SciFi Week with RoboRosewater Redesign Bonus!
Enamelpane Trestle makes a strong attempt at turning this Threestel and the Sould keyword into something sensical. The first ability to recur a artifact each turn is worthy of a mythic artifact in and of itself, probably with a lower mana cost. In a world where Ensouled doesn't exist as an ability word, I wouldn't even include the second line of the card. But in a set where this is the pinnacle of what that ability word has to offer, I can completely buy it.
As far as ensouled goes, if the threshold is always five artifacts, that's too high. I think it's better as a static three or as a variable - Ensouled X.
Second Breakfast players would have fun with this one.
That's a bad rare disguised as an uncommon. Let's talk about bad rares for a minute. Maro has discussed them at length, and I'm not going to flog that well-trodden ground. But actual bad rares are kind of a relic of the days when sets had 50-100 more cards than they do,now. There's a lot less room for super-narrow Jenny cards like this anymore in the average set, so unless they really serve a set's theme, we wouldn't see it.
That said, bump it up to rare and stick it in a set where it may matter some of the time and you have a functional Racka Rornosby that captures all of its seemingly useless spirit.
This card reversed the challenge, taking a functional Robocard and having it make less sense. Cute. If making the original less elegant, I wish there was some stronger attempt to better tie the mechanics with the art (which is an admittedly difficult art to tie anything to mechanically.)
This was one of the attempts to design for the art without fixing a robocard. It's a cool Melviny card. I wish the growth was algebraic instead of geometric, if only because, absent some counter moving shenanigans, the logical last spell to be cast for the formulator is always Draco. It's less hoops to jump through for disappointing ultimate rewards than Grozoth, for instance. Of course, a two-drop that is fully capable of getting to eight counters and even sixteen if you're willing to build around it a little more can be pretty exciting.
That's a very solid minor tweak to push a robocard that wasn't quite there yet over the line to printability. A land is a good match for the art too. Could be mythic, but doesn't necessarily have to be.
Tapping into a similar colorless-is-weird vein as the Eldrazi, these aliens do a much more limited version of the Sindbad/Fa'adiyah Seer ability. R&D has indicated a desire to nerf the 1-drop mana dude in recent sets, making them more expensive or less useful. I think that this is in the right spot in a set where colorless mana matters.
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Despite it being a somewhat regular request on Blogatog, designing Magic cards to Sci-Fi art isn't all that easy to do. Nonetheless, you Artisans made some fantastic designs, and turned RoboRosewater's gibberish into some exciting cards. Thanks to Zeno Rage for doing this week's renders.
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the US, and happy Thursday to the rest of you!
(For anyone looking for a (not-to-be-reviewed) followup challenge, take your final submission and shift it two rarities (up or down) and tweak it to be appropriate for that rarity. We can critique in the comments)
My thoughts on Eternal Temple were that it's basically a Darksteel Relic. In the same way that Darksteel Relic works to turn on Metalcraft and "Whenever you cast an artifact spell" triggers, Eternal Temple works for things that count your number of lands (or grant mana abilities to all your lands).
ReplyDeleteIf Eternal Temple were a rare, it'd be a very bad rare. On the order of Moonlace or Mudhole. At uncommon there'll be more of them around, which is bad, but it'll at least avoid any One with Nothing-style "Whaaat, this is my rare?!" moments. I have to assume that's the reason why Darksteel Relic was uncommon.
Cool challenge.
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