~Hakurei Shrine~ > Touhou Projects
Legends of an Eastern Wonderland - A Magic: the Gathering Touhou set (take two)
KennyMan666:
If that sounds familiar, you might remember that I back in 2013 posted a thread about it. I figured it was better to post a whole new thread instead of bumping a four year old one, given how many changes that have occured since. Both in my set and in actual MtG.
I've been sporadically working on the set since I last posted there, and in recent weeks have really gotten back into it. So I figure it's time to post about it again. In the time that's passed, Magic has gone through some mechanical shifts, some keywords and mechanics have been phased out in favour of others - and I've done an attempt to reflect this in the set. So, some of the major changes that's been done (some of these'll make sense later if you didn't read the old thread):
Intimidate has been replaced with Menace, and River Sanzu now gives Menace rather than unblockable.
Immortal has been reworked to no longer use regeneration (as regeneration's been phased out in favour of making creatures indestructible until end of turn - but the new Immortal doesn't use that), and more creatures have it because it was silly to just have three creatures with it naturally so I found some excuses to give it to more creatures.
More creatures with Faithbound have been introduced, and it's now represented in all colours to a better degree. Used to be that the two-coloured Suwako was the only representative for blue and red Faithbound - that's no longer the case, as each colour now has at least one monocoloured Faithbound Deity.
Certain keywords that occurred only on a few cards have been given to more cards.
Artifact creatures used to be colourless. They now have colours. Some artifacts have been given colours as well. This might change back, but I kinda like the coloured artifacts.
Made some promo cards, that are copies of regular cards but with alternate fancy frames and art. Mostly because I found cool pictures I wanted to use.
Probably some other things I did since 2013 but forgot that I did!
And most obviously, the cards no longer use the old frames - I finally cracked and switched to M15 frames, because as much as I like the old frames, I felt they were constraining me and everything looks more unified now (but they do have one issue that the old frames didn't have). For instance, any colourless non-artifact card now uses the Devoid card frame, though the Devoid keyword is not used. The colourless mana symbol is used where it makes sense, but never in any casting cost.
Starting Monday I'm going to do what I did in the last thread, which is make a post that concerns itself primarily with one colour and its mechanics per day for a week, and see what's happened with that colour since. So more on the new Immortal then. For now, let's just get a little refresher on what I've been calling the spell synergy trio of keywords:
(cards posted at 75% size - click 'em for fullsize, which is too big for inline posting, I feel. Most cards should still be readable at this size, except maybe those with an unreasonable amount of text)
More cheap auras granting common effects have been introduced to fuel Spell circle. All evergreen creature abilities now come in cheap aura form as well.
Additionally, the other mechanics that are featured in all colours - Faithbound and Shrines:
Cards have been made for all the new HSiFS characters, but they're not done yet - some lack images due to there not being enough art of them yet, and anything from the latter half of the game lacks flavour text due to translations not being done yet. A whole bunch of other cards also lack flavour text for a variety of reasons including but not limited to laziness from my part.
So I'm hoping some of you that used to post in the other thread and give me valuable feedback are still around - or that there's some new people around that like Magic and want to give me even more feedback!
I should emphasize that this set has been designed to be balanced with itself, rather than with the rest of Magic - it's not intended to be played with cards from other sets, but at the same time, costs and stuff should of course be comparable to what they'd be in real Magic, and obviously things should not be horribly broken or woefully underpowered for what they are if they, theoretically, were to be played together with... Modern, I guess.
KennyMan666:
Well then - let's just get around to our first stop on the colour pie. Before I start, though, a disclaimer: Not too much thought has gone into card rarities, and some card haven't been changed from their default common rarity. Do not take them as representative of a card's power. In general, I've considered early game bosses commons, mid-to-late game bosses uncommon, and final/extra bosses and main characters rare, but those aren't always 100% true (and with the exception of three special cards, mythic only appears on a special type of card). I've done some attempts at changing rarity on things based on how strong the card is, but I'm not positive I've always hit the right one. Feel free to suggest changed rarities on cards. Another thing that I'm sure I don't have 100% down is mana costs - please let me know if I've over/undercosted something.
Some cards have just an asterisk as their flavour text for the time being - this is because I haven't found any good flavour text for them yet. Taking suggestions!
White
Starting with white is appropriate not only because it's the first colour in the order of the Magic colours, but also because it's where the main heroine of the Touhou series exists, which seems like a good place to start getting into the specifics.
