~Hakurei Shrine~ > Touhou Projects
Legends of an Eastern Wonderland - A Magic: the Gathering Touhou set (take two)
KennyMan666:
--- Quote ---Does Faithbound U/B actually work?
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Yes. The U/B mana symbol is just shorthand for "You can pay for this with your choice of blue or black mana", so each Shrine you control decreases her mana cost by your choice of either a blue or a black mana.
--- Quote ---isn't the token missing two abilities
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Technically yes but even when using the custom token style with a taller text box I can't actually fit all that text. I can fit Faithbound U/B on it if I disable the reminder text, at least. And the idea is that you should never be able to control a Hecatia token if you're not also controlling the Hecatia creature. I considered making her a Precursor Golem, but that seemed kind of eh. (even if I already did something like it in making Suika a Pentavus)
And you can't really lock the opponent down for that long - you can only make two copies, and as soon as any of them die, all Hecatias die.
--- Quote ---quit printing one-sided Wraths of God
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Yeah, yeah, that's again me going for flavour over mechanics and not considering how many different ways I already have to make the same thing happen. Guess I should look that over.
--- Quote ---Declare kind of sucks on low toughness, no evasion creatures.
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I can see that. In this case it just seemed like it fit thematically.
--- Quote ---That's how it works, right? I entwine, I choose that the -2/-2 happens first, then we check power?
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Yes - when two effects happen at the same time, like with an entwined spell, the controller of the spell picks the order those effects go on the stack.
--- Quote ---I really like Raiko's design!
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I never posted them, but she's designed like that because Benben is blue with Flash and Tsukumo is red with Haste.
KennyMan666:
Artifacts
And then comes the artifacts. We're going to start not with actual artifacts, however, but with to creatures that concern themselves with them:
And then... so, I mentioned I had coloured a number of artifacts. This is still a bit up in the air, but at the moment, every colour except blue has a monocoloured artifact creature.
There's three multicoloured artifact creatures, one of which does feature blue, that could maybe become just blue. There's even an artifact creature deity.
I will say, though, that I am very, very unsure on Hisou Tensoku's design.
That's all the artifact creatures we have. Then there's some regular artifacts.
And since this set is somewhat about powering up creatures, of course there's equipment.
And then! A mechanic I'm using that in regular Magic has so far only been used on one single card, in Future Sight - Fortifications. So far most of them have to do with Shrines.
Which brings us to our last stop.
Lands
The cornerstone of every single Magic deck that has ever been made and ever will be made. The lands from which you get your mana. Let's start out basically because I actually made basic lands as well, just to be inclusive. Two variants of each - one regular and one full-art.
Swiftly moving on to special lands. Once upon a time I had a cycle of five special lands. If I recall, in order of colour, they were Hakurei Shrine, Misty Lake, Netherworld (or maybe Hakugyokurou), Youkai Mountain and Forest of Magic. I also had a land called Moriya Shrine and one called Gensokyo. The cycle did something really dumb that I don't even want to talk about, Moriya Shrine and Gensokyo I was never satisfied with. So eventually I scrapped everything I was doing with those and made two different land cycles instead - the first one of which being ten dual lands. So here goes.
And now, almost finally, it's time for the Shrines. I did post one of them early, but hey.
So there you go.
One more land exists. It was made separately from the land that was called Gensokyo, but it ended up being more like what I wanted Gensokyo to be than what that card ever actually ended up as, so I deleted that one and kept this one instead.
And that concludes the megaposts. I won't be doing daily posts any more, and I have a lot of things to do the upcoming week, but I might post a couple of cards, redesigned/rebalanced ones, previously unposted, maybe stuff like that. We'll see.
EDIT: Also holy shit unrelated to Magic but I finally figured out where I recognized your username from, while reading my SomethingAwful post history in search of another thing. Unless there's two Roonerspism/Roonespisms wandering the streets of the internet, you and I were in the same Advance Wars By Web game that was bonus content in Paul.Power's Advance Wars LP back in 2014!
