Alternate M:tG Color Wheel: Take II

[Username17]

Question, did you play magic during mid 00's? Because I've been gesturing in the direction of original Ravnica Block and I feel like that's falling on deaf ears. There were a fair number of weird synergy cards like I'm proposing and that format if rembered fondly as one of the most diverse of all time, despite or even because of decks that were way weirder and way less fair then Temurge, Rally, or even Marvel. You had the your aggro, your control, even your good stuff midrage, but you also had decks you don't see the like of today like, Owling Mine, Heartbeat, Greater Gifts, Dragonstorm, or Pickles.

Like you seemed so shocked and appalled by the Rally the Ancestors decks that I felt the need to look them up(I did't play standard when those decks were meta) and it just seemed fine. I expected way more looting effects and self mill, but apparently no the deck seems to mostly just played creatures the fair way and eventually cast big Rally that would kill them. (I checked some vods of the deck and apparently what you do is use the first rally to draw a bunch of cards to find the second one and then you could set up your graveyard when you discarded to hand size). It seems like a combo engine that's relatively slow and easy to disrupt.

I played very little Magic in the mid 00s.

The point of 4 Color Rally isn't that it's a horrible deck to play against or that it's terribly unfair. It's actually very difficult to interact with because graveyard hate of the period was essentially non-existent and the deck legitimately doesn't give a shit whether its cards are in play or in the graveyard, so removing or even countering its creatures doesn't really set it back. It was a very good deck with a very high winrate.

The issue is that 4 Color Rally decks don't vary much from the stock list. If your stated goal is to have more different cards see play at the top tables, then every deck like 4 Color Rally that becomes Tier 1 is a step backwards and every deck like Golgari Midrange that becomes Tier 1 is a step forwards.

Synergy decks have more inertia and a lower considerable card pool than card quality decks. A deck that was pure card quality could find room for something really out-there like Scrabble Claws that hates on graveyards or something if the field warranted doing that. A deck that was pure Synergy would not and could not.

The cost to a deck like Aetherworks Marvel to take an Energy production card out is that it's harder to spin the wheel of the Marvel itself. You need to get to 6 energy to try to get your Eldrazi Titan on turn 4. It doesn't really matter how good or bad the cards are. For fuck's sake, you usually end up playing fucking puzzle knots because you need the Energy so bad. And that means that the stock list does not and can not change very much. Every Tier 1 deck that is like Aetherworks Marvel reduces the number of cards that see play in top tables. Its midrangey opponents of the time were Mardu Vehicles and GB Delirium, and those lists varied a lot more.

You seem to be under the impression that a deck being weird is enough to increase the number of cards that see play at top tables. This is flatly wrong. The number of top decks is just the number of top decks. There are more top tier Standard decks now than there have ever been at any time in any previous version of Standard, which has to do with the Play Balance Team and shit, not with the apparent strangeness or normality of any particular deck. Turbofog and Gates are weird, Sultai Midrange and Esper Control are normal, but the point is that there are a lot of them seeing play concurrently. That's good, but we chalk it up to a good job done by the development and balance teams. We don't have separately competitive Mono-Red, Mono-Blue, and Mono-White Aggro decks simultaneously with competitive midrange lists with a White-Red and Green-Black core simultaneously with tempo lists based on a Red-Blue and Green-Blue core simultaneously with Control lists with a Blue-Red and Black-White core with combo lists based on 5-color tapped lands, Turbo Fog, Mardu Aristocrats, and Birthing Pod all at the same time because of the weirdness or synergy dependence of any particular deck. We have all these decks threatening to win tournaments because of very impressive balancing work.

Red Deck Wins and Mono-Blue Aggro share zero cards. Not even lands. That is because they are different colors, and can't share cards. If you want more variation of that sort, just add more colors. Seriously.

But the number of decks that see top play is not going to go up because you make decks weird or make them synergistic or whatever the fuck. That's an issue for development and play balance. The current team does a much better job of this than previous teams because they have decades of experience and a much larger staff. There's always going to be however many hundreds of trillions of decks you could theoretically make, but most of them are going to be essentially or literally unplayable and the difference in power between one deck or another is going to drive some number of nominally functional decks out of Tier 1.

The number of cards that see top play is simply the number of decks that see top play times the number of different cards that those decks use. Which means obviously that if that's your concern you should be encouraging decks like Boros Midrange that use a lot of different cards and discouraging decks like Nexus Turbofog that don't.

And yes, I have read up on the period you keep wanking to. There's a Throwback Gauntlet that lists Nine Decks from that two year period. All I can say is: "Meh." We could make a bigger and deeper gauntlet from major Tier 1 Decks from February of 2019 than WotC managed to highlight from that two year period.

• Sultai Midrange
• Izzet Drakes
• Boros Angels
• Judith Priest
• Nexus Turbofog
• Five Color Gates
• Red Deck Wins
• White Weenies
• Mono Blue Tempest
• Jeskai Control
• Esper Control
• Temur "Pod" Rhythm
• Selesnya "Twin" Tokens

That's 13 decks instead of only 9, and it's from a single month rather than cherry picking from 8 different standard environments.