So, yeah, that's Fantasy Nature. But I'm not sure I want it to be like that anymore. It was a pretty early designed card. I do want Reimu to have something special given that she's the main character, though.
Reimu has some spells as well:
Okay, that's Fantasy Nature. It's part of a cycle. I'll be getting back to that later, because as you can see on Evil Sealing Circle, I'm using Entwine in this set. While I have my own mechanics, I'm of course reusing a few. So here's a list of all the non-evergreen keyworded mechanics I'm using in this set:
- Annihilator
- Changeling
- Entwine
- Fortify
- Proliferate
- Protection
- Split second
- Suspend (though only sort of, more on that when we get to blue and you-know-who)
- Totem armor
I figure I'll go over my reasons for each as I get to them, so... Protection is first up, and there's not that much to say about it. And when I started making the set and included Protection, it was still evergreen, so... y'know. At the time there wasn't anything out of the ordinary to include it and it's just remained since. Entwine is there to allow multipurpose spells. So these days Entwine spells are written out as bulleted lists with the options on the cards, but I don't know if I like that... the option exists to replace Entwine with Escalate, if I want to start doing spells with more modes. The possibility will remain.
But let's get into the entirely new mechanics for the set. Apart from the spell ones, there are five new major keywords, each one being primary in one colour and secondary in another. What that largely means is that, obviously, they show up on more cards of the primary colour, but also that only the primary colour can, where it applies, provide the mechanic to other cards, and for multicoloured spells that don't have both of the keyword's colours, it can only be featured to any degree if one of the colours is the primary one. So without further ado, here's white's keyword, the one I mentioned yesterday - Immortal.
It was one of the first keywords I made for the set, and for the longest time it was only something three creatures had naturally, and about two or three other cards could make other things immortal. It was recently expanded to include more creatures. I believe it's the one that's gone through the most revisions, as well - even not counting the original version, Revive, which was completely idiotic. Immortal used to read "Whenever this creature is dealt damage, regenerate it" - automatically activated Regeneration was the vision for the mechanic from the start, the drawback being that you couldn't choose to regenerate something when it got hit by a destroy effect or something of the sort. But Regenerate has been phased out in favour of making things indestructible until end of turn, and for a short while, I had Immortal do exactly that, tap the creature and make it indestructible. But I didn't like that version, so I changed it into "When this creature dies, exile it instead of putting it into your graveyard. Return it to the battlefield at the beginning of your next upkeep." The drawback then was that it would have summoning sickness when returning, plus any auras attached to it would fall off, but it also meant getting rid of it permanently required exiling it - and it also would cause something I dubbed the "Faithbounce", which could get a bit silly. So I put the condition about only triggering if the creature had been dealt damage this turn back in since I realized I could do that without making it sound really stupid, and the only thing I'm on the fence about now is if the combined drawbacks of only triggering on damage and also coming back with summoning sickness makes it too weak - which, of course, would be solved by having it gain haste until end of turn when coming back.
So, either way, here's the rest of the white immortals.
(oh, and there's the little issue with the M15 template for MSE - text sometimes overlaps the P/T box and/or the foil circle. I haven't gotten around to fixing that on all cards where it's happened yet.)
The hermits and Tenshi were recently given Immortal, because I figure it's close enough. Tenshi used to have Protection from Youkai rather than Immortal, and she made slightly more sense then, so she might go through some minor additional redesigning. At this point, I should mention that save for a handful of Artifact creatures, all creatures in the set have the supertype Human or Youkai. That... hasn't ended up being as important as I envisioned it to be originally, though.
And given Spell circle, every basic mechanic needs to come in Aura form as well, so:
Now, as I mentioned, the keywords are secondary in another colour. This one is secondary in red, for, well, obvious reasons:
Her effect used to trigger on regenerating, but that isn't a thing any more, and obviously can't Spell circle enters the battlefield effects. It was changed a little, I think she used to deal 1 damage per regeneration, but I added some fire. I might end up changing that again, though.
And then there's one more red creature that got Immortal, who... is a little bit of a stretch, but hey, she exists in the canon:
Designed to be a mirrored pair with Junko, but I don't actually know what Chang'e's ability is supposed to do yet. Taking suggestions.
So let's go over the other mechanics we saw in the posted cards.
Split second was another keyword I expanded recently. Kaguya used to only have Flash, but Split second wasn't featured on enough cards, and I mean - "manipulation of the instantaneous". If that's not split second, I don't know what is. For obvious reasons, it primarily shows up in blue, but is featured on at least one card in all colours. In white, it shows up on three more cards:
Both flash and split second are, for this set, flavoured somewhere inbetween time magic and going really, really fast.
