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 card around this art for Amonkhet.
Official spoilers. Unofficial.
Storied Pilgrimiage 2WB
ReplyDeleteSorcery - U
Put a 1/1 white and black pilgrim token on the battlefield for each creature that dealt damage to an opponent this turn.
This is an interesting one. I'm pretty sure it could cost less. Especially as an uncommon, I would be surprised to see this at 1-2 mana.
Delete*Wouldn't
DeleteHmm. Storied Pilgrimage hints at two interesting ideas without giving up much information.
DeleteFirst, the world is populated by pilgrims that are both and white black, presumably devotees of a religion. Which can be expected for an Egyptian world.
Second, nothing attracts pilgrims more than creature-on-wizard violence.
Mechanically, yeah. Black likes sabotage and white likes tokens. Rewarding players for hitting each other is good, and this being a sorcery is smart.
Path W (bottom half of art)
ReplyDeleteInstant (U)
Exile target creature until the beginning of the next end step.
//
Deliverance 1W (top half)
Aftermath - Cast this spell only from your graveyard, then exile it.
Until end of turn, if a permanent would enter the battlefield and it wasn't cast, exile it instead.
Ooo I really love this!
DeletePath W (bottom half of art)
DeleteInstant (U)
Exile target creature until the beginning of the next end step.
//
Deliverance WW (top half)
Instant
Aftermath - Cast this spell only from your graveyard, then exile it.
Until end of turn, if a nonland permanent would enter the battlefield and it wasn't cast, exile it instead.
Glad I caught up on all the spoilers before reviewing this.
DeletePath is a fine flicker effect, removing a blocker, saving a creature, and/or triggering ETB effects.
Deliverance is curious for a white card, effectively a counterspell for cheat-into-play effects and tokens.
Playing both at once for WWW allows you to permanently exile any creature, at instant speed (along with any tokens being made or demons being resurrected).
That kind of synergy is exactly what we want from our aftermath cards, and this is pretty clever. I might be more comfortable if Deliverance were blue or green or black, so the combo was gold.
@Jay
DeleteDeliverance has always been a white effect. See: Containment Priest, Hallowed Moonlight, Fiend Hunter/O-Ring shenanigans
Hallowed Moonlight is certainly relevant precedence, and I'd forgotten about that.
DeleteTemple of Resurrection
ReplyDelete4WW
Enchantment - Mythic Rare
Creature cards in your graveyard have Embalm 1.
Actually for flavor reasons I'm going to go with Embalm W instead.
DeleteSeeing this just makes me wonder again why Back from the Brink is blue
DeleteBeing able to resurrect every creature in your graveyard for one mana is exciting and flavorful and definitely broken. Back from the Brink (which should definitely not be blue) also costs six, but requires you to pay the creature's mana cost to get access to it and the card advantage that comes with. With Temple of Resurrection, I can bring back my Iona, Griselbrand or Emrakul the same turn for a seventh mana, and I can bring back six battlecruiser creatures as soon as I untap without.
DeleteDev can fix that price, of course, and the resulting card will be sweet and appropriate to the set, but the new activation cost will be a lot closer to six than one.
I would much rather the price upfront go to 8. I forgot about Back From the Brink, but a Spiky value engine is not what I'm going for - bringing back six battlecruiser creatures for Timmy is.
DeleteBest comparison then: Rise of the Dark Realms. (Which is better in that it loots all graveyards, but worse in that it's a one-time effect.)
DeleteThat's definitely more what I was going for.
DeletePilgrimage to Sancturay 2WW
ReplyDeleteEnchantment
Tap an untapped non-zombie creature you control: put a blessing counter on target non-Zombie, non-God creature.
creatures you control with blessing counters on them have indestructible.
When a single ability uses 'non' three times, you can bet we're getting too specific with flavor. It's free to remove "non-God" here, because gods already have indestructible, so we don't need to prevent them from gaining it.
DeleteI'm rather more concerned that this card says…
Tap a creature you control: It becomes indestructible.
…With the only caveats being that zombies don't get to play and people can disenchant all of that. All of that, except the blessing counters sitting on your cards.
For an effect this powerful, I'd rather see players have to jump a hoop like having a good mix of different creatures:
Tap an untapped Zombie you control: Target non-Zombie creature gains indestructible until EOT.
Or vice-versa.
Weighing of the souls 2WU
ReplyDeleteSorcery
Destroy all creatures with CMC 4 or greater. Return all other creatures to their owners hands.
This is a pretty interesting twist on the traditional sweeper spell. Timmy would probably like it more if it was reversed, but that isn't WU, probably UB instead.
