Alternate M:tG Color Wheel: Take II

[Mistborn]

I proposed an alternate color wheel for a Magic like game before and I thought I'd give it a fuller write up. The goal here is not just to make the colors have and aethetic but also to give them a mechanical identity.

Void
Void is themed around sacrifice, decay, resource trading, and entropy. It's nexus(lands) is the Ruin. It's creatures are Zombies, Giant Insects, Mad Cultists, and Horrors from Beyond the Veil. Like Black in Magic Void is interested in sending cards to the graveyard but unlike Black it's not that interested in getting those cards back. Void see a natural life cycle of a card where it starts in you library, gets drawn into your hand, is played, goes to the graveyard, then finally gets exiled and wants to accelerate it as fast a possible skipping steps along the way as needed.

A number of Void's cards require additional costs in the from of life, milling, discard, or exiling cards from the graveyard or library. It's creatures have a certain attraction to the graveyard as well with Vanishing/Fading, when this dies triggers or both. While void can also generate resources it's always at the cost of some other resource, and often void is cute and does stuff like make you pay 3 life to draw two cards in order to hammer home the entropy theme. Of course the big ticket void spells can foist those costs on your opponent instead, the Void doesn't care who pays so long as entropy has increased.

Void Decks break down fairly neatly into aggro, mid-range and control. Aggro Void understands it doesn't matter how much of you deck and life total get's fed to the Void so long as you win before you lose. It deploys large cheap creatures with drawbacks to take an early board advantage and beat down and finishes the game with symmetrical life loss effects. Void also supports midrange attrition decks and control decks through the various cards it has that put you ahead on resources.

Sample Void Cards

Rage Zombie 1V
Creature-Zombie
Vanishing 3, whenever Rage Zombie enters the battlefield or dies each player loses 1 life.
3/3

Skittering Cockroach 2V
Creature- Insect
When Skittering Horror enters the battlefield target player discards a card.
2/2

Voidspawn 3VVV
Creature- Horror
At the beginning of your upkeep reveal the to three cards of you library put the one with highest cost into your hand and exile the rest. Target Player loses life equal to that cards converted mana cost
6/6

Call of the Void V
Sorcery
Each player sacrifices a creature

Gaze into the Abyss 1V
Sorcery
Pay 3 life draw 2 cards

Hunger of the Beyond 4VVV
Sorcery
Target player loses 6 life, discards three cards, and sacrifices a creature. Gain 5 life Draw 2 cards, and put a creature from your graveyard back into your hand.

Light
Light is pure energy, divinity, and fricking laser beams. It's creatures are Knights, Clerics, Birds, and Angels. It's nexus is the Temple. A lot of Light's mechanical identity is set by it having burn spells. Light has spells that can both be answers and a way of killing the opponent, thus it's the faction that relies on it's spells more.

It's creatures aren't as big as Void or Nature creatures but Knights have various abilities that let them win creature combats like First Strike or Bushido(renamed Chivalry). Clerics on the other hand have various "spells matter" synergy effects. Light doesn't have the same kind of card advantage effects as the other factions but what it does have are Scry effects and various ways to get more out of it's individual spells like flashback or buyback. Light Also gets Ritual spells that generate mana allowing for more explosive all in sorts of plays.

Light decks are primarily aggro decks in the classic sligh model, but also include Midrange and Control decks that are capable of turning the corner rather spectacularly when the time comes.

Sample Light Cards

Knight of Faith 1L
Creature-Knight
First Strike Chivalry 1
2/2

Priest of Illumination 2L
Creature-Cleric
When Priest of Ilumination enters the battlefield scry 3, whenever you play an instant or sorcery spell Priest of Illumination gets +1/+2.
2/1

Angel of Radiance 3LL
Creature-Angel
Flying, Angel of Radiance enters the battlefield chose an instant or sorcery with CmC 3 or less from your graveyard, you may play it without paying it's mana cost then exile that card.
4/4

Illuminating Bolt 1L
Instant
Illuminating Bolt deals 2 damage to target creature or player. Scy 2

Light of Tomorrow 1LL
Sorcery
Light of Tomorrow deals 4 damage to target creature or player
Flashback 4L

Miracle 5LL
Return all instants and sorceries you own that are in exile to your hand, Add VLLLNTM to your mana pool.

Nature
Nature is the ramp and big dudes faction. It's like green but with more access to the sorts of effects that make green deck good, it's dudes are druids and their forest friends and it's nexus is the Grove. It's creatures are bigger for their mana cost like Void creatures but without the drawbacks.

