Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Sept 10, 2020 15:54:11 GMT
ARTICLE LINK REPOSITORY• Announcing: Alara by Mako • Between a Rock and a Shard Place, Part 1 by Mako • Ajani's Advocate and Timus, the Cloud's Roar by Lycodrake • Between a Rock and a Shard Place, Part 2 by Mako • Cloud's Roar Avenger and Ajani Resolute by Lycodrake • Sharuum, Archmagocrat by Featherfall • Arcanist's Reaver, Hexcaster of Unx, and Kederekt Seawitch by squidpizza • Hellion Devastator, Ambush Gharial, and Meren, Bane of the Cairns by drchillbrain • Terraformer's Globe, Disturb the Riddle Gate, and Maelstromancy by kayiu102 • Alara Packaging and Extras by Mako • Nefarox, Strifelord, Kess the Necromaster, and Grixis Command by Turn1solring • Steel and Blood by gynoidpoet • Shardcore, Part 1 by Mako • The Real Meaning of Christmas Death and Takes | Digitized Memories by ThatDamnPipsqueak • Shardcore, Part 2 by Mako • Alara is in MSEM2! by Mako • The Legends of Alara by Mako • Announcing: Maelstrom Masters by Mako
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Sept 11, 2020 18:21:39 GMT
Posted in Mako Magic on September 11, 2020
Welcome to the first week of Alara previews. Firstly I'd like to point to the absolute genius of this article's title, as "Rock" was original Shards of Alara's development code name. Astounding. We'll be kicking things off with me telling the story of the set's design process, introducing the people and communities who have helped me with this set, and of course—previewing cards! MakoIt's me, Mako, Set Designer for Alara. I've been in the custom Magic designing community since I began playing the game in 2008, and have been trying to complete a set ever since. I've come close over the years, but Alara will be the first set I've done that I'm proud of. Here's hoping you like what the set has to offer! cyrilgreenrangerI started playing Magic with cyrilgreenranger twelve years ago, and he's always been a great friend to bounce ideas off of. He's done a lot of behind the scenes work for the set, including playtesting faction mechanic iterations, sanity checking my green designs, and turning the shard watermarks into snazzy vectors. Magic Set Editor DiscordArt by IzzyThe folks over at the Magic Set Editor Discord have been a tremendous help with this project, from its early days up to its completion. A lot of people here also inspired me to actually finish the set, and have pushed me to design with MSE Modern in mind. There's too many of you to mention, but know that I appreciate all the feedback and patience you've given me and my card designs! Custom Magic DiscordArt by Lyman#7749The Custom Magic Discord community has also been an ever present force throughout this set's life. I'm repeating myself but there's just too many of you to mention (and I'd hate to leave out names), so I'll just go ahead and thank everyone from this community who has given me support, valuable feedback and/or participated in events for the set. I'm also very glad to have a space on the Discord for the set in my own channel! Extending my thanks also to URPG and IMF, and all the random Discord friends I've had who commented on the set in one way or another. With that out of the way, let's get onto how this set came to be!
Design for this set began in mid-2017, shortly after I lost my setfiles for a return to Theros block whose sets I was calling Theros Triumphant and Dreams Discordant. The files got corrupted after having finished a draft of my commons, and motivation to continue it after disappeared. So I went to work on a different idea, eventually landing on the desire to make another Khans of Tarkir—that is to say, a tricolor faction set. KTK remains as my favorite draft format of all time, and I wanted to replicate its success. The initial world pitch was a sea exploration plane I tentatively called Piragua, whose factions were different fleets. Then September came that year and Ixalan dropped. I was determined this time to actually design a set to its completion, though, so I didn't give up. It didn't take too long for me to figure out a different direction. I already knew I loved making cards that feature canon planes. I was already working on a return set prior to all of this, too. Maybe return sets could be my niche in the world of custom Magic design? Shards of Alara was the first set I had the chance to watch as its previews unfolded, so I have a lot of nostalgia for it. It was also the easiest answer to "Which canon plane can I return to that could have tricolor factions?" And so work began on Alara. I read up on all the relevant Alara articles on the mothership, consumed all the Alara lore I could get my hands on, and drowned myself in cards from all three sets that made up the original block. Initially I called the set Alara United, and then Spires of Alara (after Rupture Spire), before going the Dominaria route and just calling it the plane name. Below is an excerpt of the Vision Design portion of the design document I was using; these are guidelines I wrote to help me keep the design direction focused. Because I am very much a bottom-up designer, most of the early work I did for the set was to figure out the five faction mechanics. (One of the advantages of making return sets is that the setting is already built, so I could focus on the mechanical side of things.) As this set was taking a lot of architectural cues from KTK, I was determined to have named mechanics for all five Shards, and also because Mark Rosewater has expressed before that Esper and Naya not having one in the original block was one of its mistakes. This part of the design process is where I spent the most time on; I find myself unable to work on sets if I am unsatisfied with all of its major mechanical components. To tackle this, I kept three approaches to making faction mechanics in mind: 1) Building off of the previous mechanical themes of each faction in the original set, 2) Designing a different mechanical identity for the Shard, while remaining true to its colors and aesthetics, and 3) Finding/tweaking other existing mechanics to see if they could fit one of the Shards (I knew, however, that I wasn't going to use the same mechanics the Shards had in the original set, so I looked into using fitting past mechanics other than Exalted, Unearth, and Devour). Additionally, I wanted to make sure that each faction mechanic erred on the simple side of things, so as not to overload the comprehension complexity of the set. Today I'll be talking about the mechanics I arrived at for Bant, Esper, and Grixis. The next article will discuss Jund, Naya, and Cycling's role in the set. Bant was one of the easier Shards to design mechanics for, partly due to the overlap of effects in these colors. Another thing I kept in mind while designing the faction mechanics was to make sure the mechanic could conceivably make sense in all three of the Shard's colors, or at least be solid in its primary and secondary colors. For this set, I had Bant primary in white, secondary in Green, and tertiary in Blue. I messed around with a couple of mechanics for Bant, the earliest one being a holdover from the WUG faction from the now-abandoned Piragua, a flicker mechanic I called Voyage. As a sorcery, you could pay the voyage cost to flicker your creature, which was meant to capitalize on enters-the-battlefield effects. I also had a few mechanics that dealt with tapping creatures (I considered Convoke here, too), bouncing your own creatures (one was an optional additional cost called "Retreat"). In the end I thought Exalted did a good job in Shards of Alara so I honed in on mechanics that evoked a similar feel. The first Bant mechanic to stick for a while was an ability word called Glorify. Whenever a creature with Glorify attacked, it let you tap your other untapped creatures for bonuses. This mechanic was inspired by Knotvine Paladin. Glorify was the one I tested the most for Bant before arriving at Encourage, and it played decently enough. When it was clear that I wanted an attack trigger for Naya's mechanic, however, I knew I had to let it go. You see, I was always juggling all five Shards and didn't work on them in isolation; I wanted to be sure that each faction mechanic was unique in its presentation (but also maintaining a level of synergy with their neighboring shards, a lesson I learned from GRN). KTK exerted its influence on the set once again as it was Outlast that inspired me to redesign Bant's mechanic into what it is today. I tried to make a mechanic that was Outlast but a bit faster, and eventually came up with Encourage. I had my reservations about Encourage at first, worried that it would do awkward things to a deck's curve. I playtested versions with different parameters—having a mana cost for the activation, a variable for the pump. (The sorcery speed restriction was always there, so as to avoid messing with combat math too much in Limited.) Ultimately I went for the simplest execution, and it's the one that has worked out the best, and was the easiest to design for. The mechanic lent itself to a Go-Wide to Go-Tall Strategy, which I felt was reminiscent enough to Exalted for it to fit Bant, and so I seeded a Voltron theme in its colors. The interesting thing I found when designing this set was that I was making mechanics to inform archetypes, rather than the reverse. The design direction for Encourage was to make sure each one had a trigger to go with the ability. It was easier to have french vanillas with the mechanic when I had the pump as a variable, but less so when it's always +1/+1. Having the bonus trigger also helped spice up the cards it appeared on. Most of them have the same trigger that checks whenever the card encourages another creature, often giving a keyword. At uncommon I deviated from this on three cards (one for each of Bant's colors) where the trigger changes to a saboteur effect, which I found to feel very rewarding. I'll just go ahead and say it—Esper is the problem child of this set. It's the one Shard whose mechanic went through the most iterations and was the hardest to figure out. (It was also the hardest to art, but that's a rant for another