You're wrong about the history and you're wrong about the theory.

-Username17

[maglag]

What's exactly the definition of "tier 1" you're using there? Because the most played Temur deck is only 2% of the meta. Only mono-red aggro, Izzet Drakes, Esper Control, Mono-blue tempo, Azorius Aggro and Sultai midrange have 5% or better of the meta, together making around 54% of the meta, aka over half.

So if being 2% or lower of the meta is enough for you to qualify a deck as "tier 1", then I've got news for you, back in 2005 there were a lot more than 9 "tier 1" decks than the ones listed in that article. But then that article would've need to be wwaaayyy larger and whoever wrote it simply wasn't being paid enough to do that.

[Username17]

What's exactly the definition of "tier 1" you're using there?

"Wins Major Tournaments."

Some of that of course is that there simply are more major tournaments in 2019 than there were in 2007. But also the number of different decks that place highly is higher. Currently there are more decks that people win tournaments with than there are slots in the Top 8, meaning that if you look at different tournaments you see different decks in the Top 8.

The MOCS championship had seven different decks in the Top 8 - eight different decks if you count Mono White Weenies as a distinct archetype from White/blue Aggro (which admittedly, you probably should not). The Star City Open in Dallas had six different archetypes in the Top 8, but also included an entire archetype that the MOCS championship did not (Nexus Turbofog), and the presented builds of Esper Control and Sultai Midrange were very different. Claims that deck diversity was better in 2005 are simply wrong.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

And yes, I have read up on the period you keep wanking to. There's a Throwback Gauntlet that lists Nine Decks from that two year period. All I can say is: "Meh." We could make a bigger and deeper gauntlet from major Tier 1 Decks from February of 2019 than WotC managed to highlight from that two year period.

That's not actually a summary of any particular standard meta, like obviously so because some of those decks have Time Spiral cards and others have Kamigawa cards. It's also not a complete list of either meta. Like just to start Randy Buehler chose to include the Zoo deck whose pilot famously drew Lightning Helix, the B/W list he was playing against, but not the R/G deck which actually won that pro tour. Like just from that PT there was also Heartbeat, Angelfire control, B/G/W Rock, Magnivore, B/W control.

Weird build around cards just create more decks because they enable new archetypes rather than slotting into existing ones. Like compare The Scarab God to Wilderness Reclamation. Both cards very powerful, but when The Scarab God was released people slid the card into existing good decks and it sucked. Wilderness Reclamation on the other hand caused people to brew up entirely new deck-lists.

[Username17]

Weird build around cards just create more decks because they enable new archetypes rather than slotting into existing ones. Like compare The Scarab God to Wilderness Reclamation. Both cards very powerful, but when The Scarab God was released people slid the card into existing good decks and it sucked. Wilderness Reclamation on the other hand caused people to brew up entirely new deck-lists.

No. Also no. And again no. Literally every single assertion you made there is bullshit.

Theoretically, a weird build-around card doesn't create any more decks than any other card does. The number of theoretical decks is beyond human capacity to calculate or conceive. What actually matters is how many competitive decks there are. And that's a function of development and playbalance, not on how many cards are in the system. If one deck is really good against the entire field, it pushes everything else out - regardless of whether that really good deck is merely an above average performer across the board (like Temur Energy was in its day) or crushingly dominant against everything (like Shadowverse's Bloodcopalypse during Wonderland). The only time you get wonderfully diverse metas like what Magic is enjoying right now is when there are multiple decks that are good and bad against any particular deck you choose to name. But that happens or doesn't happen regardless of whether cards can be shared between archetypes or not.

Imagine for a moment that we had a simple situation where there decks made with just two card slots, and we had the cards A, a, B, and b to put into them. If due to color requirements or synergy effects or whatever it was only possible (or at least only competitive) to mix A with a and B with b, then you have two possible decks: Aa and Bb. If it's only possible to make decks with a Capital and a Lowercase, you have four decks: Aa, Ab, Ba, and Bb. If you can freely mix cards, then you have six decks: Aa, Ab, AB, Ba, Bb, and ab. Obviously and eternally: six is more than four, and four is more than two. It just obviously mathematically indisputably is.

So the thing you're saying is that Aa and Bb are two decks while Ab is only one deck. That is: forcing people to make only Aa or Bb decks is more decks if freely mixing cards would lead to the degenerate case where only of the hybrid options was clearly better than all the others and left you with only one "real" choice. Like the dark days of Caw Blade or Bant Company or something, where one deck had something stupid like a 60% share of the top table metagame. And while that is a possible outcome of mixing archetypes, it's not a necessary outcome. And indeed, severely limiting the playspace is no protection at all from that sort of thing. If it turns out that Bb has the upper hand against Aa and those are the only two options, you really only have one option. The minimum for there to be a non-degenerate metagame is for there to be 3 Tier 1 decks, and obviously that is a lot easier to achieve from a starting point of 6 decks than a starting point of only 2.

