ourevel
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Post by ourevel on Nov 29, 2019 0:06:58 GMT
Set Code: ENR
Set Size: 409 cards, standalone
Set File: Coming Soon
An Old Story of the WorldAbout E.N.A.R. Project: E.n.a.r. Project has a particular story as a set. It was born as the setting for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, but over time (and the advancing, and then ending, of the campaign itself) has evolved into an "What if I transpose it into an MTG expansion?" It had everything: a story, lots of characters, different factions ... so I tried, and this is the result. But let's move on to the setting itself: The Plane - The whole world is enveloped by a thick blanket of clouds, which prevent even the passage of sunlight, leaving the ground in a perpetual penumbra. Life, after the Great War, has moved on colossal pillars that support clods of earthy crust above the clouds, making them real autonomous regions. Below the clouds, however, the domain is in the hands of its ancient inhabitants, those fairy creatures who always existed, even before Man, and those terrible invaders summoned by the sorcerers: the Elduni. The Factions - Before the actual story, it is right to introduce its characters. In E.N.A.R. Project (ENAR to simplify), there are five different "factions", each representing a different population of platforms or soil, with its different approaches to the events of history that are reflected in the colors designed for them. They are:   The Adventurers: The Empire of Acante: The Old Clock: The Wild Court:- The Elduni:
 The Ancients:
The Mechanics - Each faction can be identified by its own mechanics, which represent their essence or line of thought, making them different and quite distinct. They are: - The Adventurers with Surging Adventure:
[/div][/spoiler] [li] The Empire with Arcane Tribute:[/li] The law is law, and it proclaims the banishment of arcane forces! Acante is well equipped to fight sorceries, and they have no mercy for those who oppose them with such means: use the magic released on the field to overwhelm your opponents by clever tricks or unique abilities. [li] The Old Clock with Vow & The Pact:[/li] Oaths and agreements, describe well the compromises you have to make and the will to pursue your mission, at any cost. Find allies and take advantage of what they have available at that moment, regardless of adversity. Decide who swear allegiance and which agreements to redeem, every spell you cast can become your decisive one, and even some extremely powerful allies can join your ranks if you manage to make advantageous pacts with them! [li] The Wild Court with Primal Calling:[/li] Call your fellows, invoke the ancient magic that still resides in the corrupt land. Every creature can become multitude in a short time, their wild call will echo in the deserted lands, causing terror in your adversaries. [li] The Elduni with Smoking Shroud:[/li] Characteristic of the elduni, besides their malevolence, of course, is the thick and oily cloud of smoke that envelops them perpetually, black and dense, suffocating almost for those who surround them. And like everything else, the elduni know how to turn this into a powerful weapon on the battlefield too! Smother your enemies and put them in continuous advantageous positions with the mere presence of your creatures! [li] The Ancients with Scry:[/li] The Ancients possessed unimaginable technologies, incredible weapons and magic unrepeatable today: it releases these arsenals on your opponents by exploiting the ancient knowledge left on the ground, represented by peculiar uses and alternatives to the normal Scry. [/ul] The mechanics of some cards are deliberately interlaced however, to represent the strong connections with certain factions or their history. Planeswalkers? Theros-like Gods? It wasn't a D&D setting?   Yeah, well, it IS. BUT! I never said it is a simple one! The campaign lasted almost five years, and many things really happened until its end, and some of these ... "things" were planeswalkers, which were in fact integral elements of the campaign, especially in its final arc. Now, I didn't want to create an endless and boring text, so I don't put EVERYTHING what should be put, but the basics just to introduce the set (with also the links to all the other cards of course! But they are really too many to post one by one here immediately). Google Drive, Set ordered numericallyAny question, comment, curiosity, or anything that may come to mind ... tell me! I hope I have been entertaining enough and that my ideas can please! (I also apologize for any errors in my English: I am not a native speaker and may have missed details) |
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Post by arthurxiv on Nov 29, 2019 8:38:31 GMT
I love these 3 Vow cards, their design is great and Moment of Regret can become very strong at endgame.
