Thirteen Temples of Theros: of gods, men, and road trips

[TearsOfTomorrow]

I'm not really saying Erebos it's broken, but it is a very powerful drawing engine, and that's lovely I think 4 toughness makes it too resilient to damage based removal and pressure. What I mean is that with those stats it makes it easy to drop early and wait for the devotion cap.

Reasonable, lowered stats to 2/3. I also added two creatures with Bestow to White!

[TearsOfTomorrow]

I have created a cycle of legendary sorceries, each meant to convey a power or aspect of the corresponding god. They're legendary sorceries and they get a discount if you control an enchantment creature, so of course the idea is, since any given card of this cycle is meant to represent the power of a specific god, it is going to give its absolute best if you control the god itself when you cast it. Hope you guys like them!

[folding_music]

Still reading these but I think you have some neat ideas, definitely an improvement on the original Theros's constellation idea! Distorted Memory is a really cool card and would definitely sprout its own Pauper deck, that's my fave design :3 Fearless Charge is outclassed by at least two other commons - Reckless Charge, Samut's Sprint; you could bump that up in power.

[TearsOfTomorrow]

Still reading these but I think you have some neat ideas, definitely an improvement on the original Theros's constellation idea! Distorted Memory is a really cool card and would definitely sprout its own Pauper deck, that's my fave design :3 Fearless Charge is outclassed by at least two other commons - Reckless Charge, Samut's Sprint; you could bump that up in power.

Thanks for stopping by! I don't count Reckless Charge for this kind of reasoning because it's not legal in standard: as for Samut's Sprint you may have a point, but given that the whole gimmick with Heroic is to make creatures stronger when you target them with a spell, I'm reluctant about giving people the option of dealing 4 or 5 damage turn 2 with Anax's Honor Guard. I'll need to give it some thought.

[TwentySeven]

I love the mechanical flavor of the embodiments - growing stronger with devotion/belief is awesome!
A couple of thoughts about design:
- the denounce on Write on Earthenware doesn't work, since the spell doesn't target anything - the ETB trigger targets, but by then costs have been paid and the spell has resolved.
- A card called Sleep Paralysis already exists! See Sleep Paralysis. Your version is significantly stronger, but IMO probably still fine if there is more than average enchantment removal (and noting that Paralyzing Grasp also exists)
- The power level on the legendary spells seems all over the place: white seems unplayable, even in a planeswalker heavy meta like War of the Spark, due to the hoops you have to jump through to make it do anything, and even then it seems too narrow; blue seems significantly stronger (see River's Rebuke or Flood of Tears, and assuming you aren't against a token deck or the like) - noting that you need a legend in play to cast the spell, this seems to me to be the power level you should shoot for. Black is again very narrow (except against tokens..) - compare to Finale of Eternity, which doesn't require a legend, can hit more targets on average, and scales. Red reminds me of By Force - even assuming you will have an enchantment most of the time, you still need a legend, and it only shaves 1 mana off the cost. Green is back to being very strong, and IMO about where you want these spells, if not a little too strong.

That ended up being a lot more than I expected.. I'm new to custom cards, so feel free to disregard any or all of the comments, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts!
Looking forward to seeing more cards!

[TearsOfTomorrow]

- the denounce on Write on Earthenware doesn't work, since the spell doesn't target anything - the ETB trigger targets, but by then costs have been paid and the spell has resolved.
- A card called Sleep Paralysis already exists! See Sleep Paralysis. Your version is significantly stronger, but IMO probably still fine if there is more than average enchantment removal (and noting that Paralyzing Grasp also exists)

Ooooh those are good catches. For Write I think I'll just remove the Denounce bit entirely and leave the card as a Cast Out clone, while for Sleep I'll need to come up with a different name (which is going to be a pain, because messing with people's dreams is Ashiok's whole gimmick and a reference to "sleep paralysis" would have been great in this context); in fact, I welcome suggestions in regards to a new name.

As for the legendary sorceries you make some valid points, but the issue here is that I wanted each spell to tell a story, to clearly show what each god is about in the story: Heliod showing no remorse for how he killed Elspeth, Thassa being furious at planswalkers after the Kiora incident, Erebos denying Liliana's attempts at bringing Gideon back, Purphoros being picky and prideful when it comes to the quality of artifacts, and Nylea loving a good hunt. Especially in the last case, avoiding a straight-out copy of Finale of Devastation wasn't easy. So yeah, the way I see it the issue here is that there are three needs that must be reconciled: the need to fit the flavor I just detailed, the need to have a "family feeling" (all legendary sorceries must have the same gimmick, although it doesn't necessarily need to be the "X cost which is reduced when you have a god" one I went for), and the need to be playable. One issue I am only now realizing is that these cards, being legendary sorceries, will only work if you have a god or another big legend on the field, but since they're rare (and the gods/other big legends are also rare or even mythic) the chances of people pulling BOTH one of these AND a legend in relevant colors are very slim, which makes these cards very bad for draft. So yeah, while I do welcome suggestions on this regard, it's probably back to the drawing board with these :/

[TearsOfTomorrow]

So, I couldn't com up with a way to fix/improve the legendary sorceries, therefore I have removed them for now, reverting Thassa's Disdain to its old self. In their place, I've introduced a cycle of rare legendary bicolored enchantments! Let me know how you like them folks

[TearsOfTomorrow]

Small update: I've added a new blue card (Featherless Biped). Been very busy lately, and for that I apologize: I will have juicier updates in the upcoming days, hopefully.

[TearsOfTomorrow]

Posting just to keep this from going necro. My health conditions have greatly worsened, and I haven't had the time to work on this. I'll try my hardest to have some significant update posted as soon as I start feeling better.