/ccg/ Custom Card General /cct/

Here's hoping this is the last iteration of this.

Eh, I know it's different, but all I can think about when I see this is how poorly it seems to me next to Angelic Accord.

Hm, guess I could reduce the life requirement. I was worried that since it can do 2 life on its own, and 5 pretty easy with Auras and Equipment, that I had to be conservative. You're also killing them while you do this which Accord does not do on its own. I can reduce it to 4 life, and maybe make it 2W but that feels turbo-aggressive.
>Clownface
I don't know if I'll ever like how this works, but it's your card so you do you. Already put my two cents in long ago. I think maybe it should be 3/5 though. It's a shame most of your stuff will never get playtested to know for sure.

Does the name refer to Mac DeMarco

Sounds like a step in the right direction.

>Clownface
3/5? I'll try it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I didn't come up with the character.

>Progenitor
I made it 1WW and reduced the life requirement to 4. Should be better now.
>Panda
I think you need a "then" in there. "Then, if ~ has two or more gun counters..." I'm not 100% sure about that but I think as you have it it only does one or the other, not both. Aside from that, again, I've given my two cents on this one too. It's a bit too wordy though so I wonder what can be done about that.

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sigh

While interesting mechanically, there's a huge flavor disconnect.

I don't buy this in blue.

Yeah, people not giving any actual feedback to the people who came before them, makes me sad too man. I mean, the least they could do is give some feedback on the cards. But hey, at least they're not the dicks who might complain about something without bothering to explain what's wrong with it. Because those people are the worst.

I'm honestly thinking you could just have the damage get dealt to the creature/player regardless, since 3 damage (note how I used a numeral here, you should too) is half the starting power. Oh, and "strike" here shouldn't be capitalized.

Meh. That's kinda it for this one, sorry.

Overly complex for no really discernible reason. And I really don't think this fits at common anyway.

Eh, the three or more thing kinda kills the card for me. I think this would be better as 1UB, mill equal to damage, then get a counter for each creature card milled.

Sorry. Two of those were me, mainly since I don't like bumping the thread without posting content.

The only term I would have here is that the three should be a numerical 3 instead when referring to damage.

Hmm, would simplifying it to just a flat 1 tax work better, or do you think that sort of idea doesn't work at all for it?

>be the change
Why try anymore? Honest question man. Doing that just gets people who put in zero effort more feedback, and those that put in more effort less feedback because the lazy people get what they want. It doesn't work. If you got a better way to look at it, lay it on me, because I've tried it the "right" way for far too long to listen to this "be the change" shit anymore.

I think the idea is really cool, but I do feel like it wants to care about milling a particular thing. Since its monoblue and a thought drainer type thing, maybe instants and sorceries. I think itd also be very interesting if it milled yourself instead of the opponent so you could build around it but eh. Id also probably stat it as cloud elemental (? 1/4 flyer for 3) so its little more defensive which feels more blue to me and also puts a little more value in milling the right thing. Its fine as a 3 drop flying 2/2 as well i think but I feel like I like that flying 2/2 is decent by itself but a 1/4 is passable and something about the gameplay i cant quite explain feels more correct to me.

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Well I know the mill isn't the non-blue part you're talking about, so I have to assume it's the counters. Usually blue would spend counters if it gets them, I know, but I was trying very hard to lampoon Sengir Vampire in blue to sell the Vampire notion. Best I could come up with.

I didn't want it to self-enable right away, so I upped the requirement by one so you have to do work to enable it, but then it runs on its own afterwards. An apparently poor attempt at balance. Caring about the type of card milled sounds like it could work, though I would rather it stay monoblue. I have designs on trying a monoG Vamp as well, if I can figure out how the hell to even do it.

Instants and sorceries could work. Milling yourself is nice and all, but I feel like maybe that's a bit too meta for me. Also making it a 1/4 makes it unlikely for you to hit the card type you want as often early so it gets going slower. Blue's been getting more offensive lately due to the creature-centric nature of the game now and finding things it gets to do can be a bit of a challenge. I also don't like cheap creatures with huge asses personally because they slow gameplay down, especially fliers.