discussion.) As it originally didn't have a named mechanic, and with its main theme of colored artifacts now being less than novel, I had a tough time coming up with a mechanic for the Shard that was simple and satisfying. As all of Esper's creatures were also artifacts, I started exhausting every artifact mechanic I could think of. Most were artifact variations of existing mechanics (think Exploit for artifacts). Some were new and had potential, but were just too complex and needed more room in a set than what a faction mechanic could provide. I looked at using existing artifact mechanics too, but none felt like a good fit. While I knew I wanted to make Esper care about artifacts, I also didn't want to make the Esper decks too insular like it was in original Shards. So I quickly culled from my ever-growing list of Esper mechanics all the artifact-caring linear mechanics. At some point I tried making top-down Esper mechanics just for a change, and I arrived at an action word I called Configure. The denizens of Esper are obsessed with augmenting themselves in the magical alloy known as etherium. I tried to represent this with +1/+1 counters, and so most of the drafts for Configure dealt with them. The earliest one was just a renamed and reflavored Fabricate, which made a 1/1 blue artifact Homunculus creature token instead of a Servo. Then I had it make blue Thopters, like the one Sharding Sphinx produced. The Configure variant that stayed the longest, however, let you put or remove a number of +1/+1 counters on a creature you controlled. If you removed counters this way, you got a Thopter token. While interesting, this version of Configure was just a bit more complex than I liked, and the length of the reminder text for it wasn't doing it any favors. I stayed with it for a while for lack of a better alternative, but I was determined to replace it. To do so, I tried churning WUB mechanics without having the actual shard of Esper in mind. I started to break down what WUB as a color combination had in common. Note that for this set I had Esper as primary in Blue, secondary in White, and tertiary in Black. The easiest answer was to peg the color triad as the flying colors, and from there I knew I wanted to focus on a mechanic that made Thopter tokens. I was too focused on the +1/+1 counters with my experiments on Configure that I had forgotten the other half of the equation. I came up with a bunch of mechanics once I shifted the focus to the Thopter. One turned your permanents into 1/1 flying Thopters for a turn and granted them saboteur abilities. Another was ambitious and granted players etherium counters, like energy, which could be then converted into Thopters, but that obviously didn't cut it. At this stage of mechanical juggling across the Shards I found out that I didn't have a mana sink mechanic, and it was then that I decided to make Esper's mechanic into a kicker variant. Out of all the Shard mechanics, I feel like Embellish has played the best. It does a lot of heavy lifting in the set, too, allowing for an increased artifact density, synergizing with Bant's Encourage as an evasive body, and as you'll soon see, synergizes with Grixis as another body for Tether. Grixis is undeniably my favorite Shard. Prince of Thralls was the first mythic I ever owned. The world just appealed to edgelord teen me. And so with this return to Alara I wanted to give it a more fitting mechanic. While I can appreciate Unearth for UBR, seeing as it was designed to be "creature-Flashback", I always thought it could have done better. I knew from the get go that I wanted to turn the focus on Grixis on spellslinging; Sedris is old news, and Kess is the new face of the Shard. I had settled on making Grixis primary in Black, secondary in Blue, and tertiary in Red. Occult necromantic magics felt organic to the setting, so that's where I turned for inspiration when coming up with its faction mechanic. To be honest I think Morbid restricted to instants and sorceries is the better call for the set than anything I tried. I like the thought on a conceptual level, as the death of your creatures powering up spells fit so well with Grixis, kind of like how Ferocious in KTK only showing up on instants and sorceries represented strong creatures (GR) making your spells (UR) better. My own biases made me push for a new mechanic, though, since at this stage Grixis would have been the only one with a returning mechanic, and while I left myself open to them as I said in the beginning, I didn't want my favorite shard to be the odd one out. Naturally I looked at all the spell based mechanics and did riffs on them, always trying to tie in death triggers somehow. I had sacrifice-Flashback at some point. Sacrifice-Conspire. I diverged from spells for a bit and did some testing on a mechanic called Slaughter, which was Evoke except you chose which creature to sacrifice. Quickly I realized creature sacrifice should be left to Jund's domain. I made more spell based mechanics after, trying out stuff that were on the whole just worse versions of Morbid. It was when I thought of fixing Haunt that I finally landed on Tether. I always thought of Haunt as a salvageable mechanic, and so Tether is my attempt at fixing it. Designing cards for the mechanic was definitely challenging. At lower rarities, I had to make effects that could matter post-combat but not ones that could mess with stuff during combat, in case the Tether player had a sacrifice outlet (of course I also had the option of limiting what sacrifice outlets there were available). Of the five Shard mechanics I think Tether has the smallest design space, but being a faction mechanic meant only needing to have a couple of cards with the mechanic (and I was following a strict distribution of them at common and uncommon), so I'm still pretty happy with the ones I've managed to design.
That's all the time I have for now. Let me know how you find these mechanics, and what you think of the set design stories I've shared above. Join me next time as I talk about Consume, Stampede, and Cycling. Until then, may you find all pieces of a whole falling back into place.
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lycodrake
0/0 Germ
Posts: 3
Color Alignment: White, Green
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Post by lycodrake on Sept 11, 2020 19:38:34 GMT
Hi, I'm Lycodrake. I've only played MSEM for a short time but have active in the Custom Magic community for several years now. Those that know me know that I'm obsessed with Green-White things. And cats. Mako has been gracious enough to let me preview appropriately colored cards for Alara!
Humans elves and nacatl move in step with the great behemoths in the regions of Naya. Great beasts omnivorous, carnivorous and herbivorous stride through forests, climb upon mountainsides and roam pockets of grazing fields. Life in Naya revolves around strength, but it is not tainted by ambition or shackled by callousness. It is this region of Alara that the planeswalker Ajani Goldmane calls home, and those nacatl (or leonin) that follow him. Ajani's Advocate does a very nice impression of a Rootwalla, and in limited I'm always a fan of having a Rootwalla on my side. Its also relevant to Naya's keyword for this set, which Mako will show this coming week. But Ajani is not the only leader among his people. Timus the Orange rules from Qasali's stronghold those who still ascribe to the tradition of The Coil, in contrast to those who call themselves "Wild" nacatl. Timus gathers his people to him. He does not call for rage, but furvor and zeal. Rage can blind. And to Timus, being blinded by such would make them all no better than Marisi the Traitor. Timus's ideal niche in MSEDH, of course, is Naya tokens. Including anthems, keyword-granting effects and token doublers fuel his go-wide angle. A single token turns into three, two turns into six, three into nine; even if your opponents wipe the board, so long as you still have ways to make even a few tokens (and you should) Timus can call forth an army.
For those curious, Timus the Orange was first mentioned in this article back in Nov. 2008. When Mako was deciding on legendary creatures for each shard, I suggested Timus! That's all from me this time, though! Look forward to one more article by your friendly GW-cat-obsessed Lyco.
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Post by Daij_Djan on Sept 13, 2020 20:33:41 GMT
I really, really like the way your preview mimics WotC's official articles, seriously
Will read through everything later, just one quick note so far: Embellish as an alternative cost inspired by these should be worded:
Embellish <cost> (You may cast this spell for its embellish cost. If you do, create a 1/1 blue Thopter artifact creature token with flying when it enters the battlefield.)
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Sept 14, 2020 13:47:06 GMT
I really, really like the way your preview mimics WotC's official articles, seriously Will read through everything later, just one quick note so far: Embellish as an alternative cost inspired by these should be worded: Embellish <cost> (You may cast this spell for its embellish cost. If you do, create a 1/1 blue Thopter artifact creature token with flying when it enters the battlefield.)
Happy to hear that! I definitely have more in store so be sure to check the thread out! And yup, Embellish was written like that at some point, I just chose to go with the current reminder text since it's shorter, patterning it after Awaken. I might be persuaded still to turn it back to the standard way of writing reminder text for similar alternate costs, though, just need to make sure nothing gets too texty after the change. Part 2 of BETWEEN A ROCK AND A SHARD PLACE will be up in a few hours!
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Post by Daij_Djan on Sept 14, 2020 13:53:45 GMT
I never noticed Awaken is worded like that - I really dislike inconsistencies within official wordings Looking at other mechanics with the same wording concept I did however notice Mutate might be a fitting compromise here "If you cast this spell for its embellish cost, ..."