Now your attempt at current examples is just full of complete fucking fail. Wilderness Reclamation fit into exactly one top deck, and it's one that already existed and it's called Nexus Turbofog and it has a no-shit winrate of over 75% when the field isn't prepared for it and a winrate of about 40% when they are. It created zero new archetypes because the archetype already existed and had the highest winrate at PT25. On the flip side, Scarab God actually did potentiate new archetypes. Dimir Midrange and Grixis Energy were decks that enjoyed some success with Scarab God as a curve topper and basically did not exist before Scarab God or after Scarab God rotated. The thing you're probably thinking about is the fact that there was a period where Temur Energy was the best deck in Standard and some versions of that deck also splashed Black for Scarab God and Hostage Taker because they could. But that's still a separate problem - a problem where Temur Energy was so good and consistent that they could just splash a 4th color to use some good stuff from other decks. Decks like Temur Energy are a problem, and that's why so many cards that deck used ended up getting Standard Banned.

But as for sharing cards between archetypes in general, in abstract and in practice it leads to more decks rather than less. Because that's obviously mathematically true. And also historically experientially true.

Let's consider three cards: Hero of Precint One, Heroic Reinforcements, and Deputy of Detention. Also let's consider three decks: Esper Midrange, Mardu Aristocrats, and White Weenies. Hero of Precinct One is a key value card in Esper Midrange and Mardu Aristocrats. Heroic Reinforcements is a key card in Mardu Aristocrats and Deputy of Detention is a key card in Esper Midrange. There are also White Weenie decks that run Hallowed Fountains and splash for Deputy of Detention and White Weenie decks that run Sacred Foundry and splash for Heroic Reinforcements. The metagame is strictly richer for the fact that some White Weenies decks use a Red Splash or a Blue Splash. I don't use the term "strictly" lightly, because Magic players get all butt hurt about it. But it's true: the fact that White Weenies has the ability to be played with a light Blue splash and playa Detention Feild on legs and alternately to be played with a light Red splash and play an Overrun with legs means that there are more potential metas that the White Weenies archetype can play in successfully. And as long as White Weenies isn't oppressively good, that's strictly better than if all White Weenies decks used stock lists.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Now your attempt at current examples is just full of complete fucking fail. Wilderness Reclamation fit into exactly one top deck, and it's one that already existed and it's called Nexus Turbofog and it has a no-shit winrate of over 75% when the field isn't prepared for it and a winrate of about 40% when they are. It created zero new archetypes because the archetype already existed and had the highest winrate at PT25.

MtGtop8 disagrees with you as it lists Reclamation decks under Nexus Reclamation and Temur Control a deck that plays no fogs and no Nexus of Fate. At then end of the year there will be a format where Reclamation is legal and Nexus is not and I guarantee there will still be a Reclamation deck (assuming it isn't banned of course).

Honestly I agree with you about Hero of Precinct One to the point I'm not sure exactly where we are supposed to be at odds. Hero is a build around card, if you want to include it it requires the right supporting cast to be good. The fact that it needs a support structure leads to more interesting deck building decisions than if it didn't.

[Whipstitch]

I always kinda felt like Ravnica was overrated due to coming after the Mirrodin and Kamigawa blocks that virtually drove me out of constructed. As a limited format it was nice but I think the best thing about it was the mana base rather than pushing synergy given that being bold enough to let people rock 3 colors can obviously go a long way towards letting people also play good stuff decks.

[Thaluikhain]

The number of theoretical decks is beyond human capacity to calculate or conceive.

Been wondering, how then do you playtest such a game? Come up with something that looks good in theory, test the basic rules, and wait for the community to find issues and then take steps to fix those? Thus creating more issues to be fixed later?

[GnomeWorks]

Been wondering, how then do you playtest such a game?

[Username17]

The number of theoretical decks is beyond human capacity to calculate or conceive.

Been wondering, how then do you playtest such a game? Come up with something that looks good in theory, test the basic rules, and wait for the community to find issues and then take steps to fix those? Thus creating more issues to be fixed later?

Mostly you have theories about the kinds of decks people are going to make and you do a lot of math and you playtest the cards you expect people to use in the ways you expect them to be used. And sometimes you are wrong and cards get used in novel ways.

The earliest set was filled with trash and broken cards because the original designers didn't understand many things about how deckbuilding would actually work. They didn't understand mana curves, tempo, value, threats, clocks, answers, or inevitability - those are all terms that were created later to describe important concepts in card games. Most importantly of all, they believed that cards being "rare" would prevent them from taking over the game.

While today's balance team is much better and has a much firmer idea of what kinds of cards see play and how good a card can be and have the game still function - sometimes they miss things. The most obvious is when they design a card for one format and it gets used in another format. Wilderness Reclamation, for example, is supposed to be a Commander card. It's literally a nerfed version of a card that was banned in Commander and they previewed it by leaking it to a Commander podcast. The fact that it is used at all in Standard is something that got probably zero playtesting. Its partner in crime Nexus of Fate was a buy-a-box promo card that while technically Standard Legal was never in any card set and was never intended for or tested in Standard.

