Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

A word with interesting valences and connotations, seems ripe for fantasy storytelling. "Ichor" is both: 1. The ethereal, lethal blood of the gods in Greek mythology 2. An archaic term for foul-smelling discharge from a wound

Apparently in some cases this conflation was intentional as part of early-Christian propaganda against Hellenic religions.

Maybe the most common use of ichor today is in "petrichor," literally something like "stone ichor" or "earth ichor," the word for the smell produced by rain on dry soil. The word comes up fairly often in obscure word nerd trivia, but it only dates back 60 years or so.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

1. It's kind of hard to find appropriate post-damage effects for red and white! If you look at (common) triggered abilities in those colors, a lot of times it's stat boosts, granting combat keywords, tapping creatures, or "target creature can't block this turn." While there are some cases where Waylay might be triggered by noncombat damage and produce value with combat abilities, most Waylay triggers are probably coming from combat itself.
2. The payoffs for Waylay (cards with a Waylay ability) generally need to be played before the enablers (haste, flash, etc.), with some exceptions. That means that the overall distribution of creatures with Waylay has to be pretty low in the mana curve, especially if the average RW deck doesn't want to play many expensive creatures at all. At common, you definitely feel this crunch on the design space.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

Following up the last worldbuilding post developing our RW faction, we have a custom mechanic for red and white - Waylay. It's inspired by quick ambushes, surprising your opponent, and will primarily play in a more aggressive deck. However, there are defensive / controlling applications as well, and these will likely play a minor role in non-RW decks that end up with some red or white Waylay cards. The mechanic is a template for a certain type of triggered ability, and will appear on cards with the following text:

Waylay — Whenever a creature you control deals damage, if that creature entered the battlefield this turn, [some effect].

Let's look at some nuances of this mechanic and some card designs to support it.

Basic Idea

Generally in Magic, a creature doesn't deal damage on the turn you play it. Most creatures have to wait a turn to attack, and usually you aren't playing them on your opponent's turn (when they could deal damage on defense). So this mechanic needs some combination of aggressive creatures, surprise defenders, and other tricks.

Clarifying Triggers (for Rules Nerds)

Notably, Waylay doesn't specify combat damage; things like fight effects, direct "burn" damage abilities, etc. still work. However, the ability is still limited to one trigger per "damage dealt" event. All these events produce a single trigger:

• An attacking creature is double-blocked and deals damage to two blocking creatures
• An attacker with trample deals damage to both a blocker and its controller
• A creature ability "deals 1 damage to target creature and 1 damage to its controller"
• A creature ability "deals 1 damage to each opponent"

The only typical situation where a creature would get multiple triggers from one action is attacking with double strike. If a creature deals damage on both the first strike damage step and the main combat damage step, and it entered the battlefield this turn, then it produces two Waylay triggers.

Enablers

Waylay is a payoff mechanic: it looks for the player to meet a certain condition, then provides a (beneficial) effect when they do. Generally, and especially at common (the lowest rarity / power level for cards), the majority of cards with Waylay payoff should not help the player trigger Waylay. This means that design (and deckbuilding) require a balance of both payoff cards and enablers that help trigger the payoff. Here's some different enablers:

Haste

I showed this card previously, and it was designed with Waylay in mind. Haste will be centered in red and will pull a deck towards aggressive and proactive Waylay strategies.

Flash

On the white side, Flash is a more reactive / defensive mechanic, enabling Waylay triggers on surprise blocks during an opponent's attack. There's a little bit of tension here for the RW player though: getting the Waylay triggers from a Flash blocker, usually losing the creature, has to be weighed against keeping that creature around to attack in a likely-aggressive deck.

Noncombat Damage

This sort of effect is a good way to get some extra triggers without flooding the set with Flash and Haste creatures, though you've got to be careful. Versatile ping effects like this should be pretty sparse at common, since they can get card advantage by removing an X/1 or finishing off a creature after combat. The design above might be too strong in this context (though it has appeared at common before). If it feels overpowering, we'd probably swap this creature for a 2/1 that deals 1 damage to each opponent instead.

Instant-Speed Tokens

This is effectively Flash by another name, and will play similarly in terms of defensive focus and evaluating a trade + Waylay trigger versus keeping the creature. Like with the ping effects, this should be pretty sparse, but a couple of these effects will support Waylay a bit more.

Creature-Based "Burn"

This type of spell can be sort of be evaluated as bad direct damage. It's much less consistent than a "deal 3 damage" spell, and on some boards where the opponent has a large enough blocker, it might do nothing. But with Waylay triggers in play, you can at least guarantee some value from throwing a 3-1 to its death, even if this would otherwise be a dead card.

Blink

I don't have a blink card designed yet, but one trickier source for Waylay triggers would be blinking a creature at instant speed, then using it to block or giving it Haste. I'm not sure how much blink support the set will have, but it would be a way to get a little more white support for Waylay and diversify Waylay interactions.

