Moe to sexy girls 'color' wheel

[Username17]

Let's talk more about the Artillery Sergeant. As a 2/2 for 2 with Support, it is a French Vanilla card that could easily see zero play in Constructed. If you intend to attack your opponent with it by turning it sideways, it is essentially a bear with no text. If you intend to block with it and you don't have any other blockers, it is again essentially a bear with no text. So it's easy to imagine situations where it basically doesn't do anything on attack or defense and would be a bad card.

On the other hand, if a defensive deck is planning on trading resources by blocking, the Artillery Sergeant can block with 4 power. If you can give it vigilance you can attack and then support and double its attack power. In MtG you could imagine an Aggro deck playing Savannah Lions, Artillery Sergeant, Always Watching and end the game on turn 4 without even playing any cards on turn 4. There are definitely synergies that could exist that would make the card in high demand for Aggro, Control, or Midrange.

But let's consider what this means for the entirety of the card set of Law. I'll assume there's going to be something like 50 different Law cards in a circa 300 card set. The core of French Vanilla Support creatures probably represents like 4 or 5 of them. Law probably has about 30 creatures and 20 non-creatures. That means you need to ration your creatures by cost very carefully. If there aren't enough constructed playable Law creatures of costs 1, 2, and 3 then Aggro Law is a deck that can't even exist. If the cheap constructed playable creatures are too good, Aggro Law will roflstomp everyone.

You also have to consider Rarity. Rarity is not a mechanic in Constructed at all. If a deck archetype requires 3 or 4 copies that makes those decks more expensive to run - but doesn't change how well they do in tournaments. But it's a big mechanic in Draft. If an archetype requires even two copies of a rare card in Draft, it probably just doesn't even exist. You want to set the expected number of cards of different costs so that people can in general draft an appropriate mana curve for each color. And those expectatable mana curves will severely influence what kinds of archetypes are viable in Draft. In Amonkhet, Aggro was king and in Hour of Devastation the crown went to grindy midrange - and the only difference is that the average number of 1 and 2 cost white creatures you can get in a draft is slightly lower.

My inclination would be to make the 1 cost 1/1 Support creature (Artillery Spotter) a Common, the 2 cost 2/2 Support creature (Artillery Sergeant) an Uncommon, and the 3 cost 3/3 Support creature (Fireship Captain) a Rare. But you'd have to consider that in light of the overall draft profile of each suit.

-Username17

[Username17]

One of the first questions to answer about a card game is what the win conditions are and how you go about achieving them. Magic in particular has a simple set of victory conditions where you count to 20 against your opponent and then you win. This has the advantage of being something that is always going to be possible to achieve with Draft and Sealed decks. That contrasts significantly with games that require players to build up to specific win conditions that require separate cards. Netrunner drafting would be kind of a trainwreck because drafting the wrong number of objectives would make a deck literally unplayable.

Similarly, you're going to be making some kind of resource system, card drawing mechanics and so on and so on. The more moving parts you have, the more failure points that deckbuilding has - and the more ways Draft can fail. In MtG there are "basic" resource cards that Draft decks are allowed to use any number of. But Shadowfist has Foundation Characters and all the sites are special cards and you can't really draft it at all. It is of course possible to eliminate Resource Cards altogether - either by the Hearthstone method of simply having everyone's resource progression happen automatically or by the Final Fantasy Card Game method of being able to use any card as a resource card in lieu of its top half purpose - but having basic resource cards that are textless that you can put into draft decks freely is an acceptable compromise.

I regard MtG's primary rules-level problems to be the following:

• The first player advantage is too large.
• The number of games where one player essentially does not get to play the game due to flood or screw is too large.
• There are too many steps where people could take actions but probably won't.
• Many decks have very few different cards in them. 10 distinct non-land cards isn't even weird.

I would regard every other issue with Magic to be a card-level problem.

Anyway, the first-player problem could be attacked in various ways, but I think the most promising ways involve giving the second player something other than a simple extra card on their turn. An extra card is a lot, but in a game where it's very easy to count to twenty and win the game on turn 4 or 5, that extra card is often not enough to put up much of a fight. I would think that something like allowing the second player to get a second land-drop on turn 1 or get a bonus to actively defend themselves would be more meaningful. In Shadowverse the second player gets an extra Evolve token that helps them eliminate potential enemy attackers on Turn 4, which does help make getting run over on turn 5 more difficult (doesn't do jack to aggro rollouts that end the game on turn 4 obviously).

