HMC 4th Printrun Reviews Part I

Acid Rain

Design 5

Balance 6

Eating a bit into my own design space rather here but I do like the Desert Twister card in green that is made viable with cycling. This is the Bramblecrush version of that treatment. The cycling is not quite so convenient nor is the cost reduced, but I did treat the card to some instant speed action! I am a little concerned with this being able to hit lands but it is yet to even hint at being a problem. This is much more an insurance policy, you are generally a little down when you use it but you are glad that you had it. Instant is nice but it is still so expensive that it is pretty hard to find yourself up having used it. Instant speed interaction that is both playable and on colour in green feels like a bit of a miracle and so I will gladly take that even if it is occupying somewhat similar design space, perhaps this is just an area in green where some redundancy is more than welcome! This just seems to improve the format overall in the same kind of way that Cast Out used to in real cube. This is one of those simple clean cards that lets you properly get down to playing some good old Magic! Bramblecrush doesn't become broken with cycling, nor at instant speed, nor apparently even both. I love when you find how to make a card playable without having to fundamentally alter what the card does, I guess that is why I like cycling so much...

Aerial Thief

Design 6

Balance 6

This card is on the boring side but it does serve a good purpose in supporting the Izzet tempo archetype. It would be a bit too powerful in red where such a robust and hard hitting cheap threat really shouldn't also have access to evasion! In blue it flies more easily but pumps a little less readily and significantly less dangerously due to blue lacking the finishing power of red! I enjoy Izzet tempo decks and want to support them in my cube. This is a simple and safe way of doing so. This is card that is bland but on point, allowing other cards to shine. It might not always be needed but it'll be nice to have access to cards like this for tuning the cube.

Ancestral Unity

Design 5

Balance 6

Always nice to be able to give a nod to Ancestral Recall, especially if it is a somewhat reasonable one. While miracle is a fairly poor mechanic, making Rosewaster's Top 10 bad mechanics list I believe, this doesn't mean you can't use it, you just need to do so with a lot more caution. Miracle is a weird one, it rather falls flat on limp cards. Other attempts I had made at balancing the miracle mechanic was simply to make low key cards that didn't break the game when you randomly hit them at the right time. While the cards were indeed safe, they were also boring. Putting big effects on miracles just makes them swingy and random and a bad experience for the opponent but not doing so leaves them lackluster. The "safest" thing you can do in magic that is big and flashy tends to be drawing cards. It isn't tempo, it isn't assured power or victory but none the less it feels great. And here we arrive at this thing. The card is surprisingly fine. It is great when you hit it but no so much of a swing as to be broken or egregious. I don't think this is a great card but it is surprisingly reasonable. I think it is about as good as you are getting while using the miracle mechanic and packs a good balance of polarizing to excitement. Sadly I have quite a lot of reasonable card draw effects I have designed and they are competing for ever more contested space. This is not one of the best and is likely getting edged out sooner rather than later. It is good for a card with miracle but it has to compete with cards that say "draw cards" without having the miracle text weighing them down. 

Battle Ram

Design 8

Balance 8

Part of the drive to make white more fun. I had made so many generic 2/1 dorks in white and not only was it a bit dull, it was also something you could easily meta against. Variety is key to any healthy ecosystem. A lot of my white 2/1s did a thing once and then that was that, just a generic small body and no ongoing choices. This card is aimed squarely with some targetted design at alleviating those issues in white. It is super simple yet quite interesting. It has the capacity to scale and be more relevant than many one drops in the late game which is another thing I appreciate in a one drop beater. This is really spot on for where you want a common cheap support card like this to be. It isn't too wordy or complicated but it retains some interest and gameplay. 

Black Market 

Design 6

Balance 4

Basically just an Underworld Connections made fortification. I have since reworked this to allow you to sac the fortified land and gain 2 life. This was simply, and somewhat surprisingly, underpowered in my format and needed a little buff. This is pretty cute and flavourful but sorely awaits that buff so as to get it some actual play time amongst stiff competition in the heavily saturated world of card draw. The Zuran Orb mode buff is decent but a long way from too much. Having to fortify the land really takes the sting out of it. Your lands essentially become very bad Foods. Not sure why this has been left common, pretty clearly a rare looking card.