Angelic Guard basically gives you "Pay N Pact counters from target creature: Scry 1 N times and put N+1 Pact counters on any number of creatures" which helps increasing the amount of Pact counters you have on the battlefield even if the spell was originally supposed to spend them.
EDIT: In fact Angelic Guard lets you eat ALL your Pact counters:
- If the spell copy is created before Angelic Guard resolves, then you create a copy for each creature you control and end up with N+1 counters (but N is your total number of Pact counters here not just the number of Pact counters on one of your creatures) and Scry 1 up to N times (if you decide to remove the Pact counters 1 by 1) and N+1 of your creatures have indestructible until end of turn.
- If the spell copy is created after Angelic Guard resolves, then you Scry 1 up to an infinite amount of times and all your creatures get indestructible but you still end up with only N+1 Pact counters.
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Post by arthurxiv on Nov 29, 2019 8:58:13 GMT
Arcane Tribute ( Whenever a player casts...) Primal Calling ( look at the top N cards) Smoke Shroud ( blocks or becomes blocked) Reorx cemetery graveyard " The Old Cloack Clock with Vow & The Pact:" "I hope I have been entertain ed ing enough and that my ideas can please!" Yes your ideas are nice.  |
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ourevel
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Post by ourevel on Nov 29, 2019 8:59:06 GMT
- yes, you will end with a total of N+1 pact counter, but only from ONE creature, not all: you may remove counter from a single creature as an additional cost at the cast (like a kicker) and so all at the same time, a copy is not cast, thought is on the same stack of the original spell, so you will for example
-cast the Angelic Guard and pay (3) pact counter
-copy the spell (3) times, ending up with (3)+1 angelic guard on stack.
at the end you may distribute pact counter on the board from a single creature, or just farm one more counter (gaining the scry bonus obv XD).
ty so much! i tried to make some "fresh" mechanics, sadly i had not the way to test them to see if it works well or is just fancy to read XD
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ourevel
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Post by ourevel on Nov 29, 2019 9:00:07 GMT
Arcane Tribute ( Whenever a player casts...) Primal Calling ( look at the top N cards) Smoke Shroud ( blocks or becomes blocked) Reorx cemetery graveyard " The Old Cloack Clock with Vow & The Pact:" "I hope I have been entertain ed ing enough and that my ideas can please!" Yes your ideas are nice. OOOOPS, will correct immediatly, ty so much! |
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Post by arthurxiv on Nov 29, 2019 9:00:49 GMT
Ah yes you're right i forgot again that i have to pay attention to the word "cast" when a spell is copied. Sorry for this.
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ourevel
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Post by ourevel on Nov 29, 2019 9:06:51 GMT
Ah yes you're right i forgot again that i have to pay attention to the word "cast" when a spell is copied. Sorry for this. ahahah no problem, i was pretty sure but it is not the first time i forgot a rule myself or some mechanics of MTG, or i just misspelled it XD |
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Post by voltaic-qui on Nov 29, 2019 17:57:47 GMT
So, it's a little hard to make an all-encompassing comment on a set with 400+ cards, and it's especially hard to make individual comments on, e.g., redundancy within the set, or whether archetypes come through. (E.g., Prophet of the Winds and Rakish Adventurer are almost literally the same card; red has five mid-sized fliers at 3 mana.) General problems that endemic to the entire set: The syntax is right for all these cards but the terms are wrong ("strength" instead of power, "cemetary" instead of graveyard, "stap" instead of "untap" - were these cards translated into English from Italian?). The color pie here is super wonky, most obviously in red: by modern MTG standards the color shouldn't get tappers, efficient cheap fliers, -X/-0 effects, or literally Naturalize for  . The lore of this setting doesn't really come through at all on the cards, in part because flavor text is used for unattributed quotes like "Okay Boss, now?" rather than descriptions of the setting or references to the many named characters here. I don't actually know what an Enar is, which is worrying given the presence of Enar tribal, and also the set is literally called "the ENAR project." And most concerningly, the mechanics of this set are all pretty bad, albeit each in their own way. Which I'll enumerate now. > Smoke Shroud's main problem is that it's kind of boring - does anyone want to build a deck around a mechanic that more or