The "non-game" issue is best attacked by changing the way cards are drawn and assigned to the opening hand. If you see more cards, your chances of getting mana screwed are lower. Simply causing people to draw more cards (such as two per turn or refill your hand each turn or whatever) would lead to large compensatory deckbuilding changes and I believe the end results would be unpredictable. Something like letting players put one card from their hand on the bottom of their library and draw a replacement at the end of each turn is more likely to leave deck building in a sufficiently similar place that the resulting reduced amount of non-games could be confidently predicted.

To elaborate on that point: if you simply draw two cards per turn, the number of cards you've seen by turn 4 is 15 instead of 11. Thus the number of lands you'd need in 60 card deck to average four land drops is 16 instead of 22. If the most powerful decks end up trading out land for more spells, you won't necessarily see a reduced number of games decided by mana screw in a simple "draw 2 scenario." On the other hand, if the extra cards you see are due to rummaging rather than simply drawing, then the cost of drawing more lands than you need is also reduced and I think you're more likely to have players make decks that have similar numbers of lands to what they would play without that rule. What it would do to deck building is give players a large incentive to carry one-ofs cards that are good in some matches and not good in others. It might be enough that people could do without Sideboarding, which I would very much appreciate because Sideboarding is time consuming and boring.

Addressing the issue of there being too many times you can play a fast effect is as simple as removing some of them. I don't think you need to be able to take actions during the Draw Step, for example. Similarly, you don't need to be able to take actions between First Strike Combat Damage and Regular Combat Damage.

The monoculture of many decks is best addressed by reducing the non-land card limit to 3 or 2. Note that this would necessarily create a card issue where any build-around concepts you wanted to support would need card redundancy. Hardened Scales couldn't exist without a simultaneous printing of Snek, for example.

-Username17

[maglag]

Anyway, the first-player problem could be attacked in various ways, but I think the most promising ways involve giving the second player something other than a simple extra card on their turn. An extra card is a lot, but in a game where it's very easy to count to twenty and win the game on turn 4 or 5, that extra card is often not enough to put up much of a fight. I would think that something like allowing the second player to get a second land-drop on turn 1 or get a bonus to actively defend themselves would be more meaningful. In Shadowverse the second player gets an extra Evolve token that helps them eliminate potential enemy attackers on Turn 4, which does help make getting run over on turn 5 more difficult (doesn't do jack to aggro rollouts that end the game on turn 4 obviously).

Ahem, in Shadowverse first player doesn't only get +50% evolution points (which otherwise are pretty hard to increase/replenish), they also get to use them on turn four while the starting player only gets to use them on turn 5.

Anyway dropping an extra land sounds too good but another idea would be granting the second player a lesser but still significant extra resource like a 1/1 token or a token that can be sacrificed for 1 mana (maybe colorless, maybe any color so 2nd player is less vulnerable to mana screw). or let the 2nd player decide what they want to spend their advantage in each game.

The "non-game" issue is best attacked by changing the way cards are drawn and assigned to the opening hand. If you see more cards, your chances of getting mana screwed are lower. Simply causing people to draw more cards (such as two per turn or refill your hand each turn or whatever) would lead to large compensatory deckbuilding changes and I believe the end results would be unpredictable. Something like letting players put one card from their hand on the bottom of their library and draw a replacement at the end of each turn is more likely to leave deck building in a sufficiently similar place that the resulting reduced amount of non-games could be confidently predicted.

That would also make people run through their decks faster making milling more viable. I consider that a good thing.

Addressing the issue of there being too many times you can play a fast effect is as simple as removing some of them. I don't think you need to be able to take actions during the Draw Step, for example. Similarly, you don't need to be able to take actions between First Strike Combat Damage and Regular Combat Damage.

Awwww, but half the fun of MTG is being able to go "you've just activated my trap card!" by playing an instant at just the right moment.

