Alternate M:tG Color Wheel: Take II

[DrPraetor]

As foxwarrior indicated, the claim that a complex board state is a problem is highly subjective. But, in order to be maximally helpful, I will try to accept whatever subjective thesis you may produce. On your subjective thesis, having a reward for basic nexi that doesn't complicate the board restricts you to a very narrow slice of design space. And, your justification for doing so can probably be addressed more easily without doing that.

Be mindful, not everyone thinks of ramp-variability as a design failure. You may choose to risk not meeting ramp in order to have a richer draw later in the game; there is no objective answer to whether this is a bad game feature or not, but it's a deck-design constraint.

But, I tend to agree that it's bad - and if you agree, then you should consider the mechanics of a game like http://www.shadowfist.com/ (EDIT - that link is dead, use http://innerkingdomgames.com/shadowfist/index.html or http://www.chimpshack.org/db/ ) - which I think is a better game than MtG for a number of reasons. Shadowfist has less random variance (but more strategic variance, since new sites have a bigger cost) associated with ramp.

If you're not going to tackle such fundamental issues of game design, and the only difference you're proposing is to shuffle the color wheel around thematically - yeah, you might have an improvement; but, the latest card sets for Magic the Gathering have managed to work around the Blue problem and it's very difficult to see how some minor perturbation of color themes would justify abandoning all the empirical work that's gone into recent versions of MtG. When Fallen Empires came out, and MtG balance was a complete trainwreck, you would've had an opening.

[Username17]

When you get blown out by Surge of Growth it because it was in their hand, not because each land has an extra ability and you didn't take one of them into account because it got lost in the shuffle.

I could start a lovely philosophical argument about whether it is a worse feel-bad to get blown out because you didn't read a card that is in play or a worse feel-bad to get blown out because you didn't read a card in the fucking set list, but the truth is that it just doesn't fucking matter at all. If your game's resource mechanic is that your resources are actual cards, then there will be resource cards with meaningful text in them. Period.

Maybe you'll have sufficient message discipline to have no resource cards that have any text other than their resource production ability in the first set, but if the game gets any traction and expansion you will have other kinds of text on resource cards. Because it's extremely obviously open design space and it's fucking inconceivable that this design space won't get filled. You either write yourself space for these resource cards to be integrated easily, or the text on those cards is going to have to be complicated - but it will still happen anyway.



That is what fucking happens when you don't leave yourself space for resource cards to have simple ability text on them. You end up making resource cards with simple abilities anyway, but then the text on those cards becomes long and complicated because you didn't create the foundation for resource cards to have simple effects without extraneous bullshit text to "pay for" those abilities.

The principal problem with MtG lands is that people draw too few of too many and the they don't get to play magic. If you introduce cards that landcycle for free or for cheep you solve this problem without having to make the lands themselves complicated.

Having everyone play decks that have six lands and a bunch of cyclers isn't actually a particularly elegant solution to the problem of mana screw. Games will end up playing out very similarly in that people will search out the same lands every game because they only have six of them in the whole deck. But also, that involves a lot of shuffling and searching through decks, which is time consuming. There's a reason that most of the recent cards search just the top few cards and put the unpicked cards back on the bottom of the deck (or in the graveyard, or in exile, or whatever). That kind of searching still smooths things pretty well but it doesn't involve long periods of searching and reshuffling, so it's a lot faster in paper games.

If you want to stop mana screw altogether, there are certainly options to do that. In Hearthstone, resources build up as a simple counter and don't involve cards. In Jyhad, you start with all your mana (which is also your life) and spend that down as the game progresses. In Force of Will, all your resource cards are put aside into a separate deck and are drawn separately. And yet, in all of these games people still lose because of mana mismatch effects - drawing a hand of late game cards when you needed a mix of early and late game plays will still cause you to lose the game. Cards are still shuffled, hands are still drawn, and there will still be hands where you can't put up a meaningful fight and you get run over. That is simply going to happen.

Now personally, I didn't actually like Force of Will that much. The fact that you could always guaranty getting a resource card every turn meant that the high cost cards were far too linear. I do genuinely like the fact that in Magic the ability to play on curve becomes less and less certain as costs go up and thus threats for midrange decks can be big without being game breaking. But I can certainly see where they were coming from and if you wanted to go that direction the land deck is a viable and elegant option.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

Wouldn't the more "reasonable" and "universal" way to approach "resources" be to examine existing MtG colours, and base the resource cards off of the colours defining traits (going to use the A/B/U "-Lace" cards, b/c they have more clear terms)

Chaos (Red)

Purity (could also be 'Order') (White)

Life (Green)

Death (Black)

Thought (Blue)

With such a dynamic, you could have a block of cards that are set exclusively in a Plains, or a mountain, or an island, or a swamp; and there wouldn't be such a huge cognitive dissonance as the non-island pirate-block lands, or non-plains central asian steppes lands, or pretty much any setting that wasn't the original Dominara set.