Faithbound I'm going to get more into later, but there's one more white Faithbound creature, who also has the distinction of being the only creature in the set with native Faithbound that doesn't have the Deity creature type (which is entirely because I didn't have any pure white Faithbound creatures - now there's Junko, but I think it still fits):
As I mentioned before, Fantasy Nature is part of a cycle - there's a couple of them, and here's all the other white cards that are part of cycles, all of which except one are in all colours:
Some new things here - Tribal, Proliferate, and... the untap symbol. Okay. Tribal is actually no longer a thing in actual Magic. Which is a strong argument for no longer using it, but in this set, it only ever exists in the form of specifically Wizard spells - and that's something I've tied into my use of Proliferate. In Scars of Mirrodin, Proliferate represented Phyrexia's glistening oil continuously corrupting things. In this set, it's more about amplifying magic. This set uses +1/+1 counters, which I guess can be thought of as the Power items in the Touhou games. So Proliferating would be... powering up more, I guess. Mostly it's being used because it's a fantastic mechanic and I love it, so I found a way to design it in. I could be convinced to drop calling the spells "Tribal", but for the time being, Wizard spells need to be a thing. I guess it's not entirely impossible to just call them Instant/Sorcery - Wizard, without Tribal. As you may gather from this, and from her theme of using all elements, Patchouli has ended up being kind of a special card in this set. But more on that later!
And then there's the untap symbol. It's featured on the five cards of the fairy cycle and one additional card. I should seriously just make them tap instead and adjust the mana costs accordingly.
Last but not least - Planeswalkers! Because of course there's Planeswalkers. Each colour has one character that I've chosen for the role of Planeswalker... and they each have two Planeswalker cards. Yes, that means this set has ten walkers, which I fully, entirely, 100% admit is too much, but it happened and now that's what it's like. So each one comes in two versions of the character - one monocoloured and one where a second colour has found its way into the character, for one reason or another. Something I eventually noticed had happened entirely on accident was the way these actually ended up the same colour combinations as the keywords - but in the opposite colour order from the primary/secondary split of those. It happens. Representing white is The Saintly White Planeswalker - Byakuren.
Well, this is getting long, so let me just close out this post with a selection of some more white cards. Enjoy!
Okay, so there's one new mechanic in there - Totem armor. It's in because I adore the mechanic and in a set where one of the subthemes is "auras matter", it was a total no-brainer. So there you go. Also, upon reading the Totem armor reminder text again, I notice "Aura" is capitalized in it, so I've gone ahead and made it capitalized in the Spellbind text now as well.
Roonerspism:
--- Quote from: KennyMan666 on August 13, 2017, 12:45:01 AM ---So I'm hoping some of you that used to post in the other thread and give me valuable feedback are still around - or that there's some new people around that like Magic and want to give me even more feedback!
I should emphasize that this set has been designed to be balanced with itself, rather than with the rest of Magic - it's not intended to be played with cards from other sets, but at the same time, costs and stuff should of course be comparable to what they'd be in real Magic, and obviously things should not be horribly broken or woefully underpowered for what they are if they, theoretically, were to be played together with... Modern, I guess.
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Hello, that's me, I suppose. It's been a while since I've played a reasonable amount of Magic, but I've been keeping up with someone who streams it a lot so I think I still have a decent idea of good card design and, at least, a solid understanding of how the game mechanics work together.
Modern (well, constructed play in general, honestly) is a notable hole in my knowledge, though. As I go through each card, I'll be judging things through the eyes of a Limited player.
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3/3 for 4 with pro black and an extremely powerful ability that will never happen. I'd pick it.
Writing out "Reimu Hakurei" each time makes the ability a bit of a mouthful. I think, because she's legendary, you can use her given name instead, if you don't like "it"? I'd probably also stitch the second sentence back in to the first just to make it clearer to any insufferable rules lawyers out there that both things have to happen at the same time. Something like "[...] counters from Reimu and Reimu gets +7/+7 until [...]".
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Ah, a Constructed-only card. That's fine.
Well, I say that, but even as a player used to writing off "5 mana do-nothing enchantments", the payoff on this is pretty alright. I'd maybe pick it if I could really trust the set to give me the lifegain I need in later picks.
Also, while I'm here, does every card need flavour text, even the ones which already have three paragraphs of rules text? This one at least fits the card's mechanics well though, instead of merely just fitting the knowledge I already have as a Touhou fan, like some of the later cards.