Roonerspism:
--- Quote from: KennyMan666 on August 20, 2017, 12:50:26 PM ---That's all the artifact creatures we have [none of them seemed overpowered or very interesting. sorry. I think they were all bug-free at least.] Then there's some regular artifacts.
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You can target something that's already a copy token to get another copy for 0 mana, right?
So if any creature untaps an artifact on ETB, you've got an infinite combo.
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Flower Tank's kind of nuts but it seems like every creature is going to have a million keywords so maybe the drawback will actually keep it in line.
"At the beginning of the end step" should be either "each end step" or "your end step" depending on how much you want it to trigger.
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Hey set designer, I found an oversight with this card: The flavour text suuuuuucks.
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Hokora seems really expensive? Is "owning a shrine" really so great that you're willing to use a card and spend 6 + 1PT mana for it? I admit that I've forgotten most of what having a shrine does aside from making your Faithbound creatures cost 1 less mana (completely offset by this card's upkeep) and allowing you to play Faithbound creatures in the first place (surely you'd just put in more shrines instead of adding this card to your deck)
Donation Box is expensive enough where the first ability could maybe cost 0 instead of 1 (keeping in mind that tapping the land itself already makes it mana-neutral).
Maybe I just don't know how to value Fortifications.
Wait, why would I ever want to not untap my land when it's fortified by Onbashira? What's even going on?
--- Quote ---Lands
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I'm probably just telling you what you already know here, but there's no way these things are balanced with eachother. When you can pass a keyword to a creature for 3,T on your land...
Haste or Lifelink: You'd have to be swimming in mana to consider it
Flying or Menace: It's not great, but it would win you games
Deathtouch or Immortal: Opponent groans and slams their head in to the table, scattering their library
The condition for getting them in to play untapped is kind of cool. It's not going to happen much, but it's not like they'd be unplayably bad if it just said "they come in tapped no matter what" so you can afford to be really cute with the condition like that.
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[and the other ones aren't that much different]
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Shrines are pretty cool. Only one per colour and they're all rare, huh? Guess I'm not going to try to draft Junko after all.
I'm not sure why they say "remove a faith counter or sacrifice ~". Obviously you'd only sacrifice if you had to, but if you have to sacrifice it then why did you tap it in the first place - it has no counters! It's basically just a mean way to kick the player when they're down - a punishment for allowing your opponent to play land-tapping spells/abilities.
--- Quote ---EDIT: Also holy shit unrelated to Magic but I finally figured out where I recognized your username from, while reading my SomethingAwful post history in search of another thing. Unless there's two Roonerspism/Roonespisms wandering the streets of the internet, you and I were in the same Advance Wars By Web game that was bonus content in Paul.Power's Advance Wars LP back in 2014!
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Ah, right! It only makes sense that we'd cross paths again considering that we apparently have shared excellent taste in games.
KennyMan666:
--- Quote ---You can target something that's already a copy token to get another copy for 0 mana, right?
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Oh yeah that says nontoken now.
--- Quote ---Hey set designer, I found an oversight with this card: The flavour text suuuuuucks.
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Like that's the only one. You should also have seen that card before I both redesigned it from an artifact creature into a fortification and also found a better picture for it. It was easily the most boring card in the whole set, and that includes creatures without any rules text and basic lands.
--- Quote ---Hokora seems really expensive? Is "owning a shrine" really so great that you're willing to use a card and spend 6 + 1PT mana for it?
