Challenges 2016 - The Tops and Flops (Part 3: Conclusion)

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

It's Wednesday again so here comes the final part about this years' challenges! This final post will not only contain my run-down on another pair of challenges (one "Top" and one "Flop") but also my MSE-File as a download aswell as the look-out for next years' challenges.

Let's dive right in with...

Flop - Category: Wording/Design

Oh. My. God. Until the very end I hated the "As long as your commanders color identity"-thing but I never came up with a better way to:

1. Prevent the person from playing blue +
2. Prevent the person from playing black if they don't play blue +
3. Make the person play red
4. Word everything in a postive and rewarding way since I didn't want things like "Whenever you tap a land for blue or black mana, ~ deals 2 damage to you."

There just didn't seem to be a way that really shut down these two colors while leaving everything else to the deckbuilder... So I made everything as clear as possible and moved on.

The rest of the card is fine. I like AEther Rift as a card and basically used it as a basis for the whole effect. Since I still wanted the challenge to be fun I added the draw two to make up for the card you loose each turn in case someone pays 5 life. Playing mono red already is hard on you when it comes to card draw and trading a GOOD card for 5 life is just plain bad in a multiplayer format where everyone has 40 life.

I had 3 options to counteract that:

1. Return the exiled card to hand in case someone pays life.
2. Draw one card.
3. Draw two cards.

Option 1 just feels bad on the pay 5 life side since you essentially pay life to delay good card. Option 2 is the other way round where you essentially cycle good cards for random cards while the lifeloss isn't really too bad for your opponents since you're loosing the good part of your deck.

So when all is said and done, option 3 is the only option that felt rewarding for both sides of the challenge... the ones that pay life are happy to see a threatening card go while the mono-red player made card advantage AND "dealt damage".

WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:

The enchantment-in-commandzone-style challenges just don't offer the tools to really "force" certain colors. While you can encourage colors there aren't many ways (if any) to prevent people from "splashing" a second or third color.

As mentioned before, using an existing card as a basis for a new one is a good strategy (Wizards just seems to have creative people in their design team... who would've thought)... I'll definitely keep that in mind for next year.

Moving on...

Top - Category: Design

This challenge is basically the only one I've witnessed in a game as this gets posted so I can already say what it did/didn't do. What it definitely did was make the "Challenger" build mono white in order to maximize the devotion... What it definitely didn't was trigger even once for a single card! No cards were drawn that day, plain old NULL.

Let's break it down a little and look into what might've gone wrong:
First of all, as I did before, I tried to make the effect "scaling". What this means is that the "better" you fullfil the requirements the more it rewards you. In this case you could of course opt for a deck that tries to create a devotion of five as consistently as possible while also branching out in other colors... BUT if you built a deck that is stacked with devotion to white you might be able to draw 2, 3 or even 4 cards in a single combat step,... which is obviously very strong.
Also I tried to guide the "Challenger" into a certain style of deck via flavor. Might sound funny, but I'm serious... just look at the card and tell me what deck I envisioned.

Is it this deck:

Or this one:

Obviously it's not option number one but unfortunately that's exactly what he built. And as to be expected it worked out horribly because not only did everyone have bad attacks into his board when he had the devotion to draw cards (=> no trigger) but his devotion got wrathed away every now and then since either his board got to big or someone elses did (=> trigger with X <= 0).

Now I'll be honest with you, I didn't plan for the challenges to be "challenging" in a "I need to figure out how to make this card work" sort of way but I'll take it... and maybe even look to make all the future challenges like that.

WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:

Not so much learn but realize that creating the effects in a way that make them challenging to use/abuse might be a fun thing to do. Especially if I manage to start sooner and therefore have more time to figure out the little details.

My Conlusion

Since this is the first time I did this whole challenge thing and people just started to build around the challenges I can't say much about the real impact of the cards in games and powerlevels of the decks around them. I definitely got the feeling that everyone recieved their challenge well and were somewhat excited to try out this one thing they never liked building.

Of course I also got a challenge (thanks to the people who designed it btw):

I haven't really started building this deck but I can assure you that I have some very funny things in mind ... I just hope I can still compete with the other challenge-decks while durdling with as much UN-cards as possible. Of course I will keep you guys up to date and publish a post on the deck once I know more about what I want to do with it.


Regarding next years' challenges I think I'll do a legendary creature for everyone to use as a commander. Not only does this solve my problems with forcing certain colors but it also makes balancing a little easier because you can interact with a creature as an opponent. I can always use the "where X is the amount of mana payed to play ~"-clause Wizards used before if I want to reward people for still casting their commander after it died 5 times... Maybe for all of them, maybe for some of them...
Other than "creatures" there are a few person-specific things I'll maybe use but the actual design process is a long time away so nothing's set in stone yet.

What else is there to say? I don't think there's much left... I broke down the 6 most outstanding challenges over the last weeks and wrote down what I thought was especially good/bad to keep in mind for next year so all that is left is my MSE-File (the download button should be at the top... google drive seems to be a bit derpy with .mse-set files) and my goodbyes... I wish you a nice day, I hope you enjoyed this read and...

