~Hakurei Shrine~ > Touhou Projects
Legends of an Eastern Wonderland - A Magic: the Gathering Touhou set (take two)
Roonerspism:
Here we go again:
--- Quote from: KennyMan666 on August 15, 2017, 09:06:18 AM ---[because of the digital nature of the set...] maybe I don't need to include the reminder text for my new keywords every time when they're long anyway...
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Ah, that's an option too. But yeah, I went through some legendary cards in the MTG database and there are at least a few recent ones that skip the title, at least - like the gods of Theros use "Erebos" instead of "Erebos, god of whatever".
--- Quote ---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
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Got it. Hoo boy, in a set where discarding stuff is sometimes actually good, exile 2 (well, conditionally. Each condition isn't too hard to meet, though) for 2 cards sounds great to me.
--- Quote ---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.
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Here's the big difference between the constructed and limited view on the mechanic, I suppose. When you're drafting or doing sealed or whatever, hard removal just sometimes isn't there. I have a better idea for your plans and end-goal with the set now, but if it includes "maybe I want to get 7 Touhou fans together and draft it" then the hard-removal to immortal ratio is going to have to be carefully checked. Or maybe the red player will also have crazy stuff and not even care about the blockers she can't deal with* on the ground, who knows.
*later in your post, you say red gets hard removal in this set instead of just burn. Well, okay.
--- Quote ---[I gave these creatures immortal, and maybe forgot to change their costs. Also...]
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.
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Both of these points make sense, and aside from my concerns with Immortal in general, I think Junko was the only one I would consider so powerful that she'd need to be toned back even with this in mind. The bolded point is interesting. Some of the legendary creatures aren't that powerful, which is fine, but it does kind of go against that a bit? Like, suiting up your 2/3 Merlin on turn four and swinging in is fine, that's what we loved doing in Theros, but she doesn't have any keywords and she's just a 2/3 - she's not bringing anything legendary to the table. Like, that's not a problem unless you really really want to stick to that ideal and then maybe it is?
--- Quote ---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.
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I was judging everything as though I was drafting the set, so I really did appreciate some basic, boring cards coming up even if I was a bit facetious about it. And I've played around with MSE a bit, I know the feeling of wanting to make everything big and exciting all too well.
--- Quote ---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.
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haha, okay yes I did know that sorry I was just- you know
Anyway I'll just quickly go in to why I think Junko's so good even though I was trying to not crush the internet under the weight of my posts this time.
So she costs "6" mana, but then has kind-of-Affinity and the Hakurei Shrine can maybe produce more than one white mana in a white-heavy deck... well, 5 mana would be pretty realistic and 4 or even 3 would be the dream*. Then she's an immortal 4/5. So that's... well, it's almost fair. It's quite the beatdown if you luck in to her on turn 5, but it's still a problem on later turns.
The ability, though! Woah, spicy! That's a kill (even better, an exile) that doesn't cost a card! And you have enough white mana to kill anything south of median CMC, too, because you just cast Junko. And it's instant speed, so good luck ever getting an aura on anything.
When I imagine this card anywhere near a reasonable limited format, I see a lot of "I block your huge dude. Before damage, I tap Junko to kill your other attacker. She comes back next turn. What even is this." Although, there's also a lot of "Wow! I opened Junko!! I'll pick her because she's worth several dollars to somebody, but I don't have enough white mana/shrines to actually play her..."
*In limited, casting her for 5 on turn 10, with your off-colour shrine that you're only including for her, would be more realistic. I'd still be terrified if I was on the other end of the table, because all of my bears, pikers and hill giants are about to die or be forced to stay in my hand.
And I mean sure, she gets exiled or countered or whatever in constructed. But that's the worst case - getting one card for one card. Any big rare has to be judged on what happens if it gets through, like "exile everything with a great but not perfect protective keyword"
--- Quote ---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.
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Well, I saw more immortal than exile, so I called it like I saw it.
Creatures where the blue answer is "counter them now or deal with them forever" does come up in constructed, but it might be dangerous thinking for a draftable set. Well, that's similar to my argument about having hard removal or not. I'm sure my thoughts on this are clear now.
