MTGNexus Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day

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void_nothing
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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

Been a while, huh?

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 12/16/19 is Psychic Venom.

In the very early and lawless days of the color pie blue got land hosing like this sometimes. (See also Mana Vortex.) You could colorshift this exact card to black and print it nowadays; Contaminated Ground is actually a usually-upgraded version.
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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

void_nothing wrote:
4 years ago
Contaminated Ground is actually a usually-upgraded version.
I like it as 1{b/r}.
EDIT: I also just realized this should be in my cube (linked below for the curious impaired).
“Comboing in Commander is like dunking on a seven foot hoop.” – Dana Roach

“Making a deck that other people want to play against – that’s Commander.” – Gavin Duggan

"I want my brain to win games, not my cards." – Sheldon Menery

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 12/19/19 is Presence of the Master.

Always wondered why this wasn't printed as a world enchantment ("enchant world" in the original typeline) given the deck-crippling and global effect. Hashtag bring enchant worlds back (but not seriously).
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Post by Subject16 » 4 years ago

Aah, the old days where white could counter things. A path worth visiting again perhaps?

Countering a creature spell if they already have more creatures than you?

Countering an instant/sorcery if they've already cast one this turn?

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

I was actually thinking in the other direction, just because I'm sort of obsessed with Planar Chaos colorshifts.

Pendrell Stillness 3U
Enchantment (U)
Whenever a player casts an enchantment spell, counter it.

But I think white countering has a place.
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Post by Morpic_Tide » 4 years ago

White counterspells as instant-speed versions of prison and tax effects works quite well from a thematic perspective, and offer White some good value where it otherwise lacks it. Prison effects that simply shut off a permanent type don't work well in mono-White, but this style of ability is seen in Deafening Silence, which still lets many decks function, but shuts down almost all "unfair" strategies based on abusing the standard rules.

In general, I love to think of White as the "Slow Color", where it plods along at default pace, sometimes getting catchups on things like Smothering Tithe, and relies on constantly-mounting value like Slivers and Anthams and board-buffs. Give more slow and weak reanimation, stuff like Unearth, Embalm and shuffling back into the deck, and White can recur its above-usual value. Making those high-value cards be high in color identity then keeps them out of the shenanigans (such as having Smothering Tithe on legs for 1www, being extremely unreliable to hit in time in heavy multicolor).

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 12/20/19 is Inverter of Truth.

Confession: I love "bad mythics" more than life itself. Mythic rare should not be the "put competitive power here" rarity, it should be for wild stuff like this regardless of whether it's playable in Standard.
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Post by SecretInfiltrator » 4 years ago

Two effects white can easily have instead are "Players can't cast enchantment spells." and "If an enchantment would enter the bettlefield, exile it instead." I don't see the need to give white counterspells just to do this. For other stuff... sure. It's just a keyword action like "destroy" - different colors can handle different things differently. It's just that white is already the color that can remove any kind of permanent of the battlefield, so white already handles itself already quite well with "solving things".

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Post by Morpic_Tide » 4 years ago

Mythics should indeed be more about buildarounds and general game-ending shenanigans than simply being very competitive. On that front, Throne of Eldrain has a lot of this. Even Broko fits this pattern in being a buildaround for Food, the problem is the Elkening was way too pushed. If it was literally Kenrith's Transformation on a 0 or -1, it'd probably be tolerable since you can keep your Artifacts and you'd have an Aura to blow up.

Harmonious Archon is probably a better example of a "bad" Mythic, in that it's a buildaround for creature flood, a strategy that's suffered immensely in recent times. However, it can do a great deal to make that strategy work by turning any unbuffed block into a trade. And if you're running, say, The Circle of Loyalty to buff your stuff and Realm-Cloaked Giant to clear the way, this becomes potentially workable mono-white.

Go Boros, and you have several more such cards, like Outlaws' Merriment to continuously provide tokens that have useful abilities and are buffed by the Archon, or Rowan, Fearless Sparkmage giving you yet more board-breaking trade power and an outright win condition. And the literal Boros stuff in cards like Feather, the Redeemed and Parhelion II, which could both have served as Mythic Rares (demote one of the Gideons and Jace, Arcane Strategist to Rare for the slots), the former a buildaround, the latter a game-ender.