In general Nature does most of what it does through it's creatures, it generates value though creatures enter the battle effects and its removal takes the form of fight effects. Nature also has wolves which do the tribal synergy thing, and various dudes that accumulate +1/+1 counters.

Nature decks tend to take four forms, straight-forward beatdown, synergistic beatdown, midrangey beatdown, and ramp.

Sample Nature Cards

Direwolf 1N
Creature-Wolf
3/3

Howling Wolf 2N
Creature-Wolf
When Howling Wolf enters the battlefield search your library for a wolf and put it into your hand.
2/2

Bloodtusk 3NN
Creature-Beast
When Bloodtusk enters the battlefield reveal cards from your library untill you reveal a creature for converted mana cost 4 or less, put that creature onto the battlefield and then gain life equal to it's toughness.
4/3

Derpasuar 6NN
Creature-Dinosaur
Trample
When Derpasuar enters the battlefield search your library for up to two creatures with a combined CmC 6 or less and put them onto the battlefield.
6/6

Stomp N
Instant
Target creature gets +1/+1 and then fights target creature.

Dryads Song 1N
Sorcery
Search your library for a grove and put it onto the battlefield tapped.

Time
Time is theme around clockwork, wizards, teleportation, and of course time magic. It's creatures are Wizards Arificers, Contructs and Sphinxes. Times nexus is the Tower.

Mechanically time is all about Tempo. Time can be wound backwards untapping permanents, returning them to their owners hand or to the top of their owners library, or it can be spun forward drawing additional cards, allowing a creature to attack the turn it was played or even let you take an additional turn. Time can be stopped tapping a permanent and potentially denying it the ability to untap the next turn and it can "flicker" allowing a creature to be unblockable or "blink" in and out of the exile zone.

Time's creatures just are not as good as other factions an thus rely either on evasion or having potential blockers dealt with some other way. Time also doesn't really have a permanent solution for anything. Cards that are bounced can and will eventually be replayed, creatures that are tapped eventually untap.

Time decks thus fall into aggro-control strategies that trade cards for time or hybrid-control decks that use card draw to refill their hand. Often then hybrid-control decks play to get into a position where they can cast Cronoshift for maximum value.

Sample Time Cards

Fencer Golem 1T
Creature-Construct
First Strike, Haste
2/1

Timestealer Mage 2T
Creature-Wizard
Haste, When Rewinder Mage enters the battlefield you may return target creature to it's owners hand.
2/2

Sphinx of the Clock Tower 3TT
Creature-Sphinx
Flying, Haste
When Sphinx of the Clock Tower enters the battlefield tap three permanents you don't control they don't untap during their controllers next untap step, then untap three permanents that you control
3/4

Rewind 1T
Instant
Return target spell to it's owners hand, draw a card.

Worldline Connection 2T
Instant
Draw two cards

Cronoshift 2TT
Sorcery
Take an extra turn after this one, exile Cronoshift

Mind
Mind deals in the ephemeral it's effects barely touch the battlefield but they can wreak havoc elsewhere. It's creatures are illusions, rogues, scheming viziers, and demons. It's nexus is the Palace.

Mind effects include the coveted counterspell but also targeted discard and tutors. Mind also does mill for what that's worth Where mind falls down is when it comes to dealing with permanents on the battlefield. While mind can take full control of creatures those effects are very high mana cost, inefficient or fragile. However Mind also has spells that do things like prevent a creature from attacking for a turn. Mind also gets shot shrift in the creature department. It's illusions can be big but explode when you look at them, Rogues are evasive but small, and Viziers have low P/T and live or die based on their effects. Demons are fine but they live at the top of the cost curve.

Mind also has the hardest time getting card advantage out of it's cards as it's draw spells tend to be of the look at the top X and select one type, with actual cards advantage being sorcery speed and very high up the curve.

In general mind is a control deck using counter magic and targeted discard to disrupt whatever you opponent is doing until you reach the late game. There's also probably some kind of vizier based turbo mill deck.
Sample Mind Cards

Droning Vizier 1M
Creature-Vizier
Tap: target player puts the top X+2 cards of his library into his graveyard where X is the number of Viziers you control.
0/3

Beguiling Thief 2M
Creature-Rogue
When Beguiling Thief attacks target creature can't attack or block until the end of it's controlers next turn
2/2

Willstealer Demon 5M
Creature-Demon
Flying
When Willstealer Demon enters the battlefield gain control of target creature for as long as you control Willstealer Demon
5/5

Brainteaser M
Sorcery
Name two card types other than nexus, look at target players hand and chose a card with one of those types that player discards that card.

