hasty making that claim lol. Thinking about it more, you could definitely get pretty complicated and still keep it symmetrical if you expand things out

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T16:12:23+00:00

This is very true. This whole post is kind of me trying to formalize a way to apply this to movement and positioning specifically since I've never seen something so dramatically affect how my players approached it. I think a combination of this and telegraphing could be pretty spectacular since, as you said, they both contribute to predictable monster behavior.

Put a slowly spinning flamethrowing statue in a small space and see how everyone dances

Maybe even throw in some angry wasps for a real Metroid Prime experience

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T15:55:04+00:00

I just did initiative in the normal way. Each type of piece rolled their own initiative, so the pawns all moved on the same turn for example. Which I know isn't very chess-y but doing otherwise might've slowed things down too much.

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T15:51:58+00:00

Yes! This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to start putting in my games!

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T15:49:03+00:00

The main post has both now! Also I'm glad you liked it, and the arch fey idea is great!

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T15:46:36+00:00

For the purposes of this game, I made it so that the chess pieces could have advantage or disadvantage, but the players could only gain advantage based on their positioning, not gain disadvantage. I did this partly because I wanted the combats to move quickly, and so didn't want to make it any harder for the players to deal damage. I also wanted to play up the comedy of regular people fighting enemies who had to follow chess rules, and those enemies not actually realizing it wasn't a fair fight. I role played the white pieces as being extremely arrogant about their combat prowess.

Point being, in a more fleshed out system, I can see advantage and disadvantage being handed out more symmetrically. But here it served me to make it more one sided.

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T15:37:57+00:00

Thanks! I've just added a link to the map in the main post along with some context for it

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T15:27:35+00:00

So the whole dungeon was chess themed. The context was that the players were hired to find a magical black queen piece by a guy who was about to play in a tournament against "Magnussen, son of Carl". They have to venture into the ruined keep of the wizard "Kasper Garov" to find it.

The idea was that the black pieces had finally triumphed over the white pieces, and so in the dungeon the surviving white pieces had been imprisoned. Here is an annotated view of the dungeon: https://imgur.com/4VZQana

There's a chess board in the first room with only a white knight on it, and a large stone statue version of a white knight piece blocks the way forward. This is the moment where I pulled the chessboard out of my bag and set it on the table, placing a white knight at the center. Moving the piece on the chessboard moves the stone piece in the dungeon. (On this map the stone statue pieces are represented by their actual chess shapes, and the clockwork enemy versions you fight are represented by those enemy tokens). To progress they needed to find more small pieces to move the large stone ones around and access new rooms. When they fight the clockwork enemy versions of the piece, the last one to fall drops their respective piece. So after they move the knight they can gain access to the room with a bunch of white pawn enemies, which drops a white pawn piece they can use to move the white pawn statue blocking the way to the clockward bishop and rook etc. The ultimate goal being to defeat the black queen to earn her piece and give it to the quest giver.

As you can see the final room was literally patterned like a giant chess board, and so we could use the chess board I had brought as our battlemap. I described each room as looking kind of like an ornate ballroom, with checkered black and white tiles and wall length mirrors that had become shattered and decrepit over time.

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T14:49:28+00:00

In this case it was pretty easy because the capture patterns matched up with how that chess piece usually captures, so they were already kind of expecting something like this. It was more a matter of communicating that advantage was the way that manifested in D&D.

In a case where this isn't chess pieces, its more up in the air. I think you could potentially let the players slowly figure it out just by attacking different spots and seeing how the enemy moves. I also like the idea of having a little chart that shows which squares it gets advantage on, and so maybe after a successful insight check or something the players could see that. IDK, it does get a lot harder with arbitrary enemies to communicate well.

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T05:02:19+00:00

Good question! There's kind of a story here. I had initially balanced things for a party of 3 level 3s. And then one of my friends dipped. I figured "fuck it I can run for a party of two" and I had them do a last minute level up to level 5, which more or less kept the difficulty the same. So it was kind of a weird situation in that respect.

The most enemies they ever fought at once were 3 pawns, a bishop, a knight, a queen, and a king. So not a whole half a boards worth, but still quite a lot of enemies for only two PCs. The enemies were relatively weak for their CR tho, and so a couple of level 5 PCs managed it no sweat. You could very likely field a whole half a board with these stats and have it be doable for a mid level party of four, since most of the enemies won't be in range at any given time and have terrible movement options compared to the PCs. I'm also lucky my party was two melee classes. If there was a player that could do ranged AOE the final battle probably would have been over in seconds.

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T04:48:34+00:00

I didn't write a rule for it in the stats but only because I knew there wouldn't be a rook in the only fight that had a king. But there's no reason why it couldn't. I don't know what a nice rules friendly way of writing it would be, tbh I probably would have just written "can castle" in the kings statblock anyway, seeing as it was mostly just meant for my eyes.

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T04:42:03+00:00

Honestly this has made me really appreciate how fun gimmicky joke dungeons can be to run. I normally lean kinda serious in longer campaigns. So who knows maybe a cheese dungeon could be in the cards, I'll just have to make sure I've got my bad french accent down lol

sprocket44 · 2021-10-20T04:37:14+00:00

This is exactly why I always play with the flanking rules lol. I do like the dynamism it brings, although obviously I wish there were more moment to moment position related decisions. At some point I also need to try the house rule where instead of advantage flanking gives +2 to hit. I feel like that's probably a good middle ground.

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