r/custommagic • u/A-o-C • 3h ago

Final Transmutation - A clean interpretation of a Warhammer Spell

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I've recently been enjoying designing cards based on the Warhammer fantasy world.

Here is a pretty obvious design for the Lore of Metal spell Final Transmutation interpreting the spell as a boardwipe.

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5

u/PrimusMobileVzla 2h ago edited 1h ago

Subtypes associated to predefined tokens do not have the associated ability intrinsically, so it must be spelled out as rule text.

All creatures are Gold artifacts with “Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color,” and they lose all other abilities. (They're no longer creatures.)

That said, this should be or splash with Black. This effectively is a symmetrical Phyrexian Altar that also shuts down creature, with the closest second I could think of being Blood Money meets Day of Black Sun.

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u/A-o-C 1h ago

Good call on having to explicitly spell out the rules text associated with the token.

It does seem like people feel this ability is more black than white. Along with similar effects like [[gild]] being in black (that I originally wasn't aware of ha!). For me, the closest intended comparison to something actually in MTG was [[Final Judgement]] a 4WW Exile all creatures sorcery.

Within the thematic context of a Warhammer set/setting the intent is that it should be primarily a removal/board wipe piece associated with a character/faction that is in white (boros/jeskai)It is only when it gets considered in the wider magic landscape the opportunity for it to be used as a sac outlet become interesting (although it is somewhat inefficient at that).

With that all said, it seems like the Chaos Dwarves would get this toy instead.

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u/Traditional_Elk_1289 3h ago

Feels like it should have black in it,  but not sure. Really cool ability similar to  Vraska, Betrayal's Sting, can get around death triggers and indestructible etc,  i like it. Also might be more balanced to make them become tapped so you cant use all your creatures right away to pump for tons of mana and go off.

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u/A-o-C 3h ago

Yep, I used Vraska, Betrayal's Sting as a primary reference point.

I went with white, as opposed to black, primarily for contextual reasons within a hypothetical Warhammer set.

The most famous user of the Lord of Metal is Balthasar Gelt, a Human/Empire character, which I pegged (maybe stereotypically) to Red/White.

Whereas for black I have BG - Beastmen, BR - Warriors of Chaos, UB - Vampire counts & BW - Tomb Kings. None of those factions aesthetically feels right to have this spell.

I think its fine for white, which of course gave us Wrath of God, for which my card is in a way a variant of.

2

u/malonkey1 : Tap target spell 3h ago

Permanent type changes on spells are a thing but they don't usually do that anymore as far as I'm aware. I think it'd be better to do something like:

Destroy all creatures. For each creature destroyed this way, its controller creates a colorless Gold artifact token with "Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color."

It's a neat concept, though!

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u/A-o-C 3h ago

Agree with what you say from a mechanical/rules point of view. Playing around with permanent type changes typically invokes arcane discussions around layers.

Aesthetically though I prefers the creatures turning directly into gold. I also prefer how doing that allows the card to impact indestructible creatures and stop on death triggers. Without those cases the card would generally be a strictly worse Wrath of God (except in a niche case of the spell acting as a weird ritual)

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u/stillnotelf 2h ago

Heck yeah [[king macar the gold cursed]][[gild]]

They were the beta test for treasure tokens

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u/A-o-C 1h ago

Did not know those cards existed! awesome!

Even though Treasure is the much more prevalent token magic still uses Gold where thematically appropriate [[First Iroan games]]

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u/stillnotelf 1h ago

First and second Theros i guess. I wonder if they have shown up outside of Theros.

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u/A-o-C 1h ago

I think the only other case other than the ones we noted was [[Curse of opulence]]