The monoculture of many decks is best addressed by reducing the non-land card limit to 3 or 2. Note that this would necessarily create a card issue where any build-around concepts you wanted to support would need card redundancy. Hardened Scales couldn't exist without a simultaneous printing of Snek, for example.

-Username17

That makes combo players cry a bit.

Or one could make different cards have diferent limits per deck.

[deaddmwalking]

Or one could make different cards have diferent limits per deck.

I don't think that's generally a good idea. I could see something like 'one planeswalker per deck' but not 'you can have 4 of this creature but only 2 of this better creature'. If you mean 'you can have an unlimited number of a card in draft, but you can only have 2 in constructed', I think that could work, but I think limiting duplicates to 2-3 would make decks more interesting.

[NoDot]

Tossing ideas into the fray...

or by the Final Fantasy Card Game method of being able to use any card as a resource card in lieu of its top half purpose

Funnily enough, I came up with a similar idea myself: just let players put a card face down and declare a color. The card then taps as a basic land of that color. At any point if the card is uptapped, you may reveal it and activate it as if it was in your hand. Non-basic lands should exist, but they need to be better than playing them face down, obviously.

That solves several problems, although one (multi-color decks) it solves too well. It also has all the issues of guaranteed curves.

The monoculture of many decks is best addressed by reducing the non-land card limit to 3 or 2.

Why not limit unique cards to one of each? (Doesn't Commander do that?) There are consequences to that, but the same is true of any decision.

[DrPraetor]

By limiting cards to nominally 1 of each, you would de facto have a variable limit since presumably some cards would be functionally identical with different names. I think this would be annoying since it would be hard to tell if two cards are the same just by the art?

Draw 2 - Discard 1 is more similar to Draw 2 than it is different. You see a lot more cards, so you get less resource screw but also less voltron screw where you don't have all the pieces to your combo engine. That's going to have a big impact on deck design, from whatever starting point. If you want to avoid mana-screw but only see 12 or 15 cards per game, then take one of the other solutions where you can play anything as a resource card or whatever.

I very much like shadowfist's win condition. You play up to 5 provinces, and if you can conquer an enemy province while you have 5 out, you win. I admit it has weaknesses - it can end in stalemates, for example. But it very seldom ends in shut-out or resource screw.

Turn 2 advantage needs to be calibrated to what you have on the cards. In MtG, I think drawing an extra card and dropping 2 lands would be entirely fair - effectively, you start at turn 2? It would be more fair than no adjustment, almost by definition, since otherwise the 1st player gets his 2-mana turn before yours as well as his 1-mana turn. You could have some more complicated ramp like:
1 / 2*
2 / 2
3* / 3
3 / 4*
4 / 4
etc.
* Draw an extra card on these turns.
but this might be more trouble than it is worth.

[OgreBattle]

In Final Fantasy TCG, you draw two cards a turn.

You can discard any card for two Crystal Points of that color.

Playing 'lands' (Backups) costs CP, so you need to discard a card early. Backups often have a Comes Into Play or "tap (pay X)" or "Discard to..." effect so they're like unique lands+artifacts+sorcery

You have a limit of 5 Backups, so any card that costs more than 5CP requires discarding to play normally.

I enjoy this format compared to Shadowverse's "you gain points every round".

Something I've also enjoyed is games that do a "draw new cards at the END of your turn, not the beginning" so you have time to think about what to do while someone else is taking their turn.

[Username17]

Shadowfist is a better multiplayer game than MtG. But it's nearly unplayable two player, and it's literally unplayable in Draft. Those are huge strikes against it, because Draft is more important than Constructed for easing people into new sets (including the first set), and 2 player is more important than 4-player in all cases.

In any case, I'm quite liking the way the math works out on maximum 3 copies of cards plus being able to bottom one card at the end of each turn and replace it with a card off the top of your deck.

The first issue is what happens when you have a 24 land, 60 card deck and you keep a 2 land hand. With a single draw step each turn, after three draw steps you still have a 19.1% of not drawing a third land and being stuck on 2 lands. If you add in the Scry-Rummage at the end of turns 1 and 2, you've seen five cards after your third draw step, and your chance of not having seen a third land is only 5.9%. That's a pretty significant reduction in the number of non-games.

