Blue Library Manipulation

So the typical card draw/filtering for blue needs to deal with the fact that the blue-red and the blue-black identities are different. There needs to be consideration of both scrying for red and the possibilities of playing things from outside of your hand for black.

So let's start with this set's version of Telling Time:

Putting a card on the bottom of the library rewards the blue-red scry-to-the-bottom gameplay. Putting a card in the graveyard makes it accessible for possible recursion or playing out of the graveyard later, or even a reave kicker with a black or red card.

Here's the draw three sorcery:

I had an idea of having blue and black spells that have inherent bonuses if they're played from outside your hand. I don't want push into that too much because it's so very parasitic and not terribly compatible with reave in black. But I might have one or two cards. Scour for Answers does go great with the set's mandatory Weird Blue Enchantment:

I think this is okay as rare and not mythic. To explain what's gong on with the scry components: In a limited environment with less emphasis on sorceries and instants, players might be concerned about exiling a bunch of cards they can't play. The scry on ETB before the exile is intended to let the player improve their chances of getting playable cards. They can bottom lands or creatures. And then the activatable scry is simply to make sure it's never a "dead" enchantment if you don't get any castable cards or after the cards have been cast. And it also makes the card compatible with red-blue.

Drumbeat Enchantments 2.0

Now that I have the mechanics and color pair identities nailed down, I went back and looked at the drumbeat enchantment cycle to see if I wanted to keep it.

I think I do, rather than having a uncommon creature auras. So what I did is to create them so that they grant appropriate color-associated bonuses that aren't typical combat keywords. So they're not granting menace, or flying, or hexproof, or what have you. Those will come from typical auras and combat tricks. But with mutate in mind, I wanted to have thoughtful bonuses that rewarded strategy but didn't give the typical +X/+X bonuses.

So here's the new iteration of the cycle.

White probably has the most powerful of them (especially when combined with the U/W flyers archetype). But white doesn't have access to mutate on its own, so it makes sense.

I am still unsure as to whether these enchantments are too powerful with the flexibility or too weak with the mana requirements. It will have to be tested.

R/W Identity: Purge the Monsters!

The last of my color pairings here is probably intentionally going to have the smallest footprint in the set.

Red and white combined will be the best pairing for taking out the various corrupted, mutated, and overgrown beasts of Guthreham. That's not really much of an identity. It's what the two colors already do. 

I don't see this being a set where people would be drafting red and white. They just really don't have a lot of identity in common. But I did want to make sure they are at least playable together.

Here's a common red creature who will be helpful early on against mutating decks:

So this is going to be a little different from U/W's control of big beasts because it's based on aggression. U/W is much more defensive. R/W is going to destroy them all.

Here's a way for white to both control and be aggressive in its typical exile enchant effect:

So you remove an opponent's creature and potentially make one of yours a bigger beater. And there are red mutate creatures, so this could partner well with your own monsters if you want to be a big ol' hypocrite.

The signpost card is a sorcery, which is about as big a sign that you can get that this set is not trying to push you to play these two colors together. But it is a nice card:

So I've defined identities as best I can for each of the color pairings. I need to figure out what the artifact components look like and what I want to do with non-basic and dual lands. A set about an overgrowing plane begs for some land weirdness, but I'm really not sure of an approach yet.

B/W Identity: Survival at Any Cost

People who have been afflicted with the various plagues that have cropped up along with the overgrowing abundance of life get pushed out of The Arbor and other communities and end up in various small encampments. There's a long collection of them along what's now known as The Blightcoast. 

There people struggle to survive, and to deal with the horror of their own pending zombification when they do. It's a riff on the familiar zombie apocalypse trope, but in this case, the zombies aren't inherently predatory and they're not just randomly attacking and eating people. They don't need brains. They don't need anything, actually. They just shamble along in a brutal unlife. They respond to threats. So when the encampments get attacked by raiders or outsiders, zombies will actually help defend the humans.

The B/W identity is focused on using recursive creatures and token creatures as resources to help survive. The G/B vermin theme is about going wide in attacking with your tokens. B/W is about using tokens and recursion as tools to keep yourself alive.

