Community Set Final Uncommon Artifact Cycle

Community Set

squire1

20 October 2011

1464 views

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Hello everyone. After the voting for our uncommon artifact cycle sarpnasty was the winner. He was able to meet with the design team Thursday night to hash out the rest of his cycle. First, I would like to thank sarpnasty for meeting with us and being a great team player. It was a please to work with him and the design team greatly appreciates the time he took and all of his very thoughtful designs. So lets take a look at the original card that got sarpnasty the win.

Original card

So when the design team first had the card submitted some of us were kinda underwhelmed by it, but it fit all the criteria set by the design team and it did it in a balanced good way, so we all let it go to voting. In voting it won, again not by a landslide but it won. It started to be the little cycle that could.

Design team ideas

Starting Comments and designs

After the winner was selected by the community voting, we posted a spreadsheet for designing the rest of the cycle for the design team and sarpnasty. Everyone had agreed on a meeting time. Prior to our meeting everyone logged in as they had time to jot down any related ideas that they had regarding the cycle. Some of the early comments were:

"I like them all with flash. I think they are fine as they are. I am getting that they should all have a common 1cmc instant as the effect that is defensive"
squire1

"I think one main thing we need to be aware of is that each card will be giving every color access to an instant speed effect. We don't want to color bleed too much."
mistergreen527

"I was afraid of making it cost less because abilities like regenerate are color specific. Unless we made it a colored artifact, I think it would be bad to give off color abilities AND mana ramp to colors that didn't normally have them."
Xander574

A few of us even posted card ideas to expound upon our concepts. Again this is all before we actually met. My cards came out like this.

Most comments posted after my cards were agreed with the overall template, but Xander574 wanted the Morglen and the Chavest ability to switch. $ªmHεiπ suggested that the Chavest one deal damage. sarpnasty had suggested bouncing an instant or sorcery effect for Irindu. So we had some good starting thoughts for the discussion later that night.

Discussion

At the beginning of the meeting, we started to riff on the concepts discussed earlier, but then we realized that we jumped into that too quickly. We wanted to know what the winner on the challenge actually envisioned for his set. As it turns out sarpnasty wanted the abilities to be more synergistic with each of the shard themes. So, we completely abandoned the defensive concept of my designs, which was really a great move. We really started off with the Irindu card. We tried to think about what Irindu wanted, and that is card draw, so we all shot around ideas like "When CARDNAME ETB,:

• draw a card.
• draw a card, then discard a card
• draw a card, then put a card from your hand on top of your library. (mini Brainstorm)

What we came up with in the end is so Irindu its not funny and in most other situations its weak. We went with "..., put a card from your hand on top of your library, then draw a card." The reason why this works is because if you are playing a flow deck, this card enables flow for a card in hand and if your hand is empty you get a card. So in any other deck there is no advantage at all, but it is a great advantage for irindu.

We then looked at the Ulgris card. Ulgris is about swarm and magic suppression and wither. Well the original use of regeneration here did not really play on that too much. It was suggested that you get a 1/1 or a 0/1 creature token. The next suggestion was to make it a mini Fate Transfer. Allowing Ulgris players to manipulate the field a tiny bit in an instant.

Chavest was next and we seemed to be on a roll with synergies related to the special mechanics, so we wanted to play off of cleave. What does cleave want? Cleave wants to be blocked. So we wanted to force a creature to block. We all went back and forth for a while on whether it would force a specific creature to block another specific creature or if it would just force a creature to block something. In the end we settled on the slightly more balanced version, that target creature had to block something this turn. Again, when played correctly, this is strong in Chavest, but weak elsewhere.

Sorok was up next. Originally someone suggested that it give all creatures -3/-0 to play off of resolve, but that was too strong. We then moved to -1/-0 which is weaker and has precedent as a common (see Hell Swarm) but was for sure in blue realm. We liked it but it could still cause a bit too much, so we discussed it having to do with attacking and blocking creatures since red and white both have such concerns. In the final one we used the "all blocking creatures and all blocked creatures get -1/-0 until end of turn." verbiage. It was "attacking and blocking", then "all blocked and blocking" but Fight to the Death settled the wording for us. Again this card is great for resolve-based decks and not great otherwise.

Morglen was the last shard to deal with and really took the longest. We started with using the regenerate thing again in Morglen, but that does not work with Memento at all. So we thought about having it be an instant speed Raise Dead and have a card from graveyard go to your hand, which makes sense with Memento since you get an extra use. It was then suggested that it be a conditional Raise Dead, so "you may put a card from your graveyard into hand if it shares a name with a card on the battlefield". That seemed to work with Memento too. It was also suggested that maybe the conditional one put the creature into play. Then maybe that it puts a card from graveyard on top of your library. So we talked about all of these options for a while, then we drew our attention to the original card. It said regenerate. What does that do? It prevents a creature from dying. So in a twist on that we decided well how is that so much better than it just bouncing back into play after dying. Now this does create the trigger ability problem. We are aware. It may be too strong. I know, but that is what playtesting is for. This may have to switch back to a weaker version at some point.

Well that is about it. The cards may be undercosted now, or the activations may need to be raised, but we are planning on changes after playtesting, so that might happen to this cycle. Check out the new cards below.

Final designs

Next Challenge

Well we have been doing this for what a year or more now. I love this project and I think it is going great, but it takes a ton of time. So this week we are not issuing a challenge. We are taking a week off to meet and plan upcoming challenges. We have some ideas and I promise you that you will be seeing some old designs very soon. I won't tell you what that means yet, but you will. So the design team will meet in a week, decide upon the next challenge and you will get a challenge issued the next day.

I hope you all enjoyed the insight in the design process.