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Sept 14, 2020 16:17:13 GMT
Posted in Mako Magic on September 14, 2020
Last time I talked about Alara's origins and began discussing how the faction mechanics for three of the Shards came to be. Now we move on to the other two shards, and take a look at a sixth mechanic making its return. Editor's Note: Flesheater Vine's art should be credited to Afda Trihatma. This has been corrected in the set's latest PlaneSculptors page.In the very early stages of the set, Jund was the first Shard to get a mechanic. It was an ability word version of Bloodthirst I was calling Carnage. I tried it as an alternate cost too, which we now see as Spectacle, and I will forever lament the fact that Wizards of the Coast used such a specific name for it. Devour as a keyword never felt overtly red to me, so my first stabs at giving Jund a new mechanic were all damage focused as an attempt to make it feel more red-centric. For this set, I had Jund be primary in Red, secondary in Black, and tertiary in Green. As mechanics for the other Shards started to take shape however, I realized keeping Jund focused on sacrifice would work well next to Tether, so I tried to look at ways to fix Devour. The thing about sacrifice mechanics is that it requires a decent amount of support to work well in Limited. With this in mind, I looked into giving Jund's mechanic an alternate plan so it wasn't so heavily reliant on sacrificing things. On top of sacrificing a creature for an effect, I briefly toyed with discarding a creature card, sacrificing a land, and then borrowing the scrapped Slaughter mechanic from Grixis which I talked about in the previous article. It didn't take long for me to settle on exiling a creature card as the other cost for the mechanic, and adding a self-mill theme was pretty easy with black and green being part of the Shard. What did take a bit of iteration, however, was the formatting on consume. With Slaughter fresh on my mind, I first tried it locked as an enters the battlefield ability. I then tried it as a keyword locked to attack triggers. Soon it became clear I wanted the flexibility of being able to do both, and since I was set on giving Naya an attack trigger mechanic, I looked to Exert technology for wording inspiration. I'm quite happy with how consume has turned out, and I feel like there's still a lot to explore with the mechanic that the set hasn't touched on, so I'm confident in its potential for future reuse. There was a lot of concern that the exile option was always the correct choice, so I made sure to leverage the problem by including worthwhile death triggers in the set, and ways to generate tokens for fodder. Like Esper, Naya didn't have a named faction mechanic in original Shards of Alara, but it did have a consistent mechanical theme with 5-power matters. Khans of Tarkir has taught us that 5 is a point too high for a threshold, which is why we've seen Ferocious as an archetype theme more often since. I generated a lot of mechanics for the Shard, and a lot of the early ones were super simple, and most of them were attack triggers of some kind. "Stampede" was high on the list of words I wanted to use for Naya's mechanic, and associating it with attack triggers felt obvious, so I made the decision to have Naya get exclusive rights to an attack trigger faction mechanic. As I mentioned previously, this would lead me to change Bant and Jund's mechanics during different stages of design. Naya's behemoths are the defining feature of the Shard, so I wanted a mechanic that encouraged using them. I didn't want a mechanic that could only appear on big creatures, though, since you'd only have so many of them in a deck. So I generalized a bit and just started making mechanics centering on creature spells. An early take on Stampede was an attack trigger that went live if you've cast a creature spell that turn. This proto- Stampede is still one of my favorites and I'm hoping to find a different home for it, but as I designed more of the set I noticed tokens were playing an important role to keep things working (mostly to help consume) so I then changed it to check for creatures entering the battlefield. Creature-Prowess , Creaturefall, Creaturecraft, and Monstrosity were all things I considered and tested as well. However, the mechanic that stuck for a while was inspired by Evolve and read like so: Stampede N (Whenever another creature enters the battlefield under your control, if this has fewer than N +1/+1 counters on it, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature.) Evolve-Stampede would stay in the set longer than any scrapped mechanic—I even had it in the set still when I got my channel over at the Custom Magic Discord. All those mechanics felt decently but generically RGW, and they never felt like they were Alara-Naya enough. Evolve-Stampede was also proving tricky to develop. So I changed the focus again to mechanics that looked at greater power. Making the threshold more open would make for a better mechanic than what Naya originally had, I thought, and from this came the final version of Stampede you see today. Naya was the last to get its faction mechanic finalized, but Stampede is definitely something I'm proud of. It's got good synergy with Encourage, though admittedly the connection between it and Jund's consume is pretty tenuous. To fix that, I designed most of the lower-rarity consume cards to get power buffs or just always trigger Stampede outright. While I ended up not putting the mechanic on any of the Nayan behemoths in the set (save for one card, but it's flavored as a Yearling), I made it certain that all Beasts in Naya colors would always trigger the mechanic. This meant that your Stampede cards would always be at full potential when you have a Behemoth under your command! Shards of Alara Limited's number one mistake was there not being enough fixing. This exacerbated the goodstuff problem sets that are heavy in multicolor have; often drafts would heavily skew in favor of whoever was lucky enough to amass a decent amount of color fixing, leaving those mainly in less colors with tricolor cards they can't reliably cast. The set wouldn't have been better off if it had too much fixing either: in that scenario, factions and archetypes would matter very little, and decks become a homogenous five-color soup. The trick then is balance: and Khans of Tarkir once again comes to the rescue and shows that it's possible. While 4-color and even 5-color was possible in Khans draft, their existence didn't push out two- and three-color decks from the format. Getting color fixing right with Alara was always top priority for this set, and I knew from the beginning that I had to make sure two- and three-color decks were viable. The immediate answer to the color fixing problem is done through individual cards/cycles of cards, and I'll talk about them in another article. However, I also knew having good card flow was important. Players had to have ways to find the lands they needed. Scry being evergreen helps a lot in this regard, but I wanted a dedicated smoothing mechanic in the set. It would appear across all colors and wouldn't be tied to a specific Shard. I had Cycling in mind from the start, as it does double duty on multicolor cards and makes sure they're not dead when you're missing a color or two, but designer instincts had me making and trying out new mechanics first. One attempt at a smoothing mechanic was an action word called Traverse. It was used as a rider on spells and let you grab a land from the top three cards of your library, putting the rest on the bottom. Traverse was simple but also felt really bad when it whiffed. There was the option of action wording Treasure Hunt, but that complicated things too much for my taste. I also toyed with the idea of Spire tokens, which were basically Manaliths that entered tapped. Eventually I conceded and accepted Cycling just worked the best for what I wanted. Admittedly, my apprehension towards using it was because original Alara block already returned the mechanic, and Amonkhet was still relatively new when I started Exploratory Design for the set. Now I just see it as a cool nod towards the original block, and I had ideas to put a new spin on it so it wasn't entirely just a repeat of what we saw from Shards block. Funnily enough we'd see Cycling return on a canon Magic set before I could even finish the set with the release of Ikoria (my Spires came before the triome Crystals, I swear!) Cycling is the set's workhorse mechanic, and is the glue that keeps everything together, much like Morph was for KTK. It went well with multicolor cards. It made designing a good number of Behemoths easy, eliminating the fear of overloading the top end for Naya colors. It provided another axis of support for consume when it appeared on creature cards. Finally, it also allowed me to incorporate a five-color subarchetype in the set, much like Gates-matters was in the newer Ravnica sets. I was mentally associating the game action of chaining Cycling cards to the Maelstrom, so you'll see a lot of the five-color identity cards caring about cycling and being flavored around the chaotic nexus of mana raging on the plane. You may think having a five-color subarchetype would only facilitate the goodstuff problem I mentioned earlier, but I wanted one in the set because I felt the plane of Alara was associated to five-color just as much as it was with Shard colors. While this added another factor to consider when crafting the set's fixing suite, I'm on the whole very happy with how testing has gone—after making sure the Cycling deck needed a bit more work to get there in draft, I've found that decks ranging the entire spectrum from two- to five-colors were being drafted and played. I hope you get a chance to play with the set so you can experience it for yourself! That's all I have for this article. Which faction mechanic is your favorite? Let me know! Next time I'll be sharing design stories on a card-by-card basis. Watch out for more guest spoilers in the interim, too! Until then, may you find all the fixing you need.
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lycodrake
0/0 Germ
Posts: 3
Color Alignment: White, Green
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Post by lycodrake on Sept 14, 2020 17:11:36 GMT
It's Lyco again! Lets just get right into it, because I'm excited to share one of my all-time favorite Planeswalker characters!