Reave in black will play significant role. Here's what will likely be a staple common:

A simple zombie that would be too odd in any other set but makes sense here at common. Whenever you have a reave kicker show up on a card, you can target this zombie and he'll return to the battlefield instead of being exiled.

Here's an important uncommon build-around for this playstyle:

Note that you can get several zombies from this card. This is why I separated reave as a cost from the effect. At common, reave will cause a thing to happen once. At uncommon, a reave effect can iterate multiple times from a single trigger. At rare/mythic, a reave effect can be a recurring trigger.

Getting white involved is a little tricky. This all reads pretty black. In fact, I'm looking at this next card, and it feels black instead of white. I may need to tweak how it works:

I want white to represent some devoted healer types who were not willing to abandon people who have been touched by plagues. The way the sacrifice is triggered here feels black, not white I need to figure a white way to trigger a very limited recursion effect with Desperate Stitcher.

Here's a weird rare that I think works with this color combo:

I'm not really sure it's actually rare. Note that white will have access to fecund, so this actually also works as a bridge rare with other color combos that aren't focused on zombie tokens. There's a rules question here as to whether spells that create tokens directly, as with Disrupted Peace, count as being cast from your hand. Should it? Maybe the card should read "wasn't cast from your hand as a creature spell."

And the signpost uncommon:

Pretty straightforward.

Fecund 3.0

I wasn't really happy with the wordiness of Fecund 2.0, partly necessary to avoid immediate infinite combos. Also, I was kind of unhappy with the flavor of how the mechanic worked, which suggested a massive interspecies orgy going on. What I really wanted to do somehow is have a mechanic where an individual creature could create a token version of itself, but only once.

And then today, this lady was introduced from the upcoming core set:

So when she deals damage to something, she loses hexproof. And it's easy to remember if she's dealt damage or not. So it's a change while the card is in play that isn't signaled with counters or anything, but it is not likely to cause memory problems. So I was thinking of reversing that. What if a thing triggered only once when a creature did damage?

I made an additional hoop to trigger requiring it to damage an opponent. This keeps it a little bit more in check so that it can appear on common, and more importantly allows for fecund to remain on the token copy. The copy will need to do combat damage to another player, but if it does, again another copy.

There's the thing that because Palladia-Mors is an expensive mythic legend, you're only ever going to have one of her out. She's not going to cause memory issues for that reason. I'm not sure how difficult it will be to remember if a creature has dealt damage to an opponent or not yet if you have multiple fecund creatures out.

It's a way of capturing reproduction that has gatekeeping that keeps it being interactive with the opponent. The question will be how balanced it is, especially in a limited environment. And of course, this is only going to be able to be on small creatures. Well ... maybe one really crazy mythic. We'll see.

G/B Vermin Swarm

I thought about "batching" a bunch of small green and black creatures as "vermin" the way Dominaria has batched "historic" cards, but I don't think the set actually needs it. I'm creating many creatures that qualify as vermin, but not a lot of vermin "tribal" cards. Instead I'm caring about creature tokens, which will abound in both colors.

Ultimately I think I'm definitely cutting black out of fecund, so that mechanic will appear only in bant colors (G/U/W). Black has both mutate and reave. And it will be getting some zombie tokens, which will also be relevant for the B/W identity.

So some vermin relevant cards:

Reave isn't terribly compatible with the vermin concept because tokens aren't going to end up in the graveyard. But it is a way to get a second use of combat tricks, and not all the creatures are going to be tokens, obviously. There won't be many reave cards that this deck will want.

What fecund looks like in rare. I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Once the Warproot Ant Colony is on the battlefield, your natural inclination will to be target it with every subsequent creature with fecund that enters the battlefield. I'm not sure how dangerous this will end up being.

This is a bridge card that can also fit in B/W with zombie tokens, but obviously is also very powerful when comboed with green's fecund creatures.

And a new signpost for G/B. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep Vermin Frenzy as yet. I actually haven't decided on how many multicolor cards will be in the set beyond the signpost uncommons and the two planeswalkers.

So the play dynamic is to play vermin creatures. Use fecund to create additional vermin creature tokens. Swing in with your vermin creatures. When your non-token vermin creatures die, you make token snakes. When your tokens die, you drain your opponent.