--- Quote ---Man, this thread is going to get a lot of long posts, it seems. I'll be back with Blue in a bit.
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Yeah. Later today I'll be back and try to keep it a bit shorter...
Roonerspism:
I am convinced of your ability to balance things most of the time, so if I'm not saying anything about a card's power then it's somewhere between decent and very good but probably not busted.
--- Quote from: KennyMan666 on August 15, 2017, 11:03:14 AM ---
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I believe you can use this ability as "UU, T: exile all spells on the stack" (and I also believe you didn't do that on purpose). Suspend spells are cast when the last counter is removed, but in this case they never get any.
Declare is... interesting? Turn your spells in to auras. Chase extra value by painting a big target on the back of Sakuya's head as she sallies forth in to combat.
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Sakuya's World should probably lose its flavour text for readability's sake.
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Ha, maybe.
Sakuya's World should probably say "non-land" on that first thing, if I'm correct on how Suspend 0 works.
Also, would you ever want to actually keep Sakuya's World going more than 1% of the time? I don't really get why you'd want to keep suspending cards if you can afford to cast them normally.
"Exile target spell as it's being cast" can just be "exile target spell". That's how spell queller does it, for example.
Killing Doll is... kiiind of bad? I feel like either I'm missing something or you're expecting the blue player to work pretty hard to get something like "You cast removal, I cast this then bounce my only girl, hahaha now you have to remove one of your girls".
--- Quote ---Not an exhaustive list, but some of the other declarers:
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SORRY WHAT? I'M TRYING TO JUDGE CHIYURI, BUT THE ALARM TITLED "REPEATABLE COUNTERSPELL" KEEPS BLARING AND IT'S HARD TO HEAR OVER IT
Okay it's fine I turned it off. You've been extremely careful with the cost of the ability and I respect that. Regardless of whether my worries are founded or not, this would definitely be a rare/mythic outside of LEW.
Iku - How does stacking totem armor work, again? There's probably rules for multiple auras with totem armor, but an aura that has totem armor twice because of Iku would be weird.
Satori's cool. I'll leave it to someone else to figure out where you're supposed to get the mana to cast someone else's spell with a UU tax added on, though.
--- Quote ---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.
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Looks good.
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Rin kind of exists, okay? (EDIT: I don't think I like her non-Declare ability any more, though, so I should change that.)
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There's a deck for Mamizou out there, but I don't think it's my drafted deck. "So I get a 5 mana 3/3 (maybe even 2/2, ugh) with the promise that if I work hard maybe I get something bigger?"
I kind of like Rin's ability, actually? It's difficult to evaluate. I wish I knew what the average board state would look like with all the giant suited-up creatures people will be trying to build.
--- Quote ---Anyway, when you think blue, you think counterspells. So lets get to counterin':
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Typo on One Legged Return Hit - "target" when it should be "targets".
Also, the same thing I said earlier, you can just exile spells and the "while it's being cast" is implied. ...unless you know something I don't about how spells are going to be in weird zones but still interactable in this set.
The comparison to Force of Will is an important one to think about. That card costs 5 mana, which makes it very unwieldy if you want to keep all your cards - you have to keep 5 mana untapped all the way through your turn. If you don't end up needing to counter anything, the mana is "wasted". (But you're playing a control deck, so you don't mind too much). These cards are all costed as though they don't have Spellcard, with the Spellcard being a nice bonus on top.
...also, isn't Force of Will in like, the S- tier of ridiculously powerful spells? Like, Ancestral Recall is an S on this scale. A dangerous thing to invite comparison to.
Oh! And I forgot, back in White I was going to bring up that Spellcard doesn't have a colour requirement like Force of Will does. I can't recall seeing anything too good yet (aside from maybe Evil Sealing Circle, but I want to entwine it so I want white mana) but keep in mind that if you don't want to change that, every single deck will have 4 copies of whatever your best Spellcard card is, regardless of colour. Or in limited, I'll draft white and everyone will steal my ESCs anyway.