Blood Vendor

Design 6

Balance 5

This is very much a Seasoned Pyromancer of a card. It is a bit less tempo and a bit more longevity and utility. Safe consistency in a can. I attempted to make Blood a more relevant token type and made a load of support and payoff cards for it in the 4th and 5th printruns. Unsurprisingly these took mainly vampire forms! This is one of the most generic ones and is presently a little under tuned to have done much of much. I like how it is a fairly reliable source of Blood and discard whatever the situation and I like how the Blood it makes can fuel its own escape. It may well jump from fine filler to very good blood support card as the 5th printrun cards are more thoroughly tested but I think that will speak more to the power of those newer cards than any problems with this.

Bloodthief

Design 4

Balance 3

Conversely this dickhead is way over tuned. Stuff that can just pop back for no mana at instant speed is a right royal pain. These effects generally want to be sorcery speed, or at the very leave ensure that the card is coming in tapped. I think this guy also lost a toughness in the nerf. He was just too robust and fired on too many axis. I like the card conceptually and like the manner in which this is a Blood payoff but the implementation was all off. There is a cool kind of arc where you can either have enough other blood producers at one end, or enough sources of crime at the other end of the spectrum, where the card is playable. That or you cobble together some of both and hope the card is good enough - it did very much seem to be good enough most of the time. That in turn is concerning for a card you can't reasonably call good without support. This is not a standalone good card and thus clearly a problem when it is performing so well in limited.

Brimstone

Design 4

Balance 7

Bargain is a mechanic that came out after I stopped with real magic. I wanted to toy about with it and needed more instant speed cheap burn. This seemed like a good way to do it, and clearly it was because Wizards had done basically the same thing already. This card is fine, it does its job. It is certainly on the powerful side as the sac has utility despite mostly being a cost. Shock is a fine card and Bolt is a great one, an option on either with a bit of potential trickery and spice and we have quite the card. It is however not super original. It is just a burn spell and it is one that many people have essentially played with already. I will likely cut this before it is the worst designed burn spell remaining because it is not something I am at all proud of making. Still, you need a critical mass or clean simple effects in the game and this ticks that box like a dream. Considering how clean this manages to be, it is a whole lot more card than Lighting Bolt. Both more interesting while also more reasonable in power level. 

Buzzard

Design 3

Balance 6

This is basically a vehicle but it is in mount form. The reason I have ranked it so low on the design side of things is cohesion. This is a confusing card as it fails to conform with other mounts and how they operate, while also not quite fitting the vehicle mould. This is just not an intuitive card. It isn't exciting or interesting either. Not being able to saddle can often render this a dead card, and when it is working fine it is just a boring efficient evasive beater. I could put effort into fixing it but it doesn't seem like the best investment of time, likely I'll just cull this and move on to greener pastures. 

Caerbannog Badger

Design 6

Balance 7

A fusion of Inti and Ledger Shredder - both cards I enjoy playing with. They do a good job of being cheap relevant creatures that offer card quality and continued late game relevance without feeling too oppressive early. The Badger does all those things and manages to do so without being quite so pushed in power, and while being somewhat cleaner. This is simply an example where I have seen something I like in real magic and tried my best to clean it up and distil it. I don't think the Badger is very original but it does play rather nicely thankyou very much. Powerful but in the right kinds of way. The name is a Monty Python reference combined with a personal joke between my wife and I where I made the claim that a badger was likely the most dangerous wild animal in the UK and my wife ruthlessly mocked me ever after....

Citadel of Traitors 

Design 5

Balance 7

This is just me experimenting with lands and trying to understand the way in which they scale. This is knowingly pushed and I had no expectation of it being reasonable nor that it would last in the cube. I had just been surprised at how burst mana and double mana sources had performed thus far in my homemade cube meta - and that is a lot less impressively than in basically all other forms of real magic. I presume the reasons being less broken things to do with burst mana and greater risk of exposure for trying to take big swingy turns. So far this land has seems totally fine. It has helped with some turn three 5 drops from a mono red deck but that didn't break the game. Mostly it just feels like a spicy mountain. It is more likely to get cut for not being impactful enough than it is for being too powerful! Despite not making any waves thus far I shall be keeping a watchful eye on this one. It is exactly the sort of dangerous card that is just suddenly oppressive. It is pretty fun to play with, and it feels really naughty when you do, even if it isn't. This does all work in it's favour.

