dietcolafangirla
0/0 Germ
Karlov Family Reunion Ravnica Allegiance 2019 Hype Train
Posts: 13
Favorite Card: Gift of Orzhova
Color Alignment: White, Blue, Black
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Post by dietcolafangirla on Sept 16, 2018 17:22:33 GMT
Greetings. I've spent the last god knows how long trying to make a magic set with a focus on more contemporary military strategy, with cavalry, infantry, artillery, officers and various other bits and pieces. Principle to this theme is a mechanic to represent artillery, and orders coming from far behind the front lines. To this end, I have created "Volley". Volley [Cost]: Permanently reveal this card from your hand. [Effect]. The idea is that artillery is firing from a great distance away, beyond the reach of the battlefield. Once revealed in this way, the Volley ability cannot be activated again. It requires the card to be unrevealed to activate. To balance this additional ability, and somewhat for flavour's sake, the actual artillery pieces themselves are quite poor and overcosted, only really useful for defending your position. The synergy comes in with the addition of Officers, a creature type which typically function by buffing your Soldiers, Artillery, Knights, etcetera. A common utility effect is to activate the Volley ability of a creature you control, for free, once it has already been deployed to the battlefield. Other alternatives include hiding the permanently revealed cards in your hand such that they can let off their Volley again later. So the Commander/Player must strike a balance between blasting their opponents away from his hand with the strong, untouchable Volley effects, and playing his artillery pieces to defend his life total, using Officers to keep up the barrage on the field. To add some nuance to the deck, Soldiers and Knights fill in the blanks, giving an early game presence or quick creatures, and, given enough time, the Commander can muster his forces for a more conventional combat assault. As you can see, another set mechanic "Blitzkrieg", spread across Mardu colours, gives rewards for playing your bread and butter forces to make up the core of your strategy. To be honest, I imagine most of these cards are probably quite busted, but they are quite enjoyable and satisfying to design, and give an excuse to find great old Crimean War paintings. I'd like to spread Volley out over Mardu as well, but not limited to a single faction, like Blitzkrieg. For fun, I'll post a few other random red cards I made today in preparation for the post. Hope you enjoy. Please give me any feedback on Volley, Blitzkrieg, the general theme, or anything else, thanks in advance xx |
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Post by fluffydeathbringer on Sept 16, 2018 17:46:02 GMT
- in paper magic, a card being permanently revealed from your hand results in awkward gameplay where you either play with the card in reverse in your hand or play with it on the field and face the prospect of players confusing it as being on the field. this problem may not exist in a purely digital gameplay environment such as Lackey or Cockatrice but I think it bears mentioning all the same
- Master of Ordnance would still require you to reveal the creature you activate the Volley ability of since he only nixes the mana cost. also Volley being form the hand may result in confusion over whether Master lets you activate the Volley ability from the hand or from the field
- in general, a creature (something whose function is on the battlefield) having its main importance be in a non-battlefield zone is awkward designwise
- if you want to convey a creature attacking from a distance, canon magic has a variety of ways of doing that, such as tap abilities that deal direct damage to creatures/players. my advice would be to just use something like that as a mechanical theme
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Post by Jéské Couriano on Sept 16, 2018 18:41:04 GMT
Agreed. This is unworkable in print Magic because there's no realistic way to do this fairly.
Revealing from your hand for each use would pretty much be a discount Forecast (and probably your best option), putting it somewhere on the table or on a box would cause boardstate confusion (Is it on the field? Is it in exile?), and permanently revealing it from your hand would require you to hold the card out with one hand at all times so your opponent can see it and you can't, which isn't workable.
There's another issue with this ability, and it's one of flavour. As far as we're aware, Wizards has not said boo about the timeframe in which a given turn in Magic goes. While a permanent reveal would make sense for a battle that lasts a couple of hours in-story, there're a lot of implications in the rules and in the cards that battles take place over larger time-frames - somewhere on the order of days/months/years.