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This card sucks. Wait, no, this card rules. Sorry, took me a second to actually read it.
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This card sucks. So you've tried to make your 3 mana draw 2 more interesting and I respect that, but it's too inconsistent to just use it, and I don't want to have to work this hard to guarantee my 3 mana sorcery draw 2.
--- Quote ---And here's today's entrants in our cycles:
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Yukari - Countering is lame, redirection is cool and my friend, I'm picking every one of these I see.
Cirno - Woah woah, wait, this is way better than Sunny. This card is powerful for a cheap common.
Buddhist Diamond - This card is hard to evaluate. I can't imagine it will ever achieve anything if you try to get your opponent with it, but it might result in infinites (or at least, mana rituals) if you name blue and try to storm off or something.
I imagine the fairy in the fodder enemy cycle is going to be the best. 1/1 with keyword is usually bad, with flying being an exception.
--- Quote ---The Venerable Blue Planeswalker - Kanako.
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Goddess:
Seems fine. Another -2 I wish I could use on reaction.
Avatar:
Seems strong...?
I'm not 100% sure on this, but because Kanako can take damage during her 0, she will die to loyalty loss if she's blocked by a huge creature. Even though she's indestructible. Gideon cards usually say "prevent all damage that would be dealt to ya boy" in addition to indestructible.
The ulti wins the game on the spot. I mean, some ultis do, but it is a bit better than most. It seems like you balanced it by making the +3 bad, but...
Hm. The balance is weird.
--- Quote ---So that's blue for you, and let's finish off with some other select blue cards.
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Ha! You're good at this, sometimes. She doesn't tap if you use recursion to bring her back from the grave, because it's not as surprising the second time, right? I don't really get why she's uncounterable, though.
Oh also this card is quite powerful for a cheap common. Probably needs another point of mana.
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You're playing with fire here. The obvious, absurd argument is recurring time walks - but any spell that gets exiled should probably stay exiled.
So, how do you rework it to be more like a library effect and less like a "you can bring back any face-up exiled card, which is to say most of them"? ?\_(ツ)_/?
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Is "as though it were in your hand" necessary here? I'm not sure on the templating myself.
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"I declare this on to my creature that untaps something when it enters the battlefield"
"this doesn't work like you want it to for like 7 different reasons"
KennyMan666:
--- Quote ---later in your post, you say red gets hard removal in this set instead of just burn. Well, okay.
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Not a whole lot of it, but red gets some destruction effects mostly in the form of certain characters. Black kills - red blows shit up.
--- Quote ---Like, that's not a problem unless you really really want to stick to that ideal and then maybe it is?
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I mean I freely admit the whole design philosophy around a set where the vast majority of creatures are legendary will get super weird - on the one hand legendaries should be stronger but on the other hand not all creatures should be super fancy. It gets even more weird since while I'll design some not super fancy creatures as commons because it's a Magic set and they're made that way, this set is probably never really going to be played in such a manner where those creatures are ever going to be relevant. Basically, they're supposed to be theoretically relevant in that they're cards that exist and you might put them in your deck if you drafted the set or just bought a few boosters, or they might be featured in preconstructed decks that are sold, but... it's practically going to be completely impossible to hit the right point of balance to account for those in a set where all creatures except for (currently) eight are Legendary. This set started as a fun small thing - in a community where we used to play Magic online through LackeyCCG, we had used MSE previously to make 45 custom cards each and then do a digital draft with those, and we talked about doing it again so I made 45 Touhou cards... and then I started adding more characters and spells to it and eventually it got a little out of fucking hand. But I still enjoy trying to design cards that are cool, could technically be playable with each other, and aren't mondo broken.
--- Quote ---Junko
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Junko was design around the whole "purifying" thing, and exiling seemed like the best way to flavour purifying things in white. So perhaps I should, at least, up the cost of the effect or redesign it to be less insane.
--- Quote ---I believe you can use this ability as "UU, T: exile all spells on the stack" (and I also believe you didn't do that on purpose). Suspend spells are cast when the last counter is removed, but in this case they never get any.
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Yep, that was supposed to have a "X can't be 0". So it does now.
