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!