I am building a set! Would you like to help?

[Slyvester12]

I'd be interested in hearing more about the mechanics you want to include and what kind of factions you plan to make cards for. It sounds like Ob-Nixilis will have a lot of horror / elemental followers and the natives will have some inexperienced but newly powerful mages. Maybe more coon flip stuff for mages to reflect their recent rise to power? Giving powerful abilities a chance to fizzle or hinder you instead could be an interesting way to balance. Also, I'd like a Krark's Thumb reprint if you roll with that idea. Regardless, seeing the potential of Berserker to be a big part of the set, I'd like a Vampire Hexmage reprint.

[firebrand549]

I'd be interested in hearing more about the mechanics you want to include and what kind of factions you plan to make cards for. It sounds like Ob-Nixilis will have a lot of horror / elemental followers and the natives will have some inexperienced but newly powerful mages. Maybe more coon flip stuff for mages to reflect their recent rise to power? Giving powerful abilities a chance to fizzle or hinder you instead could be an interesting way to balance. Also, I'd like a Krark's Thumb reprint if you roll with that idea. Regardless, seeing the potential of Berserker to be a big part of the set, I'd like a Vampire Hexmage reprint.

I just finished the first draft of the complete set, Vampire Hexmage was a great call, went right in! Rather than reprint Krak's Thumb though, I went ahead and made a new chance-focused artifact (see end of this post). As for the tribes, I seem to generally be doing Zombies, Wizards, Humans, Giants, and Elves, but still a lot of reworking to be done and the way that they actually work is far from set in stone. I do like coin-flipping mages, right now there are only one or two, but I hope to increase that number when I can look at all the cards in front of me at once and see what I can tweak. Another thing I've been focusing on is symmetrical effects, to reflect the fact that even those who can tap into the plane's mana can't fully contain and control it.

Orb of Possibilities {x}{x}

Artifact

Orb of Possibilities enters with X charge counters on it.

{t}, Remove a charge counter from Orb of Possibilities: Repeat any random action. (i.e. a coin flip, a die roll, random targeting, etc...) You must keep the new result.

[firebrand549]

Big Update!
Hello people of Deckstats! I have news for you all who’ve been eagerly awaiting it (and for the rest of you too)! I finished the first draft of the set, built a few booster packs and ran a few playtests. It was fun, and I was happy with a lot of the cards I created on their own. However, the set as a whole underwhelmed me...

But WHY?
I’m glad you asked, I have a few thoughts on this. First of all, part of it is just the natural crash of being done with such a large project. For a fair while I always had new ideas and tweaks running through my mind, and labeling the set as “done” took that away. Second of all, labeling it as done was setting myself up to be disappointed, the first draft was never going to be as fun as playing a brand-new set of actual professionally-designed magic, and yet I still hoped it would be in the back of my mind. Third, I had a good approach to card design, but a very bad approach to set design. Only about halfway through did I actually start doing any real math with regards to card type distributions across colors and rarities, tracking average CMCs across card types, etc... And I never even got to tracking specific type of effects. I couldn’t tell you for sure how many ETBs are in the set, how many cards gain life, how many combat tricks there are, how much removal there is, etc... I have a gut feeling about all of these, and I’m sure the answers are buried in my subconscious, but I don’t have them right now. Throw in a whole lot of flavor that feels like it should tie in somewhere else but doesn’t and the nightmare of balancing the power of five tribes, and I’m pretty close to nowhere. With all that lacking, it’d be incredibly hard to happen upon a well-balanced set that’s comparably fun to play. Still, with all of these problems, I’m proud I managed to grind through this process, the last 50 cards really felt like a slog. My spirit is not broken!