Gather Thoughts 1M
Instant
Look at the top three cards of your library put one into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library.

Countermagic 1MM
Instant
Counter Target Spell

[DrPraetor]

To a first approximation, you've combined white and red while splitting blue in half. That's reasonable.

MtG colors have accumulated a lot of additional space, though - and even these are each conceptually more narrow than what launched in the original set. I assume you'll want vampires and dragons, for example? Where will they live? Will you have multi-color tribals - hound archons which are tribally wolves, that sort of thing?

[Mistborn]

To a first approximation, you've combined white and red while splitting blue in half. That's reasonable.

At it's core that's basically what happened, but it is a little more complicated. Black lost quite it bit in order to become Void, much of which was redistributed into Life and Mind. Just putting stuff from your graveyard back into your hand without any fuss about it is a Life effect. Duress and the like are Mind effects rather than Void. Mind also has some effects that are traditionally White like Pacificm. Time pretty much is Blue with added Haste and no non-Remand counterspells.

MtG colors have accumulated a lot of additional space, though - and even these are each conceptually more narrow than what launched in the original set. I assume you'll want vampires and dragons, for example? Where will they live? Will you have multi-color tribals - hound archons which are tribally wolves, that sort of thing?

Since Lorwyn a lot of tribes have spanned different colors, there's really no reason that a Light creature couldn't have a creature type that green creatures care about. More specifically.
Vampires - straddle Void/Mind and which one it is depend on if you stress them being crazed blood drinkers or decadent aristocrats.
Dragons - a probably Light/Nature but MtG has iconic dragons all over the color pie with some of the most famous being part of multicolored cycles, so under the new system Dragons might just all be multicolored.

[Username17]

Not sold on your land concepts. If you're looking to have lots of different lands, you're going to want things much more generic than "Temple." Also you're going to want evil temples that produce Void mana, and so on and so on. Magic set the bar very low by having one of the land types be "Mountain" which defines the land itself, one be "Forest" which defines what is growing on the land, and one be "Island" which defines what is adjacent to the land in question. That's fucking terrible, and it's easy to do better. But you also have to do better. The colored gems of Force of Will just weren't better enough than the Magic Lands for me to take that game seriously. Magic is fucking old now, and not doing better than it at defining your basic resource cards is like trying to release a modern movie on VHS.

Anyway, I think you should talk about these things much more in terms of mechanics, since the mystical flavor of these things is pretty weird and with expansion almost certainly beside the point in any case. And I think you can and should divide the color pie up harder and finer. There's no particular reason that Cancel, Negate, and Essence Scatter should appear in the same color, for example. Those spells are different in application, utility, and feel, and while they are all used by control decks, there's no reason that every control deck should be the same color or colors.

You're going to end up with multi-color decks, and you're going to end up with Aggro, Midrange, and Control strategies in each color and each combination of colors. So you should be asking yourself questions like "What does this color bring to an Aggro deck?" and "What does this color bring to a Control deck?" Other than cherry picking good stuff, why should a midrange deck splash Time Magic? How is it different mechanically and thematically from a midrange deck that splashed Void magic instead?

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I'd add that you should consider 'off-flavors'. I mean, you have a list of things that you envision clearly fitting in one or another category, but that's very limiting.

I'd like to propose the Disney test. Disney is arguably the largest entertainment company in the world and their properties are among the most popular. Their movies have informed our imaginations and many people will feel inspired by concepts pulled directly from their movies - as evinced by the popularity of Kingdom Hearts.

When I look at your categories, I don't see where an animated guardian snowman fits in. I don't see where a wish-granting genie fits in. I don't see where a sorceress that can transform into a dragon fits in. I don't see where a mermaid fits in.

If your concepts are so rigid that you can't imagine finding logical places for those, I think you've got a problem.

Regarding 'motivation', I think there is room for good and evil within your factions (like evil druids that want to destroy all civilization can still be green can be nature with druids that simply want to establish a balance), but it might be better to think in those terms primarily. In the vein, I think laying out a fundamental 'purpose' of the factions makes sense - even if the people that are nominally on that team aren't fully aligned. Like if 'void' is seeking the heat death of the universe, even if you're looking for temporal power RIGHT NOW and you're willing to contribute to the death of everything in a relatively small way, it makes some sense, but it also makes Void always the bad guys.

