I know I'm a little early in the week, but I've been waiting for weeks behind the scenes to get this new segment kick-started- Do-It-Yourself Design!
DIYD is all about the multitude of Magic cards people like me and the good folks in You-Make-The-Card forums on MTG Salvation and other sites are doing.
The fact is that Magic is made for us, and whether it's just two people having the same idea at the same time, or actually being involved in design, it's important to demonstrate to the community and Wizards of the Coast that we aren't just trying to break our game, but help to be instrumental in its creation and continued existence.
This series is all about analyzing our made-up stuff to make it formidable and inspiring for future design. Although NONE OF THIS WILL BE REAL, that doesn't mean we might be Pinocchio-ing these bitches into fruition.
So if you make stuff up like me, feel free to send it my way at unclelanddrops@gmail.com. I'd love to talk about your stuff.
As our inaugural voyage, I thought I'd kick things off with an incredible little instance of two kids in 2012 having a vision of the 2013 Theros Gods, and just how eerily similar synchronicity can be.
ENTER TECALLI, THE DANCING STONE
The rules needed a little work, but I was instantly enamored. It was strange, powerful, and the flavor of this big, dancing, sumo-golem was just too cool.
We can see that this is very top-down. Tecalli, the ever-moving stone deity, is big enough to throw his weight around, letting his momentum carry him like a pinball.
A few notes on the rules regarding his design.
1. Indestructible hadn't been changed yet, so we need to use "has" instead of "is," in order to adapt to the changes. Because Indestructible became a keyword on all of the creatures for the cycle, they must be changed as well.
2. His blocking trigger also needs to be changed on the card to, "divided as you choose among up to any number of target creatures." Every time I wrote the rules, I was always forgetting half of the clause because we knew what it meant, but never communicated it correctly on the card.
Tecalli's flavor was done so well that this story was simple. His Red magic and unrelenting dancing skills made him a "life of the party," style character, perhaps even more than Xenagos. What attracted his followers was his blind perseverance, spontaneity, and the way he was able to combine them to demonstrate strength.
So I was looking for Tecalli's art when I found four all-too convenient creatures styled in the same way with different colors. Naturally, I was like, let's build a cycle!
Continuing to design "Art-Down," I began to construct and develop a story for our characters in the set. I created a plane of islands, where underwater volcanoes were forming new pieces of land, these golem deities came alive and were in a constant struggle with each other over whom was going to rule them. This sort of them of new land meets ancient, primitive tale made for a really nice space to create an indigenous/tribal theme, borrowing cultural aspects from various native populations all over the world.
For those of you that remember older computer games, I'd taken some old inspiration from Black & White. In the game, you're a god, and you have this big animal you control that helps you worship and gain influence with villagers so that they'll praise you. Our Legendary Golems were supposed to be both god and animal.
Being Gods, I wanted them to be powerful, but lean back towards "fair," which would make for exciting gameplay. The Artifact subtype helped to weaken our Indestructible keyword, but I still wanted to see how big I could make these guys.
Bruko (Brew-Koh) was designed to be the villain of the set. His raw power attracted a polarizing group of followers, both those wanting to be like him, and those who were too weak to defend themselves.
The storyline was that Bruko has so powerful that he had to be kept in constant check by the magic of the other Golems. However, being animated stone objects, they were magical, but not innately powerful enough to cast magic. But somehow, the other Golems had gotten lucky, and a strange phenomena had kept Bruko shackled for 100 years. At the outset of our story, Bruko had broken his physical bonds and was on the loose, looking to pay a visit to his old rival, Arum (Are-oom).
Using some of the templating from Tecalli, I thought it'd be very cool to have the Indestructible thing and another color pie additive. In this case, "can't block" felt right, not because he couldn't, but simply because Bruko didn't want to!
One of the weird things I found when they began to release the Gods in Theros was the way they'd compensated for the over-aggressive cost-to-P/T ratio versus what I did here, with the -1/-1 counters. Although they are different ideas, it was cool to compare how we tackled our designs.
Overall, design for Tecalli was my favorite, mostly because I love helping to improve other people's stuff more than my own. However, Bruko's comes in close at second. It was very natural, simple, and solid with the way that -1/-1 counters interact with black cards mechanically. We didn't have to make any changes with Bruko. It was just a great first draft as far as we were concerned.
COCKY ARUM
In the story, Arum is the one who is able to physically restrain Bruko and chain him up the last time he was causing trouble 100 years ago. Since then, Arum has spent all his time reaping the rewards and taking credit for being the so-called "hero" of our plane.Arum attracted a polarizing group of followers- those who wished to serve him, and the sophisticated people for which he surrounds himself with. The former are responsible for creating statue after statue after statue of his likeness, and placing them all over the islands on the plane.