If you go back a few years, you can find a lot of pretty heavy misses by the development team. Kaladesh in particular was filled with egregious errors. They straight up did not notice the interaction between Saheeli and Felidar Guardian before the cards were printed (it's a two-card, turn 4 infinite combo). Ideas about what would happen if people went all-in on Aetherworks Marvel turned out to be very wrong. Even the simple and unassuming Atune With Aether turned out to be a fairly ridiculous amount of value once you had any kind of decent Energy sinks. The misses on Kaladesh were such a black eye that they ended up creating a whole team of former elite tournament players to destructively test new sets going forward.

-Username17

[maglag]

And then there was good old Skullclamp that got a preview article going "yep, this is crazy bonkers and we're still releasing it MWWAAHAHAHAHA!" then procceeded to dominate the meta before being banned.

[Mistborn]

The misses on Kaladesh were such a black eye that they ended up creating a whole team of former elite tournament players to destructively test new sets going forward.

I thought they already did that after Urza block?

Anyway it is a little fruitless just to argue in spherical frictionless vacuum, it's probably better to give examples of cards that would be pushed under my design philosophy. These are cards that would likely get tournament decks named after them. They all likely ought to cost one more mana than they do or otherwise be somewhat worse but instead they are priced at a point that I'm reasonably sure they would see play. (Commentary in the spoilers)

Relic of the Burned Saint 1LL
Enchantment
Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery put an illumination counter on Relic of the Burned Saint.
Remove three illumination counters from Relic of the Burned Saint: copy target instant or sorcery that you own you may chose new targets for the copy.

I see this being an enabler for two potential decks. One is a control deck that loads up with cheap interactive spells charge it up and then uses it to twincast some big haymaker. The other is combo decks uses it cast all their spells in one turn. Now I plan on printing rituals but I'm definitely not printing Storm, so the deck would need to find a way to point 7 lightning strikes at the dome or more likely copy an X burn spell a couple of times. If the engine is too good it might necessary to make the ablity cost four counters, or have mana cost as well.

Paired Lives 2NN
Enchantment
When every a creature enters the battlefield under control if you cast it you may search your library for a creature with the same converted mana cost and a different name and put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle you library.

This is another card that could go into a conventional decks as value engine but also definitely enables shenanigans.You can also build a toolbox around creatures of a specific mana cost and of course any combo built around creatures becomes vastly easier to execute

The Abyss Gazes Back 1VVV
Enchantment
The Abyss Gazes Back enters the battlefield with four decay counters.
Whenever you would draw a card outside your end step instead put a decay counter on The Abyss Gazes Back.
At the begining of your end step you lose life equal to the number of decay counters on The Abyss Gazes Back then draw that many cards then exile cards from your hand until your hand has seven cards.

this one is one is obviously playing with fire given it calls back to the infamously broken necropotence. Obvious though a lot has been done to make the effect worse most notably removing the ability to control it. The whole draw increasingly more cards and lose increasingly more life gives a good consume energy field larger then own head vibe. Decks with the Abyss Gazes Back intend to either slam it on turn 4 and win on turn 6 or 7 or play some way to blow it up. Given that just the first two triggers are nearly half your starting life I can't imagine those decks being good against aggro.

Temporal Summons TT
Enchantment
You can't cast creature spells from your hand.
1T: exile a creature card from your hand with three time counters on it, it gains suspend.

This one I'm a little iffy about if you slam it on turn two and activated on turn 3 you get your first creature on turn 6. It seems a little clunky. The shear amount of mana the card saves might be enough to be enough to get it to see play, depending on what the very top of the mana curve looks like.

Advice of the Emperor 1MM
Enchantment
1M: Discard a card, search your library for a card with the same card types and converted mana cost and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.

it's a repeating tutor gun, it's a little hard to imagine there isn't some kind of deck that can abuse despite the restrictions

[Username17]

I think that DrPraetor brought up a very good point, and I'm going to go back to it:

The Mentasi are blue, but they're extremely decadent, and their particular focus is on hanging out in palaces and doing illusions. So the particular mix of blue cards they get includes a bunch of Demons (which may or may not splash black), and some discard effects with weaker card draw, and nothing aquatic. Different "illusion" cards in Magic do a whole range of things so you can pick whatever you want for illusion to mean mechanically, really.

The Gothi are black, and they're more Cure fans and less evil. So you get sacrifice cards but they're supposed to be sad rather than wicked, and your undead have sympathetic quotes on them. You get more card draw (it costs life, as usual per black) and less discard than you might expect, with the discard being mixed in with the grab bag of spells having sacrifice costs associated with them.

The Purani are white, get significantly more direct damage than is usual for a white suit, but are otherwise bog standard.

The Qualinosti are bog-standard green - druids and other curve-boosters, big critters with better than usual value.

Finally, the Factati are red, but they're we-love-artifacts-and-industry red, and they get some unsummon and delay effects which have been more-often given to blue in previous sets. They also get various clockwork-type effects which have previously gone to artifacts; and sphinxes are red, because why the heck not?

I realize I left some stuff out which your design specs called to go into into Void = Black, Light = White, Nature = Green, Time = Red and Mind = Blue; but, you can fill out the above pretty easily. For example, Expansionar has a lot of cards that scry for basic lands, spread among all the suits.

Now, is that what you're proposing? Because it seems to me that your proposals are pretty mild all told, and amount to only slightly more than the average concept drift from one Magic expansion to another.