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Holy moly! This card is nutso!
It seems like pretty excellent removal, even in the context of Constructed. In the context of drafting, this card is set-defining. I have a huge reason to want to play white if there's going to be 5-6 of these going around the table.
Also, can I entwine off a spellcard-discard? Not to say that the other three ways to play it aren't already good enough...
--- Quote ---Immortal.
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Well, it's difficult to judge Immortal (and therefore also Eirin, who's all about it) right now... it seems extremely powerful, but there are weaknesses that the set could be designed to exploit. I mean, I was just finished with a card that deals with two immortal creatures quite handily. I'll be back for you.
--- Quote ---and the only thing I'm on the fence about now is if the combined drawbacks of only triggering on damage and also coming back with summoning sickness makes it too weak
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I mean, those are the only two things stopping it from being functionally identical to "Indestructible" - you can't fly too close to that sun if you want to put the keyword on more than a couple of cards. Without playing with it myself, I think Immortal is already fine as is, my worry would be that it might need to get scaled back.
--- Quote ---So, either way, here's the rest of the white immortals.
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Kaguya's fine. Well, maybe there's a way to make her break Constructed over your knee, but it's too conditional for me to worry about.
Junko's nutso-busto but very hard to cast. Unlike Fantasy Nature, where I'm not sure if I'd first-pick it and build around it, I'd definitely do so for Junko - any game I can play her in is a won game.
Futo and Seiga are both astonishingly powerful on defense. Futo is one extra mana for your already-great Kitchen Finks, but with two major upsides (triggers on all creatures, comes back more than once) and Seiga is a cheapish (pseudo-)invincible blocker who pulls off the ol' block-and-tap real good for you. 3 huge creatures blocked every 2 turns, no questions asked*.
Tenshi's a 5 mana 6/5. Good start! She's pseudo-invincible. Okay!? She tells the red player that their time to win the game ends the next time you untap your lands. Yeah??
Miko is a potentially big beefy creature for a moderatly high price. Her ability is extremely powerful, but a bit tricky to trigger. She will never beat any of these other creatures (without enlisting help from the other creatures in your deck, anyway) because she doesn't have evasion or trample.
*MY HUGE POST MUST LITERALLY BE PERFECT EDIT: whoops, actually it's only one per turn, but you can forgo one to get two on the next turn
So this is what I mean by "Immortal is maybe too strong, also the power level of your set is higher than normal". It's still early days, so maybe your set is perfectly balanced with itself, but any one of these creatures would be a force of nature (Miko and Kaguya would merely be worrying) if I saw them in the average Limited game.
--- Quote ---At this point, I should mention that save for a handful of Artifact creatures, all creatures in the set have the supertype Human or Youkai. That... hasn't ended up being as important as I envisioned it to be originally, though.
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Actually, yeah... if it's not serving a gameplay purpose, then you should probably change it. Most of these characters aren't really "human", right?
--- Quote ---And given Spell circle, every basic mechanic needs to come in Aura form as well, so:
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Seems like a weird thing to put on an aura, even in an aura-centered set. This is basically just a 3 mana enchant-aura that says "No effect. Totem Armor." because it falls off when you revive them.
Well, if there was some way to put it back on each time (and good luck finding the rules wording for that) then this card would be fine and perhaps even weak. The keyword is strong, but the drawbacks of immortal are even stronger when the silver bullets that get you get two cards off the table instead of just one.
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I mean, this card is great, but now my sense of value has been shifted so much higher and I've seen the immortal blockers she'll be running in to every turn, so I dunno.
Also, spell circle and immortal just do not play nicely together. And with this card in particular, it feels really bad. You want to throw her in to combat every single turn, but you just can't because the auras will fall off when she dies. Luckily she's still okay on her own, so you probably wouldn't suit her up in them to begin with.
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Designed to be a mirrored pair with Junko, but I don't actually know what Chang'e's ability is supposed to do yet. Taking suggestions.
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Who?
Well, Junko is nutso-busto, like I said, so if you want something that good and mirrored with Junko's ability, it'd be "Make a X/1 with haste and maybe even trample that dies at end of turn and you may deal X damage to a creature". I'm not sure if making ball lightning creatures and blasting dudes is what Chang'e does, though.
--- Quote ---Split second was another keyword I expanded recently. Kaguya used to only have Flash, but Split second wasn't featured on enough cards
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Just stepping in to say "hell yeah".