The second issue is what happens to your chance of drawing a specific card after four draw steps. The classic would be the Control deck trying to get to a turn four Wrath of God. But any Combo deck has much the same question. With 4 copies, your chances of having at least one copy of the key card is 56.7% after four draws. If instead you make the players cut down to 3 copies but give them the ability to toss and replace a card at the end of each turn, they'll have seen more cards looking for something that has less copies - and the chances go down but only to 55.6%. That's a modest reduction in the number of times people have specific cards, which won't be enough to kill Combo but will be enough to make games feel a little bit more varied.

As for the question of why you wouldn't just give people two Draw steps instead, I would bring up two issues: Flood and Burn. In the world where people get two draws each turn, the expectation is that everyone plays two cards every turn. This means that drawing an extra land makes you Flooded relative to your opponent. Drawing more lands than you need is perhaps not as proportionately as bad as it is in MtG, but it still puts you as absolutely behind your opponent. This means that the optimal deck building will involve cutting back on lands to reduce chances of flooding, and reductions in Mana Screw won't be nearly as good as you'd want. On the flip side, if you get to toss a card back at the end of each turn, the harm of Flood is significantly reduced and people might be encouraged to pack moar land - causing the reductions in Mana Screw to actually be better than initially expected.

The second issue is that it's really hard to keep Burn from just ROFLstomping everything and everyone if they draw two cards per turn. Direct Damage really doesn't have to be very good at all to count to 20 in 5 or 6 turns if you've seen and been able to play 17 or 19 cards at that point in your life. We're talking a spell to damage conversion of just over one to put you over the finish line. If Burn has to bottom cards to see extra cards they will obviously get more consistent (as will everyone else), but they won't get any more powerful.

-Username17

[Username17]

The First Turn / Second Turn thing is much more complicated to address. The big issue is that players take turns taking turns. This means that the first player to get a first turn is also the first player to take a 2nd turn and the first player to take a 7th turn. The first turn advantage isn't just that your opponent has to answer your play on turn 1, it's that they have to answer your plays on every turn for the rest of the game.

The MtG Play/Draw setup gives the second player one extra card, which is essentially an extra turn once both players are in topdeck mode. Once the first player runs out of steam (if they haven't won the game already), the second player becomes effectively one turn ahead for the remaining turns of the game. And this is not very effective because the fact is that many games are decided before the first player empties their hand. In actual play, the 1st player's advantage is very much larger.

Ideally, you'd have a set of advantages for first and second player where they would both be relevant and the advantage wasn't clear. The thing that comes to mind is allowing the first player to draw on their first turn and allow the second player to play an extra land from their hand. This would put the second player ahead on ramp for the first several turns but also give the first player the very first action and put them a card ahead for the end game.

Obviously it would take a lot of playtesting to determine if the first player was remotely balanced with the second, but I think this has legs.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

A 2 player shadowfist game is boring because the characters just attack eachother and die, not because of the victory condition. Likewise, the issues with draft aren't because of the win condition.

Now, count-to-20 allows rush as a strategy.

If the victory condition is instead, "hold 5 fortresses, then seize a 6th fortress from your opponent (or simply play a 6th if they have none)", that will tend to guarantee games won't fizzle, but it also guarantees games can't end until turn 6 so red deck wins isn't even an expressible concept.

[Username17]

A 2 player shadowfist game is boring because the characters just attack eachother and die, not because of the victory condition. Likewise, the issues with draft aren't because of the win condition.

Now, count-to-20 allows rush as a strategy.

If the victory condition is instead, "hold 5 fortresses, then seize a 6th fortress from your opponent (or simply play a 6th if they have none)", that will tend to guarantee games won't fizzle, but it also guarantees games can't end until turn 6 so red deck wins isn't even an expressible concept.

No. A 2 player Shadowfist game is terrible because it's extremely snowballish. Since you attack each other's power generation sites, the first player to successfully take another player's site has an almost insurmountable lead.

But yes, Draft is very difficult in a game where players need to have a certain number of fortresses in their deck. Because that would require players to draft that many fortresses every time.