The fact that the original MtG set was meant to be a stand-alone game; and that the later sets (Arabian Nights, Legends, The Dark, etc.) that followed right afterwards where also meant to be standalone games, but had to be rewritten to be the same game system as the A/B/U sets, is the very likely a large part of why the basic resources weren't well designed for use outside of the Dominaria setting's block of cards.

In the "-Lace" based style of resources, in a "swamp" setting:

Pure
-Water Spring, Berry Bog, Swamp Hill

Death
-Fetid pool, Mosquito Hatchery, Innocuous Tarpit

Life
-Mangrove Stand, Waterfowl Grounds, Castor Dam

Chaos
-Brackish Limit, Dredged Canal, Terra Infirma

Thought
-Drifting Tussock, Egret Roost, Mushroom Ring

I could see going for more than three land types for a type of setting, but most blocks of MtG tend to have three art types for each of the basic lands. Also, the more stuff you frontload, the less space you'll have to expansion later on.

[Username17]

It's certainly possible to do a game like V:tES or L5R where you care about individual people and your resource cards are like dance clubs or copper mines or something. But I would suspect that if you're going to do a kitchen sink fantasy setting that you're going to want your card suits to be something more generic and expandable.

That being said, you are going to want to have factions that have a look and feel that has resonance. I can't say I'm feeling it from "Void," "Mind," and "Time" as those basically sound like the same thing. Similarly, "Light" and "Nature" don't sound very distinct. You got three factions that are ephemeral and flooby and two that revere the sun. Uh-huh.

I have to say that while it took over a decade for them to get there, that the idea of naming the individual card suits simple colors and then having the multi-color combinations that decks actually are get faction names is probably where you want to be. Having a Boros or Mardu deck has a lot more weight than trying to make a three color deck be composed of three factions.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

That being said, you are going to want to have factions that have a look and feel that has resonance. I can't say I'm feeling it from "Void," "Mind," and "Time" as those basically sound like the same thing. Similarly, "Light" and "Nature" don't sound very distinct. You got three factions that are ephemeral and flooby and two that revere the sun. Uh-huh.

I don't see how Void, Mind, and Time are considered interchangeable. Void is necromancers and eldritch horrors, Time is clockpunk wizards, and Mind is decadent aristocrats with psychic powers. Likewise Light is knights, angels, and laser beams while Nature is plants, druids, and their forest friends.

[Pedantic]

I don't see how Void, Mind, and Time are considered interchangeable. Void is necromancers and eldritch horrors, Time is clockpunk wizards, and Mind is decadent aristocrats with psychic powers. Likewise Light is knights, angels, and laser beams while Nature is plants, druids, and their forest friends.

I can see how those concepts could be differentiated, as you put it above, but I can more easily see them as interrelated. Some of that might just be that MtG has already set some norms and I've internalized them, but those 3 things do feel like they live in the same conceptual space.

Void is the biggest offender, feeling like it overlaps significantly with the other two. Perhaps if you went more directly with Entropy? Though, that suggests time again. It might help if you moved to more specific symbols, and less general universal terms. "Mind" is far more open ended the specific aesthetic you're trying to evoke, but we all have a pretty solid understanding of sylvan "Nature."

[Username17]

I don't see how Void, Mind, and Time are considered interchangeable. Void is necromancers and eldritch horrors, Time is clockpunk wizards, and Mind is decadent aristocrats with psychic powers.

I don't know what the monsters summoned by time wizards would look like that would be meaningfully distinct from "eldritch horrors." I also don't know what the monsters summoned by mind wizards would look like that would be meaningfully distinct from "eldritch horrors." Basically you have three factions that are "pale dude in dark robes summons weird nightmare monsters." If you presented all of this as "Dark Magic" or some shit, no one would even notice that it was originally conceived as three different concepts. The concepts are simply completely interchangeable.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

at the point where you're treating the inherently very broad category "eldritch horrors" as a single unified concept you're being a bit unfair. I mean I'm pretty sure you're meant to be able to visually tell the difference between a Lord of Change, an Avatar of Khaine, a Shard of the Deceiver, and a Tyranid Zoanthrope despite those all being pretty eldritch horrors.

[Whipstitch]

I've always felt Warhammer 40k is remarkably bad at keeping things distinct from each other even aside from the bit where eldar and marines spend a lot of their time locked up in mirror matches. I don't even really think it's a goal of theirs, honestly, since they want to sell minis to as many people as possible and encourage things like the Khaine-Khorne overlap accordingly.

