Custom Magic Deckbuilding

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angelfromanotherpin
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Custom Magic Deckbuilding

Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I've been playing around with the Magic Set Editor for a while, and I've decided to put together some custom decks with custom cards for my regular gaming group to play with. Difficulty: I'm not really qualified to do that. I've played Magic since it came out, but I've never collected or competed, and so my grasp of what things are actually worth is kind of limited. So, I'm going to put some stuff up here, and I'd appreciate any advice, suggestions, or constructive criticisms the more experienced could contribute.

Some Goals:
1) Implement certain Frank/AH proposals re: Land, specifically having a 3-card land-only deck to smooth mana production, and bumping the baseline utility expected of lands.
2) Each of the decks should provide a satisfying matchup against the others; none should be a silver bullet for any of the others.
3) Each of the decks should play distinctly, so that different matchups feel interestingly different from each other.

The decks:
(As informed by the players re: what they'd like to play.)
1. White/Black Knightly Lifestealer
This player loves effects like Drain Life and Lifelink, and also has a bit of a paladin thing, which crosses over into the lifelink Knights.

2. White/Red Ironic Punishment
This player likes justice, which often means turning an enemy's effects back on themselves.

3. Blue/Red Control
This player wants to use counters, bounces, and direct damage to limit the enemy board and burn them down. Creatures will not be for attacking or blocking, but to enhance the control effects.

4. White/Green Beastmastery
This player likes to put creatures into play, then buff and protect them while they stomp.

5. Blue/Green Dirty Pun Fun
This player likes dirty puns, so I'm starting with boobies, tits, and cocks for a bird theme - flying attackers are the win condition. Also likes generally cool effects, so entertaining wall and stall for defense.

I'll put up a preliminary decklist for the first one when I've got it ready to be torn down.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Okay, I've tried a couple of times, and the formatting for presenting a deck skeleton is challenging to me. In the meantime, here's something very specific I'd like help with: WoWTCG-style weapons. Simulating the player-planeswalker facestabbing alongside their summoned critters is cool, I just have no particular idea how to cost it.

A basic weapon would look something like:
Image
Except I have no idea what should go in either X.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

I feel like you're going to actually want to change the rules, or at least create a keyword if you want that sort of personal face-stabbing.

That said, you could probably give A Simple Sword a pretty low casting cost, like 2 or 3, and a slightly higher activation cost, like maybe 4. Dealing three damage is a 1 or 2 CMC effect, but on a stick, I can see it raising to 4.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Apparently the reason Gisa's Bidding can't be a "zombie spell" is because Tribal "has" to be a card type, not a supertype, so it can be associated with subtypes.

Because Snow and Legendary are totally card types so they can have subtypes.

Oh wait. They're not.

The only other reason I've seen is "because you can't go half in," and apparently changing the text in Oracle so that cards like Gisa's Bidding have creature types is too much like work and they either haven't thought or don't want to grab a random magic nerd and say "we'll pay you minimum wage, a booster box a week, and all the industry knowledge and games with WotC employees you can stomach to enter some text for us." Seriously, they could make the booster box per month, or just one of my choice, and make me sit there while MaRo or Tabak rant, and I'd still do it.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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AndreiChekov
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Post by AndreiChekov »

We need context of the other cards in the set to know if that is balanced or not. If you are going to be using wizards cards alongside your own ones, then that card will cost a giant amount and be generally unplayable.

Myrodin had a card that cost 4, and dealt 1 damage to a creature or player for 3 mana or 1 R.

Shadowmoor had a card that cost 4 and for 4 mana put a -1/-1 counter on target creature.

I think there is a card somewhere before modern format that cost 4 and came into play with 3 counters. Tap and remove a counter for 1 damage to target creature or player.
Peace favour your sword.

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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I do plan to use a lot of Wizards cards so as to not have to reinvent so many wheels (not that Wizards cards don't have a wide range of cost:value ratios). But my point of comparison would probably start with Kamahl, Pit Fighter.

Image

He obviously is a fragile Creature and not an Artifact, and so is much easier to remove, but he also doesn't have a mana cost or life cost on his lightning bolt, so there's room to maneuver.
Last edited by angelfromanotherpin on Thu Apr 21, 2016 1:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Personal equipping... reminds me of Phantasy Star CARD where one deck was a hero with gear and the other summoned monsters.

There's Urza's Armor and Dragon Form for some existing MTG cards that represent the planeswalker himself gearing up or striding into battle.
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Post by Eikre »

Prak wrote:Apparently the reason Gisa's Bidding can't be a "zombie spell" is because Tribal "has" to be a card type, not a supertype, so it can be associated with subtypes.

Because Snow and Legendary are totally card types so they can have subtypes.

Oh wait. They're not.
I don't understand why you think Tribal would be improved by making it a supertype.

I also don't know what you're cuing with "oh wait they're not" because Snow and Legendary are both supertypes and lacking in any characterizing suptypes. Positives are not contradicted by double negatives.

