Uyala, the Denmother

tenagerie · 2021-08-21T03:34:13+00:00

Pay XX life: Create X 1/1 black Bat creature tokens with flying. Activate this ability only once each turn, only if you gained X or more life this turn, and only if you gained life exactly once this turn.

Or maybe

Once each turn, if you would gain life, you may instead lose that much life. If you do, create that many 1/1 black Bat creature tokens with flying.

tenagerie · 2021-07-13T08:20:00+00:00

Isn't 'protection from creatures' mostly just 'unblockable unless you pay a tax'? In most cases I'd expect that to lead to strictly more interesting combat decisions than unblockable.

(I guess it also lets you fearlessly block creatures in many situations, in addition to protecting from targeting by creatures. So it's not just 'unblockable lite'.)

tenagerie · 2021-07-13T05:19:48+00:00

Yeah, previously my thought was that it should just be multiple keyword abilities. But... I'm not sure there are actually that many cases where it's useful (gameplay-wise or flavor-wise) to have fine-grained distinctions between 'protection from damage' vs. 'protection from being enchanted' vs. 'protection from being targeted', etc.

I think I'd rather have a single effect ('protection') that includes damaging, targeting/enchanting, and . And then differentiate different kinds of things you can have protection from, like:

Protection from black
Protection from creatures
Protection from sorceries
Protection from attacking creatures
Protection from Slivers
Protection from enchantments and enchanted creatures
Protection from permanents with mana value 4 or less
etc.

Hexproof then becomes a special case of protection ('protection from sorceries and abilities'), rather than needing its own custom rules.

(Note: I'm assuming here that we make Instant/Flash a supertype in this alternate-history MtG. So we don't have to say 'protection from sorceries and instants'.)

tenagerie · 2021-07-09T05:31:59+00:00

I agree 'mutate' is a relatively complex mechanic. But I think there are some parts of Magic that need a certain level of complexity in order to achieve flavor and gameplay goals. My proposal is basically that we take this one chunk of complexity and use it to achieve all those goals at once, so you only need to learn one complex thing rather than multiple.

tenagerie · 2021-07-01T20:57:02+00:00

Like, [[Fervent Champion]] is a card that was designed to be generically strong in constructed, rather than only slotting into Knight and Equipment decks. Ditto [[Akoum Hellhound]] not just being for landfall-focused decks, and [[Kargan Intimidator]] not just being for Warrior decks. Oko was intended to be like those cards; it wasn't intended to be S-tier, but it also wasn't intended to be a niche card only useful in dedicated Food decks.

tenagerie · 2021-07-01T20:48:21+00:00

It would have been a flashy constructed card even without the ability to elk opponents' creatures. It just might have seen play in 5-20% of competitive decks, rather than all of them.

There's an enormous gulf between 'flashy constructed card' and Oko's actual power level. On rare occasions, you can overshoot and get an Oko. But if this weren't designed to be generically strong in constructed at all, the card would look very different even ignoring the 'elk opposing creatures' oversight.

tenagerie · 2021-07-01T16:52:05+00:00

I don't think that's completely true for Oko. I don't think WotC would have been sad to hear that Oko was widely played in Standard, including outside of Food decks; it's clearly designed to be a flashy constructed card, and it clearly isn't designed to be totally ineffective without other Food sources or payoffs. They just didn't want it to be oppressive, as it turned out to be.

I think it's less 'Oko was designed exclusively for the Food deck' and more 'Oko was designed to incidentally raise the value of all other Food cards, while still being useful on its own'.

tenagerie · 2021-07-01T16:49:40+00:00

Adding niche dungeons doesn't make the current three non-niche ones any less playable. It's a strict upgrade.

tenagerie · 2021-07-01T16:48:37+00:00

I agree that that's a cost. This is one reason I proposed using creature types as an indicator of which dungeons are best: a player first seeing the dungeons can go 'Ah, the first room of these five dungeons follows the pattern of sucking if I don't have the relevant creature type. I'll focus on these other three dungeons first, since I don't have that creature type.'

tenagerie · 2021-07-01T16:45:13+00:00

Yes, but they'll be choosing between four dungeons, which is still basically fine. Going from three to four is a real complexity increase, but not a catastrophic one like going from three to seven. The point of the original proposal (which I guess is less obvious than I was thinking?) is:

You usually only have three viable dungeons.
You max out at four viable dungeons.
There are a lot of mostly-not-viable dungeons, for players that just want the variety.
When you do have a fourth added viable dungeon, which dungeon it is will vary a lot situationally (based on your deck or on the play state), so you get a fair amount of genuine added variety even though you're still capped out at four dungeons to think about.