--- Quote ---Sakuya's World should probably say "non-land" on that first thing, if I'm correct on how Suspend 0 works.
Also, would you ever want to actually keep Sakuya's World going more than 1% of the time? I don't really get why you'd want to keep suspending cards if you can afford to cast them normally.
"Exile target spell as it's being cast" can just be "exile target spell". That's how spell queller does it, for example.
Killing Doll is... kiiind of bad? I feel like either I'm missing something or you're expecting the blue player to work pretty hard to get something like "You cast removal, I cast this then bounce my only girl, hahaha now you have to remove one of your girls".
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Suspending a land would make it get stuck in exile, yeah, so maybe don't cast that when you have a hand full of lands. :V
It's definitely a card where I was going with flavour over function, but I'm also envisioning that you could technically stack up spells to have them go off at the same time, not that I know if that's ever something you'd want to do. Also you could suspend a sorcery during your turn and remove the time counter on it during your opponent's turn to effectively cast it at instant speed, which seems like something it's appropriate for time magic to be able to do.
--- Quote ---Iku - How does stacking totem armor work, again? There's probably rules for multiple auras with totem armor, but an aura that has totem armor twice because of Iku would be weird.
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The controller of the permanent with multiple totem armored auras chooses one of those auras to destroy when the totem armor effect triggers. It's a static keyword ability, so double totem armor isn't any different from single totem armor - it's the same as if two different effects would both give flying to the same creature. It's just a quality the permanent has - either it has it, or it doesn't.
--- Quote ---There's a deck for Mamizou out there, but I don't think it's my drafted deck. "So I get a 5 mana 3/3 (maybe even 2/2, ugh) with the promise that if I work hard maybe I get something bigger?"
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Yeah, probably not a draft pick. You could do something like play U/G, cast Mamizou, then Spellcard 2-discard two green auras (I know one I'd pick, that'll show up later) and Spellbind them onto her, then next turn cast Primate Danmaku Transformation on another one of your creatures. I don't know exactly how much that'd make Mami grow, because I don't know how many creature types exist, but it's easily north of +200/+200. :V
--- Quote ---Stuff about Force of Will & Spellcard doesn't have a colour requirement
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Yeah. Only reason I mentioned FoW at all was since it was breught up in the last thread. Maybe it needs to be Spellcard 3. Spellcard allowing for off-colour play is one of the purposes it has, too.
--- Quote ---I don't want to have to work this hard to guarantee my 3 mana sorcery draw 2.
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For the time being, dropped it to 2 mana and made it common. I don't know why it was uncommon.
--- Quote ---Woah woah, wait, this is way better than Sunny. This card is powerful for a cheap common.
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Went and adjusted the cost of the ability on all the fairies yet again, to 1C, T.
--- Quote ---1/1 with keyword is usually bad, with flying being an exception.
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*cough*
--- Quote ---I'm not 100% sure on this, but because Kanako can take damage during her 0, she will die to loyalty loss if she's blocked by a huge creature. Even though she's indestructible. Gideon cards usually say "prevent all damage that would be dealt to ya boy" in addition to indestructible.
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Ooooh, right, that's why they say that. For a bit, Kanako had damage prevention but not indestructible. I've given her both for now.
--- Quote ---She doesn't tap if you use recursion to bring her back from the grave, because it's not as surprising the second time, right? I don't really get why she's uncounterable, though.
Oh also this card is quite powerful for a cheap common. Probably needs another point of mana.
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It's only a surprise if you didn't see her first, obvs. :V She had split second for a while, and I figured it was thematically appropriate enough. Upped the cost to 1UU.
--- Quote ---You're playing with fire here. The obvious, absurd argument is recurring time walks - but any spell that gets exiled should probably stay exiled.
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Time Walk doesn't exile itself though? And you're also hoping your opponent doesn't breathe on Akyuu so she falls over.
Exile is weird. Sometimes it's really meant to be the removed from the game zone it used to be, sometimes it's just a zone where cards get stored due to other cards and the intention is that they're only supposed to interact with the card that exiled them in the first place but they're still all in the same gameplay zone so weird things end up happening with certain cards.
