Wednesday, August 8, 2018

CCDD 080818 - Guild Loyalty Cards

Moving right along with some more Ravnica 3 stuff, I'm pretty convinced at this point that devotion is a fantastic mechanic for a world built around belonging (or not) to a guild. So here's some devotion cards.







There are a thousand ways to play off of devotion in the context of a Ravnica set, but I wanted to particularly key in on rewarding devotion to both of your guild's colors. I started this cycle as proof of concept.

7 comments:

  1. "Whenever an opponent casts a spell, if your devotion to white is three or higher, create a 1/1 white Soldier creature token. Then, if your devotion to blue is three or higher, you may draw a card. If you do, discard a card."

    That cleans up the wording on the latter one a bit.

    I agree that the idea of devotion is interesting in Ravnica, but these designs also emphasize to me how wordy it can be. Deliberately searching for interesting and impactful designs that have short, punchy effects would be important, given how much card real estate the devotion text takes up.

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    1. I am a very big fan of the Gruul guy, though. That would make an excellent cycle. Reminds me of that one cycle from Eternal, too.

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  2. Not sure if a mono-color mechanic like devotion really fits in a world like Ravnica, though maybe the low devotion threshold makes it ok. I still think it sends out weird signals.

    If we're talking about belonging to a guild is there any reason we aren't using double-color devotion ala the multicolored Theros gods?

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    1. For these particular cards, I wanted to have enough separate counts of the two component colors, because that strongly promotes two color play in limited (which sometimes fails since mana fixing in the set dedicated to 2-color decks is good enough to often play 3 colors)

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    2. Ah! Yeah, that does seem like a great place for devotion, though I still have reservations.

      I like the two different devotions tracks, in that it really encourages you to go for a deck with both colours. But I'm worried that it feels un-Gruul if you're punished for having RRRRWW instead of RRRWWW.

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  3. Lots of Shadowmoor echos in these. That's an interesting place to design towards, I'd just worry that devotion would cause guilds to play too similarly, with everyone just trying to get pips onto the battlefield

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  4. I like the two separate colour abilities, but I was really expecting to see "devotion to Gruul"... :)

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