[Mistborn]

I don't know what the monsters summoned by time wizards would look like that would be meaningfully distinct from "eldritch horrors." I also don't know what the monsters summoned by mind wizards would look like that would be meaningfully distinct from "eldritch horrors." Basically you have three factions that are "pale dude in dark robes summons weird nightmare monsters." If you presented all of this as "Dark Magic" or some shit, no one would even notice that it was originally conceived as three different concepts. The concepts are simply completely interchangeable.

-Username17

Time doesn't do weird nightmare monsters at all, their big creatures are sphinxes or giant robots. Mind on the other hand has the kind of Demons that are big dudes with horns and wings. You'll note from the first post that each faction has a set of sample cards including a big dude for each color. Void has Voidspawn, Time has Sphinx of the Clocktower, and Mind has Willstealer Demon.

[DrPraetor]

stuff

None of that is obvious from the name "Time". If I had to guess, I would think that Entropy Blast would be a "Time" spell and not a "Void" spell, because from the name my first guess would be that "Void" gets monks and martial artists, not star spawn and undead. So "Artifice" might be a better name than "Time" - but you could call it Chicken Liver, the names are a minor point in compared to the deeper question of how you should split up the conceptual pie.

On a first pass, splitting blue while combining red and white is a good move, but then you need to decide what to do with Trolls and Fire Elementals.

Red and White lack enough conceptual space in spells, but not in creatures. Blue has too much conceptual space in spells, but not enough in creatures. So you have to reshuffle the spell effects and the creatures among red, white and blue, rather than just deleting red and splitting blue in half.

The advantage of using colors - the reason I use colors instead of concepts myself - is because that way you can jigger effects however you want. "Blue" means whatever the fuck you says it means, so it can have Sphinxes and Clockwork Dragons, sure; and it can have haste or slow or both or neither. "Time" kinda has to have both haste and slow, and other than the riddle why are Sphinxes on team Time?

When you opened the proposal I sorta assumed the names were placeholders. You can keep them but I don't see the advantage versus using colors or nonsense words. On top of that, you want the various factions as Frank said earlier to be one or another blend of colors/forces/whatever.

[Foxwarrior]

Oh, I get it, time gets clockwork because clocks are used to keep time. So presumably that gives them sun-, water-, sand-, and cesium-themed cards as well.

[Mistborn]

In general the colors are built more around a set of mechanics the gel together well than they are the fluff. Especially with Time and Void.

Time has a bunch of effects that are easy to fluff as temporal manipulation but those mechanics also are those most concerned with tempo as a metagame concept. A bounce spell can both be thought of as rewinding the card to a previous state, it also generates tempo from the player casting. Even the card draw spells could be thought of as letting the player take extra draw steps.

Void has a general theme of entropy/decay and most of it's creatures put cards in the bin or have vanishing because they want to get there as fast as possible. It also has cards that trade or steal resources and cards like Gaze into the Abyss or Hunger of the Void get cute about it. What they give you is one less than what they consume because thermodynamics.

[Username17]

Void has a general theme of entropy/decay

What the fuck does "Time Blast" do if it isn't "entropy/decay"? I'm seriously confused here.

But basically DrPraetor hit it on the head: the divisions are arbitrary. The goal is to divide things up in such a way that all the card suits have a satisfying amount of cards to play. And further to divide things up in such a way that when you make more cards that continues to be true. Thus, you have to divide things up mechanically, and you have to divide things up thematically. If you imagine a new card, you should be able to categorize it into a card suit by what it does and also by what it represents.

Functionally, that may mean that it makes more sense to actually name your suits after you decide what's in them. The important part is that when you decide that you want a card that counters a creature spell but doesn't counter a non-creature spell that you know what card border to give it - and that when you decide that you're going to make a new minotaur that you know what design space is available for its abilities.

Starting with faction colors, or faction numbers even, makes a lot of sense. You need each card suit to have guidelines for what a 2 cost aggro-creature might look like and what a 4-cost game affecting spell might look like, and so on and so on. What forms of evasion are common or rare in any particular card suit? What sorts of tempo plays belong in a suit? How does a suit control the board and what does its finishers look like? But equally important is that you have to assign themes. Thematic elements are going to be things like tribes - and not just entry-level creature tribes either. You want to know where the Dragons go, and what the broadly similar (but almost definitionally less awesome) high end creatures of the other suits look like.

When Magic was being made, ideas like Tempo, Control, Aggro, Reach, Value, and Inevitability didn't actually have names. Stuff just happened. People created those concepts when they tried to explain why and how cards were good or bad and how decks could be made to win more than they lost. Starting fresh you have the advantage of designing the card suits around important mechanical concepts rather than having those concepts fall out as they may. Remember that there was a long fucking time when White and Green were simply "the bad colors" and you don't have to repeat that mistake.