Fundamentally, your proposals don't really seem all that out there for just being regular cards from a new expansion. I have specific problems with most of the ones you describe, but they don't seem like things that would require us to radically re-imagine Magic or the color scheme it already has.

Relic might seem weird because it's a White Enchantment that cares about Instants and Sorceries. But when you think of it like a White Enchantment that itself has Prowess, it's not actually that weird at all. White do-nothing build-around Enchantments show up in every set, and White is party of the "spells matter" Jeskai pie slice and has been for some time. This could just see printing next cycle and no one would notice or care. Now a 3 mana enchantment that gives you one Fork for every three spells you cast is not generally that good compared to Primal Amulet, which itself isn't very good and also colorless. So it seems pretty bad, but mostly it doesn't seem like much of a radical rethought for White does in Magic right now.

Paired Lives is just a Green card. Like, it's exactly one of those dumb Creature Combo cards like Collected Company. It's a little slower than Collected Company, but it's a lot more certain and the ceiling is higher. Probably a bad idea to print this exact card, but it's just exactly a Green card. My concept of Green is in no way challenged by this and my mind remains stubbornly unblown. It's almost exactly just a powered up version of Guardian Project - a 4 mana Green enchantment that's in Standard right now.

The Abyss Gazes Back obviously is a risky card, but it's just so obviously broken in Burn that I don't know why you'd even bother writing this down. You draw 4 cards and then 5 cards for purposes of spending your turn 5 mana, so you just obviously burn your opponent out. If this fucking thing resolves you win the very next turn though as many counterspells as your opponent could possibly have. But importantly it's not just a card that could plausibly be in Black, it's exactly a (slightly) nerfed version of a famously broken Black card from the early days of Magic.

Temporal Summons would be playable if and only if Really Big Red was a playable archetype. The play pattern would be to take Turn 4 off and suspend a Titan at te end of your opponent's turn if you didn't need to Lightning Strike to stay alive. But again, this isn't a weird card to appear in Red. It's almost exactly Jhoira of the Ghitu, who was a Red card.

And finally Advice of the Emperor is just "All your cards have Transmute." And Transmute was a Blue/Black mechanic that was previewed in Future Sight on a Blue card. So having this card in Blue is simply extremely unsurprising.

---

The bottom line is that I can't even think of why you'd want to redo the color pie and make a new game if your end result is simply recognizable as the five colors we already have. Your sample Green card is just a real Green card. Your sample Black card is just a real Black card. Your sample Red card is an actual Red card. Why fucking bother?

If you're going to be making new colors, shouldn't you make six or seven new colors and divide things up in an actually novel way? The only thing you've done here is ruminate on how you think value engine enchantments are cool. Well, good for you. But that doesn't mean your ideas merit any further exploration as currently conceived, and they do not.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

My own "ideas" on how to "mix up" a clearly M:tG inspired card game would be to take the weirdest things that existed within MtG, and make them the norms. Then mix in ideas from sources that are good, with ideas that are able to modify things.

In no particular order, nor in any sort of organization/planning/sense:

Colour & Naming
-Keep the colours, but change the names: Life, Death, Thought, Pure, Chaos, Artificial

-Colour of card, & Mana used to Summon; not matching. Black Trents summoned with Life Mana; Green skeletons summoned with black mana (e.g. [Life/Death/Thought/Pure/Chaos]lace, various colourless cards that require coloured mana to cast)

-Call it a parody game

-Rename to Myths: the Pretension (RETROSTUPID, instead of DECKMASTER)

-Recognize that a Dragon Dragon Shaman might be a thing; try to shrug about it, say the system isn't perfect; it's procedural


Mechanics Design: increase complexity

Probably a bad idea, b/c it will introduce more moving parts; could be alright.

-No land cards that can do nothing except tap for mana; either you tap lands to generate a Treasure token (i.e. T: Sacrifice to gain one mana of any colour), or it's a single-Mana colour token; or they outright create a 0/3, 1/2, 2/1, or 0/2, 1/1 with some ability that matches the cards colour


-More card activation methods: Tap exists, but there's other changes that can exist: Flip (into a 2/2 Morph creature, then flip back for 3 mana); potentially (I)nvert or (R)everse (lose control of creature to target opponent for 1 round).

-Other card statuses: Cumulative Upkeeps, Phasing, Echo, &etc. Except not as abilities within cards, but as abilities placed upon cards ia spells (the Phasing mechanic had a few spells that Phased out targets for 1 round, or while Enchanted).

-Bring back Banding; mostly b/c it's retro/stupid, but it's also pretentious to think players will want to deal w/ Banding. However, defensive Banding should have some sort of cap, not 1 banding creature for "indefinite/infinite" other defending creatures.

-[Potentially, combos are an interesting part of the meta tbh] Dealing with Infinite Combos: Possibly, put hard/meta caps on all card abilities that could be made to go infinite (e.g. Polyraptor, Klark Clan Ironworks, Urzatron). Meta caps could be handled by the caps being calculated in the untap step of each turn).