Off-Color Solutions

There are some ways to broaden Waylay support a bit with cards not in RW. This card has above-rate stats but has a drawback of damaging its controller. The way it's worded, you'll almost always take a hit the turn you play it (unless you can give it Haste). But if you have Waylay payoffs on the board, that first-turn hit could be a net benefit; good for Waylay, and a good tonal / flavor win for a black card in general.

Similarly in green, fight / "bite" spells that have a creature deal damage to another don't care about summoning sickness, and could be timed for Waylay value

Also, our previous custom mechanic, Vitrify, grants Haste to animated lands. This means it can also work with Waylay, though only if you animate the land you just played this turn and then attack with it. That's fairly restrictive and not necessarily how you want to use your Vitrify creatures, but it's an option if you have both Vitrify and Waylay in the deck.

What's Next

The WU and BW color pairs are still very open for this set, so it's possible that Waylay (likely the more defensive / controlling flavor) will get broader support there. I think mechanics often feel a little stronger in a set if there are 2-3 archetypes that engage with them differently, as opposed to only applying to a single archetype.

But before that, I think working out black's themes and worldbuilding is my next task. I think the existential and political ramifications of the corrupting ooze that represents black so far are going to be important to the setting overall, so we should get some more firm answers there.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

This post will be laying out some worldbuilding and flavor for the people of the northern mountains and foothills, known as the Mez Kiri. This is the first faction I've fleshed out to this degree, and in a subsequent post I'll dig into their central mechanic, which I'm calling Waylay.

Background

Previously in worldbuilding, the Mez Kiri have been called "Mountain Nation" after the jagged mountains they live in and around. We've known that they're loosely organized but share an ethnic/cultural/religious context. Along with "Savanna Nation" to their southeast, they have history with the ruins in the desert, which we have since determined are the bones of an ancient god, into which a city was carved.

In the current moment of the setting, the Mez Kiri are known as highway robbers along mountain roads, and in particular the "Caldera City" to their south denounces them while privately paying "tribute" to protect their own shipments.

Economics

Starting with the basics, the Mez Kiri are primarily subsistence farmers and herders in the rough foothills between the mountains and deserts. There is likely a mix of livestock, but the large goats native to the mountain terrain are primary. The sparsity of resources means that Mez Kiri settlements are small and distant, with little formal political structure beyond the scale of a village. There may also be some mobility between regions, with groups moving to higher altitude in summer and lower altitude in winter to follow seasonal vegetation and temperate weather.

Alongside and intertwined with these villages are the cavalry. Atop sure-footed goats, they can take paths through the mountains impossible for horses, wagons, or most humans for that matter. This allows them to ambush travelers quickly from unexpected directions and avoid pursuit. Between scores, much of their time is spent on infrastructure; goat-paths, campsites, stashes, and even the trade roads themselves benefit from cavalry maintenance.

Religion

Like the "Savanna Nation," the Mez Kiri trace their history back to the god-bone ruins in the desert to their east. We've floated before that the schism between the two peoples was likely religious in nature, following the discovery of the nature of the bones and a possible calamity that occurred there. As I've done for much of the worldbuilding process, I turned to Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number to help sketch some of this religion. I'll show the results from the WWN religion generation questions and then we can interpret.

WWN Religion Construction

• Who leads the faith? There are multiple pontiffs, friendly or otherwise, with subordinate clergy obedient to their own pontiff and perhaps cooperative with others.
• What is the god’s origin? It was an Outsider or alien from beyond
• Why does this faith matter? It’s trying to expand and needs help
• What does this faith want? Strengthen or protect its devout believers
• What are the clergy like? Common believers chosen by their peers for their technical skill and good moral qualities.
• What does this god do in society? It explains the creation and order of the world
• What is the god’s portfolio? 1. Travel or Roads 2. Death
• What are the faith’s strictures? Never/always cooperate with a certain faith

An Aside to Gush

At risk of overstating, this set of results is the reason I use procedural generation (and WWN particularly) for worldbuilding. These are random rolls on a series of tables, but they mesh so well with what we already know about the Mez Kiri and provide interesting spurs for additional complexity. It's why I chose this approach, but it still amazes me sometimes!

Interpreting the Rolls

The Mez Kiri know their god is dead. It's the first tenet of their faith and the origin story of their mythology. The desert god (name TBD) is believed to have created the world, and its death is an essential part of its (and the Mez Kiri's) story. Then, it was an act of faith for the believers to walk away from the society of their antiquity, which continues to carve that god's bones to this day. That act of faith became a hard desert journey to the mountains and foothills they now call home, but they were seen through. The road is always treacherous, but the Mez Kiri devout believe their faith sees them through travel. And as geopolitics pushes more and more trade through their part of the world, some call that a divine act as well.

Organizationally, the clergy follows the same patterns as Mez Kiri life - anyone can become a leader in the faith if their community supports them, and hierarchies are shifting and informal between communities. The faith is as old as the Mez Kiri as a distinct social group, and its practices and culture are the strongest common reference they share as a people.

Some of the extra details here, such as "Never/always cooperate with a certain faith" and "It’s trying to expand and needs help" are still loose ends for now. We'll keep them in mind as we work on building up more of the social landscape around the Mez Kiri.