You can defend the design decision to have anywhere between 4 and 8 card suits. I personally would avoid the choice "five" because it makes comparisons to Magic harder to dodge. But whatever. The more suits you have the more different slots you have to fill and the more you can split things up. Splitting things up mechanically is easier than splitting things up conceptually. The "biggest monster" slot in particular is hard to fill because western mythology only really recognizes Dragons, Angels, and Demons as top tier monster concepts.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

What the fuck does "Time Blast" do if it isn't "entropy/decay"? I'm seriously confused here.

But basically DrPraetor hit it on the head: the divisions are arbitrary. The goal is to divide things up in such a way that all the card suits have a satisfying amount of cards to play. And further to divide things up in such a way that when you make more cards that continues to be true. Thus, you have to divide things up mechanically, and you have to divide things up thematically. If you imagine a new card, you should be able to categorize it into a card suit by what it does and also by what it represents.

I thought that was what I was arguing. There isn't a "Time Blast" that kills a dude by aging it to dust, not because that would necessarily be out of them with but because "destroy target creature" was not allocated to Time's wedge of the color pie. "Time Blast" probably returns a bunch of creature to their owners hands or does the "tap, don't untap next turn" thing to your opponents team

[Username17]

There isn't a "Time Blast" that kills a dude by aging it to dust, not because that would necessarily be out of them with but because "destroy target creature" was not allocated to Time's wedge of the color pie.

The point is that you will have removal in Time, because you will have removal in all your suits. Even if you don't make any removal for one of the suits in the first set, there will eventually come a time where that happens. Maybe it will be shitty removal that you have to pay extra for because it is in a suit that doesn't normally get any, but it will happen. It's unavoidable, and the fact that it will happen is inarguable.

If you are telling me that one of your suits is called "time" that has access to removal spells, and that there is removal in your game based around entropy and decay, and that despite the incredibly obvious next assumption that those aren't the same thing, I would say categorically that your divisions are bad. Maybe you could move your categories of removal around, or maybe you could change the names and allowed concepts of one or more of your suits, but whatever you do, it cant be that thing you just did because that's an unacceptable paradox.

Which of course is why it's probably better to decide what all your suits are called after you decide what all your suits contain. And importantly, what they don't contain. So that you don't end up assigning terms like "Time" to the category that doesn't contain "entropy/decay." On account of that being fucking dumb, and obviously a thing you should avoid if you can.

Anyway, designing suits isn't terribly difficult. Designing all the suits so they are roughly equal and support different strategies is quite difficult and also involves having to repeatedly revisit your initial assumptions and give things to one faction or suit that you'd originally intended for another and so on and so forth.

A good place to start is thinking about the Heroes of Might and Magic series. It is of course possible to name all the factions by opening up the thesaurus and writing down a synonym for "Castle." But you probably shouldn't do that. Further, it's entirely possible to have one of your factions just be a collection of human soldiers of various levels of badassery - but you probably shouldn't do that either. Indeed, "humans with swords" should be an available troop type for every suit (as we discovered was so incredibly necessary with Three Kingdoms, Arabian Nights, and more recently - Innistrad), and by extension no suit should be left with only humans and swords. But back to the Heroes of Might and Magic thing - how many level 7 monsters are there that aren't "kind of dumb?" And the answer is, honestly, not actually that many. It may well be the correct choice to have big names like Titans, Dragons, and Angels appear in more than one suit.

Let's do a bit of a deep dive on how you go about doing this. Imagine for the moment that we had a six color system and we wanted to do a vaguely Dungeons & Dragons setting. We're going to have humans with swords appear in appropriately colored armor for every faction and we're going to have various fantasy races that appear in only one or two suits. We have a lot of Tolkienian races such as Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Halflings; and we also have more modern D&D inspired races like Kobolds, Gnolls, and so on and so on. And that's damn important, because in six suits you have fifteen unique two-suit combinations - and thus every suit needs to find space for five tribes that also fit into another suit (like how Elves are both Green and Black in MtG or Dwarves are both Red and White).

So consider: this means that you probably want 6 fantasy races that live in a single suit, and fifteen fantasy races that live in two suits. You also want an iconic mid-level monster for every suit and an iconic "big thing" for each suit. You want to lay this in at the ground level, because you don't want to make MtG's mistake of assigning almost the entire monster manual to Red at the beginning and then having to walk that back over expansions. Now you want to make sure that each of the cards from a tribe "feel" like they belong in that tribe. Sometimes that might be that all the cards in that tribe have a specific ability, but more likely it's going to be a range of things - all the Halfling Cards have some kind of Evasion, all the Gnoll cards have aggressive stat lines, and so on.