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I like Aya and Hatate. I think Aya might be the slightly better of the two? I like hitting people in the face with my fliers.
Illusionary Dominance is hard to evaluate. Instant first strike is a dangerous place to start with your combat trick, but then it's pretty expensive and doesn't pump up the numbers at all. Even so, this might be too good on defense?
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Huh. A plain old flying lifelinker feels like a breath of fresh air after exploring this alien set.
Well, this card is powerful. Anyone with shrines and white mana would want to pick it in Limited. But it dies when it's killed, which seems like a downside these days.
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Oh, all of these are balanced. Weird.
I particularly like Merlin as the card that a Limited player will see and think "Ah, a 2/3 for 3 mana with no text. That's fine." and Sunny as two nice things for cheap (flying attacker, tapper) barely held together on a tiny body. A card that will feel great when you manage to squeeze tiny bits of value out of it.
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Whoop, the breath of fresh air's over, time to get strange again.
Rage Trilithon - The second Constructed-only card, it seems. Both Silence and Proliferate don't seem like effects I'm going to want frequently enough to include this card in my deck.
Life Spring Infinity - Seems... bad? Am I this desperate for life gain?
Virupaksa's Eyes - Hard to evaluate. Cards usually don't do this kind of thing any more these days.
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Saint:
The +1 is good. I bet the -2 won't be used very often. (+1 makes you unblockable, -2 can't be used on reaction, so it's not even that great)
Should the +1 say "You may"? I'm not sure what happens if you try to use a planeswalker ability with no valid targets.
Her ultimate is at the usual "doesn't quite win the game" power level. The fact that it only takes three turns to do it is slightly worrying, but she costs 5 mana and can't defend herself, so it's probably fine.
Monk:
Oh, the tribes are starting to matter after all.
These abilities are... dangerous. The +1 is balanced for one youkai, the -3 is fine up until I discard some huge youkai-griselbrand to a spellcard and then it's a Vintage Reanimator plan, and the ultimate... oh wait the ultimate is only lifegain. Lifegain never hurt anyone.
I hesitate to just call it broken, though. It's strong and exciting. The +1 seems like it might be backbreaking in Limited but that's kind of just what happens if you get lucky with a planeswalker that fits your deck in Limited.
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I like Konngara and Unzan. Unzan joins the delightful ranks of cards that say "I can't block" only for the response to be "I wasn't planning on that, actually"
The two auras... hm. Good auras always seem so inconsistent. You're either beating your opponent to death with your ludicrous unblockable monstrosity, or they laugh and blast your creature as the aura's being placed on them, or even afterwards sometimes. These cards are good auras, for all the good that does them.
I like Miracle Fruit and Ghost Clifford.
Whew, I really lost myself in this! Man, set design is so much more fun when I don't have to do any of the work.
So looking back on my post, I said I'd be back for what I think about Immortal, and it seems I think it's stronger than you do. All the immortal creatures were very powerful (e.g. Futo, who would be playable if she only came back once!) and the other cards have not yet convinced me that there's going to be plenty of answers to them to go around.
The mechanics you've chosen are all ones that I kind of like as well*, but all of them in addition to the spellcard-discarding-auras trick is a bit much, maybe?
Designing a set around auras... well, I brought it up earlier. It's hard. But this set seems alright so far. Don't give up, skeleton.
*bring back Storm (don't, though)
KennyMan666:
Yay, feedback. I'mma respond to some of that before I get around to posting about blue, since some things have actually changed since yesterday. The untap symbol isn't used anymore, Sunny now does her thing for W, T instead. Other things as they come up.
--- Quote from: Roonerspism on August 15, 2017, 04:24:18 AM ---Writing out "Reimu Hakurei" each time makes the ability a bit of a mouthful. I think, because she's legendary, you can use her given name instead, if you don't like "it"? I'd probably also stitch the second sentence back in to the first just to make it clearer to any insufferable rules lawyers out there that both things have to happen at the same time. Something like "[...] counters from Reimu and Reimu gets +7/+7 until [...]".
[...]
Also, while I'm here, does every card need flavour text, even the ones which already have three paragraphs of rules text? This one at least fits the card's mechanics well though, instead of merely just fitting the knowledge I already have as a Touhou fan, like some of the later cards.
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Text length is a problem on a number of cards. I've just been using MSE's CARDNAME function, but if only using the first name for legendaries is a thing that is done these days, that would definitely help. Removing flavour text on a number of cards is an option, and given that playing with this set is mostly theoretical at this point and would probably only ever be done in a digital setting where you'd have infinite access to all cards anyway, maybe I don't need to include the reminder text for my new keywords every time when they're long anyway...
