Tree's Cardboard Dreams

A place for me to share my custom Magic: The Gathering card designs.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: SELF

Been a while since I did a card design to enter into the Inventor’s Fair contest, but I do still lurk there and keep up. This week the challenge was to make a card that references itself in its rules text, and I came up with this twist on cards that look for copies of themselves in the graveyard in order to produce a scaling effect. There’s lots of types of effects that can be scaled like this, such as direct damage, giant growth effects, life gain, etc.; this just is an example that gives form to the concept.

By loading your graveyard with all the copies at the outset, you end up with diminishing returns after getting the biggest effect on the first instance. In this example, one could spend 4 mana in one turn to create three tokens, or 6 mana to create 5, or 8 mana to create 6, since deck construction rules outside of singleton formats limit you to 4 copies. Draft would let you exceed this, but good luck getting 5 or more copies of an uncommon!

The preloading of your graveyard has another effect, in that it thins the remaining deck out. It lets you hold additional cards in your hand, in essence, as a lot of graveyard strategies tend to do.

As for the flavor, well, I missed out on the recent contest to make a card based on your pet. I don’t have a pet, but I do have a back yard that is a particularly appealing rest stop for deer that come through my neighborhood all the time! They do nasty things to my garden and are rather fearless. So they’re not my pets, but I do provide them with some sustenance and habitat.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: REHAB

The challenge? To make a Commander-playable card out of some old Legend that just doesn’t quite measure up. My mind went immediately to Tobias Andrion... a vanilla 4/4 for 5 CMC. In lore, he was a persistent prosecutor of pirates, but he died a long time ago. What if we wind the clock back to his heyday? Or what if he persisted?

I took my clues from his creature type, as an Advisor. Milling is not exactly a viable strategy in multiplayer formats like Commander, but one card goes a long way toward making it viable: Persistent Petitioners. The problem with the Petitioners, though, is that one needs to maintain a sizable board presence for a sufficiently long time, and Commander is rife with board wipes and other disruption.

Tobias lets you get value out of your Petitioners while getting set up, and also gives you a way to protect your investment on the board. Respond to a board wipe by bouncing as many as you have mana to save. Opponents will be discouraged from using targeted removal or other effects. And you can allow attackers to go unblocked since you have a way to recover some life.

But he’s designed so that you don’t have to pair him with the petitioners. His activated ability can just be used to protect himself. And he can be a political commander, giving life to targeted players in exchange for favors. He could work in a Zedruu The Greathearted deck, gaining even more life to give that beleaguered archetype time to develop.

The cost of the life gain is paid by keeping no secrets. In a Petitioners deck, what you’re doing is rather obvious anyways. Also in a Petitioner’s deck, the amount of life gained will most often just be 2 life, the CMC of the petitioners, and most other times it is zero when you draw lands.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: SILVER

How many players will get the in-joke, the reference to a famous MTG mistake in Ice Age's Hyalopterous Lemure? Maybe not that many. But when I had the thought to base my card on it, I went looking for lemur artwork, and boy I was not disappointed to find this gem by Mr. Garcia!

The mechanic I came up with in advance of the art, though. I couldn't shake the thought of doing something called "dielink", until I got feedback that it seemed too much like it should be more analogous to lifelink and trigger off of creature death somehow. So it has to be plural "dicelink" even if you only roll one die at a time.

As a build-around, this lemur will support even just a single card with the dice rolling text on it, acting like a tutor. You still have to get lucky with a dicelink roll in order to get the card from library to hand, though, but of course to be hyper-lucriferous you're more likely to build a deck that can fix die rolls to predictable values.

I’ve been having fun making Un-cards lately, even prior to this contest being announced. Specifically, I was making host and augment creatures, spurned on by the recent releases of Ikoria and Unsanctioned. I considered submitting one of those, but then came up with the card above, which I think is better. Still, here’s some bonus content:

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: WEIRD

It's been a long time since I submitted to the Inventor’s Fair contest, but this was one I just had fun with. The challenge: to come up with an odd pairing of creature types. I started by making a list of odd creature type pairings, hit on this combination, and couldn't shake it! I like that it uses mutate to support a tribe that doesn't come with mutate support, i.e. mutate as a "Lord" effect, and also gives those death-ready devil cards a sac outlet.

Do I need to clarify the name? I hope it is just subtle enough... paprika and mustard go on your deviled eggs...

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: TRIBES

The challenge: design a creature who encourages playing a deck with two tribes in it.

I came up with the idea of an Elesh-Norn-Lite, punishing creatures that aren’t one of the two types, and then went hunting for a flavorful source. I figured it would be a demon+something, and in my research I came across Juiblex, from the realms of D&D. Juiblex is an undefined mass with random eyeballs, a demon and an ooze.