Last time I got to show you all one of Ajani's followers and the traditionalist leader of the nacatl of Naya. One thing that I like really well about Timus as a contrasting point for Ajani is the role they play as leaders. Timus the Orange leads from one of the only remaining fortresses within Naya - Qasal - as a warrior-king, opposed to the wild nacatl who still believe Marisi the Traitor was in the right. He adheres to The Coil. On the other hand, you have Ajani Goldmane who is a spiritual leader, who has been affected by the seeds Nicol Bolas sewed into his people via Marisi. Timus and Ajani both want what is best for their people, both call for a life that isn't based in savagery and anarchy, but their methodologies are not one and the same. Cloud's Roar Avenger shows that Timus has no issue with rage. He believes, in fact, that it is commendable. The line for him is one that I think exemplifies where White and Red agree on something - righteous anger that is based in response to injustice and evil. As a card, the Avenger gets to show off one of the ways Stampede shines - the smaller, non-behemoth sized creature allows for both to punch through. I think perhaps one point that Timus and Ajani would disagree is whether there should be an embrace of even righteous anger. Ajani has seen much since his first defiance in the face of Nicol Bolas. He is no longer blinded by hatred and revenge is not a goal. He does not forget his brother's murder, but he has decided to move past the anger and resolved to fight for a cause greater than one person. That doesn't mean he will lie down and lets his home be destroyed or overtaken by those that would use and abuse its inhabitants. Ajani Resolute does much of what other Ajani Planeswalker cards have done in the past. His +1 grants +1/+1 counters and gains life, his -1 nets you a blocker, his -3 removes a threat and his -7 makes it so you hopefully will have the biggest creatures on the board. Looking back to Timus, Ajani's -1 can be played the turn Timus resolves and give you three blockers, and isn't that an exciting line? A 4/3 first striker, three 2/2 bodies and a Planeswalker who might make that board presence even more threatening! Ajani and Timus may not necessarily agree on everything, but they are definitely two leading figures for the people of Naya against the opposition. Hm, I think there was one other person known to lead the peoples of Naya...
I think that's all from me here. Thanks to Mako for letting me show these cool cattes off!
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Sept 15, 2020 10:07:39 GMT
Hello. I'm Featherfall, and you're watching the Alara channel. Let's look at a spoiler card from the upcoming set, Alara.
Ooh, nice, a cool commander. ...wait, who's Sharuum? Did we see her before?
Oh. So we have. That makes so much sense.
Compared to the original Sharuum, this newer incarnation is smaller, cheaper, faster (not in the haste way), and returns more artifacts. But only those that were put into the graveyard this turn. So how can we take advantage of this?
First of all: eggs. Eggs is slang for cheap artifacts that can sacrifice themselves for an effect, usually drawing a card. Sacrificing a ton of eggs and then playing Sharuum, Archmagocrat makes for a very impactful turn.
Second of all,
This is a real card from a real set with the real name of Alara Reborn.
And here's how to break it. (Provided you have at least seven things that produce mana that you're not sacrificing to Time Sieve.)
Make your friends hate you with just eight nonland cards! Not clickbait! Gone wrong!
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Post by squidpizza on Sept 17, 2020 2:15:07 GMT
Hey everyone, it's Squidpizza here with more Alara previews! This time, we're taking a deep dive into grixis's spellslinging theme.
First up, a super-exciting buildaround rare; Arcanist's Reaver
Not only are its stats premium for the cost, it powers up all your spell-synergy cards. It even has cycling, should you ever feel the need to ditch such a loveable creature (just look at that mug, how could you?)
Next up, some of the powerful commons from Grixis that synergize great with Tether's recasting your spells for free. Attachment DeletedThese highly efficient commons are great draws to grixis, but even work within other shards too as value generators.
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drchillbrain
0/0 Germ
Posts: 2
Favorite Card: Eon Frolicker
Favorite Set: Battlebond
Color Alignment: Red
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Post by drchillbrain on Sept 17, 2020 18:40:29 GMT
The year is 2009. You’re getting ready for the first round of your standard Grand Prix. The new Alara Reborn set has added many cards to the format that have players talking, but the name of one deck lingers in the air, spoken of in whispers. Vendors mysteriously run out of Maelstrom Pulses. Players rummage through boxes of draft chaff in search of Sprouting Thrinaxes. At one table, you see a Bituminous Blast cascade into a Terminate. At another, a player untaps two lands with Garruk Wildspeaker and casts a Putrid Leech. As you sit down with your freshly sleeved Cruel Control, you finally face off against the deck… Known as Jund. The bogeyman of Standard for its lifetime and later terror of Modern, there are few decks more memorably value-riffic, and few names more feared. While it’s seen as a bit of a laughing stock today, its players seen as grasping at a bygone past in the present day of Uro and Embercleave, its general game plan remains a winning strategy: An unstoppable onslaught of 1-for-1s and 2-for-1s that overwhelms the opponent with efficient value and hard-hitting damage. As we return to Alara, we return as well to the Savage Lands of the Jund shard, and all that it brings with it.
Hellion Devastator is probably the most eye-catching card for a traditional Jund deck. 4 Haste power is already appealing but attaching an incredibly powerful and versatile removal ability makes this Hellion a hyper-efficient 2-for-1 combined with fast damage that would make even Bloodbraid Elf blush. This is about as classically Jund as it gets, but as if that wasn’t enough, its Cycling ability is just icing on this oh-so-delicious cake. This gives you the option to pitch it if you don’t have all 3 of your colors, which even makes it great to splash. If you’re looking to reject modernity and embrace tradition, this Hellion is for you. However, Jund isn’t all just in its old ways, it’s got a few new tricks as well.
While classic Jund normally operated at sorcery speed, Blue isn’t the only color where open mana should scare you any more. This Croc can be a brutal defensive play, exiling one creature and then blocking another for great value, or even help muck up combat on offense by adding some damage onto a blocking creature. Not to mention its on curve body still gives it a great fail state, and you have a real Constructed contender on your hands. (Also, if someone manages to put together a Jund Crocodile Tribal deck with Grindlesnap in MSEM, please let me know because that sounds incredible.) Of course, an iconic standard deck wasn’t the only thing the 2009/10 era brought to Magic: It also introduced new Multiplayer formats, such as Archenemy and Planechase, which would eventually lead to the rise of Magic’s most popular and unique format, Commander. And in Alara, one of the most popular Commanders of all time makes her return.
Meren is back, this time with a combative twist. She’s still at her classic recurring tricks, but this time she’ll need to crash into the red zone to bring back creatures, and you’ll need to make sacrifices to resurrect them. However, this incarnation of the Nel Toth shaman also comes with some unique strengths. For one, her lower converted mana cost and higher power make her a great aggressive play, even having great potential in competitive decks. Uncounterability is a nice line of text as well, helping to give an edge against control decks. For MSEDH though, the real boon is the access to an extra color. Being able to play the powerful Jund shard cards (hey, this recursion looks like some nice synergy with Hellion Devastator’s cycling ability) gives the deck a lot more great tools, and being able to play cards with the new Consume mechanic from all 3 colors will give powerful synergy. I expect Meren will be popular and powerful in casual and maybe even competitive formats. Big thanks to Mako for giving me the opportunity to write a bit about these awesome designs! Jund is back with a vengeance, and I hope you’ll be looking forward to playing with these and so many more awesome cards.