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Maybe. Probably not. There's some interactions with Shrines and a land fortified with Hokora doesn't run on Faith like the other ones do, so you can keep a Shrine running in another way. Plus, for a while I had the idea of this thing as a regular block with three expansions (since this was before the two-block model became a thing), and this was meant to be a card hinting at Shrines an expansion or two before they would really become a major thing - now I'm just thinking of it as a large set (and the two-block model is dying anyway), but still. I even came up with names for all of the expansions - Legends of an Eastern Wonderland (which would also be the name of the block, and would introduce the mechanics of the block), Forgotten Dreamscape (which would contain the majority of the PC-98 characters) and then it would all end with Conflict of Faith (where the power of the Shrines and most of the Deities would come in). Plus, the main cycle of Shrines are legendary, so you can only play one of each. And you're not going to play Shrines for colours you're not focusing on, so a deck would probably at most contain two of the main Shrines. I guess you could go for multiple copies and Spellcard away the ones you can't play once you have one down. The Hokora can "go around" that limitation. It fuels Hakurei Barrier and Yin-Yang (which in turn fuels your other Shrines by proliferating faith counters), makes Donation Box and Onbashira stronger... and then there's another thing I haven't posted yet that I'm not actually sure is a good idea. We'll see. (and again I go with theoretical ways of playing with the set that probably wouldn't ever be done because there's faster and more efficient way to build a hilariously overpowered deck)
And it's down to being a common now. You probably wouldn't play it if you opened it, but that goes for a lot of commons. :V
--- Quote ---I'm probably just telling you what you already know here, but there's no way these things are balanced with eachother.
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Given that Immortal is unique to this set I'll give you that I can't really say if giving it to anything for 3 mana (I guess effectively 4 since you're not using the buffland that turn either) is far too cheap, but from what I can tell, giving something Deathtouch until end of turn is costed at 2 mana (even repeateable) and there's equipment with it that cost in total 3 mana to cast and equip. So expending 4 lands on giving something Deathtouch doesn't seem that busted?
But that they're not all the same power level isn't much of a surprise. I wanted to do dual lands but I wanted to do something more than just ho hum here's another dual land that comes into play tapped.
--- Quote ---Wait, why would I ever want to not untap my land when it's fortified by Onbashira? What's even going on?
[...]
I'm not sure why they say "remove a faith counter or sacrifice ~". Obviously you'd only sacrifice if you had to, but if you have to sacrifice it then why did you tap it in the first place - it has no counters!
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Okay, I'm seeing what happened - in an attempt to streamline Shrine wording by combining the lines about removing faith counters and sacrificing the Shrine when you run out of them, I ended up changing the functionality. The intention is/was for Shrines to get sacrificed as a state-based effect when they have no faith counters on them (which means you need to start building faith on the same turn you play the Shrine, either by casting spells or proliferating (and Wizard spells let you do both because Faith is Magic apparently)), but with what I did, you can have a faithless Shrine stick around - and you wouldn't tap a faithless shrine. I've reverted the Shrines to their old functionality for now. The Onbashira was thus intended as a way to "lock down" a Shrine that's low on faith, so you can keep it from losing any more counters and build it back up before untapping it again.
Also one of my favourite things about the Shrines is the flavour text of Moriya Shrine, because there are no red tengu or kappa. Casting the tengu and kappa gives you faith for Hakurei and Myouren, respectively.
Roonerspism:
--- Quote from: KennyMan666 on August 23, 2017, 10:45:40 PM ---Like that's the only one.
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Well, I didn't want to sound like a broken record every time. That one really sucked.
--- Quote ---From what I can tell, giving something Deathtouch until end of turn is costed at 2 mana (even repeateable) and there's equipment with it that cost in total 3 mana to cast and equip. So expending 4 lands on giving something Deathtouch doesn't seem that busted?
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I'll admit that I didn't actually look up any repeatable deathtouch cards to see if 4 mana for it was fair or not, just because my immediate reaction to "land that can give deathtouch" was "Uuuugghh"
Equipment isn't a good comparison just because you can't equip at instant speed, but even comparing it to having the effect on a creature is still slightly wrong - lands are harder to destroy (usually) and if the land can still tap for mana then you've snuck some functionality in to one of the cards that usually make up the "Land Tax" that every* deck has to pay 40% of itself to. That's why man-lands are always so expensive to change them from land to man-d for just one turn.
But yeah it does seem like passing deathtouch to a guy only costs 2 mana, so having it for 4 mana on a land probably isn't busted. I stand by "not wanting to be the person on the other end of the table" though, just for how much it complicates blocks and my combat tricks.
*except for the really cool ones, that are either 0% or 90%+ lands