-Username17

[Username17]

It's important to realize how few creatures you have to work with to get all your concepts in. In the entire 300+ card set there will be about 50 cards from any particular color and about 30 of them will be creatures. This has to be carved up in a way that establishes both tracks of girls for each color as well as establishing their animals and giant monsters. This is further constrained by two great truths:

• If your theme isn't at Common, it's not your theme (because Drafters won't encounter it enough).
• If your theme isn't Constructed playable, it's not your theme (because Standard players won't encounter it at all).

MtG has solid examples of both of these effects. In the early days, no one played Green Creatures in tournament magic because Craw Wurms and Giant Spiders were not constructed viable cards. Green was not considered a "creature color" in constructed play. Dragons of Tarkir has "Dragons" in the fucking name, but since there weren't any Common Dragons, the Draft experience was actually about post apocalyptic tribal warriors fighting in the wilderness.

So let's consider Blood. You have to establish Crown Girls and Vampire Girls and you have to establish royal animals and blood drinking animals. You want to establish that the Crown Girls include Nobles and also Minions of those Nobles. You want to establish that the Vampire Girls include both Vampires and Demons. And all of those have to be established both in the Draft Commons and in the Constructed viable cards (that is: cards which have been pushed enough that they see play).

So you got 30 Creature slots, and 12 of them will be Commons, 10 of them will be Uncommons, and 8 of them will be Rare (or Mythic, or Secret Rare, or whatever the fuck). Let's look at the common slots:

• Haughty Baroness (Human Noble)
• Unobtrusive Servant (Human Minion)
• Aspiring Neonate (Vampire Minion)
• Crossroads Succubus (Demon Advisor)
• Royal Eagle (Bird)
• Cloud of Mosquitoes (Bug)

That's literally half of the Common slots just to establish that these groups exist in Blood for the people in the Draft seats. You probably also want a Courtier (Human Advisor) and a Witch of some sort, leaving you just 4 slots to fill with creatures that need to exist for cost-curve purposes.

Things are very tight.

-Username17

[Grek]

But yes, Draft is very difficult in a game where players need to have a certain number of fortresses in their deck. Because that would require players to draft that many fortresses every time.

Couldn't you solve that like regular draft does, and have people draft the non-fortresses during the actual draft passes, then add fortresses to their deck until they have a usable deck?

[DrPraetor]

3/60*15 is indeed about the same as 4/60*11, so yeah that works out. The only synergy this inevitably drives is where you want some mix of X foos to Y bars (where X and Y could be nobles and their minions, for example), with several types of foos and bars. You'll note that this is a lot like the situation where you want X spells and Y resource cards, which is why you inevitably drive both. This may be a feature and not a bug, since if your nobles give bonuses to your minions you probably do want people to mix both in their decks, and a better guarantee of getting some mix of the two is desirable, but it does drive synergies of that sort.

I think with expansion cards, Shadowfist actually over-corrected on the snowballing, and led to stalemates instead. But, since 2 player shadowfist was never really much of a thing, it may not have been tested sufficiently to say.

Land destruction is bad. It's bad in shadowfist (even if they over-corrected for it), and it was even worse in MtG.

You want choke/lock/control to be viable, but always as later-in-the-game outcomes; an early lock of any kind is simply a design fail because now your opponent has to sit there and writhe while you finish them off, and they never even got to play.

As Grek indicated, you can just shuffle a stack of victory cards into your deck after you finish drafting, whether they are also resource cards or not. So the proposition that your opponent can prevent you from winning by playing a victory card of his own that you then have to stomp (as opposed to counting to 20), doesn't prevent draft.

My suggestion would be:
resource cards can be converted to victory cards by turning them over/around. Once converted to a victory card, they stop making resources and become a target for your opponent instead. So you sacrifice ramp in order to make a play for the win, which your opponent has to answer, essentially.

Of course, this would tend to produce games that were fairly long; and, poor play could still lead to a situation where it took several turns to reach an inevitable conclusion, but that would tend to be decided later in play, rather than by a shaolin warrior with explosives on turn 2.

[Username17]

But yes, Draft is very difficult in a game where players need to have a certain number of fortresses in their deck. Because that would require players to draft that many fortresses every time.

Couldn't you solve that like regular draft does, and have people draft the non-fortresses during the actual draft passes, then add fortresses to their deck until they have a usable deck?