I need a changelog, stat. I think this is unchanged from your last posting of it? The effect is plenty UB, and the first ability is expensive enough that it makes the second hard to use, which is both a balancing feature and a big problem, I think. I don't have a good solution for it, I'm afraid. The obvious answer is to make her cost more up front and reduce the cost on the first ability, but then a 2/2 feels slightly mediocre, and a 2/3 really isn't that much better because she's even easier to protect. 3/1? I dunno.

Well I can start doing it, I'm just a strictly kitchen tale player so I'm not sure how most of the cards posted here would ever fit in any real competitive environment and I wouldn't have a real good idea on how to balance a card if it needed it, which is why I post here.

Post one rate one would be a good rule for me to go by

Tried copying stuff before, but I think I like emphasizing draw more. Another previous idea was 1GU, and you drew by paying 2 whenever another creature enters or leaves the battlefield.

Last iteration before this is largely the same, just the last ability is different.

I rarely post, mostly because I'm not super good at the game, but I'll give it a try.

I don't like using the weird counters, and would rather see them as charge counters instead. I'm not a /co/fag at all, so I can't gauge them by a flavor perspective, but mechanically they don't really do anything for me. "Black/red guy who kills things if he sticks around for a couple turns" is kinda iffy outside a limited environment. And the other feels like a worse inferno titan that can drop equipment on it for cheap, but that ability feels kinda pointless since you're already dumping 5+mana into the creature, which in itself isn't a good equipment carrier.

As said before, while the requirement makes it stand out more, it really makes it kinda useless, since blue doesn't really buff creatures much. I think it needs prowess.

Again, this one feels a bit on the weak side. Yes, its a 5/4 doublestrike haste, but it requires you to already have a board presence to even attack.

I think these are actually really good takes on the idea of monowhite vampires. Feels very white, but the whole life-feeding thing is still there.

I actually kind of like this, but it feels more green than black to me. There's only one monoblack creature with devour, and that has an additional black effect (discard) to make it more toward that color. Plus "Big creature that's hard to remove" feels super green.

While a close approximation, this isn't a white effect.

Dont know the flavor of this but fuck it. It just eats mana or something.
Eh, it cant be white? Its not mine but I thought itd be fine the same destroy target tapped creature was fine. In both cases the function is that it mainly hits things that attacked.

>Dont know the flavor of this but fuck it. It just eats mana or something.
Meh, I think that would be something like
>Whenever ~ deals combat damage to a player, that player activates a mana ability of each land he or she controls, then empties his or her mana pool. Put X +1/+1 counters on ~, where X is the amount of mana emptied from that player's mana pool this way.

That is a really inelegant card man. Mine is just you feed it mana until gets fat and happy.

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If "pay mana" is supposed to be a vampiric effect, then there are a butt load more vampires in MtG.

This gives me deja vu. Has this conversation already been discussed here before?

It depends on how you flavor it. Milling isnt an inherently vampiric effect. The same effects can mean different things on different cards. Counters can represent physical growth sometimes, or represent armament in others.

What color would it be then? Red non-targeted burn is completely non-selective, and when it is, it just hits non-flying targets (Earthquake). Green has the same thing with just fliers. Blue doesn't do damage with instants and sorceries, and Black really only does damage to creatures in the form of life drain. On the other hand, White often does damage to attacking or blocking creatures. Since there are no effects in game that deal damage to specifically tapped creatures, I figured such an effect would have its place best in White.

Sure, but I expect a showcase green vampire to be more than any old green creature with the vampire subtype slapped on.

What about or makes them have to be vampires (other than the first one making vampire tokens, but that could be anything)?Are they not also just "creatures with the Vampire subtype slapped on"? What kind of logic is that? A rather large majority of creatures could be anything.

I don't care much for the blue one, but at least it has a modified slith ability that characterized the Innistrad vampires.

The white one drains life and also works with the many vampires that also drain life.

A lot of creatures have that issue. Just another reason why tribe doesn't matter. The white one even says it.

The card itself isn't white, but at least the tokens are.

>that characterized the Innistrad vampires.
Apparently not enough because they chose to bring back red vampires without having to tie them all to that ability. It was just a way for red to be able to show "draining" which is a tough thing to show in that color.