Also, each suit needs fragments of the color pie as regards spells. How is removal split up? How are value plays split up? And so on and so on. And they will need fragments of the color pie that are relevant to Aggro, Midrange, Control, and Combo play and counter-play.

This is a lot of cards spoken for, to be honest. If Orcs appear in Suit #3 and Suit #4, you need cards that are Orcs in both Suit #3 and Suit #4. Each two-suit tribe is probably speaking for 4 cards. Each single-suit tribe probably needs two or three cards to show that they exist, and each color needs two or three humans with spears to show their basic troops off. This is nearly one hundred cards just to do the people. You also need to have a bunch of monsters, and of course the spells. The things you need to have fill up most of your card set - which is why modern Magic sets are so tightly designed and constrained.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Honestly I can see some room for refuffing with respect to Void, but the difference between Void and Time cards is very clear and that's the part that's most important. It might be better to lean harder on death magic/necromancy angle for Void but I liked the idea of Void paying out one less than you put in because thermodynamics.

Like seriously fuck it if I wrote up 10 Time cards and 10 Void it ought to be clear which is which, even without any fluff.

Cardname C
Creature
Flying, Haste
1/1

Cardname 1C
Creature
First Strike
C; exile Cardname, return cardname to the battlefeild at the end of turn
2/1

Cardname 2C
Creature
When Cardname deals damage to a player draw a card
1C; Cardname becomes unblockable until end of turn
2/2

Cardname 3C
Creature
Flash, Flying
When Cardname enters the battlefield draw a card
3/3

Cardname 3CC
Creature
Trample
Cardname enters the battlefield tapped with two counters on it.
Cardname does not untap during your untap step unless you remove a counter.
7/7

Cardname C
Instant
Target creature gains haste until end of turn, draw a card

Cardname 1C
Instant
Tap or Untap up to three target permanents

Cardname 1CC
Instant
Put target spell on top of it's owners library.

Cardname 2CC
Sorcery
return all creatures to their owners hands.

Cardname 4C
Sorcery
tap all creatures target player controls they don't untap during their controllers next untap step, then untap three nexuses

Cardname C
Creature
at the beginning of your upkeep pay 1 life or sacrifice Cardname
2/2

Cardname 1C
Creature
Deathtouch
Cardname attacks each turn if able
2/2

Cardname 2C
Creature
When Cardname enters the battlefield discard a card
5/3

Cardname 2CC
Creature
Vanishing 3
When Cardname enters the battlefield or dies target player loses 3 life and you gain 2 life
4/3

Cardname 4C
Creature
Trample
At the beginning of combat you if Cardname is in your graveyard you may pay 2C if you do put Cardname into play tapped and attacking, exile it at the end of combat.
5/5

Cardname C
Instant
Target Creature gains deathtouch until end of turn, draw a card.

Cardname 1C
Sorcery
Put the top three cards of your library into your graveyard then put a creature from your graveyard into your hand.

Cardname 2C
Instant
Destroy target creature.

Cardname 3C
Sorcery
Target player discards two cards, draw a card.

Cardname 3CC
Sorcery
Each player sacrifices a creature, if two or more players sacrificed a creature this way put a creature from your graveyard onto the battlefield.

[Username17]

Designing a card game is multi-dimensional, and doesn't translate super well to discussions on message boards, which are inherently two-dimensional.

Each card has a position in a Suit's color pie but it also has a position in the Suit's narrative about itself. Every card had as a utility level in different kinds of decks - very much including draft decks and kitchen table decks - but equally importantly in constructed formats for different kinds of decks.

It's also important that only a fraction of cards are going to see play in constructed formats, while only Commons will be consistently available in limited formats and that therefore different cards are going to convey information about the Suits to the players. In the original set, Green was supposed to be "The Creature Color" because it had a lot of creatures - but in a constructed setting none of those big dumb creatures saw play. Similarly, for Dragons of Tarkir, the draft games weren't about Dragons because there weren't any Dragons at common. "If your theme isn't at Common, it's not your theme." But remember also that the designers aren't going to have perfect information about what does and does not see play in Constructed formats. For fuck's sake, Ironclaw Orcs got to the finals in a Pro-Tour, and that is a literal and intentional fucking joke card. More recently, Liliana's Mastery saw play despite obviously being a Kitchen Table card because the Zombies deck "got there."