Politics

While the practice of waylaying travelers through the mountains is not new, it's only become a full-fledged institution since the corruption of the southern mountains in the last few centuries. Previously, Mez Kiri life (and political power) were centered firmly in the village, and by extension with the religious leaders there. The bands of cavalry who camp in mountain caves and swoop down on passing trade caravans don't fit very well in this system.

But many young Mez Kiri see the cavalry as an opportunity for adventure and a way to benefit their families and communities. And it's undeniable that the cavalry have brought significant wealth and resources to the Mez Kiri as a whole, extracted at swordpoint. As a result, there is a sometimes tense understanding between local priests and cavalry captains - the village provides mounts, recruits, and stability, and in turn most seized goods flow back to the village in time. Everyone attends the holidays together and plays nice, at least for now.

Next Up

I'm really happy to have one part of the world pretty ironed out and named so that things feel a little more substantial. I actually have a fair amount of design work done for Waylay, the signature Mez Kiri mechanic, so I'll be writing that up next. After that, I'll probably pivot to thinking about black, since it feels like the graveyard is going to be important for this set.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

I've learned from a recent spoiler that Wizards has already explored small people riding normal goats. Time to corner the market on average-sized people riding large goats.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

It's taken three months, but I've decided there will be goats in my setting. They live in the mountains and are ridden by the people there. I haven't decided yet if the people are small or the goats are large to enable this. Stay tuned for more thrilling updates like this at blistering pace.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

I've referred to this mechanical theme a few times, so I thought I ought to just make a post about it. "Gravefall" is the unofficial name I'm using for triggered abilities of permanents with the form,

Whenever a land is put into your battlefield from anywhere, [positive effect].

The name "gravefall" is of course a reference to landfall, but for the graveyard. This type of ability has precedent among official cards, but only on a few cards scattered through Magic history. Thematically, gravefall represents the spreading swamp corrupting the western half of our region map from WWN worldbuilding.

Gravefall serves as a fairly general payoff mechanic, but needs other events to enable it. The primary enabler will be self-mill, where gravefall gives incremental value to supplement bigger plays like reanimating a big creature. But there are secondary synergies with discard effects (including loot/rummage) and Vitrify. A few sacrifice-theme cards might allow a player to sacrifice lands as a tertiary enabler (though this is obviously a narrow design space).

Having a lot of flexibility around gravefall effects also helps cards with the mechanic tie into other archetypes and do double duty. A gravefall trigger that gains life (as shown above) ties into a lifegain theme, one that adds +1/+1 counters works with a counters theme, etc.

One limitation of this mechanic is that the payoff per trigger needs to be relatively small on most cards. "Draw a card" would cause a "mill three cards" effect to draw 1-2 cards on average in limited, which is very strong in a deck dedicated to self-mill. This could mean the the design space for gravefall as written ends up being too small, but there are a couple of tools to address that:

1. Change the text to "Whenever one or more land cards..." This wouldn't effect triggers from a single land hitting the yard, but would mean that multiple lands being milled would still only trigger once.
2. Limit gravefall abilities to trigger once per turn. This could be done piecemeal per-card, and with either the as-written gravefall language or the modification above. This kind of language always feels a little clunky to me, though, and kills a value player's dreams.

The reason I've avoided either of these is that green/black is thematically invested in swarms and rolling over your opponents with inexorable value engines. The experience of "now I get to do an action a lot of times" is a big part of the joy of green/black to me, so I'm holding onto that until broader design challenges or playtesting convince me otherwise.

Short and sweet post this time, primarily just committing some thoughts on the mechanic (and showing off my shiny new card template, if I'm being honest).

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

Following my prior attempt to design this mechanic and the worldbuilding that inspired me to continue, Vitrify is a keyword action that animates lands as 1/1 creatures. These creatures are of the "Ashborn" type, which are animate porcelain beings made with the bones of a dead god. As a word, "vitrify" means "to make glassy," and represents the difference between porcelain and other ceramic types.

The rules text for Vitrify is:

• "Vitrify" means "Put a +1/+1 counter on target noncreature land you control. It becomes a 0/0 Ashborn creature with haste and 'When this creature dies, return it to the battlefield tapped under its owner’s control.' It’s still a land."

Below the fold, let's break down that ability piece by piece.

Design Breakdown

Put a +1/+1 counter on target noncreature land you control. It becomes a 0/0 Ashborn creature [...]

There's a couple key design moves here. First, I'm incorporating a takeaway from Mark Rosewater's "storm scale" mechanic postmortem for the Awaken mechanic: players have trouble remembering which lands are animated, but counters help with that. So we know we need a counter of some sort, and I've chosen to go with +1/+1 because it's very familiar and interacts with a lot of other cards and mechanics. If we end up with a +1/+1 counter theme in an adjacent color pair, this will help Vitrify cards do double duty.

The other thing happening here is to restricting Vitrify targets to noncreature lands, i.e. lands that haven't been Vitrified already. This is a divergence from Awaken, forcing players to go wide rather than build up a single land with repeated Vitrify triggers. This might not survive playtesting, but it's a gesture to the "army" feel that's important in green/white.