G/W Managing the Mutations

Because green and white also have a starring planeswalker, it needs a solid identity. This is slightly awkward because white is the color without mutate and green is very pro-mutate.

They do also share fecund, but again, I want green-black to be token creature heavy, and Janell just doesn't fit that kind of mentality. She wants the growth, but she also wants control. So that hit me with the idea that G/W should be the color pairing where you can spend +1/+1 counters for various effects. So flavorwise, you're having your creatures grow, but keeping them under careful control and management. There will be no wild reveling like in red-green and no secret evolutions like in green-blue.

So the mandatory elf mana dork:

She's also obviously a bridge common for anything else you might want to splash, especially if you get a strong mutate creature in red or blue.

Definitely a different idea for a card. Obviously you don't want this unless you're going to commit yourself into creatures and spells that give counters. I'm still working on the white-red identity, but you probably don't want it in there or if you're invested in the white-blue flyers token creature deck.

This maybe looks a little underwhelming. I may jack up the power level depending on how frequently it triggers and the battle effects. White will have plenty of first strike, though, so there's potential combat trickery here.

Green non-mutate common that's compatible with this color combo:

The humans have hounds (in white). The elves have cougars (in green) outside the Arbor helping deal with large beasts. Even though it doesn't have mutate, there are ways to give it more counters. But in all likelihood it will die when you use its ability. That's the point.

Here's the Green-White signpost. I'm kind of ambivalent, so it may change:

Maybe I should have it destroy a tapped creature? Destroy a large creature? Maybe it should be only four mana.

And here's my latest iteration of Janell:

Her ultimate was once my legendary angel's ability, but I think I'm going to change her to perhaps go with a red-white identity I'm working on. Note that Janell's ultimate exiles both creatures and artifacts, but only the creatures come back. Yes, I'm aware that her ultimate doesn't pair well with her +1. But the whole growth reset button is definitely part of her intended identity.

Also a fun thing. You can use her +1 on opponents' creatures to make them bigger, and then use her -3 to exile them.

U/G Identity: Grow Smarter!

Red and green just both want to grow bigger and overrun everyone. But in the secretive evolutionary battles going on in the Untended Cradle if you want to grow, you've got to adapt and survive as well.

The blue-green identity won't have a big footprint in the set, but the focus is on creatures that evolve, not just grow.

It won't have a huge footprint because it's hard to do at common. It's a little too complex, and at common we mostly want french vanilla mutate and fecund creatures. Here's a common:

It doesn't have mutate. Instead it grows as it takes down the flyers it has evolved to feed on.

I haven't really brainstormed many rares yet. Here's a blue drake:

This is an ability you have to think before using. Obviously you can duplicate any combat trick. But if you want to play some high-risk evolution games, you can copy a low-level damage spell or some sort of tap or detain spell in order to trigger mutate.

I've already introduced the Acre Breaker, but I've iterated it a little bit. And I've bumped it from rare to mythic:

Instead of a signpost creature, I've redone Self-Directed Evolution as an aura:

Given that there's no humanoid races in the Untended Cradle, don't think too much about how this spell is getting cast in the first place. Or perhaps you should, and worry just a bit.

Fecund 2.0

I was not happy with the wording for my first version of fecund, which takes up so much reminder text that you can't realistically do much with it.

So I cleaned it up, and by doing so, kind of loosened it up into a weird Animal Kingdom/"Do it like they do on the Discovery Channel" kind of place.

Here's the new version:

So, yeah, we've got crossbreeding going on all over the place. You can make a token of one of your other fecund creatures or even one of your opponents'. They're animals. They're apparently not very choosy. Something in the water in Guthreham.

Some other simple commons:

So these are obviously very simple french vanillas in common. When you start making them more complex, you really have to be careful:

When I initially made this octopus, he drew you a card when he died. But then I realized that essentially made him a bomb, possibly bumping him up to rare. He would be the selected creature of every single fecund creature you played and you'd keep trying to make tokens of him. I don't think that makes him broken, but I didn't want blue to be the primary fecund color. It does make for an interesting identity with green, but it might compete with the black-green vermin theme.