[Mistborn]

Not sold on your land concepts. If you're looking to have lots of different lands, you're going to want things much more generic than "Temple." Also you're going to want evil temples that produce Void mana, and so on and so on. Magic set the bar very low by having one of the land types be "Mountain" which defines the land itself, one be "Forest" which defines what is growing on the land, and one be "Island" which defines what is adjacent to the land in question. That's fucking terrible, and it's easy to do better. But you also have to do better. The colored gems of Force of Will just weren't better enough than the Magic Lands for me to take that game seriously. Magic is fucking old now, and not doing better than it at defining your basic resource cards is like trying to release a modern movie on VHS.

I'm not sure how to go more generic than "Temple", but the basic idea was to move away from terrain types and towards structures/power sites. The general idea is that what you build on top of a nexus determines what mana you get out of it. Thus there's an easy reason for whatever factions to fight. The Time Wizards want more mana and so they want to take over the Druids' Grove and cut down the trees and build a tower full of gears that generates Time mana. If you've got a better set of structures, or even different idea altogether I'm all ears.

[Archmage]

Why not simply call them [X] Nodes, then, where the X is the type of mana they produce? Thinking Age of Wonders here.

Then you can have "Structure" cards that are played like Enchant Nodes that do things.

Edit: Also, if you haven't played it and want to see another game with this kind of setup, you should look at Eternal--which is basically an MTG spinoff streamlined for mobile/PC play (so a lot fewer response windows to pass priority through). Its "factions" (colors) are Fire (red), Justice (green), Time (yellow), Primal (blue), and Shadow (purple).

[Username17]

Light decks are primarily aggro decks in the classic sligh model

Realistically, you do not get to choose this. You can make cards of various costs and you can make parasitic mechanics that will make people use certain cards together or not at all, but you can't actually make them choose the former instead of the latter.

Whether a particular deck is good or even playable requires much more playtesting than you'll be able to perform - not the least of which because most of the time it will be a metagame call based on what the herd is doing. Even if you make aggro cards that are very good in abstract, they won't see play if the meta is full of decks with cheap sweepers and lifegain, for example.

So what you're actually going to be doing is providing the different colors with cards of different costs. And you're going to provide different colors with cards of different intended playstyles. So the question you need to ask is "What does a 7 mana Control finisher look like in Nature?" and "What does a 2 mana Tempo play look like in Void?" and so on and so on. But which collections are going to see play is going to be sufficiently hard to predict that you'll probably end up surprised by what shows up in tournament lists.

I think the best example of this sort of thing in action was the Tier 1 Temurge deck from Eldritch Moon. Emerge was a Black/Green/Blue mechanic, but the actual tournament quality deck was Blue/Green/Red. Basically because of some pretty sweet synergy between the Emerge creatures and Kozilek's Return, a cheap sweeper designed for Ramp/Control decks from several sets back.

Or consider the progression of Shadowverse: many decks had cards but didn't see much play because they just didn't quite hold together. It's not that there weren't cards for Control Sword, it's that for much of the run where I cared about that game Control Sword was extremely poorly matched against the meta and hardly saw any play. It wasn't a deliberate attempt by the designers to kill Control Sword, it was simply that various other decks that happened to be strong against Control Sword were very popular and it was very hard to win games with a Control Sword deck.

Now consider some crazy powerful cards that hardly saw any play in Magic like Dimir Cutpurse. If a card doesn't have a home in a deck that is good overall against the meta that actually exists, it basically just doesn't matter how good that card is in abstract.

So anyway, the thing to do is to divide up the pie into what each basic strategy gains from any of the colors and what you can expect to get from each cost point and then you can consider pushing individual cards. And pushed cards that have a home in a tier 1 deck in the meta that develops will be $30, and pushed cards that don't have such a home will be weird curiosities.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

What does a sexy booby lady of each element look like?

[OgreBattle]

What does a sexy booby lady of each element look like?

[Eikre]

Not sold on your land concepts. If you're looking to have lots of different lands, you're going to want things much more generic than "Temple." Also you're going to want evil temples that produce Void mana, and so on and so on. Magic set the bar very low by having one of the land types be "Mountain" which defines the land itself, one be "Forest" which defines what is growing on the land, and one be "Island" which defines what is adjacent to the land in question. That's fucking terrible, and it's easy to do better.

You have made this assertion before, and I disagree.

The fact of the matter is that if you're running a deck construction model that's anything like Magic, the intersections of colors need to have a reconcilable identity just as much as the individual colors have distinction. That means that the basic aesthetics of the colors need to be unique to those colors, but not mutually exclusive.

