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Top 8 Candidates | Epolith | Penumbria | Wodotha | Utopia | Muraganda | Malgareth | Deadsands | Golamo Reviews | PredictionsDoom of WodothaThe Blight descends and the horizon is gone; succumb or soldier on.  #4: Booster Shot#3: Shawn Goes to the UnderPrison#3: Scott Takes Wodotha#2: Blue Commons#1: Black CommonsDesign TestEssaysThe Challenge Discussion Page Card Suggestion Page Challenge #5: Blight Deck1/23/11 11:40 PM Challenge 5 Deck Submitted!Many, many thanks to everyone who's taken the time to design, comment, or playtest. I can't express my appreciation enough. Intro to WodothaDoom of Wodotha is the story of a world that's realized it's dying. The Blight is eating away at the edges of the world and society is in a desperate scramble to survive.Edit 12/26: Shdwcat has been hounding me for some time about the genericness of Wodotha's setting. And while I didn't disagree, correcting that aspect wasn't especially my focus. I was, admittedly, a little nervous adding layers would pull focus from the blight's story or require reweaving our mechanical identities. Well, shdwcat's written up some extensive notes for embracing a more Norse identity in Doom of Wodotha and it's pretty exciting stuff that works beautifully within our existing themes. I have a few points of disagreement (I'd prefer to see more factionalism rather than focusing too much on the One Big Castle and I'm not convinced we'll be using Scavenge or Archive as mechanics), but overall I'm happy to embrace this vision. Edit 12/30: Now that we're starting to focus more on flavor, I've added some additional thoughts to shdwcat's Wodotha page. BlightBlight is at the center of Wodotha's design. Everything else needs to either be a mechanical or flavor extension of the blight. It's how the story of this apocalypse is being told. It's represented by a keyword action that destroys each other permanent with a blight counter, then places a new blight counter. It will appear most robustly in black with a strong showing in red/green/colorless and small amounts in blue/white.I've begun to wonder whether the destruction should only affect your opponent. It adds extra words to an already complex effect and it likely takes away one of my favorite blight tricks-using self-blighting as simultaneous downside and upside- but it would mean you could safely cast your own blight spells without ever needing to weigh whether it's worth it to lose your own creature if it means threatening an opponent's. The question begs a lot of playtesting, but I'd love to hear your opinions. AssaultAssault is the main counterpoint to the blight. It represents the desperation of Wodothans- with doomsday nipping at their heels, they're forced into frenzied conflict with their neighbors. It's an ability word that triggers a bonus if three or more creatures you control attack. It will appear in white, green, and red.Death MattersThe other big piece hanging off blight is a death matters subtheme. A world where everything is dying needs means to take advantage of that fact. The biggest extension of this branch is requiem- an ability word that grants spells an extra effect if a creature has been put into a graveyard this turn. The second part is a small group of creatures that have death triggers. And the third is a small group of creatures and other permanents that can sacrifice themselves to let you draw a card (this triggers requiem, but is intended mainly as a limited smoothing mechanic).The Missing Piece: Desperate ResearchSome ideas from Challenge 4: Show12/25: As I talk about above, there are two main missing pieces in Wodotha right now. I haven't gotten to playtest this idea yet, but I wanted to share one idea that might address them both. It comes from my friend Chris. Blue's role is intended to be a civilization desperately searching for answers. Cards in the vein of Peer Through Depths
Edit: The more I think about it, the more this mechanic does, in fact, want a keyword. It lets the template read easier if spread into other colors finding other card types.
