THE LORD OF THE RINGS: The Gathering [Spoiler]

This small set has lot going on, so let's start with the first mechanic: Fellowship


    
Fellowship is heavily inspired by the recent Party mechanic from Zendikar, but cares about "races" instead of "classes". 

Thank you for the corrections. My english is not perfect unfortunately. About Gimli as a berserker, it's a reminiscence of an old iteration of Fellowship that used to check creatures with no common subtypes. The fact that it can target your own creatures in not tipically relevant, but i guess i will adapt with wotc standards.

The armies of Mordor, the dark land, are known for being cruel and relentless. Sometimes even one with the other. 
Fight with your army and when you don't need it anymore... Exploit it to reduce the cost of your bigger spells!



 


See old version of the cards

Really like what you've shown so far

• Fellowship looks like a clever spin on the party Mechanic indeed.
• Adventures are definitively very fitting for this set, also I like them in general
• Merciless fits nicely, but the wording feels a bit off. It should definitively say "cast" rather than "play", and I think modeling the wording after Emerge would be even better:
  
  Merciless <cost> (You may cast this spell by sacrificing a nonland permanent and paying the merciless cost.)
• Faramir looks really weak for a rare legend. Compared to stuff like Benalish Marshal he could easily get away with turning the anthem effect into a static ability.

Also last (but definitively not least):



Nice!

Really liking the mechanics and flavor of your set so far. Here's a bit of feedback:

Bilbo - This card feels very blue. I can understand why you'd want it to be green from a flavor perspective, but his adventure especially is blue (green doesn't tutor for artifacts and isn't friendly to them in general). Skulk and combat draw could also be blue, but the effect exists in green as well. 

Great eagle - Love the design here. I would change the blink effect to only work on your own creatures. Also, the eagles themselves feel slightly underpowered. Looking through existing cards with flash and flying you should get at least a 3/3 or even a 4/4 for 5cmc. Check out Raff Capashen, Thryx, Fleetfeather Cockatrice, etc. I would probably make it 2UU for the current P/T or adjust it to 3/4.

Ring-wraith - Pretty strong, but I like it. 

Mouth of Sauron - Super cool card. I'd like to play it!

Merciless is great. Personally I'm a big fan of keywording existing mechanics and focusing them into a set theme. Be careful with the cost reductions though. The goblin card especially feels like it could be overpowered if the right cards exist in your set. Getting three tokens for 1cmc is pretty powerful, and at common no less! Lash of the Balrog also feels very powerful with its merciless cost. Red doesn't often do one-sided board wipes and this one is pretty easy to cast.  

Here we are with maybe the hardest-to-make-work mechanic of the set, Majestic. Elves are surrounded by beauty and grandeur, and their spells are at best when they are in their fabled woodlands or in their beautiful palaces.

Collect four out of five permanent types to enable the full power of the Middle Earth most ancient race.

   

This ability can be hard to make work, and I often considered to change the number of permanents from four to three. Lot of testing is needed on this.

This is my first complete custom set, but I have a couple of new ideas to work on in this 2021 

Some thoughts concerning the new stuff:

• Majestic is interesting but indeed tough to balance. Four permanent types is a lot, but at three a single artifact / enchantment creature would instantly fulfill all requirements.. I think I'd keep it the way it is for now.
• Mudborn is solid, not much else to say
• An Unexpected Party isn't a white card if it creates hasty tokens.
• Other than that, I like the concept of having flavor text on the common Sagas. I do think having it right in the middle is kind of confusing though.. It's been a while since I worked with the template: Is it possible to not have all chapter markers show up on the card? Like for A Short Rest remove the II and the card instantly becomes more grokable – and assuming that has been possible I'd then even suggest going further and indeed only use the lowest space for all the flavor texts. So on the chosen example you have the reminder text, then the I, the III, and finally the flavor text.

The days are dark in the Middle Earth, and the armies are ready to battle. Get shelter in a Fortress before it's too late!



The idea of making some Fortress cards out of the main Middle Earth locations, to me feels like a must in a Lord of the Rings custom set. Both the layout and the actual implementation of the card type has been pretty challenging. I know other users created a totally new card type, which is basically a Planeswalker card, just renamed. I see the need of doing that, because naming "planeswalker" a card which is actually a location/building doesn0t make any sense. But on the other hand, creating a new card type seems redundant and "rules-warping" from the wording point of view (you know, changing target planeswalker with target fortress of planeswalker and so on).

Fortress as I intended are just planeswalker with an extra line of text: "Creatures can't attack you", meaning that as long as you control a Fortress, opponents need to destroy it in order to get to you. This extra text is put on top, for no particular reason other than make the card a bit more "unique" and recognizable. No Plus effect for now: the risk of creating some oppressive card is high. At the end I even found space for a flavor text (on a planeswalker this may help to recognize that we are dealing with a different type of card)

Again, let me know what you think. Design, and power balance. Any feedback is gold

Make them creatures honestly doesn't accomplish much from the flavour point of view. And creatures with loyalty are just planeswalker, aren't they? The natural card type to define a fortress is Land from the standpoint of flavor, and Planeswalker from the standpoint of mechanic. But as universal rule, you cannot make lands which do much else than providing mana, so this is not an avaiable route.

The other way can be to define a new card type, but in this case we have to give it the proper design space, one that overlap the least possibile with planeswalkers.

Anyway, here's some cards, guys: today we have sagas again:


  

Today I want to share with you this A-B mechanic. I think the idea is interesting, but make it work can be tough. Expecially because the Rider ability is somehow complex to put on commons

Mount is just a definition for an existing ability, commons on cards that represent mounts (Pegaus Couser as an example).
Rider is simil to Heroism, but the main difference is that works with triggered abilities.

This idea is probably too ambitious (use the word "triggered ability" on the text of a common can be too much), but I would like to know your comments!

Yes, this was an experimental ability but I decided to remove it (I talk about Rider. Mount is ok.) In a draft/limited environment you are probably busy collecting different permanent types for Majestic of different creature types for Fellowship to pursuit further mechanics.