[ALT] Alternity

Legend
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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

ALTERNITY
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In a sense, Alternity is as much a Nexus community set as it is my own, as many of the designs are inspired by custom cards posted here on Nexus. (Okay, I stole your cards!) The original concept of this set that came to me several years ago was a full-blown MTGS community set consisting entirely of custom cards from MTGS. It was intended to be, in short, what Modern Horizons turned out to be. So, I gave up on making the set and focused on perusing the internet for art instead in the hopes of also finding new inspiration. (Besides, in my experience, finding 260 unique suitable images per set, which I had already done twice, is the most time consuming and exasperating part of creating a set.)

I was really disappointed because I actually thought Wizards would never make a Time Spiral-ish set ever again. Boy was I wrong. Modern Horizons wasn't the first proverbial needle to pop my Magic thought bubble. More than once, I'd been working on a cool new custom idea, and then Wizards would announce their cool new idea, and it was damn near the same cool new idea I was working on, so I'd abandon the cool idea and just play theirs. (I had to race to finish my second Ravnica set just to beat their Guilds of Ravnica spoilers!) I mean, part of the fun in making a custom set is for it to be somewhat original. And if you present a custom set to the world and it's just a knockoff brand of Set X, nobody appreciates it. So, I decided to make a set with mechanics and themes that Wizards "surely" wouldn't do for at least the next 5 years, giving me plenty of time to finish it. (BTW, I love both Modern Horizons sets!)

Anyways, with that in mind, during my implacable search for suitable art (that I hadn't already used in my other two sets), I stumbled across pulp fiction cover art, which led to science fiction cover art, both of which turned out to be a rich treasure trove of beautiful all-but-forgotten works of fantasy art. Paintings to be specific. Not yet-another-cliché-digital-production. But dense, lush, deep, textured, vibrant, shadowed, peculiar, emotive works of real brush-to-canvas paintings. Everything from realism, to abstract, to surrealism. Not unlike that found in the early years of Magic. (To be fair, they had their clichés, too!)

The images exuded an unexpected element of nostalgia to me, which I found inspiring. I'd seen some of the images – and many like them, especially those of the 70's & 80's – on bookshelves and in comic shops back when I was a kid. I also found some of the names of the books to be suitable for card names and the occasional teaser line on the covers to be suitable as flavor text. Shopworn though they may be, they are also incidentally quintessential. And so, with this new resource and a resolve to do something Wizards wouldn't, I settled on a science fiction/fantasy themed set with dubious mechanics and dubiouser archetypes.

As I critiqued the works of prolific and long tenured artists, whose careers started as early as the 1920's and spanned decades, they brought me through the decades with them, clear into the 1990's. I decided to make the year 2001 the cutoff point for the set's art as a self-imposed restriction and fun nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey. And so, the pulp fiction artists and editors of the twentieth century became my flavor team. Otherwise, building the flavor has been a long and lonely and sometimes very, very frustrating process. Over the course of the last two years, I've easily looked at over 40,000 images to assemble a gallery of just under 1000 images. It took me that long because it is so karstern-fraglin mind-numbing to go through them, even for a numbskull like me.

Is the art perfect? No. Of course not. But as much vintage art as possible has been used, even if it means the art is a less than perfect fit for a given card. Where it wasn't possible – that is, where there was literally no suitable, usable vintage image to be found – art that blends in with the vintage texture and tapestry of the gallery as a whole has been used. Unfortunately, frustratingly, there's a museum's worth of stellar vintage science fiction art that couldn't be used for one or more of the following reasons:
  • Artist unknown
  • Art contains nudity
  • Art is racially insensitive
  • Art won't fit into card frame
  • Art contains a familiar character, such as Conan
  • Art contains ubiquitous imagery, such as a portrait
  • Art is obstructed by something, such as a book title
  • Art contains contemporary imagery, such as a national flag
  • Art doesn't render discernibly through MSE, such as fine line work

    I hope you enjoy the art as it's presented in the set as much as I do.
MECHANICS
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SPECTRA: Spectra is an ability word that indicates the card has an ability that counts the number of colors among cards in your graveyard.
Spectra — ,,,for each color among cards in your graveyard...

ENTROPY COUNTERS: Entropy counters introduce a new, unique effect. (A permanent is exiled when its entropy counters exceed its mana value.)

EQUIPMENT TOKENS: There are no +1/+1 or -1/-1 counters in Alternity. Instead, there are Equipment tokens. Every Equipment token is identical. Each is "a colorless artifact Equipment token" with "Equip 1" and "Equipped creature gets +1/+1."

ASSEMBLE: Assemble is a creature token ability that allows you to make one giant creature token out of all your little creature tokens (with assimilate). At the beginning of each combat, you may have any number of untapped creature tokens you control with assemble form an assembly to become a single creature until end of turn. When you do, that creature will have all the characteristics and abilities of all the cards in the assembly and will be treated in every way as a single creature. Its power will be equal to the total power of all the cards in its assembly and its toughness will be equal to their total toughness.

Assemble ONLY works for creature TOKENS. If a nontoken creature should somehow get assemble, the ability will check to see if the object it's on is a token and if not, then it will do nothing.

The reminder text reads as follows:
(At the beginning of each combat, you may have any number of untapped creature tokens you control with assemble become a single creature until end of combat.)
WHITE
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W
BLUE
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U
BLACK
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B
RED
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Moon Landing (Common)
1R
Sorcery
Create a land token of any basic type and a 1/1 red Soldier creature token with haste.
GREEN
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GOLD
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D
ARTIFACT
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Starship Deliverance (Rare)
8
Legendary Artifact — Vehicle
4/X
Flying
Whenever Starship Deliverance attacks and isn't blocked, choose target creature card in defending player's graveyard with converted mana cost less than the total power of Starship Deliverance's crew. Put that card onto the battlefield under your control tapped.
Crew X

Starship Revelation (Mythic)
4
Legendary Artifact — Vehicle
1/4
Flying, haste
Whenever Starship Revelation attacks and isn't blocked, you may choose a card you own from outside the game and put it into your hand. If you do, Starship Revelation deals no combat damage this turn.
Crew 4
Legendary crew 1
LAND
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D
Last edited by Legend 2 years ago, edited 1 time in total.
“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

Legend
Aethernaut
Posts: 1639
Joined: 4 years ago
Pronoun: he / him
Location: Eternity

Post by Legend » 2 years ago

reserved
“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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