[...] with haste [...]

This is taken from Awaken also, mostly to make for smoother play experiences. Once a land is animated, it can't tap for mana if it has summoning sickness. There's the possibility that a player animates the land they played this turn and then gets screwed for that mana. Haste sidesteps the issue, while also providing some overlap with an aggro/speed-matters theme in red/white (more on that in a later post).

[...] and 'When this creature dies, return it to the battlefield tapped under its owner’s control.' [...]

This is similar to one of the rejected mechanics from my last post, but here granted as an ability rather than a counter with special rules. Having things hit the graveyard is nice, both in supporting a planned green/black theme and in terms of fully resetting the permanent (clearing counters, auras, etc). I was originally worried about how this would interact with sacrifice effects, but on reflection de-animating a land is probably pretty close in value to losing a 1/1 token, which is often the going rate for limited sac effects. It does put some design pressure to avoid powerful self-sacrifice abilities on lands, though.

The other notable design impact of granting the ability this way is that players have to remember to do it. This set won't be played on Arena or MTGO where granted abilities can be rendered on the card. However, if we make sure that all land animation in the set uses Vitrify (or at least grants the return-to-battlefield ability), then players should have an easier time remembering that animated lands always come back. And since losing a land is a big deal most of the time, players should be incentivized to keep track of their triggers.

[...] It’s still a land.

Personally, I prefer "in addition to its other types" earlier in the rules text, but this is both more concise and in plainer language. A lot of official land animation reminder text uses this sentence, so I've followed suit.

And that's Vitrify! The first complex custom mechanic I've designed for this project. I think it'll take some work to tune the power level appropriately, and I expect some iteration in the rules text and the way other cards interact with the mechanic. But for now, I'm pleased to have a design that feels both workable and fresh!

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

After my last post tinkering with ways to animate lots of lands, I was ready to set the idea aside for a while. But as often happens with creative projects, some stray thoughts from research cohered into something compelling, which brought me back to the idea. The result is an animated land creature type I'm calling the ashborn.

What's a small land creature?

One question we didn't address in the previous post: from a Magic design perspective, what does a 1/1 land creature look like? Often, animated lands in Magic represent huge masses of earth rising up as an elemental or something similar, and accordingly they tend to have better stats than 1/1. Filling white's sort of "army" role as pseudo-tokens, we'd expect 1/1 land creatures to be something more on a humanoid scale.

I spent a fair amount of time looking at mythological traditions on beings made from earth or clay; in the previous post I used "Enki" as a placeholder counter name, referring to the Sumerian creation myth for humanity. But the ancient myths I read didn't really strike me for inspiration, and I'm generally very hesitant to pull on other people's mythology or religion as wallpaper for my fantasy setting.

That's also a primary reason I've avoided the obvious choice of golems. Broadly I'm not sure how Jewish folks feel about the way "golem" gets used in fantasy, but I feel weird enough about it that I'd rather avoid it altogether. Also, golems introduce some assumptions that don't work for me. Namely that they're created to obey orders, making them either automatons or a very linear-narrative underclass. Specific to Magic, since they're constructed to serve, they're usually artifacts, not lands. Both of these are things I'd like to avoid with our creature lands.

Bone China in a China-less World

Since many of the creation myths I researched focus specifically on beings created from clay, I began to read about ceramics. Eventually this brought me to porcelain and "bone china." Apparently, porcelain is sort of a subjective category covering a few different materials. In the broadest sense, porcelain includes both pure-mineral ceramics (originally from China) as well as "bone china," which uses bone ash to supplement a different mineral makeup (and is English in origin, despite the name).

From a fantasy perspective, bone china is much more interesting than other ceramics, with an immediate question being "whose (or what's) bones?" Creatures of animate porcelain would have a striking glassy white appearance, which is great for art purposes. If that porcelain is bone china, they'd also have a historical material connection to the source of the bone ash suffusing them. I came up with the name "ashborn" to describe these creatures.

Megaplex of Bone

We know that the ashborn represent a secret magic of the people we're temporarily calling Savanna Nation, who have some connection to the "megaplex" in the desert. So far we haven't really nailed down that megaplex in any way, only that it's a moment of shared history (and implicitly falling-out) between Savanna Nation and Mountain Nation. But now that we have a question of "where does the ashborn's bone ash come from," an explanation presents itself.

The "megaplex" is the skeleton of an ancient, colossal god. If that's not constructed enough to earn the -plex, we can say that a city was carved into the massive bones, in addition to whatever mining happens there. Perhaps the scale is so large, or the form so alien, that it's hard to recognize it as a skeleton without significant cartography and study. A natural moment of schism between Savanna Nation and the religious Mountain Nation would be the revelation of the skeleton's nature.

The people of Mountain Nation still worship the god, maybe believing that it lives on incorporeally, and oppose continued mining of its skeleton for resources. In contrast, Savanna Nation are the descendants of those who chose to continue mining and working with the god's bone as a material.