-Potentially return other keywords such as Storm & other currently broken-seeming spell combination abilities, due to applying caps; either of the amount of different spells that can be used in conjunction with the card; xor meta-based caps

e.g.
-Death Storm cares about graveyards, or amount of Undead/Vermin you control;
-Life Storm abt creatures you control, or your total life, or the amount of lands you control, or the power of your creature, the amount of mana-tap/land-untap creatures you have;
-Thought Storm about Instants/Sorceries in Graveyard or cards in hand, the amount of creatures you have w/ flying/Islandhome/Islandwalk,
-Pure Storm cares about life total differences between yourself & opponent, or toughness of your creatures, or land differences between yourself & target opponent
-Chaos Storm is paid for by self-mill, self-damage, creature sacrifice

Creature design:
-Since it's Earth, we can just use creatures that are from the myths of Earth

-Probably using some narrative lenses borrowed from Frank's "Dead Man's Hand" (e.g. no humans, borrow from local myths for population options)

-Some expansive/varied scope of species from Frank's "Fantasy Kitchensink",

-Make all of the varied creature types get handled by the gritty/lethal mechanics & 44-ish creature skeletons from After Sundown that can handle 100's of subtypes in a mechanically straightforward manner.

-Clearly lay out why cards are designed the way that they are; a card with some form of depleting counters for use are undercosted mana-wise, while cards that have a T(ap) cost tend to be middle of the road, cards that can be powered by sheer mana


Creative Design:

-Far future science fantasy Earth

-Setting/World Design: Make it political commentary on present-day (21st century) Earth; more like political cartoons meets fantasy art

-Art Design: Try to go for a "bad highschool art" vibe; but don't go into the deep end

[Mistborn]

I think you're vastly underestimating what Relic and Advice are capable of, and you're reading Paired Lives wrong. Guardian Project draws you a card any time you play a unique creature. Paired Lives tutors for a different creature every time you play any creature and puts that creature right onto the battlefield. The effect is very different.

As for gaze playing it in a burn deck only guarantees you win on your next turn if the burn available is at a level that's rare to see in the standard of any era. If your deck is mostly Lighting Strikes with four Shocks, you're unlikely to get there before turn 6. On the other hand if the burn available is on the level of say modern you many not even want the card. Modern burn already has the option to play a card that let's them take a turn off to refill their hand for three mana and they don't play it.

The bottom line is that I can't even think of why you'd want to redo the color pie and make a new game if your end result is simply recognizable as the five colors we already have. Your sample Green card is just a real Green card. Your sample Black card is just a real Black card. Your sample Red card is an actual Red card. Why fucking bother?

If you're going to be making new colors, shouldn't you make six or seven new colors and divide things up in an actually novel way? The only thing you've done here is ruminate on how you think value engine enchantments are cool. Well, good for you. But that doesn't mean your ideas merit any further exploration as currently conceived, and they do not.

The title of the thread was Alternate M:tG Color Wheel, that sort of implies a set of factions that somewhat resembles the mtg colors. It's not entirely one to one however. Void and Nature have a set of mechanics fairly in line with Green and Black with different aspects emphasized. Time is mostly based on as subset of Blue's mechanics. Light is more Red than is White because Whites mechanical space is kind of nebulous. Mind on the other hand draws effects from blue, black, and white.

[Username17]

I think you're vastly underestimating what Relic and Advice are capable of, and you're reading Paired Lives wrong. Guardian Project draws you a card any time you play a unique creature. Paired Lives tutors for a different creature every time you play any creature and puts that creature right onto the battlefield. The effect is very different.

I'm definitely not underestimating what Advice is capable of. Obviously you can have various flashback and reanimator cards where the discard isn't necessarily a cost and the fact that you tutor things out of your deck is a big deal. My point is that this mechanic is simply an actual Blue mechanic that was actually printed called "Transmute." It doesn't represent an expansion or subversion of the MtG color pie at all because two sets have already come out where Blue cards used this mechanic with a fucking keyword.

And no, I'm not reading Paired Lives wrong. I mean, it's obviously broken because Druid, Vizier, and Duskwatch Recruiter all cost the same amount of mana and have different names. But while the specifics of tutoring and then playing the extra card for free are different, the basic concept of "all creature spells are a two-for-one" is the same. Aside from the thing where it's obviously broken, this is exactly what a Green value enchantment looks like in Magic right now. If you printed this in the very next set, people would justly complain about the power level, but no one would complain about the color pie because it fits exactly into the color pie. Indeed, if you made this thing cost 5 or 6 mana, it would just be a normal card that could be printed in any set.

Which is the core problem with all of this. Your five value enchantments are all things that could be or literally have already been printed in their associated colors. If a Magic expansion was made with your concepts of the colors. It would be a little weird that none of the Red cards were Burn, but none of the cards you did make would be weird for Red to have. Red getting some cheap hasty creatures wouldn't even be a thing where Burn Heavy Red Deck Wins players said they didn't get anything.

In order to justify making new names for the colors, you'd really have to have the colors do things that were new enough that it would be hard for people to accept those cards as the colors under their old names. And you haven't done that, so I don't understand what you're doing.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Your other proposals are:
[*] A. you want a reliable resource curve - but you want to achieve this by having cards with riders that modify the magic paradigm of playing 1 land/turn from however many you draw.