Your justification on the white one is pretty bullshit to me. It could just as easily be a white angel that makes soldiers. Lots of vampires manipulate counters because it's one of the ways all colors can show feeding, so my green vampire that cares about having counters on it can use other vampires that use counters, like Indulgent Aristocrat, Stromkirk Mentor, Rakish Heir, and more.
That's what I'm saying. What matters is the combination of mechanics and what it is going "okay, yeah, that's that thing". You feed the vampire your mana and it gets stronger when you feed it enough.

>goblin planeswalker leading a shitload of goblins to battle
>"Where the fuck do all these townsfolk keep coming from?"

Like the card, but it might be a little harsh. At least you can feed them to each other.

That might be an issue, actually. The Converter's ability is mandatory, and the two Citizens can just eat each other. Will add a may clause to it.

I'm not exactly sure what the function is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be an abyss type thing or is it supposed to be "you can't have anything except citizens"? I feel like for simplicites sake I'd like this a little closer to Ophiomancer like. If an opponent doesn't have a citizen, give them a citizen that makes them sacrifice a non citizen.

Swap it to when it deals combat damage and specify nonvampire? Changes things a bit, but I think 'sacrifices a nonvampire creature' would be pushing it.

Also did an update to the shapeshifting vampire, changed it to turn into a rat since I wanted to save wolf for a potentially BG gold one.

So yeah, hopefully the last time I revise this.

It's a tipple threat of features, but it can't attack, has 1 power and it costs as much as Phyrexian Obliterator.

Is the balance OK? Should it bestow wither instead of infect, since most New Phyrexian zombies already have infect, making this card kinda unintuitively redundant in combination with them?

This is probably undercosted, with far-reaching consequences.

Mirror Gallery

irror Gallery says the wording for this is "The 'legend rules' doesn't apply" and that this should probably cost more, yes.

The syntax for this probably needs to be adjusted. It should work like this:
- If you would sacrifice one of your artifacts with Arcbound Ravager, you can instead sacrifice an opponent's artifact, but not a non-artifact permanent they control
- With Airdrop Condor, you can use an opposing Goblin creature, but not an opposing non-Goblin creature
- For Alchemist's Vial, it should probably not be able to sacrifice anything but itself. You could *maybe* let it designate an opposing permanent with an identical name as a proxy sacrifice.
- For Eldrazi Scion tokens, it should definitely not be able to substitute anything else since there's only ever one thing that qualifies as "this creature"

Balance-wise, I'm probably going to increase the CMC to 2 or 3. Right now it's kinda Doom Blade on crack with the minor drawback of requiring an enabling card (which includes Cruel Edict). It was originally an enchantment at 1BBB but I figure there's probably at least one card that lets you sacrifice an indefinite amount of permanents during a single turn.

I figured there was something I was overlooking. Oh well.

You can't use the sacrifice keyword action because it is highly specific in how it works, and that is not worth breaking for one card.

A smaller version could be cheaper, though I kind of like mirror gallery's ironic uniqueness.

Marvelous Multiplicity U
Enchantment- Aura
Enchant Creature
The legend rule doesn't apply to creatures with enchanted creature's name.

Unpersonate WU
Enchantment
When ~ enters the battlefield, name a card.
Cards with the chosen name instead have no name.

Both could probably cantrip for being incredibly niche, though Marvelous Multiplicity deliberately doesn't work with Krark's Thumb.

>Mtgcardsmith.com and its god-awful formatting
ew

>BBBB
My opinion is that casting costs like this are cancer, leading only to boringly-powerful cards which go against the design of colors because the force into one color. Phyrexian Obliterator did it, and that card is not fun.

Now for the constructive criticism: See if you can make it 2BB or 3B (or, at the absolute minimum, 1BBB) and dial down the abilities.

Zombies already have enough tribal synergies without any more creatures that do "Zombies you control get/have ...". Besides, infect is kind of retired AFAIK, but that could be a non-issue depending on the set this card is in. But it still needs its reminder text.

See if you can change the second ability so that the third ability is still relevant, but not an automatic thing. For example:
>2B: Put a -1/-1 counter on target creature.

Right now, I'd say the card is "balanced", but it's not a well-designed card.

Also for future reference:

gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&mana=|=[BBBB]|=[RRRR]|=[WWWW]|=[UUUU]|=[GGGG]

4-mana Monocolor spells. Never again. Never ever.

