Marvel: The Gathering

I know my color pie is all out of wack, so I'll definitely take a look over the article. Some of it is trying to keep factions/teams aligned (ex. Hawkeye being red since Avengers are mainly white/blue/red) and some are for flavor reasons (i.e. Quicksilver having haste as a white creature). That said, I'd prefer to have a more balanced color pie to make it easier for newer players to understand. Kinda funny that we both made a lot of similar designs. Can't wait to see what you created!

jverse these look amazing! I find it funny how we used a lot of the same art but for different cards. Also the use of existing cards with Marvel-art is awesome. Great work all around!

Also, how did you do the full-art tokens? Is it a format in MSE or a custom one you've designed?

I've done a full skim of both sets (more or less), and my general feelings are that they're messy. For example, jverse, you've got two different types of player counters (Energy and Poison), as well as two different types of creature counters (+1/+1 and -1/-1), which is generally not desirable from an ease-of-play standpoint.

Also, I've noticed a lot of incredibly wordy cards. Take jverse's Emma Frost - I know you want to represent all of her capabilities on the card, but having three activated abilities, a keyword, and a triggered ability all at once just makes it kinda hard to figure out what you can really use her for. I'd personally drop the discard and counter abilities and just use Emma Frost-themed art on a discard spell/counter spell (maybe Frightful Delusions?)

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Honestly, both of your sets make me think it could be interesting to make a set themed off a single hero "team" and their enemies. Seriously, just going with Spiderman would give you plenty of legendary creatures to work with.

Part of the issue I'm seeing is that a lot of superheroes and supervillains aren't really all that distinct in a way that a card game like Magic cares about.

Take a look at a real Magic set - notice how all of the legendary creatures are usually really distinctive? The response you want out of people when you drop your legendary creatures is "oh snap, not [LEGENDNAME]!", not "what does this one do again? Is this the basic version or the 2099 version?"

I feel like there's arguments both for and against most of the characters being Legendary. One the one hand, yes, many of the cards do similar things since their source characters have similar powersets/are the same character altogether (Spider-Man vs Spider-Man 2099, Wolverine vs Old Man Logan, etc) However, since all of these characters are unique story-wise, I think the legendary addition is justified. Iron Man has a lot more characterization than Random Shield Agent #301.

jverse There's definitely room for non-legendary creatures in the Marvel universe. Not necessarily with the civilians, but Shield/Hydra/AIM Agents, Skrulls, Kree, other misc aliens, generic X-Men (Xavier's Student) or evil mutants (Magneto's Acolyte), Wakandan soldiers, and superpowered criminals/thugs, to name some ideas off the top of my head. It helps round out the set in terms of mana costs as well, since most of the "generic" ones I have are between 1 and 3 CMC, which can help to offset the super powerful (and super expensive) creatures like Sentry and Dormammu.

I've had a chance to look over a fair amount of your set, and one thing that's really striking me is the lack of mono-color creatures. Most of your characters are represented by 2 or 3 colors, which can lead to some problems when actually playing. I think having some more non-legendary creatures might be a way to add more mono-color creatures since most would only need one color (Shield Agents are white, Atlanteans are blue, etc). Overall though, great work on the set! I agree with Lady Mapi that a lot of it is super wordy, but I get that you wanted to represent all of the abilities of certain characters, and as you said, you prefer flavor over simplicity so I respect that decision. There are a lot of cards here that I love and I'll probably end up taking some inspiration from your set when designing mine. You managed to perfectly nail some of the characters I struggled a LOT with. Nice work and I can't wait to see where you go with this set!

jverse One of the things I found helped (especially with the name-in-color) was hybrid mana. For example, most of my Gamma creatures are mono-green but you can't really have a green card named "Red Hulk," so I decided to use R/G as his colored mana to account for that. Still lets you play him in a Gamma-heavy deck with almost all green, but keeps the flavor aspects you want to retain.

I think there's a strong argument for mono-green Hulk. Strong power/toughness, a lot of trample damage, artifact/enchantment destruction (Hulk Smash!), fight, etc. Red would work but I think Green is a little closer to the Hulk's character.

For what it's worth, Mark Rosewater himself says The Hulk is red-green:


magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/aaaargh-2006-01-30-0

I may argue with Rosewater color pie placement some times (he put Little Shop of Horrors' Seymour as Black-Red, while I think he's mono Red), but on the Hulk, not only do I agree with him, but if this was my set, the red-green draft archetype would be Gamma creatures. 

Hulk is not the only character I find off flavor-wise in its color. There is absolutely zero versions of Tony Stark which are mono-white. Tony's core is blue, with heavy black, and, depending on the era, either red (when he's in a "don't touch my armors" mood, like in Armor Wars) or white (when he is in a "build a suit of armor around the world phase," as in Civil War). Mechanically, though, you probably want him Esper rathen than Grixis, as they are the artefact combination. 