Crowd Source

Design 7

Balance 8

Serum Visions but surveil instead of scry. Not exactly original but super clean and on point. I made too many blue card quality effects and they were generally on the more convoluted side of things. While this is certainly not he most powerful, the self mill aspect gives it a synergy boost others lack, and the cleanliness of the card makes it more approachable and appealing. Much as I have no real pride in this card it will be very hard to cut it as it performs so well. It is that sweet spot where Mental Note and Serum Visions meet. Have two cards for the price of one. Just what a cube curator wants.

Dam

Design 4

Balance 4?

The Mana Battery or storage land have ever been a part of magic. There is nostalgia merely in the concept. Sadly they have not done too much to impact the game beyond some fringe things. I suspect it is one of those things that is fundamentally flawed and is either unplayable or broken without ever passing a sweet spot of good designs. Here was my first attempt at a storage land card. I like the flavour, I do not like the performance. This does nothing to entice people in. When I break it down it looks like it is better than most two mana mana rocks and yet I cannot ever seem to find the place for it. Perhaps it is just too fiddly and that puts people off. We all like our mana sources to be clean and easy. Tap, bam, done. Messing about with counters isn't fun when your bursting to blurt that spell out. I have to call this a design fail but sadly I can't proffer any fixes or solutions. 

Dark Halls

Design 3

Balance 2

Turns out manlands are one of the harder things to get right within a format. They do not scale quite as you might expect and subtle changes, even to weighting and not power level, can totally alter the card. I had been struggling to get manlands I was happy with in the meta and had a crack at some meatier ones. I failed pretty hard with my first go. I somewhat knew I would and so only even put out 2/5th of the cycle to test! This is one of those cards from the partial cycle. Simply put this is way too much card at too little cost. This is a huge and resilient threat basically bolted on to a swamp for effectively one mana and no cards. I wanted manlands to offer a good counterplay to planeswalkers more than anything else, but some wrath protection and late game mana sinking is all bonus good stuff. This land moved way beyond those roles and just landed itself squarely in the overpowered threat camp, I have finished the cycle of these now and reworked their activation costs, hopefully bringing them back down to where I want them. 

Delirious Girl

Design 6

Balance 4

Although Dragon's Rage Channeler is pretty broken I do enjoy the way it plays. This was a bit of a tribute to the card. In some ways I toned things down but in others I managed to boost it... This obviously has a better floor with the starting 2/1 statline able to beat relevantly regardless of the bin situation. There is also the hellbent mode where this is just drawing you a card on attack. All the things combined result in this being one of the most powerful one drops in the format. It does a lot on a wide range of fronts. Luckily for this card it looks and plays real good and so despite my lowish ratings I cannot see this getting cut.

Doctor Moin

Design 9

Balance 8

There is little more fun and powerful feeling in magic than going off with an Urza or a Tolarian Academy. Neither are very fair magic cards but at least Uzra has a wiff of fair to him thanks to cost and ability to interact with him. This is basically Urza but more so in regards safe design. This is an Urza you can attack with dorks. It is one that comes with a rather smaller dork bolted on and that lacks the built in mana sink card draw tool!  This card is great, it is loads of fun without overstepping the mark. It is a card that makes you want to build around it, rewards you with scaling and cool interactions for doing so, and does all this without being too offensive from the other side of the table. This is a product of me asking what the most fun cards and things in real magic are and trying to replicate that in a healthy way. Much as this is firing perfectly in the present meta it is a card with scaling and synergy and thus will rise and fall in power with the tides of the meta. In other words, this is exactly the sort of card that could become unplayable if the support dries up, or a bomb if I print a couple of whoopsie cards.  Until then it is going to sit happily as one of my best designs and best additions to the format.

