Friday, March 24, 2017

Weekend Art Challenge 032417—Aaron Miller

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single  card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.


Design a rare plot-point card for this art.

39 comments:

  1. Tarras's Choice
    2WB
    Sorcery - Rare
    Choose a creature an opponent controls. It's controller chooses a creature you control. You may exile both creatures. If you don't, exile all other creatures.

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    1. Feels like a good old fashioned Orzhov card. Probably reads well for a city in a jar plot point, too.

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    2. Really close to a 4 mana Wrath if you're playing a creatureless deck. Maybe destroy instead of exile?

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    3. My thought process was that it's only slightly better than Divine Reckoning (you still get value if they only have one important creature) and that was 2WW with flashback. I changed to exile because I thought the carrot to get it to see play needed to bigger, but could easily go back if Dev decided.

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    4. Divine Reckoning also lets the opponent pick the creature they save. This is closer to Tragic Arrogance minus the additional card types.

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    5. Divine Reckoning is definitely the card to compare to here. Tarra's Choice flips who chooses what survives, which makes having weak creatures among your good ones a liability. That favors the caster more, since other builders will have more trouble building around "have no small creatures" than Reckoning's "have one best creature."

      Tarra's Choice is both more interesting and more powerful than that, though, because it also has the mode where you don't wrath and instead kill the two chosen creatures. That's an expensive Bone Splinters to be sure, but having that choice is upside, especially when you can make it after the creatures are chosen.

      I'll leave it to Dev to cost this, but I think white-black fits, and I think this could be a card. The choice part will make it tricky for this to be a plot point, but it's conceivable, and I think it works for the art.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. Ride with Death 1BG
      Enchantment
      Skip your draw step.
      At the beginning of your upkeep, reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card, then lose life equal to the number of cards revealed this way and put those cards into your hand.

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    2. A bit friendlier

      Ride with Death 1BG
      Enchantment (R)
      Skip your draw step.
      At the beginning of your upkeep, reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card, then lose life equal to the number of lands revealed this way and put those cards into your hand.

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    3. I think the unfriendly version might still be too good! But that's just a Dev perspective. The effect is amazingly flavorful and I love the design.

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    4. A bit less strong

      Ride with Death 1BG
      Enchantment (R)
      At the beginning of your upkeep, reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card, then lose life equal to the number of land cards revealed this way and put those lands into your hand.

      This way it doesn't stack with itself unless you have another card draw effect

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    5. Ride with Death guarantees you draw a nonland card during your draw step, and it does that Treasure Hunt-style, by drawing you all the lands in the way.

      It's not a hard argument that effect could be green, perhaps even should be green instead of blue. The black portion comes in with life loss equal to the number of cards this nets you.

      This has more variance than Phyrexian Arena because it can do nothing (except show your opponent all the cards you draw), it can kill you, or it can be an amazing Dark Confidant.

      I wouldn't print this until after we've done the green Treasure Hunt, but then this would make sense. Not a slam dunk with the art, but good enough; weird art's like that. Without the name, this would be a mighty weak plot point, but that name does a lot of work there.

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  3. Hounded by Death 1B
    Enchantment - Aura (R)
    Enchant creature
    Whenever enchanted creature becomes tapped, its controller sacrifices another creature. If he or she can't, that player sacrifices enchanted creature.
    "I will steal from you everyone you ever loved, and you will watch."

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    1. I like this but think it's really weak - B would probably be fair. Cool flavor and definitely feel the story. This could almost certainly be a common.

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    2. Hounded by Death seems like a solid iteration on "you could keep using that creature, but are you sure you want to?" Feels common rather than rare, because of power level, but otherwise this fits the art well and could easily be a plot point.

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  4. Unlikely Companions 3GG
    Sorcery
    Put two +1/+1 counters on each of four target creatures.

    Does the art tell the story sufficiently well? Hopefully.

    I wasn't sure how swingy this could be. A bit swingy made sense for an interesting card, and requiring four targets made it a bit more dramatic when it worked, but at the expense of feel bad if you can't cast it (or have to target an opponent's creature). Likewise, I considered instant, to give you the best chance of using it, but decided that might be a bit too much.

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    1. Runner-up card name, "And their little dog too" :)

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    2. This is awesome, especially in a token deck. Reminds me of Incremental Growth in the best ways.

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    3. Try it at 1G and see if it breaks.

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    4. Now it's Monday, other ideas I considered :)

      "And his little dog too"

      Destroy target creature and up to one target creature with power 1 or less.

      "Twixt Death and Damnation"

      Target player sacrifices all creatures he or she controls unless he or she pays 10 life.

      "Loyal Companion"

      1/1 Hound. When ETB, choose knight, that creature indestructible until CARDNAME leaves the battlefield.

      "Unlikely Companions"

      Choose a creature you control, then each other player chooses a creature with equal or less CMC. Destroy all non-chosen creatures.