less reads "this creature gets +0/+1" ? Also, -1/-0 is pretty firmly a blue line of text rather than a red one. > Primal Calling is concerning for the opposite reason - every creature with the mechanic effectively draws a card when it enters the battlefield, which is exciting because it's powerful. But the cards are costed way too efficiently. Would red play a Wind Drake that draws a card when it enters the battlefield, for instance? I bet you it would. Would green play a mana dork for that draws a card when it enters the battlefield? Yes, by a long shot. This also is decidedly not a red line of text, because red doesn't get this level of card selection, and it doesn't get to care about enchantments most of the time either. > Surging Adventure is an okay mechanic, but it's totally at odds with what the faction wants you to do. Adventurers as written here is an aggressive go-wide tribe where you're supposed to flood the field with them (see Lionheart of the New Fleet). This leads to weird cards like Ship Champion and Scion of Milea which want you to control a lot of Adventurers so they can be at maximum efficiency, but you don't want to control a lot of Adventurers because then you can't make use of their abilities at all - a bit of a mismatch, bluntly. > Arcane Tribute is fine? But it doesn't leave much of an impression, in part because it's both proactive and reactive and thus doesn't have a clear strategy it enables. This isn't helped by the presence of cards like Palace Shinobi which are exclusively useful for trolling your opponent. > Pact. Um, where do I start with this mechanic? Because it's got a lot of problems, not the least of which that it results in commons with 11 lines of rules text that... aren't super useful? The payoff for casting three of these spells and having your creature(s) with the pact counters stick is... you get to scry 1 three times? You can see why I'm not impressed by that. I think this can be reworded to be less convoluted, e.g. Revamped Blessing Instant  Avowed (When you cast this spell, you may remove one or more pact counters from creatures you control. If you do, copy it for each counter removed this way. Otherwise, put a pact counter on a creature you control.)Target creature gets +2/+2 until end of turn. That admittedly removes some design space - but it makes these cards a lot more readable, because you don't need every card with the mechanic to have three line breaks now. Anyway, despite all this criticism I actually think this set has a lot of potential - for every whiff there's a card that's good, and every dozen cards or so I saw a design that made me think "oh, this is actually extremely cool." Which means you've got over a 100 good cards here, and 40 or so extremely cool designs - more than most sets can claim. It's just that there's a lot of filler in between them. |
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ourevel
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Post by ourevel on Nov 29, 2019 19:36:38 GMT
So, it's a little hard to make an all-encompassing comment on a set with 400+ cards, and it's especially hard to make individual comments on, e.g., redundancy within the set, or whether archetypes come through. (E.g., Prophet of the Winds and Rakish Adventurer are almost literally the same card; red has five mid-sized fliers at 3 mana.) General problems that endemic to the entire set: The syntax is right for all these cards but the terms are wrong ("strength" instead of power, "cemetary" instead of graveyard, "stap" instead of "untap" - were these cards translated into English from Italian?). The color pie here is super wonky, most obviously in red: by modern MTG standards the color shouldn't get tappers, efficient cheap fliers, -X/-0 effects, or literally Naturalize for . The lore of this setting doesn't really come through at all on the cards, in part because flavor text is used for unattributed quotes like "Okay Boss, now?" rather than descriptions of the setting or references to the many named characters here. I don't actually know what an Enar is, which is worrying given the presence of Enar tribal, and also the set is literally called "the ENAR project." And most concerningly, the mechanics of this set are all pretty bad, albeit each in their own way. Which I'll enumerate now. > Smoke Shroud's main problem is that it's kind of boring - does anyone want to build a deck around a mechanic that more or less reads "this creature gets +0/+1" ? Also, -1/-0 is pretty firmly a blue line of text rather than a red one. > Primal Calling is concerning for the opposite reason - every creature with the mechanic effectively draws a card when it enters the battlefield, which is exciting because it's powerful. But the cards are costed way too efficiently. Would red play a Wind Drake that draws a card when it enters the battlefield, for instance? I bet you it would. Would