R/G Revel in the Overgrowth

In the deep tangles of the overgrowth, far away from where people live, various nature denizens absolutely luxuriate in the wild growth of the plane of Guthreham and don't want to be restrained. Some of the sentient races like dryads can feel the growth and grasp the energy being pushed up from somewhere deep within the plane. But they don't know that the plane is "pregnant," and don't care. They just like the way nature reacts to it and the strength it grants them.

So red-green is all about embracing the mutate mechanic and becoming monstrous beaters. Not exactly an unfamiliar role of the two colors. Admittedly, I find this color pairing generally uninspiring, though I did end up liking how the dinosaurs worked out in Ixalan. The enrage mechanic had more gameplay to it than I recognized on paper.

So, some creatures designed for the R/G mutate archetype.

This is a mutate version of a riff on a fun thing to do with enrage in Ixalan. Yes you can use this to kill an X/1 or ping your opponent. But you can also ping one of your own creatures with mutate and even the lizard itself to give it a +1/+1 counter.

I almost absurdly put this as a common. Yeah ... no. I'm gonna have to be careful about granting unblockability in the set.

While iterating some cards for this I began realizing that green's "ramp" identity is very different in this set. It's not about getting out lands and mana-producing creatures to get out big beasts. It's about getting beasts out and then making them grow larger. So there may be a little more emphasis on enchantments and targeted/activated abilities and a little less on getting more lands out.

Now that I'm settling on pairing archetypes I'm also keeping in mind cards that can bridge between color pairings to be versatile in limited formats. The Bonfire Furiant works well in both the red/black reave decks, and if you use this ETB effect on a creature with mutate, it's quite effective. It will get the counter before the effect is resolved. So if you use the ability on the Warproot Dryad, she'll get the +1/+1 counter for being targeted, and then she'll get +2/+0 when the ability fully resolves, making her 4/2 until the end of the turn.

Also, I have no idea what the hell a "furiant" even is. I just wanted some weird angry word to represent a fire elemental.

And the signpost uncommon for Red-Green:

This is another one where I'm not sure about the strength level. Until I playtest it's hard to predict how frequently we can expect a creature to get a counter in a given game. I have a feeling this is probably going to be fine in limited, but I wonder about it in constructed.

U/R Race You to the Bottom

So after experimenting with a couple of cards that reward you for scrying cards to the bottom, I kind of ended up thinking about the idea that the wizards in both blue and red are the ones who understand that something is really wrong with Guthreham and all the growth and the ones who have isolated themselves (either up in Nightscrape Mountains or on the Runetide Flotilla) to research.

Thematically, I started thinking that this manipulation with scrying could be a neat little theme for a blue-red identity to mechanically represent the relentless push to find answers. It's tough to do anything new and interesting with the color combo because of its tendency to focus on spells over creatures (unless you go tribal with them).

So as I stared at it, I realized that technically Snap Spark could be mono-red. Red can scry, though typically it doesn't get as much as other colors. Since blue is primary in scry, I can sort of bend it by making sure they work best together.

Note the cost drop. I realized that when it was two mana it would likely feel very bad if you really needed both cards and didn't put either of them on the bottom. If I kept it red-blue, I'd probably bump it up to scry 3.

Cheap blue Opt substitute:

I worry this one also feels bad if you don't put both on the bottom and get the card draw. I could bump up the cost and have the player draw a card for each one they put on the bottom.

There are elemental shaman folks on the flotilla helping keep tabs on the environment so everyone stays safe:

Note the "leaves the battlefield" trigger instead of death. So they scry if they get blinked or bounced.

And my stab at an uncommon signpost creature for the duo:

Might possibly be too strong for uncommon. But Dominaria really raised the game for signpost uncommons.

Possible New Mechanic: Fecund

So I tossed out one of my partnered animal cycle templates for feedback over at Goblin Artisans and a couple responses suggested it would have memory issues (true) and would create removal pressure (also true) too soon. Another suggested using a counter that would be removed to create a second creature, which is a problem for a set with a heavy focus on +1/+1 counters. So that's out.

But both responses got me thinking about other ways to gatekeep making creature tokens. The more I design, the more I realize token creatures are a vital, central part of the set that need a mechanic. I didn't want to use populate, but I really needed a way to show quick reproduction. I keep using the word "fecund" and realized, "Hey, that could be a mechanic."