Combining all of these things in design was not easy. We knew that he was going to have indestructible, but getting that second ability was a challenge. Sick of seeing First Strike and Vigilance get thrown around willy-nilly, as well as just "feeling" the flavor of this card, made us think that this guy wasn't as sharp as was when he imprisoned Bruko, and we couldn't go there.
In studying where we'd gone with the other cards, the theme of combat "do's and don'ts" was beginning to show through. With Arum being the strongest next to Bruko, and the idea that he'd stopped him the last time, we arrived at this nice "can't be blocked" clause. To be more flavorful, this should've been "protection from," but we were, as I said, holding ourselves to a template with the first ability.
The second ability is really weird, but helps to correlate the idea that Arum isn't completely rusty and old. He can be strong when he needs to be, but those days of him being as powerful are few and far between.
RASMUS, THE ROOTED STONE
Before we settled on combat "do's and dont's," the idea was to give everyone a color-pie-friendly static ability with indestructible. We had Reach and Vigilance in the box, and the feel of those seemed right, but wasn't really the flavor.
You see, Rasmus is the least mobile of the deities, but he is also the most or one of the most "magically inclined," because he uses magic to control nature, which controls him. Which is why he innately could not have either one of these abilities.
Rasmus, being "one with nature," attracts the kind of followers who seek enlightenment. His people are usually the most magical, in that they have more natural magic talent. And although his people do a lot of exploring, they all find their way back to him.
"Can't be countered" broke the rule in our first line of text because we needed something to say "can or can't," and that felt the most Green to us. From a flavor perspective, it fit nicely too, even though having an indestructible thing that can't be countered is probably too powerful without the other abilities.
For his second ability, we were nurturing that flavor of being able to control nature. It was a bit of a throwback to Whip Vine, an old card that I played back when I didn't know what cards were good in Magic, and I liked how it limited his scope.
The last clause is our pseudo-vigilance thing, made to help illustrate nature resetting him to defend. Wanting this card to appeal more to the Johnny psychograph, I'd originally had it templated to say, "Whenever Rasmus, the Rooted Stone becomes tapped, untap him," but I didn't like where it was going, so we scaled it back down.
In hindsight, I think I'd want to make Rasmus a little smaller in terms of P/T, in order to make the flavor pop and justify the rules text. I'd also probably turn him into a "her," just to make the genders a little more balanced.
MADA, THE ROUGH DIAMOND
Mada (Mah-Duh) was the toughest, and probably the one that can be most improved.Using my Art-down design as flavor inspiration, the story constructed around Mada's character was that her power was derived from the crystal formations that grew within her stones. Additionally, she was the most benevolent and personable of the Deities, seeing herself as a protector and nurturer of the people.
Mada doesn't have the numerical following of any of the other gods, but what they lack in quantity they make up for in quality. Being a protector, Mada's people also align themselves with progressive pursuits of knowledge, social understanding, and teamwork.
In this way, Mada wasn't necessarily interested in combat as much as "disaster relief," which basically meant protecting the people from Bruko's attacks.
Since Bruko has been chained however, her crystals and energy don't power up like they once did. Through the story, we were going to create mechanics and communicate
While her design is cool, I'll admit it feels "intentionally nerfed." Maybe that's because I don't think Blue should always have nice things. That doesn't mean I think the card is bad, just fair, not exactly blue's shtick.
Before I talk about what I messed up with the last two rules, I want to mention her power and toughness. "The Weathered Stone" represented this idea that she is this chiseled, sharp creature, and I wanted to emulate that jagged-ness in her power and toughness. I'm not sure 6/2 are the right numbers, but they were the only ones that looked right on the card. Compared with her converted mana cost, I think the ratio is off, so I'd probably change that before I would change her power or toughness.
The biggest fails were in her last two abilities. Instead of just a simple "blocks" trigger, I'd like to entertain the possibility of "blocks a creature," thereby adding an additional counter to her if she blocks two things. The reason being that what gets her going is that need to protect her people, and I think I undervalued that in execution.
Moving into the second part, I would change the last rule to, "Remove two +1/+1 counters from Mada: Mada loses defender until end of turn." The reason for doing this is that maintaining the original version with a better blocks trigger makes Mada a 7/3, and that's not what I wanted.
Well, that's all for today. If you've got comments, I'm curious to hear what people think about my cards, and also to send me yours to unclelanddrops@gmail.com if you've got some you'd like to share.
Be sure to tune in on Thursday for a story about my #4MTGCards, and follow me on Twitter at @unclelanddrops!
Pass.
-UL
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