So, now what?
I’m glad you asked that too! To be honest, the prospect of going back and doing a giant data-entry grind to document all the info I need makes me want to puke/Lightning Bolt someone, and I think that while there are good cards in the set, the set as a whole is far enough from balanced that I want to just cleanse the whole thing and start again. I’ll keep the cards I’ve got designed so I can slot them into the set if they still fit, but I’m going to do a big set design push with as close to 0 specific card design involved as possible. This is how I should’ve started in the first place, but I got caught up in the fun parts of making a set and I forgot to do the actual important bits. This time I’m also starting at common. Coming up with the main characters of the story and overarching themes is great, but I’m going to hold off on turning those into cards until I get through the commons, uncommons, etc... I will try to keep you all updated more regularly this time (perhaps a daily/weekly brief of my progress) as this will also help make sure my ideas are at least organizable enough to put into a post here.

How can I help?
Well, first of all, send good vibes my way. Going from the high of designing bomb mythics and rares to slogging through commons to having to enter like 20 data points each for 275 cards to finally playing the cards and being kind of disappointed has left me a bit burnt out, so all positive energy helps! Second, keep the ideas coming. Even those I don’t respond directly to, I read and file for future use. Especially useful are ideas for mechanics or effects that you would like to see again/for the first time. Third of all, let me know your thoughts on the following big mechanics for the set:

Berserker
This is where it all kind of started and I still like it. At the very least I’m not ready to cut it quite yet. The biggest problem is how to balance it so that it’s not overpowered at common or meh and rare. I’m also still deciding how many cards I want to even have the ability. It’s not going to be anywhere near the way constellation was for Theros, but maybe something closer to the new heroic cards? In its current form, the berserker ability says:

Berserker X (This creature enters the battlefield with X rage counters. A rage counter may be removed at any time to prevent lethal damage. If this creature would be dealt any damage while it has no rage counters, sacrifice it.)
Let me know your thoughts!

Mutate
This ability will be in Ikoria, but as of this post we don’t know what it will do. My money is on it granting or removing keywords from cards, perhaps for a mana cost as an activated ability like adapt or maybe as an alternate/additional cost to casting (I’m imagining like a hydroid krasis that enters with abilities instead of counters). Maybe it’ll even be a flip/transform effect. Once we see a preview I guess we’ll know for sure. For now, though, I want to try to play with it could be like, so here’s what I’ve got:

{x}: Mutate N. This creature gains N of the following abilities chosen at random. Mutate each creature only once and only at any time you could play a sorcery.

Channel
This one is brand new. It wasn’t in the first draft and it hasn’t been put on any cards yet but I’d like to toy with it a bit. This has the potential to be THE flagship mechanic for the set like landfall for Zendikar or constellation for Theros. Right now it reads

Channel - Whenever N or more lands are tapped for mana to pay for a single spell, X happens.
This ability would sometimes do good things, sometimes bad things, sometimes just weird things. Flavor-wise I like how this reflects the untamed nature of mana on the plane and design-wise I feel like I’d have a lot of freedom to just toss in effects since only the trigger is consistent across cards. Rules wise it’s very close to just being a cast trigger right now, but I like the fact that using artifacts or creatures to create your mana helps control the effects of the plane’s kooky mana. I’m also not married to the ability’s name, so I’m definitely taking suggestions on that as well as the actual functionality of the mechanic.

Ripple
Ripple is nothing new, it’s from Coldsnap. I liked it a lot, and I always like number of this card matters effects like goblin gathering, rat colony, etc... It reads:

Ripple N (When you cast this spell, you may reveal the top N cards of your library. You may cast any revealed cards with the same name as this spell without paying their mana costs. Put the rest on the bottom of your library.)

You made it this far, yay!
Hey, good job, you made it to the end! A few final notes to wrap up this update: Like I said, my spirit is not broken, I’m going to return to the drawing board stronger than ever and start fresh. I’m currently working on becoming an L1 judge so hopefully that’ll make me a better designer as well, but I’m far from having all the information there is to have. Your help (yes, YOU) is always much appreciated. Other stuff I’m working on: considering adding another element to my dev sessions by streaming them on twitch or something and maybe starting a patreon (probably not a kickstarter since that’d DEFO get me in hot legal waters with wizards) to help finance all the play testing I want to do, eventually commission real art for some cards (not that Pinterest hasn’t been good to me). If you have experience with either of those types of things I’d appreciate any thoughts you have on this kind of endeavor. Enough non-magicky stuff though, thanks again for reading through all this, make sure you check back for more updates.