So a way of triggering creature token reproduction has been bouncing around in my head all day (While I'm supposed to be working, no less.) I have two versions so far.

Version One:

So the way it works, is when this enters the battlefield, if you control another snake, you get an additional copy of this creature. The token copy does not have fecund because this is an enter-the-battlefield effect and would therefore immediately go infinite.

An alternate possibility representing wild, magical cross-breeding is this one:

In this version, when Thistle Adder enters the battlefield, if you have any other creature with the fecund ability, you get another snake. The idea being that the Thistle Adder breeds with the other creature.

I think this second version is more interesting, thematically more resonant with the set's concept, and keeps it from drifting too tribal. It would go great with green-blue concepts of quick evolution I'm trying to brainstorm. On the other hand, it's a bit creepy (we are talking about interspecies sex here) and keeps it from being used on humanoid creatures (because we are talking about interspecies sex). That's maybe okay. There will be other spells that can make humanoid tokens.

I see this in being in green (snakes and spiders), white (hounds and birds) and blue (birds and perhaps some sea creatures). I'm thinking of keeping it very, very limited in red and black. Maybe just a couple of red lizards and only black rats. Even though the vermin theme in G/B loves this mechanic, black already has access to a lot of mutate and reave. Black is getting maybe too many things in this set.

Oh, Hey Look. It's Reave!

So I've been fretting all this time about whether Reave was just too parasitic to work in a set that wasn't heavily focused on graveyard shenanigans.

Today is the start of spoiler season for the new Core set, out in July. Check this out:

It's Reave! It's unkeyworded and not entirely exactly the same, but the central mechanical concept is there: Something is triggered when a card leaves your graveyard.

It's interesting that this is a rare. I wonder how much creature recursion is in the core set? There must be quite a bit if they're worried about people getting too many 1/1 flying bats that they've put this as a rare.

The Desecrated Tomb is similar to one of my concepts for Amonkhet-themed version I did for the Goblin Artisan GDS3 exercise. I visualized Temmet (the U/W embalm lord legend) returning as a W/B mummy leader. Whenever a card left your graveyard you'd get a 2/2 white zombie.

The Runetide Flotilla and Defensive U/W

While the green-white coalition is ensconced in the Arbor trying to keep the beasts and overgrowth at bay, those who lived off on the fringes of society ended up getting pushed further and further toward the coasts. With little room, some started building a flotilla of ships and rafts to live on to both stay away from all the animals and try to stay isolated from disease.

This over years ended up growing and growing in size and population until it became a small city of its own, now known as the Runetide Flotilla. This is how blue-white will be represented in the set.

The theme here is of a very defensive, reactive posture meant to keep big creatures at bay with the two colors' emphasis on control abilities. Then the win comes from its evasive flying creatures.

Nothing terribly pioneering in the ally's nature in this set. But that's okay--not every color in a Magic set gets to go bonkers.

Particular to this set is that these two colors will have an emphasis on really shutting down large creatures. It is intended to be strong against mutate-heavy decks, but vulnerable to other decks that go wider than it does (like the green-black vermin deck) and it will be probably more vulnerable to spells as it will be focused so heavily on controlling opposing creatures. (Though of course blue can always splash in some counters).

Some card concepts:

I kind of go back and forth as to whether this is common. Detain is much more powerful than tapping, but it's also conditional. I think this can be common. I want it to be common.

And yes, I know this is actually flavored for The Arbor. But you'll still be drafting this in White-Blue.

Note that with this enchant and with the the pikeman, targeting a creature with mutate will immediately give it a +1/+1 counter, so there's some interesting interactions. Every time the pikeman detains a creature with mutate, it will get a counter. If the pikeman leaves the battlefield, you might be in some deep trouble. Also maybe the pikeman should be 3/1?

A win-condition card for white. Note that creatures that have been detained or are otherwise unable to attack can still contribute to the angel's triggered ability. She's intended to help you stabilize if you're confronted with big beasts.

Very simple variation on blue unblockability.

I've tinkered with the bird lord, which is also the signpost uncommon for blue-white:

A bit of a wonky ability. I wanted to make it clear that this color combo is not about going tall, but rather taking the high route. I don't like the activation cost, but given that it's uncommon, it seems like it's necessary for a repeat trigger.