WB draft archetypes are a perennial pain for me when putting together cubes. Life shenanigans only hold my interest for so long, and WB almost always defaults to that, even when it's disguising it as a tribal theme (Vampires, Zombies, Allies, Warriors, etc.)
One overlap that the two colors have in primary is exiling from the GY. I thought that might be an interesting place to start.
This started life as a sorcery that exiled three cards and gave three creatures without counters on them counters. I wanted to try to get it into common, but I couldn't get the numbers to a place that were appropriate for common and interesting enough for GDS submission. So I turned it into a creature. I didn't want it to give itself the counter to distinguish it from Scavenging Ooze, but then I ran into NWO complexity problems, so it becomes uncommon anydangway. C'est la vie.
I gave some more thought to whether Black would distribute to a teammate (or, more importantly, if it would exclude itself as a potential recipient of spoils). Mechanically I'm happy with the first version, but in the interests of exploring bad ideas, here's a worse iteration.
Like War//Peace, it tells an interesting story, but no one wants to read it because its just too long.
I do like the second story a lot. You could kill the cost reduction/amplification and it loses a ton of words. Enough words? Unsure.
ReplyDeleteDoes that ruin the mechanical identity for WB? On this card, yes, though it still would be an enabler for that theme.
That story made me think of finding the most badass version of “selfish vs selfless”:
Azala, Light and Dark
1WWBB
Creature - Angel - Mythic Rare
Flying
W, T: Target creature gains indestructible until end of turn.
B, T: Destory target creature.
4/4
Legendary Creature not creature, obv.
DeleteAlso Triad of Fates is a card I guess. -_-
DeleteIt is hard to find new themes for color pairs. Well done there.
ReplyDeleteThat "ability costs more/less" junk has got to go. It's adding so much text, and for what gameplay?
Philanthropic Plunder 1BW
DeleteCreature - Human Rogue U
1B, Exile a card from a graveyard: Put a +1/+1 counter on ~. Activate this ability any time you could cast a sorcery.
1W, remove a +1/+1 counter on ~: Put a +1/+1 counter on another target crearure. Activate this ability any time you could cast a sorcery.
2/3
I was considering iterating along those lines. Sorcery speed isn't necessary, but that with the abilities merged would allow us to do it at common.
DeleteYeah, I'm not sure the costs need to change or why it's happening. I mean, exiling an opponent's card is a benefit, but it's also a cost. There's actually a lot you have to do just to get a single +1/+1 counter. As it stands, even without the ramp on the first card, it would take six mana and two valid exile targets to get 2 +1/+1 counters.
DeleteSorcery speed seems necessary if you're going to throw around +1/+1 counters. Otherwise the combat math adds significantly to board complexity.
DeleteInteresting themes for BW
ReplyDeleteLife
Enchantments
Reanimation
Flickering
Tokens
Fliers
Rebels
Zombies
Clerics
Humans
Vampires
Eldrazi
I like exiling as a theme too! One trick is that neither B or W have natural ways to Mill, which makes it easier to push.
Yeah with flickering and black discard creatures you can have a nice black white control draft type.
Deletetapping-matters
Deletesacrifice
religion
spirits
divinity
Black also has removing counters on its color pie (Amonkhet muddied this a little bit). So the thematic idea of "distributing spoils" in B/W actually has some interesting space if you have removing +1/+1 counters as either a cost or a trigger of some sort.
ReplyDelete