This is the sort of stuff Mythics ought to be doing. Opening the door for niche strategies, and closing the game out.

---

To now speak of Inverter of Truth in particular, it's a great example of Black doing stuff that should be suicidal for brief power, but in reality can instead be a heavy-duty source of value when you take the right precautions. What this card desperately wants to go along with is Delve, so you can filter your graveyard to have a very small deck of very good cards, alongside general card selection to get to those good cards. Use Elixir of Immortality and such to keep the cycling of these good cards going.

Generally, the nature of this usually has more to do with self-milling graveyard synergies and Death's Shadow, but Inverter of Truth takes the former and can turn it into a very dense loop of very powerful effects, especially if you're going for some variety of Commander shenanigans where games go really long and there's not much room for typical forms of redundancy.

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 12/30/19 is Jadelight Ranger.

Interesting how much hidden variance there is just in exploring twice.
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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 12/31/19 is Leafdrake Roost.

Should have been Plant Drake tokens.
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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 1/7/20 is Exemplar of Strength.

Nice visual representation of removing -1/-1 counters for attacking in the art with pulling the arrows out.
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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 1/11/20 is Controlled Instincts.

This is one of the non-reprinted cycle members alongside a pretty heavily reprinted color hoser. Hoser Auras, though, often feel pretty clever.
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Post by SecretInfiltrator » 4 years ago

Oh, I missed Lando. :D

Togk Manytooth is a neat name that screams "Jund" to me, so kudos to the flavor text author.

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 1/21/20 is Exploration.

The best one-mana enchantment ever? Iconic, so ripe for riffs.
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Post by Morpic_Tide » 4 years ago

The big reason this is able to be afforded as a one-mana enchantment, from a balance perspective, is the limitations of land-fetching and otherwise drawing into land. Generally, 20-24/60 cards in a deck are lands, so you only get a land approximately once per three cards drawn, and need two lands in hand for this to actually matter.

As a result, without deliberate land-fetching, it will most likely accomplish nothing at all as you draw two in your opening hand and not one on your second turn, and semi-frequently give you one additional mana on turn two. Rarely, it gives you two extra mana on turn two, unless running deliberate land-fetching, and at that point, with at least eight deck slots dedicated to fetching on top of the 20-24 lands themselves, you're getting a statistically-considerable rate of dead draws that aren't progressing you to victory.

Overall, this card is only worth it in combo-based ramp decks that either have easy access to large amounts of raw card draw, or can easily fetch out what they're spending mana on. Simply because you otherwise just don't have enough access to lands for this card to be worth including in the deck.

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

Quick riff not meant for a Standard expansion

Mwonvuli Enchantress G
Creature - Centaur Druid (R)
Mwonvuli Enchantress can't be the target of Aura spells.
You may play an additional land on each of your turns as long as you control an enchantment.
2/1
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Post by JovialJovian » 4 years ago

I remember when Exploration was a $1 card, a real bargain bin piece.

It's less busted than Land Tax as 1-drop land-based enchantments go, but still really strong.
I often see it outperformed by Burgeoning in EDH due to the rate at which lands are played in a multiplayer setting. Both run out of steam without some way to fill your hand constantly, which is a nice built-in balancing factor.

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 1/22/20 is Boil.

The extremely harsh global CMC 4 color hosers of early Magic are iconic, at least to me, but most likely shouldn't be done again. Not in Standard, at least.
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Post by SecretInfiltrator » 4 years ago

Boil, Flashfires, Tsunami, Perish, Anarchy, Chill, Compost, Reap, Choke,Douse, Insight, Hibernation, Karma, Cleanse, Drought, Justice... so many great single-word names used on color hosers that I could do without ever existing.

Honorable mention for blue's "god of the color pie" two-word Acid Rain which is a quite puzzling (nearly) colorshift of this CotD as well.