Akyuu's flavour, of course, is her ability to remember everything she's seen. So.
--- Quote ---Is "as though it were in your hand" necessary here? I'm not sure on the templating myself.
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I'm not 100% sure. But the point is to treat it like you have the physical card in your hand, so you have to pay for casting, but when you don't, it's specificed that you don't. I guess it's there to make it unambigous?
Next colour coming in a bit.
KennyMan666:
Black
Ever since I got introduced to Magic way back in the day, black's always been my favourite singular colour. So let's jump right into it, and you might think a certain playable character would introduce us, but there's a reason it's not so let's have another very, very obvious black character introduce us, which is also fitting for more reasons.
'cause it's Yuyuko who's got the big black Enchantment, and a kind of important spell:
So the story of black's keyword is a bumpy road. Originally, I had a keyword named Reaper, because I thought it was great as a keyword name and it's kind of weird that Wizards hasn't made that keyword yet. In its original inception, Reaper 100% didn't even work. It was reworked a bit but I ended up not really liking what it became, plus it was purely black, so it didn't fit in the coloured keyword structure I settled on. It remained for a while, and an even further reworked version exists in the keyword list for the set, but it's not used on anything anymore and I'm not going to bring it back. Instead, black got something that you'd also think they'd have made a keyword already - Curse. I think it might have done something different originally, then it was re-tooled, and that version was revised once. It's also the keyword with the longest reminder text of the five.
There's a number of purely black cursers:
(edit: I'm noticing that a bunch of cursers are strictly better than Noroiko, being stronger for the same mana cost - I've decreased Noroiko to BB but 2 mana might be too cheap for a Curse)
It's somewhat modeled after Haunt, so it should come as no surprise that the secondary colour for it is white:
And since it's appropriate now, a curser in both black and white:
I'm really not sure about her current incarnation, though - she's gone through some revisions, and I don't know if I like this one. Curse definitely stays on her, though. Also I just realized I don't know if that ability even works as printed because I don't know if cards in exile are considered "controlled".
Black does a number of things and I think this card about sums it up:
And then there's the other cat.
Black cycle members (yes, I've seen the typo on Reisen and fixed it):
So who might be our black planeswalker? For me, that was never a question. Along with the green one, it was probably the most obvious one to me. Of course, representing black is The Unforgiving Black Planeswalker - Shinki.
Colour on the background picture doesn't play super nicely with the text on the first one so I might need to do something about that. And look at that, another returning mechanic - Annihilator. In actual Magic, it only ever appeared on the colourless Eldrazi - but if it would have a colour, then it would absolutely be black. In this set, Shinki and one other special friend we'll get to later on are the only ones that get to play with it. Black/green Shinki's ultimate is pretty much super-Scavenge.
And as usual, here's some other things you'll find in black.
(one of these nine cards is a "reference" to my favourite Magic card. Guess which one!)
Roonerspism:
Alright just a couple of things before I check out some new cards.
--- Quote from: KennyMan666 on August 16, 2017, 01:20:26 PM ---I mean I freely admit the whole design philosophy around a set where the vast majority of creatures are legendary will get super weird - on the one hand legendaries should be stronger but on the other hand not all creatures should be super fancy. It gets even more weird since while I'll design some not super fancy creatures as commons because it's a Magic set and they're made that way, this set is probably never really going to be played in such a manner where those creatures are ever going to be relevant. Basically, they're supposed to be theoretically relevant in that they're cards that exist and you might put them in your deck if you drafted the set or just bought a few boosters, or they might be featured in preconstructed decks that are sold, but... it's practically going to be completely impossible to hit the right point of balance to account for those in a set where all creatures except for (currently) eight are Legendary. This set started as a fun small thing - in a community where we used to play Magic online through LackeyCCG, we had used MSE previously to make 45 custom cards each and then do a digital draft with those, and we talked about doing it again so I made 45 Touhou cards... and then I started adding more characters and spells to it and eventually it got a little out of fucking hand. But I still enjoy trying to design cards that are cool, could technically be playable with each other, and aren't mondo broken.