I should add that this would be strong support to some blue creatures that care about you casting instants and sorceries. 12/30: More playtesting determining my reaction here wasn't shared by all. Conversation taking place on the skeleton. The FutureA few ideas for sets 2 & 3 of Wodotha block: Show12/25: There's been some chatter asking about the shape of the whole block and how Doom of Wodotha is going to set the stage for the events to come. I've only given this some cursory thoughts, but here's the plan that exists in my head (much of it based on ideas generated by others). Set 2In Doom of Wodotha we're seeing a world that has just realized it's ending. In set 2, we see this world in its final days. The ground has cracked open and is pockmarked with blight, stranding survivors in tiny collapsing islands of reality. Vicious infighting abounds and we see extensive intra-color conflict (for example, the factions of green that see the Blight as a natural end to be embraced vs. the factions of green that see Blight as something unnatural to be opposed, or those merfolk who want to control the Blight pitted against those who want to escape it). Scavengers pick through the remains, giving rise to the graveyard themes that utilize our existing mechanics. The Blight itself is everywhere rather than something just tearing at the edges- we see this in self-blighting as a theme, probably in all colors.At the same time we see the machinations of the merfolk who have been studying ways to escape (which we might be representing in their minor gating theme in DoW). I imagine them constructing a vast world ark that can house the Wodothan survivors. Set 3This one is a lot more vague (and troubling). As a writer I hate sharing my intentions before they're ready, but it's important here, so understand the ideas are very raw.Wodotha has ended- the last shreds gone. The escapees have survived, however, housed together in their great, magic vessel. I'm not certain where it's headed- perhaps it's hurtling through the multiverse trying to find a home. The Blight comes with them, though, making the vessel something of a plague ship. George Gone suggested we might see the Blight as it moves on to destroy other planes and new worlds. I like the idea, though the obvious directions for that mechanically are Time Spiral-style mashups and I think that would be a mistake, drawing too much focus away from the block's focus on doom and gloom and the potential feeling of claustrophobia and paranoia set 3 seems to want.
Judges' CommentsFrom challenges 1-4: Show12/23: I've spent the day largely reviewing past material, studying the judges' comments on designs and reviewing other background material. I've been swirling around many central themes, but, as some others have astutely pointed out, we haven't fully latched onto the mechanical heart. I've included many of the most important comments below and highlighted some important points in them. From the Design TestMR: My gut is that you want to play up the world being eaten away and talk about how that is causing the conflict that is going on.MR: The Blight: Now we get to what I think of is the best thing about your world. Some unnamed force is destroying the world. (Not unnamed to us but to the creatures of the world.) Magic has had many conflicts. In fact, almost every set has some conflict to it. Magic is a game about fighting. What your world has that no one else does is the Blight. This is a doule-edged sword. It gives your block some identity, but from a design standpoint it not only has to be represented, it has to be a focal point of your set. The thing that matters most in the story has to matter most in your design. Every set needs a wow component. Whatever represents the Blight, I believe, is going to have to be that thing. MR: Your focus is very much on the conflict, which is fine. My biggest concern is that what sets your world apart for me isn't the conflict but the background (a.k.a. "the world is slowly getting eaten away"). ...I want to see The Blight in your design. That's what's compelling, for me, about your world. I feel like the war is being caused by the Blight as creatures are forced together because their part of the world is being eaten away. The war is a byproduct of the Blight and thus not the focus. Show me the Blight in your set design. Give me a cool mechanic that evokes the feel the creatures of this world are going through. From Challenge 1: Black CommonsMR: My one note about death triggers is you have to be careful not to have too many as they can incrementally make the board more complex (although luckily this effect tends to skew towards advanced players as beginners don't tend to plan around death triggers, they just enjoy them when they happen).MR: Another concern with death triggers is that you have to be careful not to do any one thing too much as it makes your set feel too "one-note." I do though like how you've made "death matters" a theme of your set. It adds a nice layer of mood. MR (on Blightbearer - a creature that blights when it deals damage): While I like blight, this card is a little more complex than I'd like to see at common. The spell blight effects are much more straightforward. This creature does some cool things but they aren't as obvious as you start playing with the card. (Damaging a creature with a blight counter on it kills it, for instance.) I think I'd move this card up to uncommon where it can have its fun, yet show up a little less. MR (on a card that sacrifices creatures for an effect): You have a set where creatures want to die. This means you have to make it a little harder than normal to make them die. Cards like this make it too easy to enable your death