Let's look to the lands in Magic. Forests are majorly defined by foliage, which is solid. "Island" has a big problem in being, frequently, a misnomer for the place depicted, but otherwise those depictions are reliably a place where a water feature is prominent; we could assume, for the purpose of the exercise, an alternate reality where the English lexicon included a term for "areas with prominent water features" and surmise they would have used that term instead. Mountains and Plains are a little more distant from punchy core elements, but the former is, broadly, an elevated and imposing place and the latter is vast and flat. Swamps have a major problem because they are supposed represent "spooky," but they're also full of water and plants. Swamps aren't basic at all, they're tri-lands containing the Black feature as well as those of Green and Blue!

And how does that play out? Well, the Alpha-edition dual lands are pretty telling: The foliage of Forests can go anywhere you want, so the Green duals solidly come through with the element implied by the Green land; Taigas are a craggy wilderness, Savannas are flat wilderness, and Tropical Islands are literally just forests sitting on islands. The depiction of the "Bayou," though, struggles to distinguish itself at all from an ordinary swamp (the words are synonymous), but you'll never find an alternative where that's not the case because swamps already have the fetid quality of a forest.

Swamps have a harder time remaining swampy when they reconcile with the other lands. Underground seas are a [water feature] and they've got the spooky thing going on that we want from Black's land, but they're absolutely nothing like an actual swamp. I don't even know what Badlands or Scrublands really are and the mountain-ness and plains-ness of them struggles to come through, but that's the natural problem when you're trying to find terms of geological art which imply "spooky," given that emotional quality isn't a geological attribute like those defining the other lands (and indeed, both terms are, at best, only a very weak success at connoting spookiness). In any event, both places are also indisputably lacking in marshland.

We might also examine how well these lands are localized to the same particular settings, because you presumably would like to visit some of those every once in a while. Ravnica places a pretty extraordinary limitation on how lands are depicted by demanding that they all be urbanized, but they still slam-dunked Forests in there without straining:




The vastness of plains and the tall, imposing structures implied by mountains are also creatively integrated:




But the illustrators, again, have trouble with the fact that the palpable qualities of a swamp are owned by other colors:




If they weren't tilted into a particular color palette, would you be able to tell that these were supposed to be tracking to "swamp" and not just ordinary water features? The reliable depictions of black settings in these sets put them underground, but that's not in any way a feature of an actual swamp. You can't even build a fucking basement in a marshland!

So, something like a "Temple" is a highly adequate representative for a color, because you can put shrines or religiosity anywhere. It's something that is easily the focus feature or background setting in an illustration without being overly exclusive towards or inclusive of the traits of other synecdoches, and therefore, it can reliably be a motif in the art on both mono- and multi-color cards. That's an indisputable asset.

[DrPraetor]

Eikre - I endorse your thesis but I dispute your conclusion.

You can put religious shit anywhere, it's true - but when you picture a generic ruin, do you picture a generic ruin isn't a ruined temple? If you manage that, how do you have a ruin that isn't a tower or a palace.

Aren't all groves nature temples? How is a temple-grove different from a regular grove?

So you have: Ruin, Temple, Ruined Temple, Grove, Ruined Grove (?), Sacred Grove (?), Tower, Ruined Tower, Holy Tower, Forest Tower, Palace, Ruined Palace, Cathedral, Garden, Tall Palace (?).

Ruin, Palace, and Grove all work pretty well, it looks to me. The Tower can be a Factory instead, I think that would work better and still gets LM's point of being busy with steampunk shit across.

I'd suggest that the defining feature of Light nodes is that they are open to the sky, and the default Light node is the Plaza.

It's a bit hard to come up with good names for all of these but I think that would better meet Eikre's standard of having definitive pairings of aesthetics.

Plaza + Ruin -> ... Ruined Plaza?
Plaza + Grove -> Glade
Plaza + Factory -> Foundry?
Plaza + Palace -> Courtyard

Ruin + Grove -> Deadwood?
Ruin + Factory -> Junkyard
Ruin + Palace -> Abandoned Keep

Grove + Factory -> ???
Grove + Palace -> Garden

Factory + Palace -> Salon

Not perfect. I don't like the abandoned keep - for Ruin + Palace you kinda want a place that is in ruins but is still being actively used to party. An abandoned warehouse rave would be perfect, but would probably be anachronous for your setting .