Nature of the Ashborn

Taking the megaplex as the source of the bone for ashborn solves some problems neatly. Rather than simply being constructs, the ashborn represent a fusion of the inherent magic of the land (mana, in game terms) with the divine residue within the bone ash. From there, we can make some additional statements backed up by "the bone just does that:"

• Ashborn are all of identical form (maybe humanoid, maybe not) and power
  • In fact, attempts to fire porcelain in a different form results in cracked, inert ceramic
• They are very durable and functionally immortal, and when destroyed or damaged can be re-fired
• Ashborn have agency and make decisions on their own
• The ashborn don't speak and rarely communicate except through gesture and action
  • They may communicate with each other through some other means, though it's not well-understood
• Their motives and goals are often opaque, but they value their own autonomy, as well as being in control of the creation of new ashborn

Filling in Some History

We know that historically Savanna Nation had a strong class division, and that a struggle happened recently to subvert that. The ashborn have a complex relationship to that history. They're dependent on the system that harvests bone and produces porcelain in order to (re)produce themselves. With Mountain Nation opposing that system, and Savanna Nation having long left the desert, porcelain production is difficult and intensive.

So we can say that there was a small upper class of Savanna Nation who controlled the mining/stockpiles/kilns used to produce porcelain, and for a long time the ashborn were more or less held hostage by that class. Given their durability (and their Magic status as an "army" in green/white), we can assume they acted as military/policing. Only recently was a broad coalition of ashborn and humans (or some other fantasy "race" TBD) able to overthrow this aristocracy. Now the ashborn have significantly more control over the kilns, though it's still an intensive process to gather bone and clay for porcelain.

The rate of new ashborn creation has been very low, but it remains an open question whether the ashborn will change that. It's not clear how the labor would be organized, or what impact such production would have on the land being mined for clay and mana. But the ashborn last a long time, and they haven't seemed rushed to action in the generation since the rebellion. One rumor says there's internal disagreement between the ashborn, although how would an outsider know? For the time being, they till the land and build houses and work the kilns alongside everyone else.

What Next?

Having designed the ashborn from a story perspective, I'm now really motivated to make them work mechanically. I have some ideas, but I'm going to put them in another post. Knowing about the god's skeleton in the desert also gives me a nice intro to the Mountain Nation religion, which will probably be my next worldbuilding post.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

Today I tried to design a mechanic for green/white around turning lots of lands into creatures (semi-)permanently. It didn't really work.

The Goals

The benefit of "animating" lots of lands, from a design perspective, is to: 1. Help support a "go-wide" theme that rewards lots of creatures 2. Create interesting decision points (you can't usually use a land to cast a spell and attack with it in the same turn) 3. Overlap with a likely self-mill theme in green/black with cards that care about lands in the graveyard or help you replay them

This would also feel very new compared to other Magic designs, which often animate lands temporarily or make animate effects larger but more rare.

Attempt 1 - Wide Awaken

A previous Magic set, Battle For Zendikar, used a mechanic called Awaken that animated lands permanently. It tended to make medium or large creatures, and it was always a one-time effect for the late game, all different from my aim. But it's good precedent, so the first version of the mechanic I considered was based on Awaken:

Put a +1/+1 counter on target noncreature land you control. It becomes a 0/0 creature in addition to its other types.

This would have a keyword associated with it, and could be added as a rider on spells or as a creature ability. The issue is, if the goal of the mechanic is to do this a lot, eventually most of your lands would be creatures. That makes the green/white player really vulnerable to removal, and it basically forecloses printing board-wipe effects that destroy all creatures.

Attempt 2 - Field-Shields

Earlier this year, Magic got a new mechanic, shield counters, which serve as a reimplementation of classic rules bugbear Regenerate. If lands dying and leaving a player without mana is the big issue of Attempt 1, maybe something that leaves the land behind would solve the problem. We could introduce a new "Enki" counter to handle our animation, with the following rule:

A land with an Enki counter is a 1/1 creature in addition to its other types. If a creature with an Enki counter would be destroyed, instead remove an Enki counter and all damage from it.

It's important to remove the damage, since damage stays on permanents until end of turn, even if they stop being creatures. Removing the damage prevents the unintuitive case where re-animating the land after combat would have it immediately die from this damage.

I'm still not pleased with this result. Primarily, the need to remove damage, something players usually aren't tracking too closely after combat, adds complexity. Adding new complexity is a big ask for a new counter with special rules, at least without the authority of an official Magic release. Finally, part of the motivation for the mechanic was to see lands hit the graveyard, and this prevents that entirely.

Attempt 3 - Gravebounce

There is a modulation of Attempt 2 that would avoid some of its drawbacks. Unintuitively, "being destroyed" and "dying" are different events in Magic, with the latter involving the card actually going to the graveyard. We could modify our Enki counter rule to take advantage of this:

A land with an Enki counter is a 1/1 creature in addition to its other types. When a creature with an Enki counter dies, return it to the battlefield tapped under its owner's control.

This sort of works. In the process of going to the graveyard the land will lose its counter naturally, so it won't be animated on return. Landfall is very unlikely to show up in the set, so the land re-entering the battlefield is not a major impact.