Each Suit is going to have between 40 and 80 cards in your basic set. Those cards are going to be split between costs, split between card types, split between assigned power levels, split between intended deck types, and so on and so on. A 4-cost 4/4 creature with a minor power has a potential place in an Aggro deck as a curve-topper, a potential place in a Midrange deck as a role player, and a potential place in a Control deck as a buyer of time. Whether it actually sees play depends on whether any of those decks are interested in having that card serve that role enough that they would run the appropriate resource cards to be allowed to play it. And people's understanding of the suit it is from will be changed substantially depending on whether it sees play in constructed or not.

Remember that while there might be 50 cards from a suit in a card set - there are still only 9 to 20 unique non-resource cards in any deck. For most of the last couple of years, the pre-eminent White deck was "Mardu Vehicles" which sometimes had exactly three actual White cards in it (Thraben Inspector, Gideon, and Avacyn). For much of relatively recent Standard, one of the highest use cards in White was known for assisting in Artifact synergies while providing card advantage. The signature abilities of a suit in constructed are what actually gets played in constructed, which is sometimes extremely unrepresentative of what the cards in the suit do in general.

Which is a bit of a long walk to say that if what actually sees play from Time is the 7/7 Trampler for 5 that kills itself in 3 turns and what actually sees play in Void was the 5/5 Trampler for 5 that you can replay as a ball lightning from your graveyard that people would naturally assume that "power at a cost" was a feature of Time while "underpowered haste attackers" was a feature of Void.

Again and still, I really wouldn't bother naming the factions or even the suits until I had the whole gamut of cards printed. You're going to be balancing things in terms of what kinds of tribes are available, balancing things in terms of how many "pushed" cards appear at different cost points, balancing things in terms of where various synergy cards are, balancing things in terms of how many cards of what costs are available, balancing things in terms of how much support there is for different kinds of decks in different suits, balancing how many "draft filler" cards get assigned to each color so that Limited is playable, and so on and so on. And after you've got all those plates spinning, the "feel" of any of the suits is rather likely to be pretty different from what you imagined going in.

To go back to the analogy of "Green: the Creature Color that Wasn't" think about your intentions with Mind and card drawing. You make the intention to have Mind's draw spells be tutors, sorcery speed, or very expensive, and thus for Mind's card draw to be something it's not good at. But imagine for the moment that one of the sorcery speed card draw effects is really good and that one of the really expensive ones is incredibly powerful and sees play as a chamber refiller in Control decks. Well, now you have two card draw spells that see play in a control deck that probably only actually wants two actual Draw spells. People would interact with Mind as if Card Draw was one of its primary selling points - because factually it would be! This isn't a bizarre hypothetical - there have been decks whose only "card draw" spells were Amass the Components and Sphinx's Revelation, and they have done alright for themselves.

So you're goign to make these suits. And you're going to make like fifty cards. And you're going to make five 1-cost cards, and fifteen 2-cost cards and so on for each suit. And after you balance and jigger it, then you can meaningfully say what the suit's actual theme actually is.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Which is a bit of a long walk to say that if what actually sees play from Time is the 7/7 Trampler for 5 that kills itself in 3 turns and what actually sees play in Void was the 5/5 Trampler for 5 that you can replay as a ball lightning from your graveyard that people would naturally assume that "power at a cost" was a feature of Time while "underpowered haste attackers" was a feature of Void.

I think it's important to note that those card were designed with other cards in their faction in mind. The whole point of Timeworn Colossus is the drawback isn't a drawback if supported with the right time cards. If in your deck the card reads "attack twice and then clutter up the battlefield as a do nothing you should probably be playing a different card. (Also it doesn't always "kill itself" after three turns it can stay back to block indefinitely.) On the other hand the decks that run Arisen Abomination don't ever want to play it as a five mana 5/5, they want to discard it to fuel other cards (like that 3 mana 5/3) and then unearth it.

It terms of "pushing" cards I'd argue that's just a bad idea in general. If you have 10-20 or so cards that you made extra powerful to sell the set and then everything else that's a catastrofuck waiting to happen. Some of those cards are going still not be up snuff or be overshadowed by the cards that are actually broken. Or worse a majority of the pushed cards all end up in the same deck and that decks eats the format. It that kind of nonsense that gets us Caw-blade or Jund. Good formats don't come from a few pushed cards, they come from open ended build-arounds and a deep bench of cards that are right on the Jedi curve.

[Username17]

It terms of "pushing" cards I'd argue that's just a bad idea in general.

Pushing cards is absolutely going to happen. There will be a range of power, and by definition half the cards are going to be above the average and half the cards are going to be below. No matter how strong or weak you make the average Bear, half the 2 mana creatures are going to be better than that. And it's important to remember that with like 15 2-cost spells in each suit, and like half of them being creatures, there's going to be like three "above average" 2-drop creatures, which is coincidentally the number of 2-cost creatures that most aggro decks would be interested in running.