--- Quote ---Holy moly! This card is nutso!
It seems like pretty excellent removal, even in the context of Constructed. In the context of drafting, this card is set-defining. I have a huge reason to want to play white if there's going to be 5-6 of these going around the table.
Also, can I entwine off a spellcard-discard? Not to say that the other three ways to play it aren't already good enough...
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Spellcard is just an alternate casting cost, so yes, you can discard the cards instead of paying the regular mana cost and also pay the entwine cost. But perhaps this one needs to cost another mana. Also it's Uncommon now. :V
--- Quote ---I mean, those are the only two things stopping it from being functionally identical to "Indestructible" - you can't fly too close to that sun if you want to put the keyword on more than a couple of cards. Without playing with it myself, I think Immortal is already fine as is, my worry would be that it might need to get scaled back.
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Remember that it only triggers if the creature has been dealt damage this turn, so any plain "destroy" effects would send them off to the graveyard.
--- Quote ---Kaguya's fine. Well, maybe there's a way to make her break Constructed over your knee, but it's too conditional for me to worry about.
Junko's nutso-busto but very hard to cast. Unlike Fantasy Nature, where I'm not sure if I'd first-pick it and build around it, I'd definitely do so for Junko - any game I can play her in is a won game.
Futo and Seiga are both astonishingly powerful on defense. Futo is one extra mana for your already-great Kitchen Finks, but with two major upsides (triggers on all creatures, comes back more than once) and Seiga is a cheapish (pseudo-)invincible blocker who pulls off the ol' block-and-tap real good for you. 3 huge creatures blocked every 2 turns, no questions asked*.
Tenshi's a 5 mana 6/5. Good start! She's pseudo-invincible. Okay!? She tells the red player that their time to win the game ends the next time you untap your lands. Yeah??
Miko is a potentially big beefy creature for a moderatly high price. Her ability is extremely powerful, but a bit tricky to trigger. She will never beat any of these other creatures (without enlisting help from the other creatures in your deck, anyway) because she doesn't have evasion or trample.
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Futo, Seiga, Tenshi and Miko used to not have Immortal, and I don't think I actually adjusted their casting costs (or Seiga's ability cost) since. So those might do with some tweaking. Tenshi used to have Protection from Youkai rather than Immortal, so she'd just soak up damage from Youkai creatures (the flavour being that the bodies of celestials are poisonous to youkai), and was part of my "Immortal should go on more creatures" sweep. As she is now, maybe her ability needs her to tap as well.
--- Quote ---So this is what I mean by "Immortal is maybe too strong, also the power level of your set is higher than normal". It's still early days, so maybe your set is perfectly balanced with itself, but any one of these creatures would be a force of nature (Miko and Kaguya would merely be worrying) if I saw them in the average Limited game.
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A higher than normal power level... kind of happens when almost every creature is legendary, y'know? That's also one of the reasons one of the subthemes is "auras matter" - when they're legendary, the idea becomes fewer but stronger creatures that you're also given incentive to power up, which is much the same reason equipment is a thing in this set too, but more on that when we get to artifacts.
Plus it's very easy to get carried away when making your own custom set. Sure, I could make this creature just a bear, but I could also make it do something cool.
Also, I mean, you're only seeing a selection of cards. There's some more basic things floating around as well. Take Kotohime, for instance - just a 3/3 with Vigilance for 3W. I suppose I'll eventually post "full spoilers" of the set (though this set is a bit of a perpetual work-in-progress anyway), so it can be looked at as a whole rather than just the mostly strong cards I choose to post for now that highlights the special mechanics of the set.
--- Quote ---Actually, yeah... if it's not serving a gameplay purpose, then you should probably change it. Most of these characters aren't really "human", right?
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Well, I've typed as Human anything I could get away with - Lunarians are just humans from the moon, Hermits and Celestials are basically Humans But Better... essentially, I've typed as Human any character that is Human or Humans that turned into something that's not necessarily Youkai. Something that'll show up later is that I have ghosts that come from dead humans be Human Spirits, and things like poltergeists are Youkai Spirits.
--- Quote ---Seems like a weird thing to put on an aura, even in an aura-centered set. This is basically just a 3 mana enchant-aura that says "No effect. Totem Armor." because it falls off when you revive them.