Why is Captain America not Jeskai? You made his frame red,white and blue, but the card is only white/blue. I'd at least give him a red activation (maybe somethign that represent him throwing his mighty shield, like direct damage or artefact destruction?)And while white/red/blue works flavorfully for Cap, in general I advise against defaulting to the character's or artwork's visual colors to decide the card's colors. While real-life Magic does make sure a card's art predominant color(s) matched the cards' color(s), us amateurs working with found artwork do not have that luxury. 

What's you rationale for Spidey being white-green? He feels more white-blue to me.If you absolutely want green, then green-blue would suit him better.

Magneto is neither red nor blue. He's White/Black. In fact, he's THE White/Black character. See, once again, Mark Rosewater:

magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/playing-their-own-rules-2006-03-27-0
 

Sultai for Doom is perfect though. Kudos on this one.

collex

• There's definitely an argument for Red-Green Hulk, but considering my set is already low on mono-green cards, I think I'll leave Hulk where he is for now. However, if I can get enough green cards to balance it out, I'll probably shift the Gamma characters over to Red-Green.
• Captain America (alongside Captain Carter and Civil Warrior) have red/white/blue frames cause I designed those cards before I realized that wasn't something you could actually do. I figured the mana cost determined the color and that was it, so the card color could be whatever. Obviously, I've learned this isn't the case, but I do like the idea of a red "Shield Throw" ability. Maybe I'll try to work it in somewhere.
• Spidey got shifted over to White-Green for a few reasons. One, most of the spells with Spidey flavor (specifically Great Power // Great Responsibility) were in green and I wanted players to be able to pair those alongside Spidey. Additionally, the Agility mechanic (attacking with flying) basically acts as Reach while attacking, and since White doesn't really get Reach whereas Green does, it seemed appropriate to make the shift.
• Magneto (at least for my set) started off as Red for the anti-artifact abilities, and the blue represents his ability to manipulate metal/artifact (specifically the "Gain control of target artifact until Magneto leaves the battlefield") since gaining control of opponent's cards is a very Blue ability. I think character-wise, Magneto works best as White-Black, but ability-wise he works as Red-Green.

As someone who knows next to nothing about cube design... here are some opinions?

It looks like there's a general consensus that you should have tons of creatures.

Just a quick update for those interested. My set is nearly complete and I'm playtesting extensively in between working from home to get it to a state I'm satisfied with. 

I'm still tweaking mana costs, rarities, and some complexity/balance issues with the sagas, but otherwise, it's very close to done. If you notice any spelling mistakes or other issues that I might have missed, please give me a shout!

Marvel the Gathering by JVerse

Thanks for your feedback, Schwa. It's very helpful. I should take the time to address each of your points:

• Absorb - Yeah, I know it's already keyworded, but exceedingly rare, so I hoped no one would notice or care!
• Magik - Oops! Good catch.
• Planeswalker names - I hadn't thought of that, but I think I'm going to leave it as is. I briefly considered Legendary Planeswalker - Stephen (just for a fun of it). 
• Carbonadium - I blame Google image search! Anyway, a second look turned up very little so I think I'm going to have to go with a simple image of Omega Red. I wish I could get a shot of the metal somehow, but like adamantium, it isn't often depicted apart from already being grafted to someone's bones or body. 
• Gamma creatures - Ok, you talked me into it. It didn't really affect anything except the flavor, so they're Gamma creatures now.
• Hybrid/Normal mana - I also didn't like doing this, but for both color pie and flavor reasons I felt I need cheap creatures to be tri-colored, so I went with the strategy used in Alara Reborn which features similar mana costs. Since posting this version of the set, however, I decided to color each creature based only on their abilities and not on their flavor (or personality), so quite a few things have changed in that regard, including these tri-colored creatures which are now gone. The only one I'm still not happy with is Magneto, who is currently Izzet. I really want him to be blue alone, but he needs to deal damage and/or destroy artifacts, and those are both in red's wheelhouse. 
• Typelines - I've changed these so many times I've lost count. Eventually I decided that every creature needed a race, and almost all needed a class. Some are artifacts, so that got added in as well, and then the typelines became enormous, especially since they're all legendary. Since each creature has a billion names in the typeline I wasn't afraid to add some stupid things for each of them if it felt relevant, like Human Octopus Rogue. Before I publish and print the final version of the set, I will scale down the typelines for each creature on a card-by-card basis, but that's a waste of time until it's all finished.
• Reprints - Admittedly, this was a bit of a cheat on my part. I knew the creatures were going to form the backbone of the set and that they were going to be complicated to design and implement. A large number of new non-creature cards added to the design would likely add to the work and make balancing very difficult, so I figured the best way to keep things as balanced as possible would be to stick with cards that have already been tested and approved by WotC, hence the reprints. I would have loved to do the whole thing from scratch, but I know how long it takes to build a set by yourself and I wasn't quite willing to put in that kind of time on this one. Hell, I thought this one would be a quick process, but it's taken as long as any standard-sized set I've made, and perhaps longer.