It's just a mathematic fact that there will be above average cards, and it's equally important to note that constructed decks have few enough card slots that they will not play cards that are average or below. "Mediocre" is essentially synonymous with "unplayable" in a constructed format. You don't have to play any cards in your deck that aren't above the average and therefore you aren't going to do it.

So regardless of whether your baseline of a 2/2 is supposed to be the 3 cost Pearl Unicorn or the 1-cost Diregraf Ghoul, people are not going to play the Baseline creatures! Or at the very least, if they do it will be for weird curve-reasons where for whatever reason people have decided that they need to play the 4th or 5th best 2-drop creatures in a single color. The cards people will normally actively want to play will be the ones which are better than average, even if only that it has a relevant creature type or synergizes with some other card for some reason. Which means that every card that sees play will be either "pushed" by the development team to be deliberately good enough to be in the playable zone, or something that slipped through the design netting and is accidentally good enough to see play.

Regardless, you seem to be trying to push everything, which is likely going to go the Yugioh route sooner rather than later. The basic logic of short curves is that 1 power on turn 1, 2 power on turn 2, 3 power on turn 3 and 4 power on turn 4 is enough to kill with cards to spare on turn 5 without any special abilities at all. If you make everything above curve for what people currently expect to play in Standard, you're pretty likely to have most games decided in the first couple of turns. That 7/7 Trampler that only gets to untap twice is a 3 turn clock by itself, but I doubt anyone would ever both playing a 5-drop in a game where the "basic" cards include an easier to cast Watch Wolf and an Exclusion Mage with Haste. No one is going to survive to cast a 5-mana spell if normal curve-outs consistently involve putting more attack power onto the board for next turn than the turn number. Counting to twenty is just way too easy if all the cards are this good for there to be a meaningful "late game".

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Regardless, you seem to be trying to push everything, which is likely going to go the Yugioh route sooner rather than later. The basic logic of short curves is that 1 power on turn 1, 2 power on turn 2, 3 power on turn 3 and 4 power on turn 4 is enough to kill with cards to spare on turn 5 without any special abilities at all. If you make everything above curve for what people currently expect to play in Standard, you're pretty likely to have most games decided in the first couple of turns. That 7/7 Trampler that only gets to untap twice is a 3 turn clock by itself, but I doubt anyone would ever both playing a 5-drop in a game where the "basic" cards include an easier to cast Watch Wolf and an Exclusion Mage with Haste. No one is going to survive to cast a 5-mana spell if normal curve-outs consistently involve putting more attack power onto the board for next turn than the turn number. Counting to twenty is just way too easy if all the cards are this good for there to be a meaningful "late game".

In general most of the inspiration for the sample cards are the Ravnica/Time Spiral era cards that saw play in standard. Spectral Force the card that inspired Timeworn Golem and that card was a 5 mana 8/8 that came out even earlier. In that era the top aggro deck played a 2/3 on turn 1 a 3/3 on turn 2 and a 3/4 on turn 3. If you just let them do that yeah you got burned out on turn 4, never the less that deck went up against this list and lost in the finals of a regional level tournament.

2 Aeon Chronicler
2 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
3 Angel of Despair
2 Body Double
4 Court Hussar

4 Azorius Signet
3 Castigate
4 Compulsive Research
2 Dimir Signet
2 Persecute
1 Phyrexian Totem
4 Remand
4 Wrath of God

2 Flagstones of Trokair
2 Ghost Quarter
2 Godless Shrine
4 Hallowed Fountain
1 Island
3 Orzhov Basilica
2 Plains
1 Swamp
3 Underground River
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
1 Urza's Factory
1 Watery Grave

Note how this deck is heavily teched against slower grindier decks. In a format with the actual Watchwolf and several options for 2 power 1 drops not only did decks get to 5 but the decks that intended to were a supermajority of the field.

[DrPraetor]

Let's consider the world of Expansionar.

Expansionar has five orders of mages.
The Mentasi are blue, but they're extremely decadent, and their particular focus is on hanging out in palaces and doing illusions. So the particular mix of blue cards they get includes a bunch of Demons (which may or may not splash black), and some discard effects with weaker card draw, and nothing aquatic. Different "illusion" cards in Magic do a whole range of things so you can pick whatever you want for illusion to mean mechanically, really.

The Gothi are black, and they're more Cure fans and less evil. So you get sacrifice cards but they're supposed to be sad rather than wicked, and your undead have sympathetic quotes on them. You get more card draw (it costs life, as usual per black) and less discard than you might expect, with the discard being mixed in with the grab bag of spells having sacrifice costs associated with them.

The Purani are white, get significantly more direct damage than is usual for a white suit, but are otherwise bog standard.