But either way, Tribal-as-a-type was a stupid fucking idea driven by a rules manager who drinks too much at work or something and didn't have the intellectual stamina to address the taxonomy of this game as it pertains to type-changing. Particularly given that subtypes don't need to fucking do anything.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Shit, I put that in the wrong thread. Oh well.

Well, there's really no reason for Tribal to be a card type rather than a Supertype. Legendary and Snow are supertypes that get functions calls. Tribal could have been instituted the same way, with the basic rule of "a Tribal card can have a creature subtype even if it's not a creature," and I really don't understand why they apparently didn't consider that. I mean, I'm sure they did, but then they decided it needed to be a card type so that it could have subtypes associated with it directly. My "Oh wait," is specifically about that. Because Legendary and Snow creatures have subtypes on the cards, but those types aren't associated with the supertype, they're associated with the type. So this idea that to give a card a subtype it has to have a card type that can have subtypes associated with it is just fucking bizarre to me.

Basically I'm saying "Because legendary and snow totally work like that, oh wait, they don't, because it'd be stupid."

I know they're on this whole "can't make the game too complex at common" wagon, but, yeah, tribal really isn't that complex, and there were plenty of ways they could have made it work, and mysteriously they chose to not do any of them. I can really only conclude that Tabak is either an idiot and these ways did not occur to him, or that he was opposed to the entire idea of tribal spells, and so instituted it in the worst way possible on purpose to bury it.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Eikre »

You know, now that you've brought it up and I've had some time to scratch my chin a little over it, I actually do think I find "tribal-as-a-supertype" more reasonable. The justification that Tribal needs to be a type so that it can have subtypes is really no more legitimate at all than the justification that Tribal needs to be a supertype so that it can have a rule, which happens to be that the card is exempt from ordinary subtype restrictions. Except for the fact that the second case is seriously what is actually happening here and the actual purpose of the mechanic. Everyone fucking knows it.

Furthermore, Tribal completely fails to fulfill the primary purpose of a type, which is to have a basic rubric for playing it and resolving it. If you have a Land, you know you can play one per turn. If you have an Instant, you know you can play it by paying its mana cost, whenever you have priority, and that after its effects resolve it goes to the graveyard. If you play a creature you know it turns into a permanent with summoning sickness and the capacity to participate in combat and stuff.

So here's the question: How do you use a Tribal? Not a Tribal Sorcery or Tribal Enchantment, just a Tribal. How do you play it? The answer is... You actually can't. Such a card does not have an endemic function for leaving your hand or doing anything if it does. Its mana cost is meaningless, it can't be "played" like a land, and even if ended up on the stack somehow then when you got around to resolving it you'd just get a NULL_EXCEPTION error and wouldn't know where the card ends up. The graveyard? Exile? Fuck it, "Tribal" does not do anything that a Type needs to do at all. That's so obviously horseshit! How do they forget about that, but get all anal retentive about how only creatures can have creature types? What the fuck?
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Post by Eikre »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:But my point of comparison would probably start with Kamahl, Pit Fighter.
Wrong point of comparison.

Image
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AndreiChekov
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Post by AndreiChekov »

I really didn't get my point across, and I should have worded that better. My point was that every card ever that has done that is shit and nobody plays them.

If everyone has them, then you can balance them to each other and it should be fine.

Example

[[Simple Sword (no mana cost, can't be played from your hand)



Artifact - Weapon

If this card is in your deck, you begin play with it on the battlefield.

Shroud, Protection from everything

Simple sword can't be removed from the battlefield in anyway.

2, T: Simple sword deals 1 damage to target creature or player. If the target is a creature, that creature deals damage to you equal to its power.]]

then you can have other cards that modify it but have fading, so that they don't last forever and are easier to balance, and so that you can't just stack 30k enchantments on your weapon. The reason for it not interacting with the rest of the game, is so that you always have this basic weapon around, but the enchantments for it can be destroyed to turn it back into the kind of shitty thing it starts as.

[[Fire Enchantment 2RR]]

Enchantment - Aura

Enchant weapon

Fading 3

The weapon enchanted by Fire Enchantment becomes red and deals 3 damage instead of 1 damage. If a creature is damaged by this, it gains haste.]]
Peace favour your sword.

I only play 3.x
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Post by Eikre »

AndreiChekov wrote:...everyone has them...

...you begin play with it on the battlefield...

...can't be removed from the battlefield in anyway...
Yeah that's sort of a thing already, a whole battery of casual formats.
MTG Comprehensive Rules wrote:408.1. The command zone is a game area reserved for certain specialized objects that have an overarching effect on the game, yet are not permanents and cannot be destroyed.
So the point of comparison then is more like this shit:

Image
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Image

If one wanted to remain within the ordinary Magic milieu, however, you would desire a mechanic more like

Image
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