I like how this is even an instant just to make certain you can punish blue for spending some mana at the end of your turn and leaving their shields down even for the tiniest moment.

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Post by M00NSIDIAN » 4 years ago

I'm not entirely opposed to color-hosing cards. I can roll with them as a part of design philosophy, but I admit I'd rather see more interesting things done with them than just "hey, remember that 'ally and enemy color' concept from way back when?" (which I pretty much hate because ever since at least Apocalypse, it's become increasingly meaningless; one of the manuals described enemy colors as "natural foils" which is perhaps a lot smarter).

But "destroy all lands of X type" is definitely the point where land destruction becomes really, really unfun. They're sideboard cards at best, generally limit your deck-building (unless you have no islands and generate blue from nonbasic lands only, you're not playing Boil in UR+), often very nearly blow out your opponent in one card... I mean, that latter part is okay when you do it, but anything like that sucks when it happens to you (anyone out there ever see people suggesting Force of Will would be okay for Standard?)

Technically speaking, there's more space to explore for this kind of thing (Conversion exists, but why stop there, why not make "Destroy all mountains" for 3W?), but there's definitely a time to leave things on the cutting room floor. Generally, if it says "Destroy all [land-related word goes here]," costs 4, and doesn't have a LOT of extra rules text, it shouldn't be done nowadays.

So if it happened, I'd expect it to be more like From the Ashes.

Boil Over
3R
Instant
Destroy all Islands. For each land destroyed this way, its controller may search their library for a basic land card and put it onto the battlefield tapped. Then each player who searched their library this way shuffles it.


I made a couple small changes from that card (kept it an instant, lands drop tapped) so it's not completely useless against certain decks until an extreme late game that won't be reached very often. Lands drop tapped to help preserve the effect of stopping your opponents from countering your stuff on your next turn -- but honestly, just like the original Boil, if they weren't going to counter this, they were probably not going to be able to counter anything you did anyway.

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Post by folding_music » 4 years ago

SecretInfiltrator wrote:
4 years ago
Boil, Flashfires, Tsunami, Perish, Anarchy, Chill, Compost, Reap, Choke,Douse, Insight, Hibernation, Karma, Cleanse, Drought, Justice... so many great single-word names
I've always thought they should bring in a keyword to allow new cards to have the same name as old ones - all these fantastic names stranded on outmoded, banned or intentionally terrible cards...

like "Parallel (Your deck may include this card, or a different card with the same name, but not both.)"

Anarchy is a great and totally warranted card though, giggle. Apart from it being able to destroy enchantments I have incredible sympathy for it to this day =P White victimized Red back in the day so it deserves a kill-spell for armies of Soltari Priests! Hibernation is also totally fine imho.

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Post by JovialJovian » 4 years ago

In Unstable, there were mechanically distinct version of some of the cards. I feel like Unstable was a testbed for some of the wackier ideas they have knocking around, not necessarily ones that cannot work in normal Magic. So that might actually become a thing down the road, "you can have up to four cards with the same name in a deck" would cover mechanically different cards that share a name.

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Post by void_nothing » 4 years ago

The Custom Card Creation Random Card of the Day for 1/27/20 is Goblin War Drums.

A card that a couple of decades after it was printed, suddenly became a mass keyword granter.
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Post by M00NSIDIAN » 4 years ago

Goblin War Drums is a simple card with an extremely clean design (which was probably a bit funkier back in the day), which I imagine could get away with being reprinted in a Standard-legal set today. I mean, Angrath, Captain of Chaos exists, so it's not too far off of an option, right? Well, maybe. Permanent mass evasion seems like something the team isn't the hugest fan of.

I went off to see if there was a card that was the reverse of this (i.e. makes your creatures blockable by only one creature at most), and there is (Familiar Ground), which I'm surprised to see hasn't been reprinted since Seventh Edition (Masters 25 aside, neither has Goblin War Drums!) and is an effect we've seen fewer variations of (Gruul War Chant grants menace, along with some other cards; aside from Familiar Ground, there is nothing that gives all your creatures "can't be blocked by more than one creature).

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