This card is based on the 1974 film of the same name. tl;dr for that film: Zardoz is floating head that gives barbarous humans guns in exchange for food, and teaches them that violence is their natural state.

Issues:
1. I am not certain what an appropriate P/T, color, or cost for this card would be.
2. As a god, it should probably not always be a creature. However that would make the card very wordy. Although since he doesn't feed on faith, it would make sense to also not have that effect.

I want to brew together a simple Tribal focused cube to use as a way to introduce people at my college into better drafting/deckbuilding (Think Onslaught block 2.0). I might be mixing custom cards in (probably just lord effects/benefits for having X or more of that type of creature) but I want to decide on the tribes first. Rough draft right now is:

>WU Spirits with blinking/tapping
>UB Wizards with a bit of a Necromancer theme going so Zombies/recursion
>BR Goblins sacc outlets
>RG Beasts aggro
>GW Human Soldiers weenies/tokens

Any tips for someone wanting to make a cube for the first time? I know this isn't really custom card-related, but I figured it's better than just making a new thread for it.

>Green humans
Eh?
>Black goblins
Cool I guess.

Can't help you, don't know much about making cubes, sorry.

I think Colorless would be fine for him if he's indented to be more of a construct. Avatar might fit better over God though.

As for the effects, it puts a pretty hefty tax on the opponent attacking, though it also gives something of a bonus. I think the wording could be improved, but I would say that if you made this thing something beefy like a 4/4, you could have all that at 5 or 6 mana. Archangel of Tithes would be something I would point to, along with Norn's Annex/Propaganda for non-creature versions.

Decided to fix this up into having a somewhat more Black effect by default, while altering the White effect to be more standard lifegain. The Black aspect rewards you for saccing more to it, and the White aspect gives it even if you sac nothing.

Still don't get the interaction, but I think better wording would be
>[...] you gain X life for each Plains you conyrol, where X is the number of creatures it devoured.
Or switch it around. I think. Honestly not entirely sure how the effect is intended to work.

Wait, is this devoured + Plains?

I may have had the phrasing off. The intent was 1 life for each devoured creature and 1 life for each Plains, adding up to a nice sum if you had a lot of White mana and sacced a lot of your own creatures.

I also want to avoid getting it too wordy here. Tried out another option as well.

I would say that you might not have enough U Wizards that care about Zombies, though finding some that like returning spells should suffice. I also don't think Green gets many Soldiers, though you may be able to go with Warriors just as well.

As for building a Cube, I think power level is an important thing to keep in mind. You don't want to load up on of these archetypes with the best tribal support and legends ever, while another only has a handful of things to deal with and is mostly vanilla creatures that match the card type.

I was planning on doing this as well bedore I decided I just wanted to try working on a general cube, but something to make tribal work in cube I think, where theres (usually) no redundancy, and sort of a lesson from SOI which is why I think it was a useful set in learning about tribal, is that you should lean on the strategy more than caring about creature type. You can have some cards that do of course, but due to lack of redundancy and massive variation in power level and general... spread? Density? (Basically some tribes have a shit ton and some tribes have like 3 of these effects), you can balance this out by instead, for example, choosing to use cards that focus on self mill and grave value in UB eith an emphasis on using wizards that do it, with the few actually good wizard tribal cards, then making BR goblins focus on red and black self sacrifice effects, and choosing to only use a few choice synergistic goblin tribal abilities so theres some equality between the two in terms of density of tribal effects. And this also allows natural crossover between tribes for drafting-- some of your red goblin cards that benefit off putting things in grave can synergize with some of your blue wizard cards that can pull things out of the grave.

>when you accidentally write a wall
s-sorry

I'm super late on this, but if the user I was talking to about silver border vs black border is still here, while there is a ton of untapped design space from looking at what is actually written on a card, it also opens up a ton of rules headaches, which is why effects like that have never hit print. I assure you designers made those effects and development or the rules team told them they had to shelve it; that's how a ton of un-cards came into being. Check out MaRo's Drive to Work podcasts on the un-sets for info on that.

It was good advice at least. Tribal should be based in keywords and theme first, and actual listed creature types second. It'd be better to include a BR card that wasn't a Goblin that worked with a Sacrifice strategy over an actual Goblin card in those colors that didn't contribute or worked against it.

Oh. In that case, you should look to War Report.