However, I think this design would warp sacrifice effects entirely. A land that sacrifices itself like Evolving Wilds would need to be balanced for potential infinite recursion. Creature sacrifice effects would need to be weak enough for loops of animate -> sac -> repeat to be reasonable. You could add an intervening "if it wasn't sacrificed" clause into the rules, but then the mechanic just starts to feel clunky. And since all of this is still dependent on a new counter with special rules, there's very little room for clunk.

Reflections

It's not too surprising that it's hard to make "turn all your land into creatures" viable. After all, one of the biggest downsides of animating lands is the increased vulnerability to removal or combat. Sometimes trying to design something fresh leads you to a lot of reasons it hasn't been designed yet. I still kind of like the idea thematically and mechanically, and I'll probably toy with other designs if I think of them; feel free to drop a comment if you've got a way to make it work!

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

We're continuing Worlds Without Number's region generation process for high-level details of our setting. Last time we placed major terrain and landmarks, this time we'll build nations using a bit of randomly generated history.

Here I've had to modify the WWN approach a bit. In particular, I'm skipping any detailed mapping the book calls for (drawing rivers, etc). I'm also a bit constrained - as we discussed last time, Magic really does ask for a certain correspondence between terrain and social flavor. So I've massaged the process a little bit to make sure the flavor of our nations matches their physical geography.

National Borders

To start, we need to split our regional map into various nations / polities are located. To avoid our working map just being a jumble of text, I'll start by replacing the terrain labels with a color palette. Since the last post, I've also decided the mountain range should cut off the western part of the map from the north:

This helps answer an important question: what separates this region from the rest of the world? In our case, the mountains and the desert provide natural borders to the north and east, complementing the ocean to the west and south. It also works towards some plans I have for the red/green color pair; more on that later.

Next we need to add national borders. WWN recommends about six nations per region, so I've worked out the following map:

These names are temporary for this post. In subsequent posts I'll be working out the specifics of each nation, including actual names.

History Generation

Each nation receives two random historical events, which often imply connections to other nations. Rather than generate a pair of events for each nation individually, I decided to roll all six pairs at once. This gave me a little more flexibility to make sure each nation fit in with the Magic color identity of its area.

An Aside About Swamps

In Magic, the color black has a dimension beyond either the social or the ecological - while black represents individualist pursuit of power by any means, it's also poison, corruption, and demons, capital-E fantasy Evil. That gets aligned with the land type of swamps in a move that sits uneasily with me, working on a certain conception of a swamp as a location of corruption, death, and danger. This poses a problem: Magic needs swamps, and it needs them to support black's flavor, but as a designer I don't like resting on tired stereotypes about a real-life ecology. Trying to solve this ended up creating the core setting detail of this work, starting from our first national history:

Blackred Mountain

Tags:

• Twist of Fate: Roll again; if the event was positive twist it to ultimately be a negative to the group, and vice-versa.
  • Great Infrastructure: Some tremendous work of infrastructure was accomplished: canals, vast walls, roads, aqueducts, mines, or the like. (twisted to negative)
• Depravity: Vile debauches, unclean habits, and base hungers became commonplace among the group.

This was a huge undergrown mining and trade city built into an entire mountain. During a war with Swamp Nation, for unknown reasons an unnatural black fluid flooded Blackred Mountain and spilled outward. Denizens of the city were twisted by contact with the fluid, and their monstrous descendants are still present with unknown goals or social structure. Blackred Mountain has not engaged in diplomacy or trade since, and consistently lethal scouting missions have led other factions to avoid the area.

Swamp Nation

Tags:

• External War: The group faced a war with some external enemy or rival nation, with grave consequences.
• Brutal Oppression: Some portion of the group was reduced to a state of wretched subservience by the rest.

The swamp area used to be a regular marshland with several major cities and many smaller settlements, forming Swamp Nation. After the war with Blackred Mountain, corruption spilled into the swamp, making endemic life more alien and hostile, poisoning the land, and causing the buildings sink into the swamp. One city survived within Swamp Nation's borders, surrounded by ancient hyper-optimized farmland which resisted the vile changes. This city has developed a firmly rooted power structure and a massive underclass descended from wave after wave of refugees as the nation's other cities collapsed.

Savanna Nation

Tags:

• Freakish Magic: A particular type of magic was developed here that is unknown elsewhere, and its practitioners keep its secrets well.
• Class Struggle: Different classes were in conflict, either subtle or overt, all seeking their own gain.

This group once lived in the megaplex ruins in the desert, either as its original builders or later inheritors. They for the savanna after an ancient catastrophe, but they brought with them a secret form of magic. Unlike Caldera City spellcraft, this magic directly augments people (specifics TBD based on where we land on green/white mechanics). Until recently, this art was used to support a small ruling class's dominance over the majority of the population. In living memory, there was an organized revolution from the Savanna Nation underclass, resulting in a much more egalitarian, community-based social structure.

