Saturday, April 27, 2019

Overgrowth Booster Examination 2

I'm up to about 200 cards and am fleshing the set out--both the feel and the mechanics--as I start churning out some more cards across all rarities. So I figure it's a good time to see how an individual pack might look again.


As I'm building green, it's too easy to fall into having everything relate directly to mutate or fecund. I realized in the rare slot I could actually craft a creature that works with the B/G vermin theme. I didn't want to do a typical "vermin lord," so I came up with this. It can work with just green, but it's better if you play it with black.


I really like the relatively new W/R concept of caring about a creature's combat skills. There are enough creatures in this set for this to work. It also works with green, which has a few vigilance creatures in this set.


Initially I had this scribe have you draw a card for each bird you controlled, but the ceiling for the number of cards you might draw seemed high for uncommon, and I thought maybe he was too niche for rare. So I put a limit of two to make it fit the slot.


So I decided to bump up the power, cost, and rarity of this one. Zombie tokens in this set all have base 2/2. Interesting detail on its use in the set besides just trying to sweep tokens: Since it only targets one creature, it can deal damage to mutate creatures without giving them counters. There are creatures, like elementals and lizards, where some have mutate and some don't.


An interesting design challenge with the Choked Fen Nest, B/G signpost card: There's a natural inclination to want to give all the small critters in black and green fecund already, given that it's the set mechanic. But if all the selected creatures already have fecund, it makes the enchantment meaningless. It doesn't stack. So I did my best to make sure that most of the fecund creatures, especially at common, did not share the targeted creature types. Scorpions are not on the list.


There are two common lands that sac to give you some fixing and five uncommon lands that sac for effects. I think that's enough to get lands in the graveyard to assist with R/B reave cards.


Since white and blue are so heavily dependent on flying and defensive tactics, I wanted to give red tools to be aggressive with them. Red also has a reach creature (a wizard) with reave that does damage to a flying creature if you pay the reave kicker.


There is not quite enough of the suppress mechanic in this set, particularly given that the U/W uncommon signpost card rewards you for suppressing. There are only eight cards that suppress, four in blue and four in white. I will probably want at least one more in each color.


I've weakened the main spell here so that it's no longer -2/-2 creature removal. That seemed a little strong, and I'm using reave in the set for other -X/-X effects in black.


This guy hasn't really changed much at all, other than me fixing the wording so that it enters the battlefield with the counters.


Yes, I'm going to go with the familiar set pattern of putting in a vanilla in each color to help fill out curves in a limited format. I made the green vanilla a snake and the black vanilla an insect, so you can give them fecund with Choked Fen Nest.


So when I designed this, it became clear how much fecund is just free embalming (compare to Sacred Cat). The difference is that you cannot control when the token is created the way you can with embalm, which could potentially be a weakness. I'm still not sure if that means I'm undercosting these creatures up front.


With the absence of a devoted mana-smoothing or card-sorting mechanic in this set, I'm spreading scry around a bit.


Note the death trigger here rather than the enter-the-battlefield trigger. That's going to be typical for the cephalids.

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Meaningful Choices in a Couple of Rares

A different take on white's typical board clears:


White creature-focused board clears are supposed to be "fair," equal across all players, but it's also intended for white to build their deck in such a way that they can take advantage of the "fairness" of it all. In this case, you can take the board state into consideration and decide what "all" includes. Because white has a lot of access to token creatures, it may be that you want to save them from your wrath.

In blue, I decided that Compelling Memory is weird without actually being as interesting as I thought at first. So I've scratched it and replaced it with a different type of modal steal spell:


Note that with that first choice, if you target a creature with mutate, it will come over to you with an additional +1/+1 counter.

Monday, April 1, 2019

Races of Guthreham: Ogres


The ogres (appearing in red and black) are hardy, shamanistic, tribal creatures that appear to be immune or at least highly resistant to both the plagues and the mutations the Overgrowth is bringing forth, but they're not taking any chances.


They tend to keep to themselves now and are known for killing any other sentient races that they encounter. The mage hermits of Nightscrape Mountain are adept enough to keep themselves safe, and so they've been trying as much as possible--turning to magics other than just pyromancy--to see how the ogres are managing to survive in the wild.


The ogres don't just kill whatever they come across, they cremate the corpses, saving only edible meat that they make sure is clean through shamanistic magic. This even includes their own. They engage in cannibalism, but it's more out of survival than cruelty. Though ... honestly ... they don't hate it.

All that's left of any dead ogre (or any creature they kill, either for food or to protect themselves) is ash. It's been this way for decades now. The ogres don't have graveyards. They have cairns piled around throughout the Nightscrape Mountains to memorialize the dead. There are no bodies to dig up there, but ashes of ogres who have died are scattered around the earth.


The ogres are part of an aggressive midrange strategy. Black and red spells are used early to clear out initial threats. Then the ogres come out in force and reave can be used in various ways to make the ogres stronger or to clear a path for attack.