So, I'm curious, just why does this thing interact with Plains anyway?

Now the guy you were talking to, but looking at the Un-sets is pretty interesting in that a lot of the cards introduced there eventually influenced black-border design. Like how BFM inspired split cards. Which... now that I think of it, may have inspired Meld as well. Though Meld came about from a few different sources.

>So, I'm curious, just why does this thing interact with Plains anyway?

Multicolor subtheme. I wanted a bridge between Black and White at common

Also, War Report ends up being even more wordy.

...
War Report says
>You gain life equal to the number of creatures on the battlefield plus the number of artifacts on the battlefield.

Translating that to this card would result in
>When ~ enters the battlefield, you gain life equal to the number of creatures it devoured plus the number of Plains you control.

Yes, and as I said, it ends up being even more wordy than the version I just posted.

So it doesn't really matter what the plains ability does, you just want to cross the colors? I would actually just take the devour off this design and then focus on having an etb trigger that a white card could have. The problem with devour in this design is because there is a lot aesthetic reason to want to tie the plains trigger to the devour trigger, but scaling stuff like that is usually uncommon iirc, at least that's one of my measuring sticks. On commons I usually impose the mental limit of threshold 1s or 0s. Tar Fiend was one of the simplest executions of a black card that cared about what it devoured, but that couldn't be lower than uncommon imo.

If you want this line, MAYBE make it something like "If ~ devoured a white creature, do x white thing" or whatever the wording would be.

Not that user, but I like the
>"If ~ devoured a white creature, {white stuff happens}"

>Hellkite Hatchling has flying and trample if it devoured a creature.
Wording of Hellkite Hatchling for reference. This is uncommon buuut I think you could justify it at common since it's only threshold 1 and doesn't scale.

Speaking of white stuff.

Well, no reason it has to be a permanent effect, although some of the White keywords it could get might not fit as well.

Another idea I had was simply giving it an activated ability that triggers off of white, though I do like the idea of tying in devour with it.

Oh also I realized this would probably be an etb trigger and not grant static abilities like Hellkite Hatchling so I definitely think this could be common.

If you have devour on it, I don't think you can just have another random effect. It's functionally fine I guess but it's a really ugly design, because its two mostly mechanically unrelated things stuck together. Something like "When ~ enters the battlefield, if it devoured a white creature, gain 4 life" or something would be a really nice design imo.

Yeah, I agree, which is why I was avoiding an activated ability or something that just gave a keyword.

Perhaps something like this could work?

Should be
>When ~ enters the battlefield, if it devoured a white creature, you may destroy target artifact or enchantment.

'White' isn't capitalized.

Good design by the way.

Nice. I like it, though what the specific white ability you get depends a lot on what's surrounding it. I actually really love this twist on devour. It's simple but it makes sense and it is a new thing and it's functional by enforcing color pairs.

Nice. Glad it worked out to a good place. Thanks for the advice on wording and making it flow better.

I did want to include Devour in the set for this reason. There aren't really a lot of cards that have it, especially at lower rarities. I wanted to see it on more cards that weren't just large with a couple keywords.

Looking at cards, it looks like devour should come first here. It's a small formatting thing though.

Noted. I think that works better, as it won't leave anyone wondering what 'devoured' means when they get to the line.

Oh yeah, and super haste becoming pacts and stuff, it's really cool

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Playing this on turn one means you'll probably have 4 mana by turn 2, and 7 by turn 3. It's an absolutely insane amount of ramp that doesn't cost anything to use.

This one is a much more reasonable. Sacrifice to either get a big creature, or some LD with a smaller one.

this should not be adding 3 to your mana pool, or if it is it should have a much steeper downside. Also it's in the wrong border.

Lol I've done it with a sliver deck, why not with an Arbor deck? It's called potential

I kinda like the idea of a legendary forest, the place where all forests come from, that taps and searches your deck for a forest and puts it in lieu of making mana. Not sure how to balance that though. Also muh shuffling

ok

I think you could make it work by having it search your library for however many forests as it enters play and exiling them, and then having it tap to put a forest from exile onto the battlefield.

It'd still be quite strong at increasing your number of land drops, and also allow you a lot of consistency. Plus, if you have the exiled lands enter untapped, it serves as that land generating mana itself, in a way.