Tuesday, June 14, 2011

CCDD 061411—Molten Collossus

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/14/2011 - Next up in my monster cycle is a red take on Gaea's Liege. The funny thing is I wasn't thinking of the Liege when I made it, but looking at it now, it's clearly cut from the same cloth. I'd love to add another tweak that makes it more unique, but even the simplified text is pretty voluminous. At least it's more fun to replay Molten Colossus, since the counters stick around.

I had Obsidian Fireheart in my mind during this design, but determined I shouldn't use blaze counters since they would work differently here and all counters should work the same. Maybe it does put blaze counters on lands and counts the number of burning lands instead of mountains.

Another similar possible design would straight up destroy a land when it attacks and have P/T equal to the number of lands in graveyards like Detritivore. Repeated land destruction isn't fun, but we all know how brutal titans can be.

10 comments:

  1. If Blue, this would be a fine Leviathan.

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  2. But then it'd need Islandwalk and another line of text and MSE would freak out.

    P.S. - I really hate how MSE formats text sometimes. It has some terrible justification and line break settings that make me want to just punch it in the face.

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  3. It wouldn't *need* islandwalk. It's okay to have a Leviathan without it.

    I think I read somewhere that MSE purposefully does line breaks differently in order to make them easily distinguishable from real Magic card renders. Or maybe not. *shrug* Being procedurally generated its text is going to be worse than actual cards which have more human control over typesetting, line breaks, etc.

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  4. Oh, and I tried a render and you can get the exact same number of lines as the Colossus here even with Islandwalk added, provided you're using more technically accurate wording. :)

    Tidal Monstrosity 2UUUU
    Creature - Leviathan
    Islandwalk
    Tidal Monstrosity’s power and toughness are
    each equal to the number of Islands on the
    battlefield.
    Whenever Tidal Monstrosity attacks, put a
    flood counter on target land.
    Lands with flood counters on them are Islands.
    */*

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  5. For all that text, the end result was a little underwhelming. And so sad compared to Inferno Titan.

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  6. Bloodpaint Colossus 2RRRR
    Creature- Giant
    Bloodpaint Colussus’s power and toughness are
    each equal to the number of Mountains on the
    battlefield.
    Nonbasic lands are Mountains.
    */*

    I mean, red already has a cool, establish way of making things mountains.

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  7. I like Tidal Monstrosity and Bloodpaint Colossus both more than my own, since they each use existing land-transformation techniques. Nice work *cans.

    I declare that MSE is nothing short of amazing. It does instantly what would take most of us an hour to do manually. That its results are only sometimes inferior to those of a professional typesetter, makes it a pretty damn good deal for the price. It's also a better piece of software than any Magic-related product EVER ...with the arguable exception of Duels of the Planeswalkers.

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  8. I absolutely love MSE, I almost never try to design custom cards without using it (so I can check if something is too wordy, or otherwise doesn't look right on a card). And it's super-handy for keywords, too. One of the best products an amateur Magic designer could ever have.

    (Okay, where's my check?)

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