Designing Suvnica, Week 9: The Same Thing Different

Hey everyone! Sorry I'm running a little late with this. It has become pretty clear that two keywords a week is going to be impossible to keep up with. In the interests of keeping this project moving along at a reasonable pace without drowning under it, I'll be doing the keyword challenges alongside other challenges, which should keep the workload bearable.

I'll discuss the non-keyword challenge first, then we'll talk about which guild is getting keyword suggestions this week.

Ravnica was as much defined by its cycles as it was by the guilds. Half of the excitement about Guildpact and Dissension was in trying to extrapolate from what we knew about Ravnica's cycles and figure out what the remaining six guilds would contribute to those cycles.

While some of the cycles were pretty loose, like the champions, guildmasters, and guild artifacts, others were very subtle, and developed over the course of the block.

Eight cards like this appeared in Ravnica - two for each represented guild in that first set. They were all instants or sorceries, and each gave you a bonus for using the second guild color to cast it. It was alternative take on hybrid - you could run this multicolor card in a deck that doesn't use both colors, but it really shines if you use it in guild.

Guildpact evolved on the cycle, making its six spells in the cycle creatures with bonus ETB abilities for casting with the second color.

Dissension was the weirdest batch for the cycle. For starters, it pretended that the spells were creatures, when they were really spells that had a kicker effect of letting you keep the creature that triggered the ETB ability. This is why the black card gets double strike while the red one gets fear - they only stick around as creatures if you treated them as multicolor cards in the first place.

I thought it would be interesting to experiment with evolution of a cycle with one of the potential cycles that we've already come up with.

Jules proposed this cycle back in Week 4. I think that this has a lot of potential for development across a block. Using this as a template, this is what I came up with.

I modified Jules' design a little bit, but the basic elements of the cycle are still there. An aura in CD that gives two abilities, one from each color, that you can shift to another creature when it hits the battlefield.

Rimid is in Set #2. To change the cycle a little bit, I added a slight bonus/penalty for moving it from creature to creature. Development would have to look to see whether this is too powerful or not.

Grohm are going to show up in the final set of the Suvnica block. For the Favors in set #3, I decided that the auras don't switch creature on a new one entering the battlefield, but rather come back from the GY when a creature of BOTH colors ETB.

Design by Committee

The guild getting a keyword treatment this week is the Gilrog, who appear in set #3. I actually had a couple of ideas for keywords that fits within the guild philosophy/description.

Like Graft creatures in Dissension, all chimera creatures have an activated ability. On dying, they become pseudo-enchantments that give +1/-1 and an activated ability. They also chain into each other. 

There may be memory issues here, but I think it's overall a less confusing mechanic than Haunt turned out to be.

My other mechanic idea was Glass Cannon. I wanted to try to figure out what other kinds of things I could do with fate counters that I couldn't with +1/+1 counters (POPOCs). It is very difficult to give something +X/-X with POPOCs, and that's the kind of thing Gilrog wants, so I thought that might be a good place to start. 

I would love some feedback on both mechanics and the cycle development, so let me know what you think in the comments.

Week 9 Challenge

Part 1: 

• Pick a cycle that we've already discussed, or create your own. 
• Create a card (or two!) for Sahleen for that cycle to be used in Suvnica, the first set of the Suvnica block.
• Create a card (or two!) for Rimid, evolving that cycle in some way, for the second set of the Suvnica block.
• Create a card (or - you guessed it - two!) for Grohm, either evolving that cycle further or evolving it in a different way, for the third set of the Suvnica block.

Part 2: 

• Come up with a keyword idea for the Gilrog guild, and offer examples.

Optional Challenge:

• Come up with good names for Sets 2 and 3 of the Suvnica block.

Good luck everybody. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

-zeff