If you have "generic fortresses" then you aren't doing the Shadowfist thing. If you're just having targets that don't have relevant cards and text, you might as well do the L5R thing and represent those targets with face down cards. And if you are doing that, you might as well do the full L5R thing and have the relevant number of targets start in play rather than playing and building them at all.

But regardless, I'm not sure how it's particularly desirable to have players build up a set number of victory conditions before they are allowed to pummel their enemy in the face. If the beatdown rush is good enough to work, having players spend some time with their thumbs up their ass building up forts first is just a waste of time. If Control is good enough to stop Aggro, then having the Aggro player sit around building sand castles for a while before they get to realize that they've been outgunned is also just a waste of time. Shadowfist's system of buildup was only an advantage in a multiplayer game. In a two player game it's a waste of time.

In any case, the primary issue for Draft is that by having six colors instead of five, the number of "off color" cards goes from 3 colors to 4 colors. That seems best addressed by having the players draft from larger pools of cards so that they have more cards they can choose from for crucial early and mid-pack picks. I suspect that having two 8 or 9 card packs three times would be better than having one 15 card pack three times.

-Username17

[Username17]

One of the severe constraints is cost curve. That is, you need to have at least two cards at each cost point between 1 and 6 at Common so that players can build the kinds of mana curves they want in Draft. But that's 12 cards spoken for and there are only about 50 cards split among three rarities. If you had equal numbers of Rares, Uncommons, and Commons, you'd only have about five flex slots for Commons.

Now fortunately, you don't need equal numbers of Commons, Uncommons, and Rares. Indeed, you probably want more Commons than Uncommons. Whether you want more Uncommons than Rares or vice versa is a "collectability" question. In the hypothetical nine card pack there is 1 Rare, 2 Uncommons, and 6 Commons. But the expected number of each Uncommon in a draft (or in your collection) is only double that of a Rare if there are the same number of Uncommons as there are Rares. If there are more Uncommons, the average number is lower and if there are less Uncommons, the average number is higher. The average number per pack is always X/Y, where X is the number of cards of that rarity you get in a pack and Y is the number of cards of that rarity on a printing sheet.

So let's run some hard numbers: each color has 20 Commons, and there are 15 Colorless or multicolored Commons. That's 135 Commons, meaning that each pack has 6/135 copies of each Common. Each player opens packs two at a time in Draft and immediately sees 12/135 copies of each Common. The whole draft has 8 players do this three times, so the draft as a whole has 288/135 copies of each Common. The average number of copies of each Common seen is 2.13. Most Drafts you will not "get there" with Squadron Hawks or Goblin Gatherings even if you are the only one drafting them. It also means that in your two colors, each pack has an average of 3.56 Commons in your color, which I take to mean that you will generally be able to draft playable cards from the later packs even if you are fighting for your colors with players on the other end of the table.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Frank,

For 'value' reasons you want a pack size that is greater than 15. If you go with a smaller pack-size, it has to be to increase the rate of 'rare' cards, but I think a 20-card pack with 2 rares (one might be ultra rare), 6 uncommons and 12 commons. Alternatively, 12-card packs are super-easy to divide up with 2/3/4/6 players, and if you're going for a 6-color mix, encouraging a 6-player game is good.

[NoDot]

20-card pack

At what point does it stop being a "pack" and start being a "box"?

More seriously, what're the consequences of killing the entire "uncommon" grouping? You don't want everything at common, but do you need more than one rarity?

[DrPraetor]

I'm not a fan of rares, but they do serve a purpose, especially if there are more of them. The purpose is in constructed deck not in draft, though.

Given E(each Common) = 2.13
E(each Uncommon) = 0.71
E(each Rare) = 0.36
You would have to run dozens of drafts before you could even tell that uncommon and rare were different categories, statistically speaking. If you have twice as many rares to choose from,
E(each Rare) = 0.18
Even then, you'd get as-many-or-more of any given rare than of any given uncommon >20% of the time but at least you could tell that rares existed.

But, in constructed deck, the uncommons are a lot easier to collect. So if you want to gate constructed more gently, you could try this. Now, inevitably, you are going to midjudge the card needs of high-end constructed and there is going to be some rare that people will want x3, and that rare just becomes increasingly sought-after.