      "Hounded by death"

      Enchant creature. At the beginning of it's controllers upkeep, they sacrifice the creature they control with least power.

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    5. Unlikely Companions is very similar to Incremental Growth but gives you more total boost at the risk of being worse when you don't have 4+ creatures on your side of the board.

      Reminiscent of Hex in its usability this way. Other than that, though, I'm not feeling a strong tie between this art+title and the effect. I suppose the story could go "but then the green knight and his dog made an alliance with death and his minion, and they were all much stronger as a result."

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    6. Thank you.

      Yeah, I was thinking of hex. I don't want many cars like that, but the "need four" fit the story so well. I forgot incremental improvement.

      Yeah, I was going for "what story is this where death, demon, Knight and dog travel together". The story should be in the name AND art AND flavor text AND mechanics, if they just repeat each other, there's less there. But if it makes no sense to people reading it, I stretched too far.

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  5. Memento Mori 5B
    Enchantment
    Whenever a creature dies, all other creatures become copies of that creature until end of turn.

    Doesn't work well because... creatures often die at the same time as each other. Alas. I'll come up with something more.

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    1. Very Johnny/Jenny. Love the implications of this in a Commander deck that has a sacrifice theme. I think it's very tight and clean as is - I wouldn't change a thing!

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    2. Would this clear up APNAP issues or just make the card unplayable? Probably costed quite a bit less:

      Whenever a creature a player controls dies, each other creature that player controls becomes a copy of that creature until end of turn.

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    3. "you may"?

      That way if multiple creatures die at once, you can just pick the one the survivors become copies of and ignore the rest. APNAP isn't a concern because the trigger is on the enchantment, meaning you control the order of all of them.

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    4. I'll take the "you may". I'm sure a little playtesting could arrive at a wording that splits functionality and fun.

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    5. I guess this is what I'm reviewing?

      Memento Mori 5B
      Enchantment
      Whenever a creature a player controls dies, he or she may have each other creature that player controls become a copy of it until end of turn.

      That's a very cool card for Johnny. (Only for them, because it normally only triggers after combat.)

      No idea how a Magic story involves "and then someone important died and everyone else became her for a while." Revenge of Spartacus?

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    6. I will say, it is a much more sinister plan for a Lich to force the person who kills him to become him than it is to simply be unkillable.

      Sinister Lich {B}{B}{B}
      3/3 rare Lich
      Whenever ~ dies, target creature that dealt damage to it this turn becomes a copy of it. Gain control of that creature.

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    7. I should've rewritten the text out:

      Memento Mori 5B
      Whenever a creature dies, you may have all creatures on the battlefield become a copy of that creature until end of turn.

      The metaphor for MM, I think, is kind of a "it tolls for thee", but spiced up for Magic storytelling.

      Sadly, I think the Lich would be made UUU as a parasite, (following the design principle "All Cards are Blue.")

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  6. Entreat the Reaper 1B
    Sorcery
    Sacrifice any number of creatures. Search your library for a card with converted mana cost less than or equal to the total converted mana cost of the sacrificed creatures and cast that card without paying its mana cost. Then shuffle your library.

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    1. Due to casting living end and Ancestral Vision for 1B, I think this is sadly unprintable.

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    2. "one or more nontoken creatures. If you do"?

      Still fairly ugly wall of text.

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    3. You'd have to take out "less than or" and have "nontoken", I think, but you'd still be able to entreat memnites for cards.

      "Sacrifice any number of creatures. If the total converted mana cost of creatures sacrificed this way is six or greater, search your library for a card with converted mana cost 6 and cast that card without paying its mana cost, then shuffle your library" could avoid Suspend shenanigans, but it's a little awkwardm whatever # you set it to.

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    4. Another solution is to have it search for cards that cost exactly N+1 instead (using Birthing Pod's text).

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    5. Final version:
      Sacrifice one or more nontoken creatures. If you do, search your library for a card with converted mana cost equal to the total converted mana cost of the sacrificed creatures and cast that card without paying its mana cost. Then shuffle your library.

      If someone wants to play Memnites and Ornithopters to maybe free-cast a costless suspend card, I'm ok with that. If you don't draw exactly Entreat + Creature the component parts don't do much on their own.

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    6. I vaguely wonder if this should only get a creature, or even only get a demon, but black can do crazy things and you're sure paying for it, so yeah, why not let them Cruel Ultimatum?

      Leave it to Dev to find a fair cost for this. Seems tricky.

      At 7 lines of text, this isn't too texty for a rare, and the effect is actually pretty intuitive once you read it. I could absolutely see this rules text for a plot point card. Not sure it's a perfect fit for this art, but I can see it.

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    7. Search for creature sounds perfect for the flavor to me, even if black can also do "any card" mechanically.

      If it simplifies the template, that's a bonus.

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  7. These were some pretty sweet designs. Nice work, Artisans!

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