DeleteThis is a great "protect the weak" flavor that is enhanced by solid mechanical history. I like it quite a bit. That said, I think you could use a lot of different art on the card, and wouldn't need to flavor it in an Egyptian way to make sense.
Weighing of the Souls is half Day of Judgment, half Evacuation, killing big things and bouncing cheap things. Clearly, you're meant to play mostly cheap creatures so you can permanently answer your opponent's bombs and then replay your weenie army. It's worse in a creatureless deck, and not as much of an auto-include in a random Limited deck, which suggests this card has found its niche. I can see how it works with the art too.
DeleteNothing Beside Remains 3W
ReplyDeleteEnchantment
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, target permanent's controller chooses one:
• Exile that permanent until CARDNAME leaves the battlefield.
• Exile all other permanents he or she controls until CARDNAME leaves the battlefield.
If you target an opponent's card, this is a at best a 4 mana o-ring. If you target your own card, I'm not sure what happens if you pick the second option
DeleteThe 4CMC was to make sure this couldn't Stone Rain too early, but the wording could use some work. This makes it more clean if you're controlling the permanent, but stops feeling very white at all:
DeleteSorcery
Choose target permanent. It's controller chooses one:
- Exile that permanent.
- Exile each other permanent that player controls.
Maybe another attempt:
Nothing Beside Remains II 1WW
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant nonland permanent
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, enchanted permanent's controller chooses one:
- Exile enchanted permanent
- Exile each other permanent he or she controls until enchanted permanent leaves the battlefield.
Which I think leads to:
Nothing Beside Remains iii 1WB
Enchantment Aura
Enchant permanent
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, enchanted permanent's controller exiles each other permanent they control until enchanted permanent leaves the battlefield.
Enchanted permanent has "T: Exile this."
Probably all too busy.
This last one, at rare, as a build-your-own Vindicate with token counterplay, is my submission.
DeleteNothing Beside Remains does literally what it says: You lose EVERY other permanent except the one enchanted. There are a million situations where that's absurd and loses you the game, of course, which is why you can always choose to exile the enchanted permanent, which will kill this aura, which will bring back all your other permanents.
DeleteThat's a lot like a sorcery with "Exile target permanent unless its controller chooses to exile each other permanent they control" except that this lets the target trigger ETB effects or 'counter' it with a Naturalize in response; and it also lets the casting player lock the game in with Ice Over. Probably just reprint Vindicate?
Yeah, this probably is better with:
Delete"When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, untap enchanted permanent. It's controller exiles each other permanent they control until it leaves the battlefield."
The upside here is that the exile helps against Indestructible Gods and also can wipe a whole field of tokens, if either of those become problemati. Thanks for the challenge, Jay!
Pyramid of the Trials
ReplyDeleteLegendary Land
Whenever a creature enters the battlefield under your control, you may create a Gold token with "Sacrifice Gold: add one mana of any color to your mana pool."
At the end of your turn, sacrifice all but one creature you control.
This land doesn't add mana to your pool directly, but it does on turns you can play a creature. Better, it makes mana for each creature, and can pretty easily make multiple mana in a single turn, perhaps even chaining out a handful of one-drops. Better, you don't have to use that mana the same turn you make it. Despite that first downside, that's dangerously strong.
DeleteThere's one more downside (okay two, it's legendary) and it's a doozy: You don't want to chain into a bunch of creatures, because you'll have to sack most of them.
Well that's a conundrum. The first line says "play a lot of creatures" and the last says "play very few creatures." I'm guessing the actual use case is to go ahead and play a lot of spawn-y things, so that you can ramp out one huge alien threat early.
I don't know if this is printable. I'm skeptical, but the downsides are real. Playtesting would probably show fairly quickly. Let's say it is: the flavor is evocative of a brutal civilization such as Nicol Bolas might create.
Surprised the internal story of the card wasn't mentioned. The creatures pay gold to participate in the trial, which is held every turn.
DeleteThat's definitely not coming through on its own.
DeleteJourney to the Afterlife 1W
ReplyDeleteEnchantment (Rare)
Whenever a creature card would be put into a player's graveyard from anywhere, exile it instead. That player gains life equal to its power.
This is pretty sweet
DeleteThis enchantment turns off all reanimation including embalm, and most of delve, dredge, delirium, etc. It also adds a lot of life gain to the game. Assuming we knew nothing about Amonkhet, I could imagine a metagame hate card like that. Given what has been officially spoiled, I can't imagine they'd ever make such an effective hate card against the newest set's main theme.
Delete