I'm not sure about dmwalking's point because these relative #s and %s and so forth are all free parameters you can set however you want.

[Username17]

There's a pretty big difference in the chance that a particular Uncommon will have two copies in a Draft as opposed to a particular Rare. But I agree that having a lower number of Uncommons than Commons is a solid idea as it gets the average number of each Uncommon in the draft to about 1. If there are 100 Uncommons, for example, the average number of each Uncommon is 0.96.

There's no constraint at all from the Draft side on the number of Rares. Whether there are 100 or 150, any particular rare is more likely than not to simply not be available in the draft pod at all.

-Username17

[Username17]

So here's an example of how Blood would look at Common:

Commons	Cost	Type(s)
Royal Eagle	R	Creature - Bird
Spawn of Krevory	R	Creature - Vampire Minion
Unobtrusive Servant	R	Human Minion
Blood Rush	R	Spell
Taste of Vitae	R	Ritual
Grasping Succubus	1R	Creature - Demon Advisor
Haughty Baroness	1R	Human Noble
Jealous Courtier	1R	Human Advisor
Palace Guard	1R	Human Guard
Heart of the Hart	1R	Spell
Braid Mane Lion	2R	Creature - Cat
Heart Warden	2R	Creature - Vampire Guard
Call the Guards	2R	Ritual - Human Guard
Heart Piercer	2R	Ritual
Strength of Conviction	2R	Charm
Champion of Ruin	3R	Creature - Human Knight
Cloud of Mosquitoes	3R	Creature - Bug
Ravenous Ogre	2RR	Creature - Giant Berserker
Exsanguinate	3R	Spell
Haruspex	3R	Ritual
Blood Soaked Fiend	4R	Creature - Demon
Drain Life	4R	Spell
Ogre Baron	4RR	Creature - Giant Noble
A Feast Unknown	5R	Spell

You'll note that there isn't a whole lot of space for creatures of any particular type. There are only two Common Demons and only two Common Giants and only two Common Vampires. Each creature in Blood has just a few examples to cover its conceptual space through implication.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

How real is this getting?

I ask because I have some experience mocking up custom cards with nonstandard symbols (which is irritating as fuck to do in Magic Set Editor), and am willing to do so for this if it gets that far.

[Username17]

How real is this getting?

Surprisingly real. The prospect of going after the factions from a thematic standpoint first and a mechanical standpoint second is surprisingly fruitful.

One thing I do note is that the basic source for Law probably shouldn't be a "Court", despite how nice a fit that would be. Blood ends up with Courtiers and Court Jesters and Court Poets and stuff - all referring to the Queen's court rather than to a Court of Law. So it's actually kind of confusing to use the word "Court" to refer to another faction's basic Source cards. Like, people would get pretty pissed if they couldn't use a Court to play a Court Jester, and I think that is fair.

Probably it would be better for Law to get their power from Towns, Markets, or even Dungeons.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

What about calling it an "Assembly" or "Tribunal" or something else legal sounding rather than Court?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Tribunal is too specific. Assembly isn't bad, except that it refers to the people rather than the place, and 'House of Assembly' seems kind of cumbersome, unless you want to brand Law as wordy, which... doesn't seem off-brand. I would probably go with Hall, which could be of justice or of records or of mess, all of which are on theme for Law.

On reflection, what actually bothers me is that Fief and Wild are regions and the rest are individual structures. A fief can have a temple in it, and a wild can have a ruin in it. Fief can become Castle or Stronghold or whatever, but Wild can't be reduced to a single structure. It'd have to change to be like Natural Wonder or something.

It seems like maybe a source represents a reasonable area, but that area's mana color is determined by whatever the most influential feature in it is. Then the Girls can in-fiction have Feng Shui conflicts over whether the baron or the bishop (or the chief librarian or whoever) has more friends in order to abstractly increase their color's prevalence.

Anyway, since my print sheets are A4, they hold nine cards each. That means that the set should probably have 18 sources. That could be three per faction, but it could also be one or two per faction and some others. Also, each rarity in the set should probably have a number of cards in it that is evenly divisible by 18.

I note that you have 24 commons for Blood, that would make 144 (colored) commons in the set, which neatly fills 16 sheets. Are you planning to have colorless cards in this set?