triggers. I would recommend putting a mana activation on this card at the bare minimum. Remember that your job isn't to make it easy for the players. Your job is to make them work for it, because it is the overcoming of obstacles that makes games fun. MR: One of the hardest things about design is resisting the urge to play with all your toys. Yes, blight can be used as a drawback mechanic, but not in the first set of the block and not at common. MR: I like how you've put blight where the creature kill would go to keep it from creating too much destruction. You obviously chose black because it most shows off blight, but I'm eager to see how you handle it in other colors. Staying where the creature destruction/damage is is a good start. MR (on Demon's Bite - a spell with what's become requiem): I like what you're going after. "Death matters" is cool. You have to figure out how to execute it so that what you are doing happens when you expect death to happen. Boosting creatures in combat creates unhappy times as you don't get what you need until it's too late. Also, if you're going to make death matters you have to move beyond the mechanics and think about the flavor. I want to see effects where you get why the death improves it. MR (Spoil Soul XB - Target creature gets -X/-X): I'd prefer to see this card care about something more in flavor. (The obvious choice flavor-wise is dead creatures, but your set isn't very graveyard focused right now.) MR: I get there's some black rat theme running through here but I'm not quite sure what that subtheme is. I do like black rat tokens though. It's the closest they allow me these days to squirrel tokens. I would like seeing some future definition of the rats subtheme. AF: I don't think the 5/3 self-blighter is a common, but otherwise very solid... I'm tickled by the Rat tokens, and I like the bloodlust "death matters" thing, but it all feels very, very black, so I'm not getting a great sense of what the other colors might be doing in this world. MR: I don't think blight has worked through all its kinks but I do believe you have tapped into something with real potential... The area I'd like to see you work on for next week is that I want to get a better sense of the rest of your world. You've figured out how to represent the Blight. Now work on the world shaped by it. I see glimpses of it with you toying around with "death matters", but I feel like there's some conflict that you had in mind that needs to resurface. Another issue to think about is what is going to happen during the course of your block. This is important because Wodotha needs to set up the rest of the block, so whatever you're setting up has to be established here. From Challenge 2: Blue Commons(on Deepsea Lookout- a one drop that looks at the top card of your library and asks if you want to put it into your graveyard):KEN: It's like my first card Merrow Witsniper. Except you can only shoot yourself in the head, maybe. I'd expect to see this in a graveyard-based set, though.MG: I love this card. Functionally, it's a nice blue draw-smoothing one-drop for Limited. Flavorfully, the ability captures the impending feeling of the Blight in blue, as the edges of the world are disintegrating. We get it on permanents in black, and we get it in the library in blue. ZH: Cool. Wondering what this has to do with anything, but cool. MR: One of the roles of common is to make simple little cards that subtly play into your themes. This card seems like it's hinting at what could be a fun set. I'm just not sure that it's your set. This card would like an environment where knowing your top card mattered or one where what was in your graveyard was relevant. My point here is that this card is fine in a vacuum. I'm sure it will play just fine. But what could have been in this slot is something that did everything this card did as far as being a simple, easy-to-play but interesting common, but also fit neatly into your set's mechanical structure. I do enjoy the flavor of seeking knowledge which was running through your submission this week. You did create an overall sense of people who are searching for answers which is a nice identity for blue and makes sense in your world. This card fit well into that flavor. MR (On Forsaken Scholar - 1U 1/3 with 2, sac: draw a card): This card played well in playtesting and does a good job of conveying the knowledge seeking blue. (On a blue assaulter) MG: I like this ability—encouraging attacking is always a good thing; it keeps the game moving along. It feels wrong to me in blue, but that's just an aspect of seeing the blue "assault" cards first. The ability makes a lot of sense in white (unified forces), red (impetuous assaults), and green (overwhelming incursions), so if it appears in all colors, it will feel much less jarring in blue. I'm curious if this ability might backfire—encouraging attacking with three creatures might mean you hold back most of the time until you have a nice, safe, three-creature attack. Or the bonuses might be so great that no one can ever block, which is boring and non-interactive. But it's a compelling idea that conveys the "populace in frenzy" feel. ZH: ...anything that gives blue an identity beyond "Draw cards and counter spells" makes me happy. MR: Assault could be an interesting mechanic—in the right color. I could see this mechanic in just about any color save blue. For starters, blue is the color most focused on spells and least focused on creatures. Traditionally, in common in a large set, blue has the smallest number of creatures. Besides being a misfire on the color pie, it also doesn't work for me philosophically. You've done a lot of work to play up blue's love of knowledge. Where does