The Qualinosti are bog-standard green - druids and other curve-boosters, big critters with better than usual value.

Finally, the Factati are red, but they're we-love-artifacts-and-industry red, and they get some unsummon and delay effects which have been more-often given to blue in previous sets. They also get various clockwork-type effects which have previously gone to artifacts; and sphinxes are red, because why the heck not?

I realize I left some stuff out which your design specs called to go into into Void = Black, Light = White, Nature = Green, Time = Red and Mind = Blue; but, you can fill out the above pretty easily. For example, Expansionar has a lot of cards that scry for basic lands, spread among all the suits.

Now, is that what you're proposing? Because it seems to me that your proposals are pretty mild all told, and amount to only slightly more than the average concept drift from one Magic expansion to another.

Now, forget even the huge player-base, Magic has a lot of development power sunk into a range of issues like Frank mentioned above. So unless you're going to do something more radical than that (which would then require a lot of design work, if you hope to actually-achieve your stated objectives), I just don't see why you'd bother with a magic clone that's only slightly off-spec (if at all) from ye old generic Magic expansion set.

A more radical proposal might obscure some of Frank's issues - for example, Shadowfist still has cards you play on turn 2, but they may not say "2" on them, it nonetheless has second turn drops of which you only use the tiniest best slice of your faction - but none of them will go away. While a lot of design work has helped with this, MtG has a fairly narrow 0+1+3+6+10 = 20 design space, and many fewer cards seen per game (thus making synergies harder to drive, which seems to be a key objective of yours) than the games that followed it, so if you're making a new game there really isn't a lot of reason to make it a MtG clone, unless you're making it similar enough to Magic that it benefits from that MtG-specific design work, in which case you've gone to far and to my mind it may as well be a Magic expansion.

[JigokuBosatsu]

7/7 Trampler

I thought this said "7/7 Trampier"

[Username17]

Spectral Force the card that inspired Timeworn Golem and that card was a 5 mana 8/8 that came out even earlier.

Spectral Force can only attack once if it doesn't meet conditions or combo with other cards. Your Timeworn Golem attacks 3 times and is sufficient to kill your opponent by itself.

Note how this deck is heavily teched against slower grindier decks

Solar Flare had 4 Azorious Charms, 4 Remands, 2 Castigates, 4 Court Hussar's and 4 Wraths. More than half of the non-land cards in the deck are geared towards surviving the first five turns. Counting mana rocks as mana sources rather than spells, it was a deck with 30 mana sources, 18 cards for surviving the first five turns, and 12 late game or card-draw cards. Describing that as "heavily teched against slow decks" is pretty weird.

But basically this:

While a lot of design work has helped with this, MtG has a fairly narrow 0+1+3+6+10 = 20 design space, and many fewer cards seen per game (thus making synergies harder to drive, which seems to be a key objective of yours) than the games that followed it, so if you're making a new game there really isn't a lot of reason to make it a MtG clone, unless you're making it similar enough to Magic that it benefits from that MtG-specific design work, in which case you've gone to far and to my mind it may as well be a Magic expansion.

The 0+1+3+6+10=20 reality of Magic in particular means that very few cards are drawn or played in a game where one player curves out and the other player for whatever reason does not. If you make things fiercer than that, things end with a sucker punch even more often.

Consider how fucking shitty Shadowverse got during the Alicepocalype. The reality of 0+1+3+6+10=20 meant that once there were enough neutral cards that you could just do that with every faction, people just did that. With every faction. Games were short and terrible.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Spectral Force can only attack once if it doesn't meet conditions or combo with other cards. Your Timeworn Golem attacks 3 times and is sufficient to kill your opponent by itself.

Only two times actually. It comes into play tapped and only untaps itself twice. Also they've seriously printed a 5 mana 8/8 trampler with upside since then, and for most of that format the best deck Temur energy could play Verdurous Gearhulk and elected not to.

Solar Flare had 4 Azorious Charms, 4 Remands, 2 Castigates, 4 Court Hussar's and 4 Wraths. More than half of the non-land cards in the deck are geared towards surviving the first five turns. Counting mana rocks as mana sources rather than spells, it was a deck with 30 mana sources, 18 cards for surviving the first five turns, and 12 late game or card-draw cards. Describing that as "heavily teched against slow decks" is pretty weird.

Charm not Signet, Charm was in RtR, and of course they're playing some early game interaction, what do you expect them to do for the first four turns nothing? It's not so much about what's included in the main deck as what's excluded. This list has no Last Gasp, no Condems, no Faiths Fetters, no early game point removal at all. Instead it has 3 Angels of Despair, 3 Castigate, main deck Persecutes, cards that are much better against control then they are against aggro.