See y'all 'round!

Challenges 2016 - The Tops and Flops (Part 2: Wording)

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

As promised here's Part II of the Challenges-Recap-Series...

I mentioned it last week: sometimes wording can get a bit awkward, especially since there's limited space on a card if you want the text to be readably big. Therefore this week's two challenges are all about wording. Well not the Challenges themselves but the article...

Flop - Category: Wording

While most of the time we're playing multiplayer, free-for-all games, there's always the possibility of 1v1s if two people get knocked out early. For that reason the player that recieved "The More the Merrier" never builds multiplayer-focused decks or even plays cards that "prefer" multiplayer environments. He just wants his decks to be 100%-playable in 1v1 & free-for-all.

Now if we put aside the wording f***-ups, this challenge would make me very happy, basically encouraging the player to play cards like Howling Mine, etc. which are bad in 1v1 most of the time, but as you might've noticed the wording on this card is a bit wonky.

What I wanted it to do, is allow several sorts of "public card draw" to give the player the biggest amount of options when starting to build his challenge-deck: Instants and Sorceries, donating stuff or just group-hug draw.

There is one main problem with the card: "Whenever a CARD"...
This just makes me wonder what I was thinking back then. "Cards" just never appear in situations that will trigger this. Creatures that die go to the graveyard and become "creature cards" while spending their vacation there, anything in your hand is a "xy card" but spells, abilities and permanents are NO cards... they're spells, abilities and permanents... obviously.

This means instead of this abomination of a trigger-condition I should've used something like "Whenever a spell you control or an ability  of a source you own...". Not pretty but at least it works like it should.

The "allows an opponent" clause seems a bit awkward but I think it's somewhat within the rules... still I'd wish there was a better way to word this... so far I just haven't come up with one...


WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:
Wording is hard, so once I know what the card "does" I should spend a lot more time figuring out the perfect set of words. Design-wise I like cards with multiple modes so maybe I'll do more of them next year. Especially the lifegain mode I found pretty awesome since it essentially is an anti-Nekusar, and while you could of course build a deck that completely ignores the second option, where's the fun in that?!

Top - Category: Wording

Tribal-Aggro-Challenge!!! God did I love this idea. Not only is "Tribal" a thing I absolutely love to build and see other players play, but it's also the thing that the challenged player hates even more than building agressive decks. Now to be fair we kind of made an agreement that he CAN'T throw more goblins into his existing Purphoros-deck, a deck he only built because he hates Purphoros - no it doesn't make sense other than "If you can't beat them, join them!" He just is more of a slow, grindy, get-incremental-value type player and therefore we hardly get to see him smashing hordes of creatures into the red zone with enthusiasm.

Looking at the wording of the challenge everything is just clean and pretty. Ok I'll be honest, it is mostly reuse of existing cardtext but yeah,... what isn't?!

"Play with the top card of your library revealed.": Pretty straight forward and easy... seen a few times around. (if you didn't click any of the links, at least click the last one, trust me ...)

"As long as the top card of (and so on and so forth)": Also nothing really new, even combined with the top-is-creature-part: Link!

...and last but not least...

"Creatures you control gain [...]": Well if you haven't seen something along these lines you probably played to much Yu-Gi-Oh recently... No, seriously, you should know effects like this... no links for you...

Everything combined the challenge tries to mitigate some weaknesses tribal decks have:

1. Sometimes you just don't draw the key-synergy pieces which leaves you with a bunch of creatures that share a creature-type but don't do anything for each other. With this you'll be able to a) filter through your deck to find more creatures and/or one of the mentioned key-pieces and b) buff them at least a little while doing so.
2. Attacking into the big creatures that see so much play in EDH isn't very satisfying so getting First Strike on your dudes can at least sometimes help making combat easier while also uping your damage output if you manage to get through. What I like about Frenzy here is that I could've went with straight a "+2/+0" but that would probably be too strong when combined with First Strike. Frenzy makes it so that you get one ability that benefits you getting through and one that can benefit you when getting blocked but both abilites don't interact with each other.

WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:

Combining abilities that don't synergize can be very cool like I did with Frenzy and First Strike. Also, when it comes to wording, reusing several pieces from actual cards and changing little details only is a fool-proof way of getting a decent wording down. 

I can't believe this is over already... Part II done! Next week I'll post Part III, the final Part, with not only the recap of the third pair of challenges but also a download of my MagicSetEditor-File (with ALL of them in it) and an outlook of what I want to do for next years challenges... because it's not even February and I'm already pondering ideas...

See y'all 'round!