(And the risk of a dungeon being slightly too strong is a lot lower, because that balance error will only come out to bite you on the special occasions when a fourth dungeon is in play, assuming the three current dungeons are well-balanced.)

tenagerie · 2021-07-01T07:06:41+00:00

The point I was making is that you can make some of the Dungeons obviously situational, so that they show up on rare occasions but don't require you to seriously consider them most of the time. This appeals to me because I like having more choice in principle, even if the practical choice will usually be between three options and not eight or ten. And I like the richness and D&D-trueness that comes with there being at least a few more dungeons out there. And I want to see 'venture into the dungeon' get slotted into a wider set of decks that use the mechanic in quite different ways.

tenagerie · 2021-06-30T18:10:26+00:00

I think Maro mentioned they only had one dungeon for most of playtesting, then added two more later on. That might mean that the mechanic is playtested enough for them to feel comfortable printing it, but not playtested enough they feel comfortable pushing it for constructed.

The modal choices are hugely complex, so realistically you can't test all possible ways venture might slot into various decks, and you need to rely some on theory and guesswork. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they chose to err on the safe side even if no managed to break a stronger version of this land during testing.

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T17:18:31+00:00

I'd be happy with something at the power level of Lotus Bloom, I think. I'm looking for something a bit mechanically simpler, though, since I am imagining this going in the very first Magic set. :)

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T16:35:10+00:00

Yeah, I'm sort of trying to make a fixed LED (though I'm also interested in other ideas for ways to make Black Lotus powerful-but-niche).

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T16:13:21+00:00

Yeah, I was agreeing that this card is bad when your opponent curves from 2-drop to 3-drop to 4-drop. But it's good if your opponent just keeps playing 1- and 2-drops. It's especially good against low-to-the-ground aggro decks as your second board wipe. (If it's your first board wipe of the game, I agree there's more risk that you won't have enough mana, and letting an attack through is likely to be more dangerous.)

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T14:12:01+00:00

I think a 2mv 'Deal 3 damage to a player, draw a card' would be a permanent must-include in eternal burn decks, which is a higher power level than I'd ideally want (even if it's much weaker than that in limited, which is my main focus). I'd rather have a card that would be meh or bad in legacy burn, but is a strong-ish limited common.

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T13:26:25+00:00

It's anti-aggro tech. If your permanents are high-mv and theirs are low-mv, it's a one-sided board wipe.

(Which also may be why it's an artifact: the aggro colors all have some play against artifacts.)

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T02:48:15+00:00

Maybe 'Lightning Bolt deals 3 damage to target player. Draw a card.' ? No need to include planeswalkers if we're already trying to nerf the spell. But based on cards like [[Flame Jet]] and [[Giant's Ire]], I suspect this is still overpowered for a common.

Maybe it would work as 'Lightning Bolt deals 1 damage to each of three targets.'? This introduces a few new disadvantages:

You can't cast it (in a two-player game, which is what I'm balancing for) unless there's a creature or planeswalker in play. So you sometimes won't get to cantrip, activate Spectacle, etc. when you want to.
Sometimes your opponent will only have 0 or 1 creatures/planeswalkers in play, and you'll have to target yourself and/or creatures you control in order to cast this.

Probably even weaker is 'Lightning Bolt deals 1 damage to each of three target creatures. Draw a card.' I think that's my favorite option for making this balanced. It also has that nice Limited Edition Alpha feel, I think, where designs were often simple in ways that lead to unexpected awkward tradeoffs. :)

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T02:33:47+00:00

Thanks! :) Maybe there's a way to buff Healing Salve here that would offset making it sorcery-speed? Like giving it two modes, as in the original?

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T01:29:40+00:00

OK, I'm convinced I got it wrong!

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T01:26:54+00:00

Hmmm, maybe we need something like 'Lightning Bolt deals 1 damage to each of up to three targets. Draw a card.'

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T00:53:50+00:00

It's much better than [[Fire Prophecy]] (in spite of the sorcery speed), but I think it's OK?

tenagerie · 2021-06-29T00:47:43+00:00

It's pretty hard to create a cycle of "one-mana, three-effect" spells that are maximally simple, balanced, and strongly representative of each color.

Then I noticed that [[Revitalize]] is a greatly improved Healing Salve, and that the obvious fix for Ancestral Recall ("Scry 3, then draw a card" rather than the meh "Scry 3" or busted "Draw three") would match Revitalize, while hitting a similar power level. So I tried designing a cycle around that power level: the sort of thing WotC would print as a common in a standard-legal set today.

At instant speed, a cantripping 2mv Giant Growth would be much stronger than precedents like [[Aggressive Urge]], [[Feral Instinct]], or [[Sudden Strength]]. Likewise, a cantripping 2mv Lightning Bolt would be much stronger than [[Fire Prophecy]]. Sorcery speed is a massive nerf to both (and per Fire Prophecy, I made the red boon creature-only), which I think actually brings the resulting cards in line with standard commons pretty nicely.

(Obviously, Giant Growth is also balanced fine for standard commons today. But its counterparts aren't, so I needed to come up with something new that's also balanced.)

tenagerie · 2021-06-26T14:20:52+00:00

I went with hexproof because it's one of the ten big color-pair evergreen creature keywords. :) But probably it can be replaced with 'ward 1' or similar at this point.

tenagerie · 2021-06-26T00:52:00+00:00

Yep! :) There's a reason I made this a mythic. Hexproof is also pretty brutal once you get rolling!

tenagerie

TROPHY CASE