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This is all cool and noted.
A set with mainly legendary creatures is probably "bad design", yeah, but if it's large enough* then it might be more playable casually/draftingly than you think? Most drafts I do/watch end up with few, sometimes even no, duplicate creatures. And then colour mirror matches where I play my legendary creature as a removal spell for yours - but they were both just hill giants with keywords, so who even cares - that would be kind of funny.
*how many cards is a cube draft again? 360? There would be no problems if your set was that huge. Except for your set being huge.
--- Quote ---Time Walk doesn't exile itself though? And you're also hoping your opponent doesn't breathe on Akyuu so she falls over.
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Oh, right, Time Walk is really really old. I meant that whenever they print a Time Walk-like effect these days they always make it exile itself to prevent recursion, so it's the first thing I think of when I see a card that can recur things from exile. And I mean, yeah she has 1 toughness, but also the payoff (for this weird Vintage but also Touhou deck I'm apparently trying to make) is infinite turns so I'm willing to keep counterspells up and wait for the perfect moment if that's what it takes.
--- Quote ---Exile is weird. Sometimes it's really meant to be the removed from the game zone it used to be, sometimes it's just a zone where cards get stored due to other cards and the intention is that they're only supposed to interact with the card that exiled them in the first place but they're still all in the same gameplay zone so weird things end up happening with certain cards.
Akyuu's flavour, of course, is her ability to remember everything she's seen. So.
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Well, alright. As long as you're aware that exile is weird and that's what Akyuu's supposed to do, then that's what she does.
(Although, I would say that if you wanted to rebalance it, you could just explain it as "Sure, she remembers it, but it's not like she can recreate a spell card just by looking at its effects, she needs an original copy" instead)
--- Quote from: KennyMan666 on August 16, 2017, 02:27:27 PM ---Black
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This card is strong, exciting, maybe busted but you do have to throw away any counterspells or whatever you could have used to protect it. Cool.
Why do the cards get exiled face down? Usually that means the cards are going to be important later, so they need to stay secret, but this card doesn't do anything with them.
--- Quote ---Cuuuuuurrrse
[More curse cards]
(edit: I'm noticing that a bunch of cursers are strictly better than Noroiko, being stronger for the same mana cost - I've decreased Noroiko to BB but 2 mana might be too cheap for a Curse)
It's somewhat modeled after Haunt
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Oh yeah, haunt. It could also be described as "threaten but weird" - you have to combo it with a kill spell (or a complicit opponent*) but the opportunity for some really rude instant-speed plays ("I declare these attackers." "I kill the cursed one." worms2_ohdear.wav) is there.
*Do you have any Curse cards that make the cursed creature harm its controller each turn, making them want to throw it away? Or hell, you could be extremely non-subtle about it with something like "The creature cursed by ~ must attack if able" on a very overcosted creature.
I'd be wary of Curse for 2 mana, yeah. Especially on a card which already boasts playable P/T for a 2 mana creature.
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There's a really cool play here that doesn't work and it makes me sad:
So you curse a creature with this, wait until opponent declares attackers, you spellcard-cast a kill spell targeting the cursed girl and discard a couple of auras...
And I'm pretty sure it falls apart there, you have to put the auras on someone and Kikuri hasn't hit the battlefield yet because the kill spell is still resolving. You don't get your Flash and Deathtouch-but-better blocker.
I guess I'm mentioning this because a) Maybe you can tell me it actually works? Stack wizardry is hard. b) man wouldn't it be cool though
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I would maybe make this a "takes combat damage from" instead of "blocks or blocked by". I think that makes more intuitive sense (especially so for non-expert players).
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I'm really not sure about her current incarnation, though - she's gone through some revisions, and I don't know if I like this one. [Also are exiled cards "controlled"?]
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I think if a card isn't obviously controlled by someone, you just default to "the controller is the owner"? I haven't read the rules that much, but I think I remember hearing that one.