Doom

Design 8

Balance 7

Yet another example of my wanting to explore and understand a new mechanic. Comically this landed pretty well and managed to do so despite a typo resulting in ambiguity over the card. It seems to have both impending 3 and 4 thanks to a reminder text error. What really threw me is that the card played fine at both values. People said it was bad at 4 and yet it got plenty of play. I assumed with it being fine at 4 that running it at 3 would make it oppressive but no, it was still somewhat the same. Much as it was initially hard to believe I think ultimately it just speaks a lot to the mechanic and the progression of games. This is a two toughness dork that is very rarely attacking before turn six and that broadcasts itself a long way in advance. Doom provides every opportunity for counter play and that is ultimately what makes it interesting. Edict needs to be boosted to be playable and this is a bad Edict on the front end. If left unchecked however it slowly turns to a bit of value and then ultimately into a game ending problem. Broadly this one seems to have been a good success but I don't know if that is because it is a good mechanic or just good fortune. I also still don't know when to set the impending counter at!  Four is probably sensible but then it is wise to push the more fun and interesting cards. Lots of conflicting things going on here!

Dragon Peaks

Design 3

Balance 1

This is the other mono coloured manland I printed and boy was it a booboo. It is perfect for red in design and then also under cost. Probably at six to activate this would still be a bit problematic in my format. Against a red deck it kindof just feels like a Lava Axe sat there in play. That is the floor as well. It can just kill you pretty much all by itself if you fail to have the appropriate answers. I have attempted to rework this but still fear it is the problem child of the cycle and anticipate more reworks down the line. Activations now require the sacrificing of lands and I am still not convinced it will do enough much like with Fireblast! The mere existence of this card makes it seem like opponents start on 15 life. One does not need lands in play to win the game!

Edvard

Design 7

Balance 8

Another card to be born out of the question "what real cards are fun". This is simply Torbran but toned down and made a little broader in appeal. Toned down in that the damage boost and stats are less. Broadened in that the cost is less red intense and the effect is not limited to red things. All told this is a pretty powerful card but it is doing so in the right kinds of way. It is interactable. It is scalable. And most importantly it is still fun and alluring. I see this and I want to play red. I scan through my ping effects etc. While not the most original card it is clean and very much fulfilling the brief. I also love that ultimately we are looking at a Hill Giant here when there is nothing else going on. 

Homemade Cube Double Faced Cards

 

I dipped an experimental toe into the world of double-faced magic cards a couple of print runs ago and have been testing them in the homemade cube since. While I think it is a bit of a logistically fiddly mechanic it did transpire that a lot of people's favourite cards, myself included, are flip cards. This is because they are able to cleanly show a narrative and "do the thing"- a neat summation of what is most fun in a magic card. A flip card allows for arc in a way that most cards do not. With that being the case it felt necessary to master the art of designing double faced cards. 

With designing double faced cards you have twice the real estate to work with for more art, names, card types, and of course mechanics allowing for much more combinations of things going on, all without risk of the card getting busy too quickly. Obviously the more moving parts you add to a card the more of a challenge design and balance becomes. I learned this the hard way with planeswalkers and companions. I also generally learned that when you don't know something you get it more wrong. This is why the double faced cards I designed have been lurking in the background for so long. I made them to experiment. I knew I would get a lot wrong about them and need a long time using them to learn how to do it right, or at least better. As such I designed a spread to cover various bases and probed a bunch of avenues. I also designed relatively few, in part because you never want lots of these kinds of card slowing down games and drafts. Also because I simply didn't know what I was doing. 

I made around 25 total cards. a bunch of which ended up just being riffs on real cards I liked. It is hard to go bottom up design on these cards as there is so much going on and that made it harder still as that had been my main design process. I think in hindsight it was my biggest stumbling block. When a double faced card fails it can be because the card is bad or because the flavour doesn't work, it needs both parts to work together much more so than a normal magic card. In many ways you need it to justify the extra logistical component with the flavour. When you have no specific story you are trying to tell the inspiration for these kinds of cards is elusive. In the end I just wound up picking real world examples of things and doing a top down design tribute. This lead to some cards that worked in a flavour sense but were often not suited to cube play. 

Righto, lets look at the cards one at a time as see what is good and what is not so good and why!