[Eikre]

Following up. These conceits come with a concomitant exercise: When you lay out the symbols of your colors, try to determine if you can come up with satisfactory titles for their intersections. This is what I would read into Mistborn's Nexuses:

	Void (Ruin)	Light (Temple)	Nature (Grove)	Time (Tower)
Mind (Palace)	Broken Stronghold	Sovereign Cathedral	Capital Gardens	Royal Eyrie
Time (Tower)	Bloodstained Spire	Moutaintop Monastery	Treetop Complex
Nature (Grove)	Salted Earth	Sacred Glade
Light (Temple)	Desecrated Shrine

What I immediately notice is that bibles and potted plants are easily portable, so Groves and Temples are good. Ruins are good, too, and gives the interesting impression that Void can't build a nexus, only subvert one by blowing it the fuck out. I struggle with Tower and Palace, though. Is the primary feature implied by the palace its gilding, the attendant population, or the implied secular might? Is the primary feature of the tower its isolation, its impregnability, or mere elevation? Furthermore, though I do imagine that cunning people like to live near palaces and that physics-fuckers might seclude themselves in towers, neither of those constructions have a particularly intellectual or temporal quality.

[Eikre]

Ah, I see my previous post was pre-empted. Good show. A few comments:

You can put religious shit anywhere, it's true - but when you picture a generic ruin, do you picture a generic ruin isn't a ruined temple?

Sure. The burnt-down house that was at the end of my cul-de-sac when I was a kid was a ruin. Western ghost towns are ruins. No-Man's land in WWI was a ruin. The generic ruin is a fucked to death pile of ashes where you know some shit went down but the previous function of the place might take some effort to determine.

Aren't all groves nature temples?

No. Some of them are just parks or farms. A temple-grove is one that a bunch of people hold in religious significance, either because they think god wants it there or because trees are a necessary element of their preferred setting for sacred ceremony.

The Tower can be a Factory instead, I think that would work better and still gets LM's point of being busy with steampunk shit across.

I like the direction you're thinking in but I don't know if I endorse factories as the correct choice.

[same exercise I did with a few different basic nexuses substituted]

Not perfect. I don't like the abandoned keep - for Ruin + Palace you kinda want a place that is in ruins but is still being actively used to party. An abandoned warehouse rave would be perfect, but would probably be anachronous for your setting .

I think this illustrates pretty well that plazas don't have a striking feature. Granted, flatness is an easy attribute to work into a space, but it needs to be far more vast to qualify as any kind of a theme.

[Username17]

I'm not sure how to go more generic than "Temple", but the basic idea was to move away from terrain types and towards structures/power sites.

"Temple" in particular is fucking awful, because it is absolutely inconceivable that you would want to always and forever avoid having any anti-Life religions and thus never ever ever have any temples devoted to death gods or chaos gods or time gods or whatever the fuck.

So, something like a "Temple" is a highly adequate representative for a color, because you can put shrines or religiosity anywhere.

Temple is a completely terrible way to represent a color because it limits you severely in what you're allowed to do going forward. Consider Fallen Empires, where the Order of Lightbeer fought the Order of the Ebon Hand. That's two different sets of temples that are in opposite factions. Or consider Theros or Amonkhet where there are gods and temples of every single color. These are not weird things to want to be able to do. In fact, it's extremely difficult to come up with temple based storylines that don't involve multiple competing temples, and there's only so many variations of internal color squabbling you're going to want to do.

The very moment you ask "What about the Void Cultists and their Void Temple?" you've lost the plot entirely.

"Island" has a big problem in being, frequently, a misnomer for the place depicted, but otherwise those depictions are reliably a place where a water feature is prominent; we could assume, for the purpose of the exercise, an alternate reality where the English lexicon included a term for "areas with prominent water features" and surmise they would have used that term instead.

The generic term is usually "wetland" but often "Swamp." Many "Island" lands are literally Swamps.

In any case, the prominence or lack thereof of easy access to water is a facet of the setting, not of the land. A set of cards set in a horse nomad khanate or inside a major city or in fucking space logically has zero lands that are big water things. A set of cards set in the battle for Atlantis or the Adventures of Sinbad has literally every land covered in fish. Areas with prominent water features are available somewhere between ubiquity and never depending on where you put your story. And having that be one of your factions is like having one of the factions be the permafrost faction - many potential story setting will give them zero lands or all the lands.