Mountain Nation

Tags:

• Religious Rise: A powerful new religion arose among the group.
• Consequences: Pick an event of a prior age; it had long-term consequences that were good, for a bad event, or bad, for a good event.

This is a loose affiliation of groups living in the mountains and foothills, traditionally herders. They tend to follow good weather and good grazing, and they all claim a shared past after fleeing a grim event (possibly the same that caused Savanna Nation to leave the megaplex). A strong religious tradition began with that exodus and binds this people together. After the Blackred Mountain incident, overland trade was rerouted northward through Mountain Nation land. With so much wealth flowing through the mountains, herding has been supplemented with highway robbery - a reasonable tithe to the Mountain Nation peoples.

Caldera City

Tags:

• Magical Tech: The group developed a useful and widespread magical tech or infrastructure that may have survived into the present.
• Diplomatic Coup: The group achieved an extremely successful alliance or affiliation with a neighboring group that may yet persist.

One of the oldest institutions in the region is the college of spellcraft in Caldera City. The arts taught there protect the city directly, and also confer enough wealth and prestige to solve most problems of diplomacy. While the City publicly denounces banditry in the mountains, practically they enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship with Mountain Nation. City caravans always carry a generous "tribute" for any unexpected stops, and Mountain Nation ensures that outsiders bent on less gentle robbery schemes are promptly put out of business.

Jungle Nation

Tags:

• Rare Resource: A uniquely valuable resource was found or manufactured by the group, which used or traded it to full effect.
• Exquisite Art: The group produced art that is revered to this day, either in general or in a specific medium or form of literature.

Jungle Nation nominally controls the full breadth of the thick rainforest, but in practice most people and power are situated along a major river system, connected to outside trade through a mouth at the western ocean. These rivers serve as primary transportation, avoiding the thick undergrowth in the forest or the beast-filled hills in the north and east. The jungle is home to a unique type of tree whose fibrous bark can be woven into textiles, and its cultivation, processing, and export drives Jungle Nation's economy. The most skilled arborists maintain trees selectively bred for color, allowing the creation of complex woven patterns without any dye or pigment. These are prized as fine attire throughout the region.

Non-National Elements

Each of the six nations above roughly corresponds to a Magic color pair. For three of the remaining four pairs, there are non-political processes:

• At the border of the swamp and the jungle, the process of seeping poison moves upward, weakening the land and transforming the endemic jungle ecosystem (black/green)
• On the coast of the swamp, the same corruption spills into the ocean, where more and more ships go missing and strange monsters are seen in the depths (blue/black)
• In the hills surrounding the jungle, there have always been large, territorial beasts. Some people eke out a living in small villages, others travel from afar to hunt (red/green)

A Trade Guild

While overland trade occurs, it seems that much of the region is more easily traversed by sea, or by air. A guild of sailing and flying merchants, with potentially complex internal politics but a clean bureaucratic exterior, fits the remaining color pair of white/blue well, and provides an additional entity for the various factions to have interactions with and orientations to. I'll likely use WWN's "Court" procedures to roll up more complex information about this guild in a subsequent post.

Looking Forward

I think that wraps up the region-level worldbuilding for now. The next few posts I make will probably be more focused on mechanics as I start to lock in themes and archetypes for the set, then we'll return to worldbuilding to drill into each faction in detail.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

Starting off here, let's take a high-level look at the region where our set will be based. I'll be using Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number for this stage, which has really detailed procedures for building a fantasy world. Let's get started!

WWN is a fantasy setting that assumes a deep past of lost magic and seems to integrate some Dying Earth sci-fantasy elements as well. I'm following the instructions pretty faithfully, but will make some light modifications. In particular, WWN assumes the needs of a tabletop campaign: a lot of detail where the players start, rough outlines to be filled in later everywhere else. For a set that covers the whole region, we instead need a middling level of detail pretty much everywhere. Magic color identities and evergreen mechanics also require specific themes (need unnatural harmful things to fill out black) and content (gotta have creatures that fly), so we're a little more constrained than WWN might anticipate.

Major Features

We start by rolling six major geographic features in the region:

• Jagged mountains. A new or resharpened mountain range forms a barrier in the region. The mountains are young, tall, and likely cast a substantial rain shadow.
• Jungle. A classic adventure-worthy jungle of wild, semi-alien flora and fauna.
• Megaplex. The ruins of a single huge ancient structure stretch for endless miles.
• Scrub desert. These often appear on the leeward side of mountain ranges. Borders will often be grasslands or savanna.
• Swamp. A sinking river, lake margin, or wet coastal delta forms a vast bog in this flat land.
• Ancient farmland. A huge stretch of land was re-engineered for optimal farming.

From that list, we can pretty easily infer a geography, with the two wetter biomes separated from the scrub desert by jagged mountains. I was originally hesitant to produce maps of the region, since a Magic set doesn't call for a map, and because mapping frames how you think about the world in a certain way. However, later steps of WWN worldgen really do expect spatial relations between places. As a compromise, I've taken a very abstract approach:

Next, I want to integrate the megaplex, which I think will go well in the desert. I also have an image of a magical college or a city built on an island in the middle of a caldera as an anchor location for UR. (AN: In the process of editing this post I learned that the island in Crater Lake, notable caldera, is actually called Wizard Island. I'm taking this as a sign that caldera islands are universally understood as wizardly.) Between the scrub desert and the ocean I placed some savanna, which seems like a natural transition. I'm still not sure where "ancient farmland" will go, so I'm holding off on placing it just yet.