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Post by kayiu102 on Sept 18, 2020 1:46:03 GMT
Hi y’all! I’m Kayiu, a member of the custom magic community, and I’m here to A. talk about my favorite experiences drafting Alara and in doing so, B. , give you some sick previews! I think for lots of these previews, its tempting to point out the exciting and splashy mythics/rares. However, what really makes a set tick is its limited environment, and that lives or dies by its commons and uncommons. For me, when drafting, one principle matters above all others: You only draft once! (Or YODO, for short.) This means you should treat every draft as your last, and thus always make the picks that are the most fun, even if they aren’t the most optimal. Take that janky buildaround and roll with it! Pivot your draft halfway through pack three! Live a little! Of course, the most enticing YODO thing to be doing in a multicolored format, at least for me, is going the full hog and building 5c Greedpiles! To start off, one obviously needs fixing, and nothing in this set does it better than… {...this secret card which youre going to have to click on this spoiler to find out}...Terraformer’s Globe! This card, frankly, is insane and I honestly feel like it's a little underrated by people drafting this set. The obvious comparison is Arcum’s Astrolabe, but in that limited you at least had to draft the snow lands to use with it, while here you get basic Islands for free! Fixing is king in multicolored sets, and this is the cheapest you’ll get it here. While your opponent plays a tapped land t1, you can drop this cantrip, and have an artifact to boot, for the cards that care about that. The only cost to this card, really is having to be in primary blue. However, that’s not really a cost when you likely would’ve been in blue anyways for… {ooh nested spoilers how spooky}...Disturb the Riddle Gate! This card is an absolute house. Like Mako said earlier, cycling helps 5c by both, well, being in all colors, and also because the ability itself is effectively colorless, and thus allows you to use it in a bind to dig for bombs, removal, or simply your last color. At worst, you can clear a bunch of lands off the top of your library; at best, you get a draw 5 for three mana, a feat that puts all but Dreamsight Well to shame. Drafting multiple copies of this also feels great, since you can just chain them into each other! Okay, but I hear you saying: neither of these cards really embodies YODO. Sure, they each in their own ways potentially enable nutty decks, but they can just as easily be put into less all-in decks and still be powerful. That’s fair. But that’s where you turn to... {oh boi here we go}...Maelstromancy! Okay now we’re really talking! This card has, more often than any other in the set, been my P1P1 siren song. Part of being able to draft 5c is of course getting access to the most powerful bombs in each color combination, but it sucks to have to sometimes cycle one of them away because you didn’t have the right colors to cast it. Maelstromancy mitigates that drawback by allowing you to rebuy them in the lategame! Build a board out of nowhere and stabilize with Master of Etherium! Calamitous Rampage your opponent for lethal! Or hell, do it twice if you’re grabbing back an Incantation Demon - or maybe you want to use its ETB to rebuy a Disturb the Riddle Gate? Oh, and best of all? These are only the potential applications at common! And of course, this isn’t even discussing the less flashy but no less powerful first ability, which gives you unparalleled card selection. Overall, Maelstromancy is my favorite uncommon and maybe even favorite card in the set, and is emblematic of what makes Alara draft exciting to me. Okay, before I go, I just want to add one personal note: I am not a fan of custom sets that return to canon planes. I have never played in standards or limited formats with any of the Alara sets. In general I am largely ambivalent towards what I know of the plane of Alara’s lore. In short, I am emphatically not the target audience of this set. However, I still fell in love with this set purely on how exciting it was to draft, and I think that speaks volumes about the quality of design this set has. Big Ups to you, Mako, and excited to see the future of this set in constructed.
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Sept 18, 2020 21:07:43 GMT
Posted in Feature on September 18, 2020
These products obviously aren't real, but Booster Packs look cool and are fun to make. Here's what they look like for Alara: Featuring (from Left to Right) Godspeaker Mayael, Maelstrom Elemental, Sun-Sigil Ordainer, Tharrsus, Tyrant's Scion, and Esper Shardseeker. But why stop here? We can pretend there's also Booster Boxes. This mock-up features art of one of the new Planeswalkers in the set! Exciting. And while we're at it, we might as well go all-out and have a "Buy"-a-Box promo. Here's Kaalia, Sky's End, which doesn't appear in the main set: Look at that pretty foiling. You can imagine it curls like a taco for premium authenticity too, if you like. Now Alara's main set has 259 cards total, and Kaalia here is collector number 265. The Basic Lands occupy slots 260-264 because each Booster Pack of Alara will have one of ten common dual lands in the Basic Land Slot. Maybe these Basics show up in a Bundle, but alas I have no mock-ups for that fake product to show you. You can admire the pretty art on the Basics themselves, though: And then there's the Tokens (and one Emblem!). Which one is your favorite? I'm personally a fan of the original Shards of Alara Zombie token, so I used the same one here. Ditto for 1/1 red Goblin, white Soldier, and the Blue Thopter (Embellish time!). The all-color Elemental sure is something, and we see Etherium Cell returning (though I can tell you Tezzeret isn't in the set). That's all I have to show you for now! Stay tuned for more upcoming previews! Editor's Note: Hellion Devastator's art should be credited to Angga Dwipayana. This has been corrected in the set's latest PlaneSculptors page.
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Sept 22, 2020 0:33:17 GMT
NOTE: This article was written by Turn1solring. Thank you, sol!
Hello There. I’m Turn1solring and this is my preview article. There are very few things in magic better than blue and its counterspells. One of them is dimir. And if you are willing to add red, you can run this preview card as your commander! So, how to use this commander in the best way possible? Run counterspell tribal where every counterspell also draws you a card for two extra mana. Oh, you want your opponents to have fun? Then the best way to play this commander would be a graveyard focused deck. This turns most of the cards in our graveyard into extra spells. Why wouldn’t we want to kill something when arcanist’s reaver dies? And what about all the cards we can exile with Nefarox after we cast traumatize? This is a commander I would love to play. But if that isn’t something you like, here’s another fun grixis commander: Every single instant or sorcery you cast brings something back from your graveyard! Imagine reanimating Sheoldred after you cast opt! And because Mako was very generous, here’s a third preview card, a spell you would want to run with both of these commanders:
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gynoidpoet
0/0 Germ
Posts: 2
Favorite Card: Maelstrom Wanderer
Color Alignment: Blue, Red, Green
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Post by gynoidpoet on Sept 24, 2020 3:59:06 GMT
Hello, everyone! I'm Marina, aka gynoidpoet, a long time fan of Magic both canon and custom, who has only recently gotten involved with the MSE community via the Discord server. Needless to say, I'm honored that Mako would allow me to take part of the spoiler season for such a great set, and can only hope that with time, I can grow to be as cool as him. So, Alara time! Alara takes me back to my school table magic years, where cards like Invincible Hymn seemed like the best in the game, an Esper intro deck a top tier contender, and the newest spoiler, Progenitus... simply jaw-dropping. But my favorite part of Alara is something that I would discover years later, round the times of Kaladesh, when I was getting back into the game and beginning my first true dip into its lore. Scouring card galleries as a pastime, I found within Alara a special kind of forgotten gem, cards representing a link both in the fantasy of the game and its mechanics: Inhabitants from one shard being changed by another. The shards, in their state of division, constitute what makes Alara, Alara. This is why almost every proponent of a return insists on how important it is for the plane not to become a multicolor hodgepodge, as the tricolor identities of the world would be totally lost. And yet, the shards are united, and the resulting impact cannot be denied. And perhaps one of the most important results of Alara's unification, is how one of the shards has what another desperately craves. The red material needed to create Etherium, known previously to the Esper shard as carmot, has been found to be Jund's sangrite, thanks to the work of a certain commander staple: And now, the orderly esperites delve into the savage lands of Jund to find the crimson gold they so desperately crave. Thus begin our spoiler cards, starting with two of Esper's famous colored artifact creatures, experiencing a bit of a culture clash, with varying degrees of danger involved: These two are quite solid fliers for limited, as stapling cycling on a finisher or growing potential on a midrange threat is a significant upgrade from a simple vanilla creature. It would appear sphinxes aren't very compatible with the sacrificial tendencies of goblins. But who is this Tharrsus mentioned by Irasa? It turns out, Breya's expeditions have left quite the impact on Jund, changing that which most closely resembles politics in the plane forever: The Ooze is another solid finisher, with a solid body and evasive ability, plus the ability to function as a one mana cantrip in red. Bask in Fire is a strong card for controlling red decks, being able to both refill your hand and get rid of pesky small creatures. And finally, the sculptor is a classic blue-style mana creature to enable artifact shenanigans. As you can see, Breya and her esperite harvesters have killed the greatest dragon in Jund in their quest for sangrite, for the best place to find the blood red crystal is in the veins of dragons themselves. However, as this rare creature shows us, getting sangrite this way is no simple task: Sangrite Dragon is a Jund-ier take on the classic Shivan Dragon archetype of rare, allowing you to quickly devour creatures to firebreathe your opponent away. As far as Baneslayers go, the Dragon is a glorious one for sure. However, not all relationships between denizens of the different shards are of a warlike nature. And on the same note, not all harmonious bonding between alarans leads to benevolent results... This lich from Grixis has found out that making jeweled vessels to bind its soul to is far easier in the word of steel than the world of flesh. So much so, that his power to return to the world of the living has reached the levels of Zombie staple Gravecrawler. This one drop cares about artifact creatures instead though, a subset of magic creatures notoriously more powerful as a whole than Zombies! It's embellish cost can even help you have an artifact creature for him to cling to, and you can cast him with said cost from your graveyard too! And that's the end of my preview article! Let me finish by saying that if you have a history with the plane of Alara, you should trust Mako to take you into a new leap inside it! And if you don't, I'd encourage you to take a chance and explore this world of shards, conflict, and discovery. Perhaps you too will find something that will stay with you for over a decade!