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kinotherapy
6/6 Wurm
stupid kor i just fell out of the floor
Posts: 322
Favorite Card: Ruthless Raider
Favorite Set: Rising Tides
Color Alignment: Blue, Black, Red
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Post by kinotherapy on Sept 16, 2018 18:48:09 GMT
I shared some thoughts on Volley before and the others have covered most of it, but a few things I'm wondering: - Is Volley mono
 ? There's about 3 different things red can do so you might find yourself struggling with design space Is Volley supposed to be only usable once? I can't read but anyway the reveal should be listed as a cost, I'm not really sure if that stops it from being repeatedly activeable or not under the current rules.- Is this for limited, constructed, or both?
onto the rest: - Field Spotter is a pretty weak rare, since red gets bears with upside at common now. I'm not sure how much value this would usually get, since it'll do nothing early (though that's fine) but you also don't want to play it too late, after you've played all your volley creatures
- The different class types thing is a little strange since they could all be covered by one creature type at the cost of a little flavour but I guess that's a conscious decision you've made already. Bear in mind that you'll have to look out for 3 times as much relevant info on typelines, and that each individual class will have to do a lot of work to differentiate/justify itself
- Rifle Squire itself seems pretty good ye. Not sure how good since it depends on the battalion boys' frequency (the classes should be capitalised though)
- Send in the Next Wave is an interesting one cause it's literally just a double spell, basically just flashback. Will all the volley spells look like this? The volley part would be instant speed, is that intended?
- I don't think a relevant creature type is enough to feel good about a 2/4 for 4. Siege regiment I'm skeptical about because you'll generally want to be playing volley creatures after you've revealed them which works counter to it, it also works counter to the un-reveal guy from earlier
- Flavour text and watermark are lit (I like the flavour a lot actually, I think the timeframe thing is fine)
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dietcolafangirla
0/0 Germ
Karlov Family Reunion Ravnica Allegiance 2019 Hype Train
Posts: 13
Favorite Card: Gift of Orzhova
Color Alignment: White, Blue, Black
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Post by dietcolafangirla on Sept 16, 2018 19:19:32 GMT
Well, the long and short of it seems to be that hand revealling just isn't going to fly. Back to the drawing board.
Thanks for the comments folks, I've got a lot of work to go.
I might make the Volley be a tap ability with a name, such that it can be referenced by other cards. Expect MKII of this keyword soon.
Jeske, I have to disagree with you regarding flavour, I'm quite conscious of the scale for the various engagements over the course of a game. I think that having regiments clashing, cannons firing, battle plans being drawn up, secrets, plans and tactics deployed, political, courtly and military intrigue, technological prowess and social reform as well as individual, personal heroism can and should all exist within the timeframe. The ambition is for the match to almost be a self contained standalone story in itself, which is partly why I'm being so ironclad with the factions and whatnot.
Kino, Volley is Red right now, but I'd like to expand it to Mardu colours. I have no real justification for that besides that it feels right.
The differentiation between creature types is something that appeals to me personally, I suppose that's all I can say.
Oh dear I forgot to capitalise the class types, doh.
With hand reveal gone now, feedback regarding it is probably moot, but ty for giving it some thought.
Ty <3
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Post by mythwind on Sept 23, 2018 16:24:36 GMT
Your art and flavor texts are amazing! Kudos on your design!
I liked the idea of the mechanic, makes creatures with Volley hard to remove by keeping them in your hand. It will be interesting if discard type spells then become the way artilleries try to engage each other. You are almost making another zone for the game.
You could say that long range damage-like mechanics have been done in MTG, with cards like Prodigal Sorcerer. Once a creature is in the battlefield, if you choose not to block or attack with it, removing it depends a lot on the options available in your format/set to deal with them. Now the Volley mechanic actually prevents you to use your creatures to chomp block...
Another thing is you do not need to reveal the card... you can cast it for the volley cost and have it return to your hand on resolution instead of the battlefield. I do not see people saying Capsize or cards with buyback are bad design.
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impspiritguide
2/2 Zombie
Favorite Color: Brown
Posts: 129
Set Hub: http://magicseteditor.boards.net/thread/256/pokemon-thread
Formerly Known As: Imp Elemental Spirit Guide
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Post by impspiritguide on Sept 23, 2018 18:42:43 GMT
First, I look forward to seeing this set.