Well, if there was some way to put it back on each time (and good luck finding the rules wording for that) then this card would be fine and perhaps even weak. The keyword is strong, but the drawbacks of immortal are even stronger when the silver bullets that get you get two cards off the table instead of just one.
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The aura was made back when Immortal was auto-regeneration that triggered on damage, so the Immortal creatures would stick around on the battlefield. It's 100% a remnant from that, so I'm just going to make this card into an instant or sorcery that gives target creature Immortal until end of turn.
I did consider wording Immortal so that Auras stayed on creatures that were in the process of reviving, though. It's not off the table yet.
--- Quote ---Also, spell circle and immortal just do not play nicely together. And with this card in particular, it feels really bad. You want to throw her in to combat every single turn, but you just can't because the auras will fall off when she dies. Luckily she's still okay on her own, so you probably wouldn't suit her up in them to begin with.
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So yeha same thing there, and her having spell circle is also a remnant from when Immortal didn't take her off the battlefield. So maybe she just needs a new ability entirely.
--- Quote ---Who?
Well, Junko is nutso-busto, like I said, so if you want something that good and mirrored with Junko's ability, it'd be "Make a X/1 with haste and maybe even trample that dies at end of turn and you may deal X damage to a creature". I'm not sure if making ball lightning creatures and blasting dudes is what Chang'e does, though.
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Chang'e, that Lunarian who drank the Hourai elixir and her husband killed Junko's son so Junko hates her. And if Junko's that supremely broken, maybe she needs to get toned down a little first.
--- Quote ---Just stepping in to say "hell yeah".
I like Aya and Hatate. I think Aya might be the slightly better of the two? I like hitting people in the face with my fliers.
Illusionary Dominance is hard to evaluate. Instant first strike is a dangerous place to start with your combat trick, but then it's pretty expensive and doesn't pump up the numbers at all. Even so, this might be too good on defense?
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Since yesterday, split second has actually been axed from the set. It didn't appear on enough cards to be relevant, and that's for when it's even relevant in the first place. Almost all instances of split second on creatures is now a simple flash instead, and on any spells where it might be relevant, I can just toss in a "can't be countered" instead (because really, that's what split second is in 95% of cases). Aya and Hatate have been redesigned as well - Aya's now a 2/1 with Flash, Flying and First Strike, whereas Hatate is a 2/2 with Flying and First Strike. Their old abilities used to be modeled after what they did in Double Spoiler, but it was really kind of questionable.
--- Quote ---Rage Trilithon - The second Constructed-only card, it seems. Both Silence and Proliferate don't seem like effects I'm going to want frequently enough to include this card in my deck.
Life Spring Infinity - Seems... bad? Am I this desperate for life gain?
Virupaksa's Eyes - Hard to evaluate. Cards usually don't do this kind of thing any more these days.
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There's two reasons to want to proliferate in this set: Beefing up creatures with more +1/+1 counters, and more importantly, Shrines. Shrines will be explored more thorougly later.
Life spring... I don't know. It's a five-card cycle of the divine treasures and having something called "Life spring" not provide life gain seemed wrong.
Virupaksa's Eyes was just one of those basic mechanics on auras thing. Obviously, there's one of each colour, providing protection from its two enemy colours. I'm considering upping the cost on them by 1 and giving them Totem armor as well.
--- Quote ---Saint:
The +1 is good. I bet the -2 won't be used very often. (+1 makes you unblockable, -2 can't be used on reaction, so it's not even that great)
Should the +1 say "You may"? I'm not sure what happens if you try to use a planeswalker ability with no valid targets.
Her ultimate is at the usual "doesn't quite win the game" power level. The fact that it only takes three turns to do it is slightly worrying, but she costs 5 mana and can't defend herself, so it's probably fine.
Monk:
Oh, the tribes are starting to matter after all.
These abilities are... dangerous. The +1 is balanced for one youkai, the -3 is fine up until I discard some huge youkai-griselbrand to a spellcard and then it's a Vintage Reanimator plan, and the ultimate... oh wait the ultimate is only lifegain. Lifegain never hurt anyone.
I hesitate to just call it broken, though. It's strong and exciting. The +1 seems like it might be backbreaking in Limited but that's kind of just what happens if you get lucky with a planeswalker that fits your deck in Limited.
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There's Planeswalkers around that just say "target" without any "you may" (see original Chandra, for instance). The rules don't actually say anything about what happens if you use a loyalty ability without any legal targets, but I think it's technically two separate actions anyway - you activate the loyalty ability and adjust the walker's loyalty accordingly to put the "spell" on the stack, and then it'll just fizzle if there's no legal targets for it.