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Sept 25, 2020 15:27:47 GMT
Posted in Mako Magic on September 25, 2020
I wrapped up mechanical design stories for Alara last time, so today we're focusing on card-by-card stories. Let's get to it! Celebrant of Jubilation, Ethersworn Elite, Incantation Demon, Varakna Wurm, and Ziggurat BehemothWe kick things off with the set's tricolor commons, which are arguably the most important cards at this rarity. Not necessarily in terms of power; they're important because they help define the set's identity. Alara at its core is all about the tricolor Shard combinations, so these were the first thing to be included when I was figuring out how I wanted the set's multicolor common slots to look like. They're crucial enough that I was definitely willing to spend the set's common complexity budget on the cycle, though I did try to have them be simple when possible (and in their final state that you see here, I think Varakna Wurm is the only one still on the complex end of the spectrum). I had three requirements for this tricolor cycle: 1) They all had to have the same converted mana cost, 2) They played into what their corresponding Shard's play style was, and 3) They all had to have Cycling {2}. The cycle's direct inspiration comes from Khans of Tarkir's own common tricolor cycle (featuring Abomination of Gudul and co.), and Requirement #1 was borne out of a desire to make sure each of them was usable roughly on the same turn number, meaning I didn't want to have one Shard be able to use their tricolor common much earlier than the rest. Of course some colors have access to mana acceleration, but I at least wanted measures in place to make it feel like each Shard was on equal footing when it came to their tricolor commons, and making the cycle strict with its CMC requirement filled that role. Requirement #2 is pretty straightforward: each card on this cycle had to play well with what the rest of the Shard is doing. Angel of Jubliation untaps your creatures to double your Encourage activations in a turn. Ethersworn Elite provides an artifact count of three in one card. Incantation Demon buys back your Tether spells so you can recast them. Varakna Wurm rewards you for consuming tasty creatures. Ziggurat Behemoth pumps a creature to enable Stampede. Requirement #3 was an easy thing to settle on once I committed to Cycling being in the set, and it's so that they had an out in case you couldn't cast them, analogous to the KTK cycle having Morph. Before I move on from this cycle I'd also like to address a common critique I was receiving throughout much of the set's life: it's that some of these don't have to be tricolor at all! "Ziggurat Behemoth could be monogreen!" the crowd exclaims, to which I respond by presenting my views when it came to designing multicolor cards for this set: • Multicolor cards don't have to express each of their individual colors through effects equally, or at all. • Sometimes a card is multicolor just as a balancing tool. • Sometimes a card is multicolor only because it's part of a cycle. And to quote Blogatog:Hopefully this sheds some light on the design choices I made for some of the multicolor cards in the set. Not every gold card can be Mantis Rider, after all. Sighted-Caste Knight, Sphinx's Scrutiny, Spinebreak, Brutal Struggle, and Sacellum VisionaryAlara's multicolor slots at common went through a lot of revisions. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to have more than what KTK did (it only had the 5-card tricolor cycle at common). For reference, original Shards of Alara had 15 multicolor commons: 1 Five-Card Cycle of Tricolor Cards, and 2 Five-Card Cycles of Two-color Cards. This was also the configuration I tried first, but I ended up cutting the extra Five-Card Cycle of Two-Color Cards, and so Alara only has 10 multicolor cards at common. I was on the lookout for ways to increase tricolor presence at common so I tried designing Two-Color cards that had bonus abilities if you control a permanent of the third color, like so: CM01 Dagger-Thrash Assailant {2}{R}{B} Creature - Viashino Warrior First strike As long as you control a green permanent, Dagger-Thrash Assailant must be blocked each combat if able. [3/2]People seemed to like them, and some members of the cycle were pet cards of mine, but I ultimately found the designs to be unsatisfactory over the course of playtesting and so I dropped them altogether. So for Two-Color cards at common I was left with the cycle you see above. I tried designing them to be simple yet appealing multicolor cards. You'll notice all of them are allied pairs, since the set didn't make use of enemy pairs as doing so makes it easier for Drafters to pivot from one Shard to its neighbor. As such, these cards are intended to be decent in either of the Shards that has the pair it's in—both Bant and Esper decks for example would be happy to play Sighted-Caste Knight. I also designed the effects on these to be more A+B to contrast the holistical approach when it came to the Tricolor commons. I realized I was initially trying to be too clever than I had to be with the multicolor commons when the set really just wanted to have generically good gold cards. Ajani's Advocate, Jhessian Cavalier, Cesspool Scrapper, Torchlight Tormentor, and Flarespore MycoidEditor's Note: Jhessian Cavalier's art should be credited to Hoang Lap. This has been corrected in the set's latest PlaneSculptors page.While I ended up with only 10 multicolor cards at common, there were other ways by which I was able to increase the presence of multicolor. As you see above, cards with off-color abilities was one such method, and I have to say I really enjoy designing cards that fall into this category, and think that more sets should have them, custom or otherwise. My personal favorites from a canon set were the ones in original Theros. They add texture to the Draft environment but require less commitment than what an uncommon gold signpost might demand. After designing the actual gold cards I decided that the set should have 10 cards with off-color activations: one cycle going clockwise around the color pie (in WUBRG order) for the color tied to their ability and the other in reverse. The cycle above is the counterclockwise half of this 10 card cycle, and again all of them have allied pairs for color identities. Skygrid Surveyor, Essence Erasure, Sangrite Ooze, Calamitous Rampage, and Sigil of FortitudeThe cards above compose the other half of the off-color activation cycle at common, this time going clockwise (with the White card, Skygrid Surveyor, having a Blue off-color ability and so on). I wanted to differentiate the halves of the 10 card cycle from each other beyond what their main colors were and what color their ability needed, so instead of designing more activated abilities that functioned on the battlefield, I made use of Cycling. Doing it this way also answered a design task I assigned myself, which was to emulate the modality of hybrid cards without actually using hybrid (if you recall from the Vision Design Document excerpt I posted in a previous article, I was firmly against having hybrid in the set). This is why they were initially designed to have hybrid effects as well, as evident in Skyrgid Surveyor, Sangrite Ooze, and Sigil of Fortitude, but you can see I broke the pattern on Essence Erasure and Calamitous Rampage. That decision stemmed from holes in the set needing to be filled (another counterspell, a large burn spell), and also for Essence Erasure's case I wasn't coming up with a hybrid effect I was happy with. I do like the end result a lot, though, and it's interesting to me that off-color, one-color cycling hasn't been done yet in canon Magic. When Ikoria came out I briefly considered just turning these into Cycling {1}, but after drafting that set a lot I was certain about keeping one mana Cycling costs requiring colored mana. Citadel Battlemage, Sanctum Battlemage, Necropolis Battlemage, Savage Battlemage, and Jungle BattlemageNow we move up one rarity with these uncommon Battlemages named after their Shard's trilands. New Shard-Identity Battlemages were one of the things that I knew had to be in the set. The ones from Shards of Alara were all {2}{M} 2/2's with {N} and {O} tap abilities (M, N, and O here representing different colors) so I tried different combinations from a matrix of costing, P/Ts, and ability styles. I decided on 2 CMC for them fairly quickly; I already had another uncommon cycle at 3 CMC that had close enough to a Shard-Identity which I was unwilling to change (they're called Shardseekers and I will talk about them in Part 2 of this article), and doing them at 4 CMC felt too high. I wasn't interested in doing 1 CMC Battlemages so that left the sweet spot at 2. The P/T was also decided by process of elimination: I tested them as 1/1s but they weren't appealing enough in that state; 2/2s were out of the question because Blue couldn't get Bears (unless the cycle was costed as {M}{M}, but double pips were something I used sparingly due to the multicolor nature of the set); 0/Xs bored me; and 1/2+ were less vulnerable than I'd like. For a short time I considered breaking my No Hybrid Policy and bringing back gold-hybrid but I felt it wasn't worth using on a single cycle (later we'd find out that Ikoria would say otherwise). That left 2/1, and so Pikers they were. I didn't want to repeat tap abilities for this cycle so that was removed from the equation early on. I tried {M}{N} and {M}{O} activations; {M}, {N}, and {O} abilities; and {N}, {O}, and {M}{N}{O} abilities. All of these felt overdesigned and clunky so I just went for {N} and {O} abilities in the end. The effects I assigned to each of them evolved quite a bit too, and there was much development tweaking with this Cycle. All in all I'm happy with how they turned out.
