MTGNexus

Welcome to the Card Creation League! Everyone is free to participate in either or both of the first two rounds. Come join us!

Theme

It's time for Elements Month to return with a vengeance! Last appearing over two years ago on MTGSalvation, this flavor-based month of challenges is a guaranteed fun, if strange, time. All will be explained below, but let's get on with the show.

The magic of the natural elements is some of the most primal and mysterious there is - simplistic though it may seem, appearances can be deceiving, and the "elements" can include more abstract and powerful forces than most mages imagine.

This month, you'll be theming design around your picks from the following lists. Choose wisely, as your picks will carry over round-to-round. Challenge Contestants:
Henlock
Ink-Treader
kwanyeegor-ii
Subject16
Schedule

• Round 1 — Open to Everyone (September 1st-7th)
• Round 2 — Open to Everyone (September 8th–14th)
• Rounds 1 and 2 Critiques (Due September 16th)
• Top 8 — Open to top 8 finishers (September 19th–22nd)
• Top 8 Critiques (Due September 24th)
• Top 4 — Open to top 4 finishers (September 25th–28th)
• Top 4 Critiques (Due September 30th)
• Final (End of month, winner determined by public poll)

Blue Snow and Green Storm

Howling Hinterlands
Snow Land (R)
Howling Hinterlands enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add G or U
GU: Put an ice counter on a nonsnow land you control. If you do, that land becomes snow and Howling Hinterlands becomes a 4/2 snow Elemental creature with flying and trample until end of turn. It's still a land.
The winds shall rage, until all the world is buried in ice.

Red Dust and Green Flesh

Ashvale Mycelium
Land (Rare)
As Ashvale Mycelium enters the battlefield, you may exile a land card from your graveyard. If you don't, Ashvale Mycelium enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add R or G.
RG, T, Exile a creature or land card from your graveyard: Create a 1/1 green Saproling creature token.
The fungi absorb the nutrients in the volcanic ash, birthing life from a force of destruction.

White grain and Green seasons

Flowering Ryefields
Land (r)
Flowering Ryefields enters the battlefield tapped unless you control an enchantment.
: Add or . If Flowering Ryefields is enchanted, add wg instead.
Scholars have tirelessly observed the stars so as to understand the cycle of the world. We have always understood it in the fields out our windows and the foods on our tables.

Blue ice
Red energy (positive)

Advancing Iceberg
Snow Land (Rare)
T, Pay 1 life: Add U or R
Snow spells that you spend three or more snow mana to cast can't be countered

Round closed! Please critique and rank everyone else.

Ink-Treader - really interesting manland and flavorful, love the condition to animate it. However snow + nonsnow feels like a weird playstyle

Subject16 - Seems very powerful yet fairly boring. There are already plenty of lands that tap to make 1/1 tokens. I think this might just be too strong for a dredge type deck

Henlock - really cool payoff for auras on lands, I like it

1. Henlock
2. Ink-Treader
3. Subject16

Ink-Treader: I like that it's a fairly cheap and strong manland but with limited capability because of making your lands snow. I feel both elements despite it being far from green's typical storm associated cards.

Henlock: The elements are super well meshed together and it's nice that it works with land auras because a lot of them reference times of season. The only thing that bothers me is that a lot of these auras (particularly newer ones) also tend to give you "T: add two mana" which would make this card's extra mana condition a little redundant. But for the sake of the older-style land auras like Overgrowth and Trace of Abundance this is a great reward for an archetype.

kwanyeegor-ii: It's strong land that comes in untapped unconditionally. I see the uncounterability as the essence of red's element, but I think logistically it's a bit difficult to keep track of how much snow mana you produced and where/when you're spending it. Something along the lines of spending the mana on a snow spell to make it uncounterable like Boseiju would have been a lot more elegant.

Top 3:

1: Henlock
2: Ink-Treader
3: kwanyeegor-ii

Ink Treader: This reads a bit odd in mixing snow lands and nonsnow lands in the same card, but in commander, where there are quite a bunch of nonsnow utility lands, this can be a very serviceable manland, specially if you don't rrally care about snow. Compared to both Faerie Conclave and Treetop Village this looks very good. It packs more punch and extra evasion. The biggest downside I see is that it has no tension. As I said, as long as you don't really care about snow, the limitation is pretty negligible.

subject16: In a world with fetchlands, this is very strong. In modern, you're very likely to have a land in graveyard quick and this becomes an excellent T2 land drop. Extra copies need some more work to enter untapped but the fact that you can use the resource for it later to create a token looks pretty encouraging when playing it suboptimally. Token-producing lands tend to have a more expensive activation cost, That said, I don't think a cycle of these would be healthy, so a rg is more than enough and fits with the land matters in those colors' tradition.

kwanyegor- This looks a bit too constricting against strategies that use countermagic as their way to deal with opponents. I think you got carried away with the "Take it, blue" approach. In a land, that kind of hossing is simply too powerful.

1. Subject16
2. InkTreader
3. kwanyegor

And our finalists are Henlock and Subject16! Final round to come soon.