To see this in action, actual Magic the Gathering had Amonkhet - a setting set in a desert oasis surrounded by wastes full of zombies back to back with Ixalan - a setting based on the Age of Sail. The first had logically no place for islands or coastlines because there wasn't any fucking ocean because it was a god damned desert full of zombies. The second logically had only place for coastlines because there were pirates, conquistadors, and fish people of literally every color.
---

Ultimately you need concepts that have legs and don't paint you into a corner in every single setting you might want to do. One of your factions can't be "Frozen" because some of your settings are hot and don't have any ice. One of your factions can't be "Religious" because some of your settings are going to be centered around squabbling between religious factions.

Probably the best bet is to have the actual core title of the basic resource card just be the Pokemon resource card - if it provides Mind power, call it a "Mind Node" or whatever. And then draw various towers and mazes and pools full of brain coral and whatever the fuck else - the color tinting can be the only thing that these cards actually have to do with one another, and that's fine.

Now a more fundamental question is how you want to handle non-basic resource cards. The question of how good a reource card is supposed to be is extremely fundamental and colors how the game handles its design space in important ways.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Now a more fundamental question is how you want to handle non-basic resource cards. The question of how good a reource card is supposed to be is extremely fundamental and colors how the game handles its design space in important ways.

Personally I don't like you proposal of every land also having relevant ability, given it's potential to double or triple the complexity of a boardstate. Some nexuses will have abilities and basics will just be a little worse than other nexuses. The reason that you play basics is because of cards like this.

Seeker of Time 1T
Creature-Seeker
Discard Seeker of Time from your hand: search you library for a
basic time nexus and put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.
2/2

[DrPraetor]

That doesn't make the board-state simpler, it makes the board state harder to read because the powers of each basic nexus are written on other cards.

If you want to simplify the board state, just make every nexus a multi-nexus for exactly two colors and leave it at that. So, there is no "grove", there is only "sun-dappled glade", "black forest", etc.

[Omegonthesane]

Seconding the idea that basic nexuses should be two-colour nexuses and special lands should be one-colour instead of having to be more restricted than that.

[Mistborn]

That doesn't make the board-state simpler, it makes the board state harder to read because the powers of each basic nexus are written on other cards.

If you want to simplify the board state, just make every nexus a multi-nexus for exactly two colors and leave it at that. So, there is no "grove", there is only "sun-dappled glade", "black forest", etc.

Can I have what ever it is you're smoking? A Seeker of Time is essentially a split card, you can either play it as a bear or discard it to get a land and then play that. Once that decision has been made little if any complexity is added to the board, indeed the card is balanced around the lands it searches being basics without any additional text.

Also obviously you don't want the default to be dual lands because that eliminates monocolor decks and pushes all deck to being 3-4 colors.

[Krusk]

your land types are bullshit. They are all generally too broad.

A temple is super generic and doesn't tell me literally anything about a building, except that someone holds it in high reverence. If its even a building and not an outside space.

Ruins can be anything, so long as its old and broken. Also, how do I build new ruins? Or do I go to some temple, and break it? What if i find a new source of Void in the world, and want to tap it? do I have to go find some light dudes, have them build a temple, and burn it down?

Grove - I'm actually ok with this one. Although you should turn nature into woodlands or something. Because deserts are natural and don't have wolves or groves.

Towers - Are generally speaking any tall narrow building. See temple rant, but at least this tells me what it should look like.

Palace - So someplace sprawling and rich? thats broad as shit.

----------
Now that I've called you names, my suggestions to do it better.
Void - Graveyard. Void people literally tap into graveyards and halls of the dead. Sometimes its got a bunch of tombstones, sometimes its a sacrificial pit, sometimes a tar pit full of dinosaur bones. But its always a place with heaps of corpses.

Light - Castle. A castle is a structure with definable characteristics, but has enough variety you can put a bunch out there. From stone keeps, to japanese shiro, to really any fortified building. If you want to tap into light, you gotta bring the military with you.

Nature - Grove. Groves are fine, but you need to highlight that its actually mostly woodland, not nature, so you probably want to rename it. Woodland doesn't sound right based on the others, but something like Life might make sense.

Time - Laboratory. seems like its basically artificers and wizards, who do science stuff. So they do it in a lab. Your art is all steampunk, clockwork, and whatever the ___punk for Dr. Jekyll is. Immediately recognizable, but can have tons of looks. You can show anything from robotic assembly lines, to cloning vats, to Frankenstein switches.