I have to cut the card stories here for now, but join me in Part 2 where I delve into the design of the set's fixing slots. Until then, may you go for gold in all that you do.
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Post by Lady Mapi on Sept 26, 2020 3:08:33 GMT
Savage Battlemage is my favorite card so far, especially since I totally have a deck that that guy can fit into with little-to-know tweaking.
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Post by ThatDamnPipsqueak on Sept 28, 2020 22:40:07 GMT
The Real Meaning of Christmas Death and Taxes
There's an old saying, "In life only three things are certain: Life, Death, and Taxes". Now, of course, starting a magic article off this way is already causing people's minds to jump towards visions of Thalia, of Aether Vial, of Rishidan Port, and so on. But I want you to step back for a bit, and challenge some of your understandings of the archetype known simply as Death and Taxes, or DnT, in Legacy and Modern.
Contrary to popular belief, the oldest Death and Taxes decks did not feature tax creatures. After all, they predate Thalia, and many of them predate Glowrider, the first tax on a white creature. Death and Taxes did not, in fact, refer to a deck that taxed you and beat you to death. It instead referred to alternative version of the saying we opened with: "In life only three things are certain: Life, Death, and at any given Magic tournament there will be someone on white weenie."
For basically as long as magic has existed, people have been trying to turn white creatures sideways for lethal. Whether the OG Savannah Lions or the more recent Adanto Vanguard, as long as there are cheap white creatures with decent stats people will be trying to curve out. But as magic evolved, and many archetypes grew more powerful, simply curving out stopped being good enough. Instead, a key element became maximizing white's access to Hatebears, cheap aggressive creatures with disruptive upsides.
In MSEM, we have plenty of hatebears, plenty of aggressively stated white creatures, plenty of disruptive elements. We have the perfect storm for Death and Taxes, and all we need is a shiny new reason to do so.
Etherium Abrogator looks good. But it isn't good. It is absurd. A flying 2/1 for 2 mana means it'll hold equipment amazingly and help you beat your opponent down even if they are on a creature based deck. And the hoser? It hits almost every creature based deck in the format. Turning of ETBs renders midrange decks almost useless as they struggle to generate value, and need to dig for an answer. Soul Sisters Aggro is a fairly popular deck, and this shuts it off. Wanderfall, a combo ramp/midrange deck built around abusing landfall triggers, just won the last GP. In the face of this, its Seeker of New Horizons doesn't work. Its Into the Unknown doesn't work. Its Splitting Bloom doesn't work. The deck folds. All of the enchantment based decks that show up, that use O-Rings to control the board, or Featherfall Ascetic to generate an unfathomable amount of value, are dead in their tracks.
Alara isn't a lock for MSEM, but if it gets in, three things are certain.....
Digitized Memories
I can remember the very first pack of Shards of Alara I opened. The first card in it was Windwright Mage, and I just stared in awe at the multicolored artifact frame. I'd been playing Magic for less than two years, and the majority of that time had been experiencing Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, two blocks with a very traditional fantasy aesthetic. But staring at the Etherium body of the Mage, seeing the sci-fi esque art, I was hooked. That was 12 years ago, when I was 12 years old. The original Alara block holds a special place in my heart, and it brings me great joy to say that Mako truly honored the block and setting with his set. And the memories of that first pack still resonate as I page through the spoilers.
While I've now settled myself firmly as a UBX player, with the X usually being R or G, I wasn't always that way. Back in Lorwyn, my favorite tribe was Goblins, and my favorite deck was a green deck that I called "rare tribal" since it was every green rare I owned. Shards was one of the things that changed that, with Esper becoming my favorite color combination for a long time afterwards.
One of the things that was truly mindblowing, that we now take for granted, about Esper was the presence of colored artifacts. Artifacts could be, could do, anything. I think Ostracizer Orb is a great example of this type of Esper Innovation. In a normal set (such as, for instance, Lorwyn or Shards of Alara, my childhood sets), this sort of effect would be an Enchantment named Oblivion Ring. But Ostracizer Orb being an artifact opens up so many different options for synergies. Additionally, the 'nonartifact' clause gives the Orb a sort of old-school feeling to it, evoking Terror as an efficient kill spell with the notable downside of missing artifact (and black) creatures. Ostracizer Orb would be a standard powerhouse, as 2 mana to answer most things is an absurd rate. But as an artifact, it is very fragile, with green usually having main deckable ways to break it open and free whatever you ostracized, and the fact that it misses artifacts leads to an interesting metagame counterplay where artifacts are valued more highly.
Back to that first pack I ever opened of Alara, I passed through most of it, eyes greedily taking everything in. And then I got to the final card, which solidifed me as an Esper player. My very first Mythic rare stared back at me, with amazing art by Chippy:
Every color combination, whether shard, guild, or wedge, has things they excel at, and ideals they hold. To me, the idea of Control has always screamed Esper. You surpass the need for a normal body, slowly drain your opponents, and hold the answer for anything they do, the only answer they deserve: "No." At the LGS I went to growing up, there was an inside joke, spawned from a dubious decision in a previous Lorwyn draft: "Do not pass the Cryptic Command." Commands, and then Ultimatums, were a large force in that era. Cryptic Command defined Standard tempo and control, and then Cruel Ultimatum acted as the ultimate go over the top card. Later, when Zendikar arrived, people would build meme decks designed to abuse Lotus Cobra to cast Violent Ultimatum as early as turn 3 (thankfully, wizards never made the mistake of printing Lotus Cobra into standard again, given its ability to color fix and cast incredibly powerful cards ahead of curve.)
When Mako showed me the final of these three preview cards for the first time, I had to smile. To me, this is Esper, in its most pure and perfect form. And I look forward to trying to cast this, even in a format as brutal and efficient as MSEM.
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Oct 6, 2020 18:08:19 GMT
Posted in Mako Magic on October 07, 2020
Previously we dived into card-by-card stories for Alara, and today we continue with a focus on the set's approach to fixing. On to the show! Sculpted Observatory, Gloomtide Gulf, Erupting Territory, Bigroot Valley, Serene Trail, Somber Meadow, Twisting Fissure, Caustic Mangrove, Hazy Summits, and Lush CoastThe first card slots that were put into Alara's set skeleton were for a full cycle of common dual lands, which was another thing from Khans of Tarkir I knew I wanted to emulate. KTK's gainlands ( Tranquil Cove and co.) did most of the heavy lifting for that set's fixing, so starting with the same sounded like a good idea. The default plan was to just reprint the gainlands, but as I'm a stubborn card designer I was hellbent on coming up with a new cycle. The problem was that finding decent dual designs for common was a very difficult exercise. I was working on this cycle in conjunction with the faction mechanics, and it went through a number of iterations as well. I had set myself up for a difficult task, but I wasn't without guidance: I was using Mark Rosewater's article Gates Foundation while designing, and I highly recommend giving it a read if you ever find yourself wanting to design common duals. The one constant across all my designs for the cycle was having them enter the battlefield tapped, as I wasn't interested in any other drawback. For my earliest attempts I tried to find a minor enters-the-battlefield ability as a substitute for the lifegain from KTK cycle. I considered a +1/+1 buff (essentially making Turntimber Grove into a dual cycle) but that was quickly scrapped just after one playtest, since tap duals want to be played as early as possible, and having a P/T bonus created an undesirable tension in that regard. I tried mill one on enter, and while the set would evolve to have somewhat of a graveyard component thanks to Jund, it felt unfocused for the duals to play it up. This approach wasn't yielding any results so I moved on to looking at every common nonbasic that's ever been printed, regardless of whether it produced colored mana or not. For a time I fixated on Seraph Sanctuary, specifically its second ability. Instead of gaining 1 life right away on ETB as on the gainlands, maybe I could have a trigger on my cycle for lifegain? It was easy to swap "Angel" with "multicolored permanent", as that's what the set focuses on. After a few playtests with this version, however, I found it too unwieldy and the cycle was gaining more life than I wanted. Then I briefly considered just doing it Gate-style, giving the land a relevant subtype ("Spire" was the main candidate for this, next to just giving them basic land types), but I was already making Cycling the non-faction archetype and didn't want to detract from it. This then gave me the idea to give the lands Cycling, and for a lot of the early versions of the set they all had Cycling {1}{M}{N} ({M} and {N} being the colors of mana they produced). Essentially those were worse versions of the Amonkhet duals ( Irrigated Farmland, etc.) but they were serviceable enough for Limited. I was only ever just okay with them, so I was still on the lookout for replacements. I arrived at the final iteration when looking through original Innistrad (I'd often look through the card lists of my favorite sets for inspiration). I had somehow missed Shimmering Grotto (and Unknown Shores, for that matter) when I searched up all the common nonbasics ever printed. Sidegrading it so that it could tap for two colors of mana in exchange for entering the battlefield tapped seemed perfect for the set. I had some worries about them making 4 and 5 color decks too easy, but I was pleasantly surprised with how they've performed. This is probably the cycle I'm proudest of designing for the set. Thanks to cajun for indulging my request to include a gold option for the namebar and typeline on MSE Mainframe, which I think adds a sleek touch to these lands. This cycle appears in the basic land slot in Alara booster packs, which is drafting tech I've loved since it was used in Fate Reforged.
