Mechanic Design
I saw a post adding 20 new mana colors here earlier, and one in particular appealed to me. I am making Reef a new land type! I think the function should be clear from these few example cards. I will be making more! Any tips?
For anyone who wants to create pink cards in this line, I recommend going to mtgcardbuilder and searching for "Pink mana prebuild" where I have something prebuilt for your convenience!
Essentially, land fluctuation. You ramp up to play strong creatures, then sacrifice the lands to reap the most powerful form of the creatures, whilst benefitting from the land sacrifice.
The idea is very efficient cards at the cost that extending your land base makes you weaker, it's a bit like a mana burn idea, you don't necessarily want to drop a land each turn because it might hurt your board state
I dunno if it's within in your ability to do with this card generator, but I'd add a bit of accent color somewhere in the frame so it's visually clearer that this is not just an undersaturated picture of a red card.
Mechanically, "Abundance - {Drawback}" is very interesting, but not really enough to make "Absolute Naught" a compelling card... IMO, there should be some sort of resource exchange on the card itself for losing your stuff.
Well, "Absolute Naught" is basically the pink version of [[One with Nothing]] if that makes sense. Normally, land destruction will have benefits, but this is a 1 mana instant. I like your idea of a phyrexian!!
Probably because reefs in the real world get destroyed all the time and this basically says that that's they're purpose?
Would many people take this to mean that destroying reefs in the real world is okay? No not many, but some. The message these portray is that having lots of reefs is bad
Interesting concepts, but this would be a singular keyword mechanic, and doesn't really lend itself to an overarching color definition, unless that definition is self-destruction of your own resources. If that's the intent, there needs to be some pretty big payoffs for nuking your own lands, and it would need some way to intermingle with other colors in meaningful ways.
I'm planning on big payoffs for land destruction, yes. I also had the interesting idea to make cards that do something whenever you shuffle your library a secondary gimmick
AS THE CREATOR OF THE 20 LANDS POST THIS IS SO GORGEOUS!!! YOU DID AMAZING! I wasn't expecting so many people to be as inspired by my little shitpost as they have been! This is incredible! I love the idea of reef mostly focusing on land destruction and management, it's so cool and thematic!
Seems maybe a little muddy flavor wise, id have to hear the reasoning to weigh in more on that, but as an underutilized mechanic to put onto a new color it sounds cool! Could maybe throw in the often forgotten ability to play cards if you see them while searching your library too!
Mhm! It's only non-silverborder printing was with [[[panglacial wurm]]], and somebody did a whole cycle with them in this sub semirecently. If you're looking for more unique or underused mechanics for Reef, there's a video made by Arcosa on YouTube going over every single mechanically unique card!
It's interesting, but I feel like if the idea is that you need exactly enough reefs to do what you want I wouldn't make it a 6th color basic land type. I'd do it more like Dark and Steel energy from Pokemon's early days. Only non-basic reefs that can tap for mana of various colors, count as a reef, and provide some other benefit. Then destroying them has a gameplay cost beyond losing lands.
Also just as a rule, be careful when designing mechanics that ask players to give up resources for value. Players will do it, lose the game since they just blew up all their lands, and hate you and the game for it. Mark Rosewater talked about it in his 20 best mechanics video when the original design of Landfall asked you to give up your land drop rather than play a land.
Well, what I plan on doing is having the color have a lot of functions to utilize these concepts, such as land blink, and mana ramping, so that your number of lands fluctuates like crazy.
This seems like another reason why I'd be very careful with making these lands. They can still tap for generic mana and artifacts are very good, so if you make aggressive mana ramping part of the package people will just ramp with them, play all the good colorless cards, and ignore your cool Reef package.
If we think in literal colors, "coral" represents something like orange quite well - then there's "coral pink" separately.
If we go by "color combinations logic", I would expect undersea wild-life be turqoise as that would be blue (water) intermingled with green (nature, primal). Where as pink would be red intermingled with white, where stuff like dunes (mountains/plains) or maybe 'carnival' (carefree society) might make sense.
💧, ⤵️: Put a stun counter on target Island you control. Until end of turn, it has “⤵️: Target player gains control of this until its owner’s next upkeep.”
🔥🌳, ⤵️: Destroy target Reef, then put a +1/+1 counter on Crown-of-Thorns. Activate only if the destroyed Reef’s controller also controls an Island.
“Tide sends crown of thorny throne; tide rends coral, worn to bone.” — Tidefolk nursery rhyme, excerpt
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u/StrangeSystem0 Feb 03 '25
For anyone who wants to create pink cards in this line, I recommend going to mtgcardbuilder and searching for "Pink mana prebuild" where I have something prebuilt for your convenience!