[*] B. you want card choices to be driven more by synergy and less by independent value, but it's unclear from what baseline (full disclosure, I gave up Magic the Gathering more than 20 years ago).

[*] C. you want to simplify the board state.

Now (A) is a subjective goal but your means of achieving it are objectively bad unless you are literally making a magic expansion, in which case you aren't going to rename the colors or make Islands into Palaces.
(B) depends entirely on baseline. If every deck is just a pile of the best cards, that's a degenerate state, and a worse state than when no competitive deck is simply a pile of the best cards. But that isn't the state MtG is in now, where synergy-heavy decks, value-heavy decks, and decks with some synergy but the other half of the cards are in for pure value, are all viable. So you want to eliminate these non-synergy decks from competition... why exactly? And, again, you want to do so using a kludge on the magic engine. Synergies are a lot easier to drive in games like Vampire or Shadowfist where you simply see more cards; so if this is your goal, you would make a game that was recognizably different from Magic.
Finally, (C) is again entirely subjective, but "fork every 3rd instant" (keep track of tokens from turn to turn!) certainly doesn't simplify the board state, and neither does "card draw becomes yet more card draw that becomes damage".

[Username17]

[*] A. you want a reliable resource curve - but you want to achieve this by having cards with riders that modify the magic paradigm of playing 1 land/turn from however many you draw.

Now (A) is a subjective goal but your means of achieving it are objectively bad unless you are literally making a magic expansion, in which case you aren't going to rename the colors or make Islands into Palaces.

This.

It's also important to note that however you change the rules or the cards that are or interact with your resource mechanics, people will adjust their deckbuilding which means that reliability won't change as much as you'd think. If you give people 100% reliable resource curves like Hearthstone does, people will respond by putting 8-cost cards into their deck and they can still end up getting "curve screwed" even though it is no longer possible to be "mana screwed."

So it's important that whenever you consider a rules change or a new type of card/resource interaction that you recall that this will affect deckbuilding and that it won't have the same effect as it would if people played 24 lands and 36 spells with a curve of one to 4 cost spells. A more reliable curve will make people play more expensive cards. A more reliable access to resource cards will make people play less resource cards. A more reliable way to trade resource cards for action cards will make people play more resource cards - and so on and so on.

Mathhammering out what an optimal deck looks like under any particular resource schedule is quite difficult. Famously, Richard Garfield predicted that an optimal number of lands for a 60 card deck was twenty. And he was wrong, because flooding on early turns is often less bad than being mana screwed on early turns. But if you propose a change in the way resources are used on a card level or a rules level, you're going to have to figure out what optimal decks look like and only then can you decide whether the end result is the right amount of wins and losses due to "non-games" for what you're trying to do.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

The ideal number of "non-games" is zero, arguably this is impossible but in general decision that make them less likely are good decisions. Basically the idea is to make landcycling an evergreen mechanic and print cards with the effect that people would actually want to play. Something like each faction gets a bear that cycles for free, a french vanilla four drop that cycles for one colored mana, and a spell that cycles for 2. So for instance Mind would get.

Seeker of Mind 1M
Creature - Seeker
Palacecycling reveal another Mind card from your hand.
2/2

Guardian of the Palace 3M
Creature-Giant
Vigilance
Palacecycling M
3/4

Imperial Authority 2MM
Instant
Counter target spell.
Palacecycling 2

While Seekers likely go into most decks aggro decks get the most value out of them because they care much more about the 2/2 half. On the other hand aggro has a harder time playing the other landcyclers because they cost tempo in the early game. I'd expect that most decks play something like 14-18 lands 8-12 cyclers but that's some pretty rough napkin math.

[Username17]

The ideal number of "non-games" is zero, arguably this is impossible but in general decision that make them less likely are good decisions.

Then your choices are, as DrPraetor said, objectively terrible.

If you want to make the number of non-games near zero that's a thing you could do. You could make everyone create four separate 20-card decks and choose which one they draw from whenever they draw a card. You could make any card playable as a resource card by playing it face down. You could have the players start the game with the full game's worth of power points and simply spend them down in order to do stuff. You make the rules, and you can have them be whatever you fucking want them to be. If you want the chance of getting mana screwed to be literally zero, you can do that.

Now I would argue that actually having luck play a significant part in who wins any particular game is a good thing. That having good players with good decks beat bad players with bad decks all the time makes the game very difficult to get into and also makes the progress of a game less interesting.

But regardless, let's say you wanted to simply make decks more consistent. There are lots of ways to do that. You could let people dump up to three cards in their hand to the bottom and replace them with cards from the top at the start of the game. You could let people play spells upside down as a basic land. You can let people scry every turn before they draw. You could just let people draw more cards.

What you definitely shouldn't do is create a bunch of cards that make people search through their deck and then reshuffle their deck several times throughout the game. Because that shit is extremely time intensive. And you especially don't want to do that kind of shit if the supposed goal is to reduce the number of non-games and the increase in deck consistency is fairly small. Let's be honest: cards like Fetch Lands and Cycling Lands do increase deck consistency but they generally only change ideal land totals by zero to one in formats where they are available and the deck consistency isn't massively different from ones where they aren't around.