assault come from? Blue isn't the "run into battle" color. No, blue likes to take its time thinking through the repercussions of its actions before it ever acts. Assuming assault can work in blue (a big "if" in my mind), the design of this card seems pretty clean. There's the issue of whether or not you're supposed to count this card with its bonus, but templating can solve that issue. I do like how the timing works out well allowing you to get your flyer before it can be blocked by a ground creature. (on death-trigger Man-o'-War MG: In a world with increased attrition and death, death triggers make sense. MR: I like that you're carrying over the death triggers to blue. An important part of getting set cohesion is making sure that each color has aspects that will play well with aspects of another color. ...The best (death-trigger) effects are positive ones for the controller of the creature that died. Make no mistake though that ETB effects are better overall for complexity than death triggers. MR: ...You also seem to be dabbling with an information theme in blue. Just make sure that you make outlets for the knowledge to be used. MR: You have a lot going on. I like the sacrifice theme and I can imagine it could be very relevant to your set, but I haven't seen all the pieces begin to interconnect yet. As I suggested to Jonathon Loucks, I think you need to step back and figure out the essence of what your set is about. Is it living in chaos? Is it dealing with destruction? Is it the sacrifices of survival? Once you can narrow down what messages you're playing with, it will help you get a better sense of where to center your mechanics. The Blight is definitely helping give you definition, but it's time to take the next step. MR (on requiem): I'm glad something else was carried over from black. Your set very much has a death theme so caring about death feels right to me. As you're exploring your themes, death is a very potent one that might serve you well. KEN: In summary, we've got some milling riders that point nowhere. This has me very perplexed, though it might pay off in the other colors, or just be a weird manifestation of blue Blight. We've got the assault mechanic and some tapped-matters and multi-targeting spells that enable each other. Attacking is a noble cause, even for blue cards, so I'm very happy with this aspect of the submission. Then there are more forsaken things to work your requiem spell, though I'm not convinced it's inherently fun to pursue this line of play. MG: I like what you're doing, but overall, it seems way too subtle, and not distinctive enough. Look at the mechanics: "Assault" goes everywhere. "Cycle from the battlefield" goes everywhere. "Requiem" goes everywhere. "Death triggers" go everywhere. What is blue doing that feels distinctly blue? It's got a couple of one-shot "Think Tank" effects, and it cares a heck of a lot about tapped creatures. Both of these are functional, but neither is sexy. I can feel the underpinnings of the set themes rippling through, but they're so gentle as to be unnoticeable. This is a solid foundation for blue commons (definitely strong enough to move on in the competition, in my opinion), but it needs some identity. You need to ask yourself why you would play this color in Limited. You need to figure out what it does. MR: Because I believe The Blight is so crucial to what's going on in your set, I might have been tempted to include one blight card in blue common. The idea being that you probably won't play it unless your second color has a number of blight cards. The thing that I feel you need to spend some time on is what we call the "mechanical heart" of the set. The mechanical heart is the thing that the set uses as the basic building block to create the design skeleton. In Zendikar, for example, the mechanical heart was "lands matter." The world theme was adventure world. You know your world theme but I don't think you've latched onto your mechanical heart yet. What game element does your set care about most. Once you know this, you can start thinking about the different ways you can play into this mechanical theme. Find your mechanical heart and you will be well on your way to executing your vision. From Challenge 3: Scott Takes Wodotha(on requiem sorceries)KEN: ...This cycle will be quite a dare to block your dinky 1/1 attacker. Too much reward here will make the correct answer "never block" in an experienced player's mind. Careful; we don't want that. BT: ...these are sending a message that combat and creature death is good. I like encouraging combat, but what's the tie-in with creatures dying? CBD: ...The problem is that the extent of requiem's flavor is "things die a lot here," and that's not a flavor players tend to relish. So pushing it downward and outward in common might not be a great choice. Players, especially younger and/or newer ones, just hate it so much when their stuff dies that trying to riff off that for flavor is a risky proposition. on auras that return the creature when it dies CBD: ...How to make players like a setting in which their stuff is dying constantly? Give them ways to cheat death. MR: I like your impulse to design cards that interact positively with blight. I agree that the Blight is becoming the center of this design, so it's important to make the set play nicely with its core mechanic. MR (on the enters-or-dies-trigger legends): This cycle reads a little similar to the Magic 2011 Titans but the inclusion of a death trigger rather than an attack trigger does make them read a little different and definitely helps play into the set's themes. HistorySlightly easier to navigate than the archive: Show
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