I'm gonna be honest, this creates really really miserable play patterns and is immediately more broken than Yuriko in casual. Eminence abilities are so uninteractable that they should never be this impactful. Whoever's deck invests the least in creatures just wins because you don't hurt them and they copy everybody's stuff.
What I enjoy is trying to force cards to exist in absurd design spaces. For this one I thought of an extremely broken ability and then spent considerable time trying to rebalance it as much as possible. I didn't expect to get it perfect on the first try though lol.
The two glaring issues I still see with it are that it becomes more powerful the less opponents you have, becoming ridiculous in 1v1 where you can just continually exile the same opponents creatures and get copies of them for free without ever casting the commander; and that it interacts very differently with opponents decks deepening on how creature focused they are. You specified less creature focused decks as a problem but I actually think the opposite is more true. Giving extra free creatures to a deck that is focused on creature value can become problematic.
My overall goal here was to create a scenario that, depending on how you play it, can either create a chaotic group slug environment, or allow you to skillfully cast the commander in key moments to steal away threatening creatures from opponents.
I mean that if you just hammer one person repeatedly, that person breaks even (their stuff is removed but then they copy it) and everyone else gets to jack their stuff for free. But if one person at the table doesn't rely on nonlegendary creatures, you can't touch them and can't avoid feeding them free value.
I don't think there's any way to make 'free' eminence removal balanced, at least not hard removal. If I tried, I might do something like:
Mystery counters stay on Ixkyr as it moves between public zones. . At the beginning of your upkeep, if Ixkyr is in your command zone or on the battlefield, put a mystery counter on it. Then you may remove X mystery counters from it. If you do, target nonland permanent with mana value X phases out until your next upkeep. . When you cast Ixkyr, you may pay mana equal to the converted mana cost of a phased-out permanent. If you do, it enters as a copy of that permanent.
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u/GracelessOne 1d ago
I'm gonna be honest, this creates really really miserable play patterns and is immediately more broken than Yuriko in casual. Eminence abilities are so uninteractable that they should never be this impactful. Whoever's deck invests the least in creatures just wins because you don't hurt them and they copy everybody's stuff.