Spire of Bant, Spire of Esper, Spire of Grixis, Spire of Jund, Spire of Naya, Terramorphic Expanse, Rings of New Alara, and Sigil of the Skyward EyeThese cards fill up the colorless fixing slots in Alara (and yes, technically the duals are also colorless, but they were designated differently in the skeleton). The Spire cycle was my replacement for the KTK Banners, and whose wedge versions we see in Ikoria at uncommon. They were easy enough to arrive at once I knew I was using Cycling. Manaliths haven't been historically good (and we've come a long way since the shard Obelisks) but I felt the need to include them anyway as they do decently enough in Sealed, and help contribute towards the Cycling archetype at common. The set having artifact synergies also makes them a shade more appealing. Terramorphic Expanse could have been a utility artifact but I chose yet another fixing land for its slot. I considered including it in the basic slot but decided not to. Rings of New Alara and Sigil of the Skyward Eye reside at uncommon and were designed to be less direct fixing. Finding the amount of fixing for this set involved a lot of trial and error, but seeing all the draft decks in action made it a fulfilling endeavor.
Bant Shardseeker, Esper Shardseeker, Grixis Shardseeker, Jund Shardseeker, and Naya ShardseekerWhen I talked about the Battlemages last time, I mentioned Shardseekers, and here they are—creatures that ended up far from their original Shard due to the Conflux, looking for their way back home. Like the common duals, this cycle concept was one of the earliest designs I made for the set, though they've changed a lot since then. The initial design had them at common, and they all fetched lands when they entered the battlefield. Reactions to it were mixed; some felt that they were too breaky colorpiewise (for the nongreen colors, at least), while others didn't seem to mind. I was justifying them as bends that made sense given the context of the set, which gave me good reasons to include them as they were—all colors needed ways to color fix in this environment. Honestly, I believe in that still and think that fetching on ETB is still the truest form of this cycle, but I conceded to feedback and just turned them into land cyclers (though I refused to give them the keyword, as I have never been a fan of typecycling being lumped together with regular cycling). The move to uncommon was brought about by space issues, and I was trying to reduce shuffle effects at common. Maybe in the alternate timeline where I stuck to my guns and kept these as ETB they could have asked you to discard a card for the fetch.
Meticulous Mechanist, Terraformer's Globe, Perilous Sojourn, Chromeleon, and Conduit of the ConfluxThese cards represent more of my efforts to give all colors fixing, or at least as close to fixing as the colorpie would allow. White's been getting more scry in recent sets, and it's a change I support. Smoothing draws will hopefully mean getting the proper lands to cast spells, so I looked for white card slots to give scry to. Terraformer's Globe is a blue take on fixing, following the footsteps of Grixis Illusionist. Perilous Sojourn does a sneaky impression of a land-fetch spell while putting in work for the graveyard-oriented archetypes. Chromeleon shows red adding other colors of mana, a theme that is echoed on a few more red cards at higher rarities. And of course there's green with Conduit of the Conflux, showing it as the best fixing color, though I took steps to make sure the gap between the colors wasn't too wide—for instance I refrained from giving green a Rampant Growth variant in the set.
That's all I have for this article. What do you think of the cards previewed so far? If you've drafted Alara before, what do you think of the state of the set's fixing? Let me know! More articles are coming, so keep your eyes peeled!
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Oct 20, 2020 10:51:07 GMT
Posted in Arcana on October 20, 2020
Big news everyone, Alara has been accepted into Magic Set Editor Modern 2, which you may be familiar with as the largest custom card Constructed format! Alara becomes legal to play in MSEM2 starting November 1st, 2020. I'm currently working with the MSEM2 Council to make some balance changes before the set release, so some cards (possibly including those which have already been or will be previewed in this thread) may see some tweaks. If you haven't already, come be a part of the MSEM2 Discord and join in on the fun. I also just wanted to give my thanks to the people who believed in the set. Together we can Master the Maelstrom!
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Oct 20, 2020 11:09:59 GMT
Posted in Savor the Flavor on October 20, 2020
Alara is a plane rife with conflict, and so brings with it figures of legend both familiar and new. Check out what's happening with the legendary creatures and planeswalkers in the set below! If you want to discuss Alara's lore further, hit me up on this thread, or drop by the set channel over at the Custom Magic Discord.
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galva94
2/2 Zombie
Posts: 123
Favorite Card: Cryptic Command
Favorite Set: Kamigawa
Color Alignment: Blue, Green
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Post by galva94 on Jan 25, 2021 14:45:20 GMT
All this work is impressive, I'm amazed by the cure for the details you put into this!
Is the full spoiler available somewhere? Or the .mse-set file?
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foureyesisafish
7/7 Elemental
Posts: 386
Favorite Set: Ikoria: Lair of the Behemoths
Color Alignment: Blue, Red, Green
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Post by foureyesisafish on Jan 25, 2021 16:58:28 GMT
The full release was a few months ago I believe.
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Mako
0/0 Germ
hunk of flesh
Posts: 13
Formerly Known As: SonictheBrushwagg
Favorite Card: Lightning Bolt
Favorite Set: Shadowmoor
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by Mako on Feb 7, 2021 19:43:42 GMT
All this work is impressive, I'm amazed by the cure for the details you put into this! Is the full spoiler available somewhere? Or the .mse-set file? Thank you for your interest, and apologies for the delayed response, but a spoiler of the full set can be viewed on ALARA's PlaneSculptors page here. The .mse-set file for AlARA can be downloaded here, and Cockatrice files can be downloaded here.
As for this thread . . . it's been a while, eh? I suppose while I'm here I'll take this as an opportunity to announce that Maelstrom Masters is now accessible on PlaneSculptors: Maelstrom Masters is a curated expansion featuring canon cards set in the plane of Alara, offering a fresh twist on ALR Limited.
The recommended draft format is ALR/MMM/ALR, but feel free to experiment! Sealed is generally best with 3x ALR and 3x MMM. I know I promised this much earlier but life got in the way, as it does. But it's here! Feel free to host some ALR drafts with it. Lastly, I want to say I have one more article left in me before calling it quits on this thread, which I hope to write and post in the near future. I'll be doing a retrospective on the cards of ALARA. Or maybe I won't, we'll see. Peace.
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foureyesisafish
7/7 Elemental
Posts: 386
Favorite Set: Ikoria: Lair of the Behemoths
Color Alignment: Blue, Red, Green
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Post by foureyesisafish on Feb 8, 2021 12:46:38 GMT
All this work is impressive, I'm amazed by the cure for the details you put into this! Is the full spoiler available somewhere? Or the .mse-set file? Thank you for your interest, and apologies for the delayed response, but a spoiler of the full set can be viewed on ALARA's PlaneSculptors page here. The .mse-set file for AlARA can be downloaded here, and Cockatrice files can be downloaded here.
As for this thread . . . it's been a while, eh? I suppose while I'm here I'll take this as an opportunity to announce that Maelstrom Masters is now accessible on PlaneSculptors: Maelstrom Masters is a curated expansion featuring canon cards set in the plane of Alara, offering a fresh twist on ALR Limited.
The recommended draft format is ALR/MMM/ALR, but feel free to experiment! Sealed is generally best with 3x ALR and 3x MMM. I know I promised this much earlier but life got in the way, as it does. But it's here! Feel free to host some ALR drafts with it. Lastly, I want to say I have one more article left in me before calling it quits on this thread, which I hope to write and post in the near future. I'll be doing a retrospective on the cards of ALARA. Or maybe I won't, we'll see. Peace. So that's what that set symbol was for, huh? Seems fun. EDIT: I take it back its Inkwell Leviathan
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