As a demon, he comes with a drawback - he will disempower your own creatures, assuming they are not both types but only one. Of course, he tends to wreck your opponent’s creatures moreso, and then he gives your other creatures a way to overcome the deficit they have been placed in.

The activated ooze-based ability was going to be just giving oozes the scavenge ability, but I think wording it this way avoids some hassle. There are a handful of oozes who enter the battlefield with one toughness, meaning that they would die right away from Juiblex’s static abilities. This pseudo-scavenge means that they can still be useful to play, as Juiblex finds it easy to adaptively reuse the parts left over by other oozes. There are no demons with one toughness, so no danger there.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: HORROR

For Halloween, it was time to design a card that evokes the feeling of horror that runs throughout the Innistrad blocks. And it must be common. Where my mind went was to consider the humans-versus-monsters theme and find the fright in what the humans might do to each other.

What if the worst monster is a human? What if every human is a monster?

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: SPHINX

Or was it Contest Entry: RAT?

The Discord discussion turned towards rats even before the contest topic was announced, and several determined to work in a rat reference somehow, despite the tribal commander imperative.

I began with some flavor, since I could make a “rat fink” of sorts. Yes, it’s almost silver-bordered, but I think with the new Eldraine set we see instances of black border going equally close to the line.

I made up the keyword Dirty just so I could get that word on there for flavor; it is based on the split card Down/Dirty, and worded in a way that it could be a keyword that gets used on multiple cards of various types. For a commander, it is extra utility since you can get your commander back by recasting.

The last ability is the full blending of rat and sphinx creature types, and could lead to some very fun and political commander gameplay. I made the first ability to try to lead you towards favoring card draw.

The artwork is a composite image, using the winged rat sculpture by Evgeny Hontor and a landscape background by Marina Ortega. It was REALLY hard to find something usuable as art for this blended creature!

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: ADDITIONAL

What can you get out of a card if you pay an additional cost beyond the properly-colored mana? How about an abject color-pie break?

I was inspired by seeing another custom card posted on a website that I considered to be an obvious color-pie break, and that led me to an “Ah-ha!” moment. Can red get enchantment removal for just a single mana? Sure, at the low cost of card disadvantage.

To make use of this card you have to have a deck that includes green or white cards, which implies that you could have just included a Naturalize/Disenchant equivalent instead of this card. Hybrid mana is a thing, so yes there are ways that this could be useful in mono-red, but still you’re going down a card for the privilege of flagrantly violating color norms.

Flavorfully, it is as if the red mage just tries to imitate what green or white mana is doing, without truly understanding it. Harmonic resonance of improperly injected mana causes the target to shatter itself.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: CHARM

Like Kaya’s Guile, this is a “charm” card with four options, and the ability to choose either two or four modes. Unlike the Guile, the ability to choose four is conditional, based on whether you control the named planeswalker. Also unlike the Guile, I decided to let the player choose the same mode more than once.

Ajani is all about helping the team, and initially I was calling this “Ajani’s Teeming”, a play on words. But I like this flavor better: if Ajani is there, he can do it all, but if he’s not, your army can only remember how to do about half of what he would do.

Because this is modal, I deliberately left out some smoothing language like “up to two target creatures” or “creatures you control of the chosen type”, which would normally appear on a planeswalker with these abilities. If being forced to choose two is not going to be in your favor, you can just not choose that mode.

Giving the next spell Convoke is not a precedented Ajani ability, but it fits his mode. It represents the team coming together and doing something, in a way that Ajani would favor. Not much point to choosing that mode more than once, but I figure the other options are going to get used far more often.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: PREFIX

This week’s contest was to design a split card using the Guilds of Ravnica / Ravnica Allegiance model, in which the half-cards share a three-letter prefix in their name.

I came up with words that differ by one letter yet with distinctly different meanings, and decided to try to blend them flavorfully. When thinking of what sort of game action would be the most irritating, having one's creatures bounced to library rates pretty highly in my book!

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: MATURE

This contest was to revisit an existing card and show an older, wiser, matured version of that card. It was expected that entries would be characters, such as legendary creatures or planeswalkers, but it wasn’t limited to that.

When last we visited Adanto, it had grown from a mere foothold for the Legion into an established fort. But then the world changed, as the Immortal Sun was removed from the plane, and Adanto found itself well positioned to treat with arriving planeswalkers, who no longer had reason to avoid Ixalan.