In WWN the next step is to start working on nations/factions operating in the region, but first I want to take inventory of how Magic color pairs might fit into this geography. In Magic, colored mana comes from specific types of land, so there should be some degree of correspondence between colors and terrain types. And designing for limited requires each of the ten color pairs to have it's own feel and themes, so the pairs are the most relevant color identities. There's probably some risk of this overdetermining the rest of our worldbuilding, so I'll treat it as a one-off exercise to identify where there might be gaps.

Most of these are freebies, treating the jungle area as green, the jagged mountains as red, the swamp as black, and the ocean as blue. I marked the central caldera as UR as planned, and assigned RW to the eastern foothills between the scrub desert and the mountains. Savannas have a history in Magic, and are typically associated with GW. There's one natural pairing, BR, which I didn't place yet, mostly because I think "swamp mountain" needs some more consideration.

The other two unplaced color combos are WU and WB. There are a couple options to consider. We could add some drier land around the swamp area and create a WB zone ("plains swamp"), for example. The current map also doesn't have any oceanic islands, which might work well for WU. They also might not be associated with major geographic areas - a single violently oppressive and/or haunted city might anchor WB, for example.

This post has probably gone on long enough already, so let's pause here. Next time, we'll generate the major nations/polities and think some more about color pairs.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

I figure people might have questions at some point on how I structure the project or make card images. In my (hiatus-ish'd) project making a custom Magic "cube," I developed a workflow that seems pretty good for me, primarily in Google Docs and MSE (more below the cut).

Google Docs

Primarily, I use this for tracking a design skeleton, which for me is basically just a spreadsheet of all the "slots" in my set by color, rarity, and mana value. Typically I use other sheets within the same file to track draft archetypes and ideas for new cards. The spreadsheet structure also makes it easier to calculate things like mana curve or how frequently a given mechanic appears weighted by rarity (so-called "as-fan").

I'll probably use Docs to track a lot of my setting information too. People speak really highly of tools like Obsidian that let you interlink a bunch of different documents like a personal wiki, but generally I've found tools like that lead me to caring a lot more about the structure than the content. Sticking to something simpler tends to result in more of my time going towards ideas and less towards the database itself.

MSE (Magic Set Editor)

This is a tool specifically for creating custom cards for Magic and other card games. I use the Mainframe card templates, which look a lot like contemporary official cards, and the program handles a lot of the graphic design (placing text boxes, inserting mana symbols, etc.) automatically. Some people use other tools, or just their own photoshop templates, but I've found MSE gives me just about the right level of customization for my needs.

I set up my MSE "set" file to use custom card numbers, which I reserve to match the card codes in the design skeleton. Every card I design goes in MSE, but cards currently matched to a slot get the appropriate code. At any given time I have a lot of designs I'm not yet sure about with no code, several assigned a code, and I also tend to use the code "X" for rejected designs. This keeps old designs around in MSE for reference or reworking later, but keeps them out of my way for tinkering on more workable cards.

Sophie's Dice

This is really just here as an excuse to shout out a great tool. I have a lot of physical polyhedral dice for rolling on tables, but I don't always want to use them. Sophie's Dice is a really robust dice roller with a lot of customization options that still feels like I'm actually rolling. If that sounds good to you, I highly recommend it! It runs on Mac/Windows/Linux and also on Android/iOS, and there are community copies if you can't afford the $5.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

I'm using this page to document the process of creating a full unofficial set of Magic: the Gathering cards (about 250) in an original setting. To help build out that setting, I'm going to use systems from tabletop RPG systems for worldbuilding and likely for specific characters as needed. More info below the cut.

Design Goals

As a MtG set, I'm building for "limited" play (draft and sealed) almost exclusively. Anyone is welcome to pick up these cards for other forms of casual play, but It's not front of mind from a design perspective. My hopes for the set are:

1. Evocative card designs, gesturing to a shared setting without fully inscribing it
2. Dynamic gameplay and mechanics (this is my #1 value in MtG personally), and
3. Approachable total design, targeting a complexity level a little above a core set, but lower than the trickiest official Magic sets

Why RPG Systems?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about, playing, and prepping for tabletop RPG sessions, and hands-down the part I find most exciting is procedural generation systems. I really enjoy the process of narrativizing incongruous dice rolls together and the texture of the results you get. As much as I enjoy Magic, to some extent the project is also an excuse to play around with RPG systems towards a final product without running a whole RPG.

Card Art

At this point, art for this project is an open question. Art is very important for MtG cards, but I'm not much of a visual artist, especially for the number of cards in a set. I'm not willing to use "AI" generated art for this project, but might lean on creative commons sources etc. If you're an artist and you want to contribute, feel free to reach out and we can discuss some options.