[Slyvester12]

Sucks the first draft didn't turn out like you were hoping, but I enoyed what little I was invovled with the first time around, so I can't say I'm upset you're back to designing cards. As this post was basically just mechanics, I'll give my impressions of each of them.

Berserker: Right now, seems a bit wordy. Maybe something like "Berseker X (This creature enters the battlefield with X rage counters on it. If this creature would be destroyed, instead remove one rage counter and all damage marked on this card and remove it from combat.) This way it would work like a limited version of indestructible / regenerate, and it would synergize with flicker effects. As for which cards should have Berserker, it sounds like a red mechanic to me, so maybe it should be the main mechanic of one of the tribes with a few horrors and other creatures thrown in?

Mutate: Since this is an official keyword that will be revealed soon, wouldn't it make more sense to change the name if you intend to make something up for it? Regardless, I think reandomly assigning keywords might be a bit too random as you have it written. Maybe make it so that the creature has a mutation cost, which then allows the player to roll a die, and a set of values (1-3, 4-6 or 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6, etc...) determines which keyword is gained. This could be a repeatable ability, allowing something like a gambling version of the level up mechanic, hoping to not roll a dead value (or you could make certain values do things other than keywords, like +1/+1 counters or get REALLY risky with something like +1/-1). However you decide to do it, I think this would make it easier to balance cards.

Channel: I think this seems pretty fun. It could make a ramp-centric big mana strategy pretty powerful, depending on what effects get triggered. It would be nice to see both big mana payoff abilities (Channel 6: the channeled spell gains cascade. / Channel 8: draw X cards, where X is equal to half the mana cost of the channeled spell, rounded down.) and punishing abilities for aggro (Channel 5: this card deals 3 damage to the channeled spells controller. / Channel 6: the channeled spell's controller sacrifices a nonland permanent. If he or she can't, he or she discards two cards.). I would hesitate to make it too easy to trigger, though (Channel 3: draw a card).

Ripple: I love ripple and have always wished for it to be on more spells, especially in the sense that Thrumming Stone uses it.

Overall, this is still sounding fun and interesting, and I'd love to hear more updates.

[firebrand549]

I do like your version of Berserker at the very least because it’s simpler and more concise. I wonder if there might be a way to keep the simplicity but still have some drawback when you run out of rage. Maybe it could just be something like this creature gets -X/-X if it has no rage counters? In V1 it was mostly on red, with a few black and green bois mixed in, I think that’s the way to go.

You’re right on Mutate I should probably just make my own thing and then once stuff gets spoiled I can see if I want to make the switch or forge my own path... perhaps instead of a cost to pay it could be a triggered ability, so if you attack with your creature it may gain flying or it may get a -1/-1 counter, or if you draw more than one card a turn, or ... etc... That would also make room in the set for a card or two that block certain triggered abilities in order to “lock in” a mutation that you like. This feels VERY simic, maybe with a little black thrown in if a mutation could grant persist or something.

For Channel, maybe it would be paired with a sac cost? I could imagine a creature that has Channel 3, for example, saying: When you tap 3 (exactly 3?) lands to pay for a single spell, you may sacrifice this creature. If you do, that spell gains ... something cool. This feels green since it’s lands matter, but flavor-wise I think it fits with the wizards of the plane, so I’d put in in esper or jeskai colors...

And ripple, yeah I kind of just want to toss onto some cards and see what sticks. I get the sense that this format will have a lot of inconsistency between games with so many random effects, but I can try to put in cards to tip the scales of fate or I can embrace it and make a real chaotic plane haha