I took a different take on the contest theme, but I definitely think the flip lands have a bit of progression inherent to their design, and a further card could extrapolate in a meaningful way. The other ones are flavored more like exploration and discovery, but Legion's Landing/Adanto, the First Fort is more clearly chronological.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: INITIALS

With a suite of design constraints, including that the name must begin with our own initials, I had to come up with a Sorcery that is mythic or uncommon, and I was randomly assigned white and black for a color identity.

Can a sorcery serve as a build-around? I decided to make use of a mechanic I've used before (Enduring), which in this case works like a flashback variant in which the extra cost for playing the card again is to skip a draw. But doing so lets you get the effect whenever you need it, making the card reliable enough to commit some of your deck building to it.

The trick is that black and white aren't great with direct damage spells, but they both do have a few. But I think of it like a prism through which your other spells flow; by layering on the black and the white, you alter their effect.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: HUMOR

Well this contest entry certainly won’t win.

I had come up with the card name and then designed around it; the name might actually make it too silver-bordered for the contest. But there is a version that could be printed, just by changing the name. It could be “Maladroit Mimic” for instance, but then part of the humor is lost.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: MORPH

How many Morph-variant mechanics can you think of?

I decided to try a version that lets your formless 2/2 flip over and become a spell (an instant) instead of a creature. This would function rather similar to Evoke, except that with Evoke you control the timing of its effect by doing it up-front, with this “Blastmorph” you control the timing by when you flip over the creature.

The card here is basically Magma Jet in creature form. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel for the spell effect, as the point is to show how the morph variant works. Like Evoke, there are tons of staple instant spells that can be employed in a similar way. The trick is flavor; in this case I could see magma being shaped into either a jet or a creature form just as readily.

I guess I’m on kind of a red card roll lately, huh?

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: ABILITY

The challenge was to design an ability word and then a card that showcases its use. I came up with “Rush” as a kind of anti-exalted; it refers to a trigger condition of having attacked with every one of your creatures. The effect could be anything, with obvious ones for commons being simple stat buffs or gained abilities. It’s also similar to Hellbent/Heckbent, the Rakdos tendency to throw caution to the wall and go all-in whenever it can.

This exemplar, though, shows how the ability can create a bit of tension. A 2/1 token is not likely to survive combat, so if you want to use this guy to build up an army, it will get tougher to do so each turn. He creates them tapped so they can’t be used for defense, they’re gonna have to attack next turn if you want to get another, so how are you going to take care of them?

Flavorfully, this first orc in finds a weakness that can be exploited, and then the other orcs follow his lead. But he relies on the chaos of all-out attack to mask his approach. If the team isn’t behind him, then his efforts will be fruitless.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: ADVENTURE

This contest was to design an “adventure” card, which is a card type engineered by another custom card make, @imakethecard. The general sense I got of the card type was that it lets you task your creatures on a sort of side quest which can have an effect if they are able to complete it. The payoff is the card’s ultimate sacrifice effect, and your opponent can impede your completion of the quest.

I wanted to invert that a little bit, to make the payoff of the card be what it’s doing while it still has quest counters on it. As such, I wanted it to come in with a lot of counters, and have the incentive for the opponent to be to get it to tick down as fast as possible, while the controlling player wants to keep it going as long as possible.

An early version of this had it coming in with X counters equal to your life total, as a way to get a high count, but this was too wordy and inelegant. So I went with an average value of 10, thinking that once an army has demonstrated its ability to deal 10 damage to an enemy then it should be done with rehearsal and ready for the actual invasion.

Lifelink is the ongoing payoff, and trample is there as a way to help the opponent as it ensures that the counters will tick down, even if they are taking profitable blocks (like using a 3/1 or a little deathtoucher to take out bigger attackers).

Perceptive readers might notice that I slightly reworded the reminder text to clarify that creatures can do the attacking and blocking and that quest counters are what get removed. I noticed that at least one other entry tried to rework how such cards might function; I just felt that specifying permanent and counter types could help avoid some rules questions.

One of the awarded winners was another R/W card that actually used artwork that I had considered for this card! I did a double take when seeing it.

[wpandp]

Contest Entry: SAD

This card title just came to me, when considering what I might do for a contest all about the flavor of sadness, and then I designed around the name.

The biggest concern is whether this is too narrow in its concern for legendaries, but then look again: it serves as regular removal at a minimum. I didn’t want to open up the middle ability to non-legends because it loses the flavor of remembrance if the deaths are of nameless minions.

Why is this card red? Because red is the color that prefers to feel its emotions and act on them. Why black? Because black is the color that would consider using those emotions as a resource.

This card would do well in War of the Spark standard as well as in Commander. The art was chosen to be somewhat abstract and subdued, since the contest rules stipulated not relying on the artwork. I just don’t like submitting cards without art!