 

Infinity Evolved #9 - Sweet Irony

Challenges 2016 - The Tops and Flops (Part 1: Design)

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

The holidays are over and I'm putting out content again (as you might have seen) so... yeeiii I guess! If you were listening to my first podcast, which I posted a few weeks ago, you might be aware of the so-called "challenges" I designed for everyone in my playgroup. For those of you who didn't I'll explain them in a few sentences:

A "challenge" is basically an enchantment providing its effect from the command zone. The player still has his commander in the command zone, and can only play the colors in that commanders color identity. It is "good sportsmanship" to try and build around the challenge as heavily as possible.
What makes them "challenging" is that their player-specific design is oriented towards rewarding the player for things he's normally NOT DOING. What that means exactly will get clearer once you see what the challenges did this year.

The idea behind them was that as a "new years resolution", so to speak, the people in my playgroup had to broaden the deckbuilding horizons. And while I am very happy with some of my designs, some of the Challenges got a bit wonky/bad/don't really do what I intended.

So here they are, my personal tops and flops of this years challenges:

Flop - Category: Design

I'll call this challenge a flop not because I'm unhappy with the design, it just potentially fails to force the person it is supposed to be challenging - let's call him Mr. Ramp for now - into unknown territory.

As one might have guessed by now the goal was to make land-ramp of any kind unappealing while also creating benefits for low cost creatures and a proper (aggressive) curve. The first idea was buffing low-cost creatures but that really didn't fell too great since you can still ramp and use high-costed noncreature spells while reaping the benefits with a low curve creature-wise (*cough* Karametra *cough*).

Therefore the challenge ended up having this "6 or less lands" conditional. Not only does it limit the mana costs of the cards you can play but will also make landramp rather bad because after one ramp spell you're practically at you "sweet spot" if you count in regular land drops.
Now to make use of the redundant lands you'll eventually draw I added an additional ability that let's you dispose of said extra lands to make sure to stay at 6 lands while providing some additional Bloodthirst-counters.

And that's where I messed up big time. I could've done discard, I could've increased the activation cost but noooo I essentially make land ramp viable again since you can always sacrifice the lands out of your Explosive Vegetation + the land drop for the turn for a whopping 6 damage and still play a cmc 6 creature... I mean wtf?! What did I think when I designed that ability?!
Basically the only thing that keeps me from crying every night is that the player is still going down a card and invests a ton of time into it so nothing insanely OP happening... hopefully.

WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:
I still think strictly "positive" abilities as in "rewarding people for things you want" are the way to go, but next year I'll make sure to think things through to the end. Also this year, I had the idea to make the challenges pretty late and ran out of time for number crunching which explains the little slip up with the activation cost - it definitely should've been 2 mana instead of 1.


Now I need something positive...

Top - Category: Design

Finding deckbuilding patterns isn't always easy, especially if you don't have exact decklists but only the cards you get to see while facing the player.
At first nothing really stood out to me: Narset Superfriends, Yeva, Norin, Progenitus Landfall,... but after I had finished rough drafts of the other challenges I finally realized that while Progenitus contains black, the theme and cards in the deck have very little to do with black. This, and the fact that all above mentioned decks heavily center around permanents, made me think of the challenge you see above... after a long circle of idea, dismiss, idea, dismiss,...

This time around though both parts of the ability were designed in one go. I wanted to encourage playing heavy black but not rule out splashing for a second or even third color (although that might be ambitious) since the second focus of the card were instants and sorceries. After a while I was sure I wanted to do something that involved "equal the number of swamps you control" that triggered when something happened with instants and sorceries. But things like "whenever you cast" just felt too strong considering that might lead to a very oppressive Bx Control-build that just never went out of gas.

That's when I came up with those manifest-shenanigans. Giving the player the opportunity to manifest cards from his or her library at the price of some mana and a little life (how very black) gave the challenge a really great feel to it. The manifest ability is a modification of Qarsi High Priest where I took away the "sacrifice a creature" part and traded it for "pay 1 life" - history shows that one card is worth one life in black. I strapped on a second "pay 1 life" because you can activate the ability more than once each turn (provided you have the mana) so that if you wanted to get greedy you'll have to pay a fair price.

The triggered ability then is where the "magic" happens: The trigger wants you to have as many instants and sorceries in your library as possible - and in your graveyard aswell, hello "nonpermanent" - so the manifest-ability provides you with a way to generate creatures without the need for a single creature in your deck while also being the main, if not only, way of getting said trigger to go on the stack. This trigger also adds a little mini-game to the table since opponents will never know which manifest is "save to kill" and which isn't especially if you act like you'd want certain manifests to die.

WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:
Again I wish I had had more time to make the wording a little smoother and 100% rule-proof - as I'm not entirely sure if the ability does what I think it does... - but even if it wouldn't do what I envisioned we'll just act like it did and move on.
Still not having played any actual games against it, I can't say much about its atual behavior in-game. What I do know is that "scaling" abilities - since the later the game the more swamps you'll have -definitely have a great feel to them and I hope this feeling sticks around as we get to play against "The Dark Side"... maybe he even brings some cookies...


With this I'd like to end part 1 of this three-part series where I recap the design process of this years challenges. I hope you liked the read and look forward to the next part which will come out next Wednesday.

See y'all 'round!

Infinity Evolved #8 - The Start of Something Magical