Mind - Stage. If they are ephemeral and barely touch the battlefield, they shouldn't build palaces. Which are defined by being huge and opulent. They build stages, circuses, and theaters. This can range from an open cleared bit of packed earth, you would otherwise walk right past, to a larger more elaborate theater. Heck, sometimes they are even mobile, setting up for a bit, tapping the nexus, and moving on once they draw too much attention. You could put either end on the "better" land spectrum. Stage or Theater. A theater being big and more impressive, so it makes more, or a theater being big and impressive because its ineffective, so it makes less.

- Take 2 Mind. If you want to be out there, Mind doesn't even tap nexuses. Its got some 0 mana 0/1 spirits who can be tapped for M. Now as you play, you've got a bunch of spirits or cultists or whatever who run from battles and try not to engage, but band together to pull off big rituals.

[Whipstitch]

A Seeker of Time is essentially a split card

His complaint isn't that a Seeker of Time tells the players too much, it's that under such a scheme a basic land doesn't tell us enough! Kinda like how artifact lands look completely harmless until someone shows you what the Affinity for Artifacts cards can do. It's the sort of mechanic where depending on the meta playing the card could tell an expert a lot and a newbie virtually nothing. By contrast a Desert is seriously just a weenie defense card for decks that would love to make it to turn 7.

[DrPraetor]

I assume the Seeker of Time is not the only card that cares about the basic time nexus.

If it is, then you want to have exactly one basic time nexus somewhere in your deck, so that you can swap it for a bear if needed. I assume that's not the emergent property you want.

You could have a number of cards which mill for basic nexi, and if that is all that basic nexi do, then that wouldn't complicate the board state. However, that's a very hard mechanic to tune, because you'll almost-certainly end in a degenerate state where you only use either basic nexi or advanced nexi depending on whether the mill effects are worth it or not. Partial success would be a bifurcation where two near-optimal decks either use basic nexi (and cards that mill for them) or advanced nexi (with whatever advantages, maybe being more colors?); the state where near-optimal decks include a range of mixes of basic-nexus-mill and advanced-nexus-splash is going to be very difficult to achieve.

If there are cards that don't-destroy basic nexuses, or get bigger when your opponent plays a non-basic nexus, or whatever else, than each of those cards potentially complicates the board state just by being in someone's deck or hand.

Taking a step back - you're spending a lot of time on lands which are not really the design failure point of MtG. People complain because they're poorly balanced, but that's it. If you're going to swap colors around, you should also build a better game, which starts by having more robust mechanical foundations (and yes, a simpler typical board state might be nice).

[Foxwarrior]

(and yes, a simpler typical board state might be nice)

I... think I disagree. There's not much to playing MtG (as opposed to building decks) other than evaluating the board state and figuring out how to change it in your favor. So an interesting MtG clone is one that presents the player with as many different complex board states as possible. But not too many red herring cards that take a long time to read but little time to evaluate I guess.

[Username17]

Whipstitch got it in one. If cards care about basic resource cards, then that is equivalent to all the basic resource cards having extra text explaining the relationship the other way. For example, in the current Standard, Basic Islands could equivalently be written that they give a stacking +1/+0 to all your Tempest Djinns and that if you have one of them in your deck you grab it when you play a Grow From the Ashes or your opponent plays an Assassin's Trophy. Indeed, Basic Islands are quite good and many decks play them when they have other options available because of this "secret text" on the basic island.

Now that's a perfectly defensible design choice. You could indeed have resource cards that are "basic" and required in some number for decks to benefit from certain interactions with those basic resource cards. But equally you could just say that basic lands are draft chaff that you only ever use in limited.

In any case, the idea that you would make your resource cards in such a way that they didn't have abilities and interactions is fucking absurd. Even Pokémon didn't manage to do that, and their energy cards literally don't even have text on them.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Taking a step back - you're spending a lot of time on lands which are not really the design failure point of MtG. People complain because they're poorly balanced, but that's it. If you're going to swap colors around, you should also build a better game, which starts by having more robust mechanical foundations (and yes, a simpler typical board state might be nice).

In any case, the idea that you would make your resource cards in such a way that they didn't have abilities and interactions is fucking absurd. Even Pokémon didn't manage to do that, and their energy cards literally don't even have text on them.

I think it's important to understand the failure case when it comes to adding additional text to lands. Imagine if you will you are playing a game of Magic. Things are going well you played some creatures, they played come creatures. Then you make what at the time think is a profitable attack

and get blown out by part of the scenery. The more moving parts you add to the boardstate the more likely it is that this sort of thing will happen. On the other hand imagine this card.

Surge of Growth 1N
Instant
Target Creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn.
Discard Surge of Growth from your hand: search you library for a Basic
Grove and put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.

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.

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.