Second, from what I see you are working on a standalone set (this set is probably not planned to be consistently used with the 20,000 other cards of MtG), it would be a standalone set and could use set only game mechanics (the only MtG set I know to compare it to is the Unstable set with the Contraptions). So another possibility is additional battlefield zones. You could have the front lines (the standard deployment zone for MtG cards), and then the rear lines with additional rules that apply to them (maybe something along the lines of cards deployed to the rear lines may not block or defend and have hexproof unless the opponent pays an additional  , just to give you ideas). I already know that there are some people that will argue with me on this, but I urge you to consider outside the box thinking for this set. There may be a whole host of other possibilities that may be possible.
As for volley, I will have to agree with fluffydeathbringer conserning the "permanently" revealed cards in paper cards imagine trying to play your hand and having to have half of your cards facing your opponent and half facing yourself. That said if you had some really long range artillery you could simply have the card abilities deploy from the hand similar to Infernal Spawn of Evil, but bear in mind that given the current rules the only way to destroy such cards is through discard and as such they should be handled with care unless you provide in-set counters to them.
Further on volley, I have to chime in with mythwind, there are already existing artillery. Two old tournament staples used to be Orcish Artillery and Orcish Cannoneers during the Sligh days. Bear in mind that from the combat standpoint all cards are effectively not on the front lines until placed there by the player during the attack phase. You cannot target a certain unit when attacking (unless you have included this as a broad concept in this set, "Provoke" is something I would consider with Cavalry myself) as such that unit could be considered to be on a hilltop already anyways. Similarly with the hand based volley concept, artillery volley's could not target other artillery as they haven't been placed on the battlefield, although a good commander would hope to place their artillery in this position it was often not true in battle and artillery often fired upon the opposing emplacement. If you really wanted to make the off the battlefield idea stick you could simply make an keyword ability "Artillery: This creature cannot attack or block" similar to that of Defender.
Another possibility for artillery is to use the mechanics in either artifacts or enchantments, or even create your own new card type. This would mean that the artillery isn't actually a creature (and therefore can't attack or block) but could be given volley type abilities once in place on the battlefield. Examples are Barbed Field, Deadapult, or Pyrohemia. You could also include cards that provide the more supportive roles of artillery fire such as support fire things like Orcish Oriflamme, Goblin War Drums, or Brutal Suppression all provide concepts that could easily be attributed to artillery support.
My one question concerning your set has to do with player life. The problem I see with conveying any real-life battle concepts into magic is the player life total. For a mage who summons his creatures into battle using magic that then defend him to his death (at which point they are set free from his spells or return to the realms from which they came) I understand. To a certain degree I could even understand adding some of this to early Roman, Viking or certain feudal battlefields as if the commander is overrun then the battle could often be over. But especially by the time of Napoleonic warfare the battles where more objective driven, destroying any one command unit or under extreme circumstances even routing the opposing army may not actually win the battle, which makes the player life total feel very out of place to me. Are you considering alternative win conditions or anything?
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Post by Jéské Couriano on Sept 24, 2018 1:17:25 GMT
Second, from what I see you are working on a standalone set (this set is probably not planned to be consistently used with the 20,000 other cards of MtG), it would be a standalone set and could use set only game mechanics (the only MtG set I know to compare it to is the Unstable set with the Contraptions). So another possibility is additional battlefield zones. You could have the front lines (the standard deployment zone for MtG cards), and then the rear lines with additional rules that apply to them (maybe something along the lines of cards deployed to the rear lines may not block or defend and have hexproof unless the opponent pays an additional , just to give you ideas). I already know that there are some people that will argue with me on this, but I urge you to consider outside the box thinking for this set. There may be a whole host of other possibilities that may be possible.
Look up the VS System, because that's essentially what you're describing.
VS System, at least for characters, has two different types of "in play" for the 2PCG - you have the front line and then you have a backline which is protected from enemy attacks so long as the front line has one character in it.
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