Amenemhat the Returned // Interred Open

Design 8

Balance 4

One of the more fun cards. The flavour and art all work together and the bonus discard ability temps you to find ways to have a good time with it. This was all a bit of an accident, it somewhat made itself once I had the notion of a black creature that flipped into a saga and back again. The card plays pretty well and it is pretty fun but it is a touch over tuned. I toyed with adding another stage to the saga to keep him away longer but think losing a toughness and 3 life instead of 2 on stage one will be enough to get him to the right power level. Obviously with an ability that is so scalable this one will be more sensitive to the quality of discard effects in the meta. Even with both the suggested nerfs the card will be very much on the upper power level of my cube. I am pretty happy with this for several reasons. One is that this card is not super direct. Power is safer when it is spread out doing different things. Secondly much of the power is locked within synergies, and you need to pony up for double black on a three drop as well, all somewhat gating the power. Lastly however, I think you just want your flashier flagship cards to have a little more zest under the bonnet! Flip cards want to be flashy and thus command a little more liberal spreading of the power.

Giant Cocoon // Giant Moth

Design 4

Balance 6

Here is a card that attempts to "fix" Delver of Secrets, and in that vein it does an OK job. If this were red or white, or even blue, it might be a bit too good as those colours are all quite strong at leveraging cheap efficient threats with evasion. In green this is just small and slow. It is fair but because it is not super useful rather than because the power level is right. The flavour is nice but this card still misses the mark. This is because the grandeur is lacking. A flip card wants to be a bit more exciting than this, it wants to be the big event and not a supporting act opening things up. Flipping this is too much effort for the excitement it brings. Delver of Secrets is more egregious in a lot of ways but the top of deck lottery does at least add some excitement to the situation that this fails to do. Caution - when fixing bad cards one may find more problems than are immediately apparent! This is a neat enough card that might have been a failure as a card design but was a great success in being a learning experience. It isn't a problematic card, it just isn't an exciting or great one. I'll leave it in the cube while there is space but it doesn't have long term prospects.

 

Hermit // Best of Bodmin

Design 3

Balance 5

I felt I should have a werewolf card in the flip card roster but forcing myself simply resulted in a supremely dull filler card. Coupled with the fact this is gold and we have a less playable and less useful card than the Giant Moth. There is nothing wrong with this per se but it isn't a card I want gumming up the works in a cube setting. I may try and rework this into a flashier threat in the 3-5 mana range and try and emulate Huntmaster of the Fells a bit more - there is good reason that card was so popular and it wasn't the power level for very long! 

Map // Treasure Island

Design 6

Balance 7

A shameless rip on Treasure Map / Cove. The flavour on this concept is just such a clean win and I loved the original. Mine is a little more front loaded . I prefer my general flavouring despite it being hard to criticize either. I also like that mine is more generally useable given the spread of across the card. This is one of the few examples of a cheaper, more supporting role orientated flip card that manages to work. The only real qualm I have with this is the similarity - it feels unoriginal, because it is! I probably need to call it Booty Map or something too so as to distinguish it from Map tokens...  

Aladdin's Lamp // Genie of the Lamp

Design 8

Balance 7

One of my favourites as it manages to fire on all the important axis and a couple of extra bonus ones. It has the important flavour cohesion while also being flashy and potent enough to merit the double sided treatment. I like how this pays tribute to some classic magic cards thus ticking that all important nostalgia vibe (despite failing to credit Dan Frazier correctly on the first printing...). Like the Treasure Map there are plenty of existing magic cards that attempt to show the genie in the lamp trope but I feel I have managed to do a better job with mine, largely due to the implementation of the double sided card. I also really like how both sides of the card remain relevant regardless of which you commit to which is one of the better justifications for the MDFC branch of the dual faced card tree. The original design on this was nearly identical but had the card draw stuck on the genie side, you would tap your lamp, flip your card then use it once, flip it back and draw a card. I felt like this was a neater top down flavour/mechanics mesh but the problem was it was basically just a convoluted vehicle involving a flip each time it was crewed. A design that is messy and forced for the sake of flavour is big fail and so we moved to this design where both halves of the card independently have merit while also being suitably linked to each other. This is a high power card but it comes with plenty of tempo risks and is ultimately pretty slow. As mentioned, I think you need extra power in the flip cards as it helps justify them and make them exciting but it needs doing with caution. The extra moving parts mean extra flexibility and more unexpected scaling potential resulting in much more easily broken cards. Adding back in a bit of a slow yield or risk helps keep things calm. 