green play a mana dork for that draws a card when it enters the battlefield? Yes, by a long shot. This also is decidedly not a red line of text, because red doesn't get this level of card selection, and it doesn't get to care about enchantments most of the time either. > Surging Adventure is an okay mechanic, but it's totally at odds with what the faction wants you to do. Adventurers as written here is an aggressive go-wide tribe where you're supposed to flood the field with them (see Lionheart of the New Fleet). This leads to weird cards like Ship Champion and Scion of Milea which want you to control a lot of Adventurers so they can be at maximum efficiency, but you don't want to control a lot of Adventurers because then you can't make use of their abilities at all - a bit of a mismatch, bluntly. > Arcane Tribute is fine? But it doesn't leave much of an impression, in part because it's both proactive and reactive and thus doesn't have a clear strategy it enables. This isn't helped by the presence of cards like Palace Shinobi which are exclusively useful for trolling your opponent. > Pact. Um, where do I start with this mechanic? Because it's got a lot of problems, not the least of which that it results in commons with 11 lines of rules text that... aren't super useful? The payoff for casting three of these spells and having your creature(s) with the pact counters stick is... you get to scry 1 three times? You can see why I'm not impressed by that. I think this can be reworded to be less convoluted, e.g. Revamped Blessing Instant Avowed (When you cast this spell, you may remove one or more pact counters from creatures you control. If you do, copy it for each counter removed this way. Otherwise, put a pact counter on a creature you control.)Target creature gets +2/+2 until end of turn. That admittedly removes some design space - but it makes these cards a lot more readable, because you don't need every card with the mechanic to have three line breaks now. Anyway, despite all this criticism I actually think this set has a lot of potential - for every whiff there's a card that's good, and every dozen cards or so I saw a design that made me think "oh, this is actually extremely cool." Which means you've got over a 100 good cards here, and 40 or so extremely cool designs - more than most sets can claim. It's just that there's a lot of filler in between them. Well, yeah, it was translated from italian XD I checked twice all cards for wording and such, but (as you pointed) is a huuuge set, i guess something escaped. i'll re-check everything for errors and wrong terms. I was doubtful on the distribution of the cmc on the various colors, but i have literally no a real idea on whats should be a good distribution of the mana costs, and i can see your point. Maybe i can try to reduce the cards and "lighten" the set. most of the fillers were derivate of an high number of rares and legendaries (i tried to mantain the proportions on the rarities like Wizard does on it's sets): that was the major cause for such an high number of cards... the color pie itself... that is in part wanted. I know what normally colors should do, and wanted to try something new, but without unbalance the thing too much, so i understand that feeling "XD Regarding Enar, Elduni, and archetypes, i'll provide further explanation soon here, and yeah, i should try to put some lines on the flavour of the card "XD For the mechanics... uhm. i understand your points. all of them. -smoke shroud... i may think of something else more interactive and more fun. yeah. i'll re-think the whole thing, it can only improve! -primal calling... i really like it, but you're right, maybe is just "too much". increasing cmc should be enough? or in your opinion it needs a rework as a rule? (the enchantment part is referred more to the green-side of the Wild Court) -Surging adventure... i'll try to re-write and re-think the effects to give the faction a single direction, maybe it will fix the problem -arcane tribute... this one i do not see how to improve it. the mechanic itself does not seem op in my opinion (none in yours i read), what should i do? -i really like that restyle you proposed for the pact! that mechanic just went ont from a long list of modification, and in my opinion to was way too long. better than it's first version at least...brrr... i'll try to rephrase the concept more compact and simplier. i really THANK YOU for this comment, it help me so much to improve. I had almost no people to discuss this matter and ask opinions while i worked at the set, so ave this criticisms help me a lot! if you don't mind, can you just point some cards of those you said were "okay" or "cool"? so i will have a base to start again XD (and obv some "bad ones" too) in hope this text is somewhat clear and not too messy, ty again! |
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