For fuck's sake, just listen to yourself talk:

I'd expect that most decks play something like 14-18 lands 8-12 cyclers but that's some pretty rough napkin math.

That's terrible and you should feel terrible. You're talking about shuffling an extra two to three times per game and expecting players to enjoy the consistency of being able to act like their decks have like one or two more lands than they do now. What the actual fuck?

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Now I would argue that actually having luck play a significant part in who wins any particular game is a good thing. That having good players with good decks beat bad players with bad decks all the time makes the game very difficult to get into and also makes the progress of a game less interesting.

I don't know if you were referencing Upper Deck's Versus System, but in case you weren't: this was pretty much proved by the failure of VS. VS was described by high-end players as being a lot like MTG but with more reliable mana curves and also every deck was Big Green Stomp. It was so hard for even slightly less proficient players to defeat more proficient players that retaining newbies was very difficult. Despite having basically all of DC and Marvel's comic book IPs to draw from, and an aggressive cash prize schedule, the whole thing folded in less than five years.

Even the higher-end players I spoke to said they basically only played for the money, because decks were too consistent and the games wound up being very much the same. Upper Deck had successfully made a game that reliably rewarded skill in deck-building and play far better than MTG did – and it was fatal to actual enjoyment at basically every level of play.

[Mistborn]

If you want to make the number of non-games near zero that's a thing you could do. You could make everyone create four separate 20-card decks and choose which one they draw from whenever they draw a card. You could make any card playable as a resource card by playing it face down. You could have the players start the game with the full game's worth of power points and simply spend them down in order to do stuff. You make the rules, and you can have them be whatever you fucking want them to be. If you want the chance of getting mana screwed to be literally zero, you can do that.

That goes against whole idea behind the thread which is essentially "what if we revised the some of the card design assumptions behind magic but not any of the rules". That's why the title is "Alternate M:tG color wheel". If you're changing the rules of the game that's not "Alternate M:tG" it's just a new game entirely.

Now if the idea of shuffling effects around the color pie and tinkering with certain design assumptions isn't interesting to you. I won't fault you for it and you're welcome not participate in the thread. If you do however I'd appreciate if you engaged with it on it's own terms, rather than castigate me over my submarine not flying because you'd rather talk about planes.

That's terrible and you should feel terrible. You're talking about shuffling an extra two to three times per game and expecting players to enjoy the consistency of being able to act like their decks have like one or two more lands than they do now. What the actual fuck?

This must be hyperbole because because by that standard almost ever format of Magic ever is terrible. Having people search their libraries is already a relatively common occurrence and cyclers don't add any more shuffling than fetchlands.

[Username17]

If you just want to fiddle very slightly with the color pie and leave the rules exactly as-is, it's pointlessly confusing to talk about Void instead of Black. There's literally no point in you talking about Groves instead of Forests if you think "But Magic the Gathering did it that way!" is a counter argument to literally any suggestion at all.

Either you're talking about a Magic expansion or you're talking about a new game. If you are talking about a Magic Expansion, it's hard to make new rules and I'll grant that - but you aren't making any fucking new colors either, so what the fuck are you talking about? If you're making a new game, you can have as many suits as you want and call them whatever you want - but you can also make any rules you want at the same time.

There is no middle ground where it is possible to trade "Red" for "Time" but you can't pick a number other than 7 for how many cards people see before the game starts. If you can change one, you can change the other and vice versa.

This must be hyperbole because because by that standard almost ever format of Magic ever is terrible. Having people search their libraries is already a relatively common occurrence and cyclers don't add any more shuffling than fetchlands.

This is not hyperbole. Fetchlands are fucking horrible. They slow down the game a lot and add a very small amount to the consistency of decks. They are used in formats where they are available, because obviously people would agree to speak only in rhyme if it meant that they got a few extra percentages of consistency. And the fact that Fetchlands can grab Shocklands means that they add a lot to the consistency of three color decks.

But for fuck's sake. Modern design mostly looks like Elvish Rejuvenator or Militia Bugler - where you look at the top four or five cards and don't search your whole deck or shuffle your whole deck. It's much faster to resolve.

Your suggestions are too weird to be a Magic Expansion. You obviously wouldn't make five new Mana Symbols, because that's confusing and dumb. But it's not ambitious enough to be anything else. And even evaluated as a Magic Expansion, your ideas are bad. You're talking about decks playing a bunch of land cyclers: which takes a lot of time to resolve, involves decks being a lot less different one to another, and actually only increases consistency by a small amount. The drawbacks are all very visible, while the thing you're hoping to achieve is something like a 3% lower chance of getting mana screwed and people might not even fucking notice.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

We have a guy who runs fetches in EDH even when he doesn't really use landfall or dredge and I wouldn't really mind if he was shot into space.

[Leress]

We have a guy who runs fetches in EDH even when he doesn't really use landfall or dredge and I wouldn't really mind if he was shot into space.

So, I guess in my case I should be shot into a black hole since I run this list occasionally:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/798384#paper