Teumessian Fox // Canis Minor

Design 2

Balance 4

This is a pretty impressive fail case all round. I spent way too much effort trying to keep this fair and in doing so I fell at almost every other hurdle. This is not an exciting card. You don't even really get to do the thing. It just dies and the thing happens. It is exciting enough to make you set about doing it so it just happens when your opponent gets involved. The power level of the card is pretty high but in a way that most places would find hard to take great advantage of, and your typical blue deck struggles even more. There are plenty of little mistakes here too. I failed to make these legendary border dropping some visual consistency. Even the rarity feels like a miss! One of the worst things about the card is the bolted on scry. You just don't want extra like that on your mana sources, you just want to tap it and play your thing. It should have been an "or" not an "and"! It is comfortably one of the most frequently forgotten abilities on one of my cards, and that itself is a huge indicator that it is a bad ability! This lacks the raw power and flashiness that a double sided card should pack while still managing to be a little over tuned. It doesn't even really feel blue! Perhaps I can make something out of this by going white?

Siddhartha Gautama // Enlightenment

Design 7?

Balance 6?

This remains one of the more elusive flip card designs. I simply don't yet know if it is a win or a fail. Certainly the power level is pretty high but it is also a slow and risky card. Mostly this is a Lumengrid Warden and that is a pretty hard sell for any deck. It does get play but not as much as you might expect given the seeming high power level. Aggressive decks don't have the time to wait for the returns and control decks are not too enthused about playing low impact cards that die to their own mass removal. For midrange decks there are polarity issues in that the front end is too little for too long and then the back end could well be too much. I like the feel of this card, it is cute and cool. I dont know if that affection is causing bias and blindness to it or if it just hasn't had quite enough action yet. There is a lifegain synergy coming to white in the firth print run and that could well push this entirely out of hand. Lots still to do and learn with this one. Not least fixing the lack of legendary frame on the frontside.  

Sword in the Stone // Excalibur

Design 8

Balance 5

Much as I think this is pretty cool design I can't take too much credit as I saw something very similar on a custom cards post somewhere and stole it! I don't even know who I stole it from to credit them with their good idea! The front end will be coming in tapped when I get round to balancing this one as it just makes the card a little too low cost to play. There is too much potential payoff for the low low inclusion cost. Beyond that I am pretty happy with the card although there have been calls from others in my playgroup for the backend to do more to increase the excitement of it. I had a request to make it also make a 1/1 token every turn when flipped. I don't hate that conceptually but think the flip cost needs rather increasing if so.

Stealth Elf // Murmuring Woods

Design 7

Balance 4

I made this mostly to troll one of my playgroup who takes real issue with me placing any nonland, specifically creature mana source like a Llanowar Elf, with my lands. I get it but old habits die hard and so it still happens. Turns out this troll card is one of the cooler cards. Indeed, it is also one of the more powerful and rather needs dialling back. A tap cost added to the front flip and a mana to the return flip should get it inline power wise. As printed this card was just tedious in combat being able to fog an attacker and dodge removal and generally be a real pain all on top of being pretty decent acceleration. It is basically super Sakura Tribe Elder. The design idea was that you would flip it over once early to have it be mana then back late to be some chump body for something. In reality it was cost a little too efficiently and spent all day long flipping back and forth! Despite being quite a low key support card there is something about this that carries it as far as deserving on of the few slots I want to have for dual faced cards. I think it feels safe and homely and elvish which is perhaps enough.

Daphne // The Laurel

Design 2

Balance 5

A fail similar to that of the Fox. The mana source is not quite so tedious in use as the Fox's, and the Laurel offers rather more power. That being said, you have even less agency over flipping Daphne and that is a big part of the narrative enjoyment of the transform cards. It is well known that most cards in magic where you give a choice to the opponent are sucky and I had managed to do that here without even noticing! Regardless, this is a low impact card that isn't exciting, isn't really doing anything much of much or directly, and just gums up a game in an annoying kind of way. This is an example of a card I went full top down on and in doing so missed creating a card with mechanical cohesion or relevance. I have no real notion of how to fix this, only that doing so would involve significantly different looking end result so much so that it probably couldn't be considered the same card. It is funny that a card that isn't that problematic in a power sense from any perspective could be such an impressive fail from a design perspective. 