--- Quote ---So looking back on my post, I said I'd be back for what I think about Immortal, and it seems I think it's stronger than you do. All the immortal creatures were very powerful (e.g. Futo, who would be playable if she only came back once!) and the other cards have not yet convinced me that there's going to be plenty of answers to them to go around.
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Well - we're only in white so far. White's main response to these things is exiling them, and that should be used somewhat sparingly. We've still got blue counterspells and forcing creatures to tap so they can't get into combat, black forcing people to sacrifice, black and red straight up creature destruction, and green... okay, I don't know what good response green has to Immortal, except for maybe big creatures that won't die when they block an Immortal so they'll still be around to attack on the green player's turn while the Immortals are on vacation in the exile zone. But I guess it's not necessarily a bad thing if a mechanic is better against a certain colour than the others.
--- Quote ---The mechanics you've chosen are all ones that I kind of like as well*, but all of them in addition to the spellcard-discarding-auras trick is a bit much, maybe?
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It's basically there to incentivize actually using Spellcard costs for things, and get Spell circle going on creatures faster.
Man, this thread is going to get a lot of long posts, it seems. I'll be back with Blue in a bit.
KennyMan666:
Alright.
Blue
That most infamous of Magic colours. Counterspells, time magic, card draw, annoyances. It's a colour that's both fun and hard to design for. So there's a few Touhou characters that are very very obviously blue and let's start with the most obvious of them all, who also gets to introduce the keyword that's rooted in blue - Declare.
First things first - it was mostly Sakuya's fault that Split second existed in the set at all (her ability used to also read "Use this ability as an instant with split second") and it's 100% Sakuya's fault that suspended cards and time counters exist at all. As I mentioned, it's never used as a casting cost - only as a way to freeze spells in time. Right now, it's only featured on one other card, the blue entry in the cycle that Fantasy Nature also is in, so here's that and another of Sakuya's spells:
Sakuya's World should probably lose its flavour text for readability's sake.
So anyway - Declare. It's the only one of the five keywords that hasn't gone through any changes since it was first made. Somewhat modeled after Cipher and in every way a very Touhou-appropriate keyword in both name and function, since it has the creature declare literally a spell card to use when it fights. A Declared spell will often have more opportunities to get used than a Ciphered one, given that Cipher requires actually hitting the opponent whereas Declare kicks in whenever the creature enters combat - but Declare doesn't let you cast the spell for free like Cipher does, so if you're planning on using it, you need to keep your mana open. But it also has the advantage of letting you use the spell on your opponent's turn, if you block.
Not an exhaustive list, but some of the other declarers:
Oh, yeah, I'm trying the inverted common symbol now. I think it looks a bit better and more in like with the uncommon/rare colours of it. Maybe. Tell me what you think.
So Declare sits primarily in blue, and if it weren't for that Immortal already occupies the spot of being secondary in red, it would be a good candidate for its other colour - so instead, Declare has also found its way over to green:
Rin kind of exists, okay? (EDIT: I don't think I like her non-Declare ability any more, though, so I should change that.) But there's a returning mechanic on Mamizou. Changeling is, well... gives a creature every creature type. I'm sure you see what you want to do to make Mamizou hilarious and there's among one other thing a spell to facilitate that:
Anyway, when you think blue, you think counterspells. So lets get to counterin':
So, yeah, Ancient Duper is basically Cancel But Better, though one card is worth more than a life, so it's not Force of Will.
And our blue deity:
When you think of blue, you also think card draw. So let's draw some cards, too:
And here's today's entrants in our cycles:
No new mechanics, but you may have reacted to the fact that Yukari is a regular creature. She'd be the obvious choice for a Planeswalker, you'd think, given that, well... she is kind of actually canonically a Planeswalker. Or the closest Touhou gets, at any rate. But I wanted her to be able to redirect spells and Planeswalkers can't do that, plus there was someone else that I wanted in the spot of blue Planeswalker. So let's get to that, shall we?
Really, without Yukari, there's not that many choices left. So representing blue is The Venerable Blue Planeswalker - Kanako.
My favourite part about the alternate version is that she was blue/red before I even found that she has the character title "Avatar of Mountains and Lakes". My least favourite part about the alternate version is that blagh that text is small. I've fixed it slightly - it used to be worse!
So that's blue for you, and let's finish off with some other select blue cards.