I'm glad you said you don't like this card, because that was my reaction too. There's three things that I don't really like:
1. "How many exiled creatures do you control?" "Oh my god. Okay, the 2 you just exiled, plus this one here. 3." "What about this Curse card?" "Ugh, that counts. 4. Probably." "How sure are you?"
2. No matter when she comes in to play, she can't make use of the P/T increase that she only gets that turn. Your opponent controls no creatures to block and she's summoning-sick so she can't attack.
3. For Limited specifically, 5 mana "you can't block this turn" is going to win games and the only way to stop it is counterspell (Or some kind of other really great spell, like "tap all creatures")
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Skulls. Finally, I've got through whatever colour those last several cards were* and we're ready for some black cards.
The effect of Zombie Fairy (err, the sorcery) is powerful and yet I still hate it. I like to sacrifice things on reaction to them being targeted. Also, imagine how owned you are if you spellcard-cast this and then it gets countered. Yuck. Someone else can cast this card and kill me with the fairy tokens, I don't care.
*Elly was also technically black.
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Ah, right. I forgot about deathtouch. Next you'll tell me that kedama are 1/1 for 1 with firebreathing and crows are indestructible for some reason.
I feel the need to comment on every divine treasure enchantment I see because they're all weird. I'm now convinced that I think the white one is probably too weak, because these last two have been "weird but maybe it can work" instead of just "weird and then all I get is lifegain?" I do put a very low value on lifegain, though.
--- Quote ---The Unforgiving Black Planeswalker - Shinki.
Colour on the background picture doesn't play super nicely with the text on the first one so I might need to do something about that.
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Yep, agreed.
God:
This... seems weak, actually. The ultimate is great (it takes quite a few creatures before it gets close to "win the game on the spot", though), but the ultimate is the least important part of a planeswalker.
The +2 doesn't do anything*, so aside from "pray for ultimate" your best plan is to play her as a 5 mana draw 1-2 from grave?
*I mean, sometimes +X abilities don't do anything, but this really doesn't do anything unless your opponent is trying to recur/reanimate
Creator:
If I was going to be very nit-picky, it's a bit strange that neither ability fuels the ultimate.
All of these abilities seem pretty good. I'd even consider playing her and just -4 immediately (against an opponent with a big flier, or something).
--- Quote ---And as usual, here's some other things you'll find in black.
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Woah, Mystia's learned a neat trick from hanging out with Cirno. She's powerful but maybe not worth an urgent nerf.
Her ability is strange. It taps (or destroys, murder is good too) a creature and reduces its power? Seems a bit redundant.
The word "sacrifice" should be capitalised on Yoshika's card. "Three mana 3/3, but also with two abilities" is a heck of a place to put a common.
The wording on Regretful Bound Spirits is strange. I mean, it gives deathtouch so the "lethal damage" part is less ambiguous than it usually would be, but still. The Sengir Vampire wording ("Whenever a creature dealt damage by enchanted creature this turn dies", in this case) is what our grandpappies used and I'll be damned if I let some punk-
*ahem* Also I'd personally remove the "you don't control" clause, just because it makes it wordier and I like the idea of some idiot chasing value by infighting their own creatures.
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(one of these nine cards is a "reference" to my favourite Magic card. Guess which one!)
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Filled Miasma is dangerous. It's making me want to go back to Regretful Bound Spirits and say "ALSO MAKE SURE IT SAYS COMBAT DAMAGE".
This card kind of just works on its own (discounting whatever idiot you attach it to), though, right? If you have more life than your opponent and you play this card, it's easy to see the game progressing like this:
"I have more life than you and control Filled Miasma."
"Okay, I'll start agressively attacking to dissuade you from using it all the time."
"Ah yes, agressive creatures. The ones that have low toughness and die to Filled Miasma."
"Yes, those ones, and I don't like your tone."
Your favourite card is Mind Rot.
I'll be overly strict again and say "-0/-X is just a dumb way to give direct damage to black". Although if I was going to whine every time an amateur designer strayed out of colour I wouldn't have time to do anything else.
"Spellcard 3, also it hits you" seems kind of harsh for the spellcard cost on Your Days are Numbered? I think it could be "2, also it hits you".