Orpheus // Apollo's Lyre

Design 5

Balance 2

Despite the low ratings I have bestowed upon this one I think it might wind up lasting if I rebalance it properly. It is simply rather over tuned in addition to being quite tedious to play against! All sorts of unkillable on the dork end with hard to interact with tedium that really messes with your shit on the back end. Orpheus would come down and control the early game to some extent and when you were beyond just needing some sticky stats you can upgrade into the powerful board control tool that is the Lyre. This was fully top down design, I had no notion of what I wanted the card to do mechanically and the result is something that really dominates other creature strategies. I think I am effectively going to hit every aspect of this card with a nerf and that should result in somewhat interesting little tool for green to use. It reminds me a bit of Bow of Nylea, a bit of a mess of a card but surprisingly useful in a wide array of novel green builds. To fix this I will make the discard to bounce ability sorcery only, remove the stun on the tap, and add a mana to the goad/provoke mode. It might still be tedious when properly balanced but I am holding out hope that it will do more good than harm. 

Overly Curious Physician // Queen of the Dead

Design 8

Balance 7

This had been a huge success somewhat across the board. Design wise it is just a cobbled together array of mechanisms and flavours that are well worn paths. I didn't feel this card was super original nor really much my work. At best I packaged this. Regardless of how it came into being it is one of the more enjoyed, played, and explored flip cards. It also feels most like a real magic card, likely in part because I went fairly ham on the text here and used quite a lot more than normal! The card works in a lot of places being a somewhat innocuous low end support card that offers decent late game payoff. I was quite pleased to have found a reasonable way to sneak the monarch mechanic into the format without it being too present or problematic. I may well increase the dork count needed to flip from five to six if needed. Presently it seems fine but I do have a self mill synergy package coming to black in the fifth print run and this is set to get a whole lot better with that. Self mill is actually mostly just a risk in the homemade cube for most slower decks and this has absolutely caused a loss from the self mill already! With that set to change I can easily see a presently balanced card shooting to being unreasonable.

Lifeless Orb // Despair 

Design 3

Balance 2

Much as I still find this card interesting and cute, with the benefit of hindsight it is quite easy to see how it is pointless and unplayable. I am not even sure how exciting this would be in some kind of Death's Shadow synergy deck. Still probably pretty bad and there is nothing in the homemade cube to benefit from having a low life total! I have tried a few times to design stax style cards but they always come out unplayable. Being an older player the various low econ resource denial decks somewhat feel like one of the fundamental strategies in the game. It was a great choice to phase out cards like Armageddon, Balance, (Small)Pox, Wildfire, Smokestack, Braids, etc etc. They are rarely fun to play against. If you make them reasonable then they lack the required power to be playable and if not then you have just made a bad card that players will not appreciate. This pretty neatly falls into the bad card camp and I am fairly sure there is no cure where it stays cute and innocuous but somehow becomes playable. It could perhaps be made a constructed card but things like this are rarely for limited play. 

Xenagos // Temple there of

Design 6

Balance 6

I loved the idea of gods becoming a land when slain and slowly returning to power. Very Sauron. A perfect flavour and mechanic win from wizards that I wanted to steal and have a play about with myself. These cards came out as I was moving from real magic to my homemade stuff and for those cards and mechanics I became a lot less fussy about finding open design space and would essentially just do my own cover versions of cards I liked or found interesting. This is one such card. I like it, it is fun and plays reasonably well but it is a little out of balance. Nothing here is original but it does work quite neatly as a very real feeling card. The front end hits a little hard and the back end is perhaps a little slow. I am working on a way to take a small amount of power out of the card and also smooth that power return out over time a little more. As yes the game ends before it Xenegos transforms to the temple by a margin and he has not yet flipped back to life from the temple mode. Certainly not something I want to see often but more than never is desired from the final iteration. 

Firestarter Flint // Keith, Twister Firestarter

Design 7

Balance 4

The Origins flipwalkers are some of the most beloved cards in our playgroup. I would have gone pretty ham making these, likely a full cycle, had I trusted myself to get them right. I trod pretty carefully with this one, not straying too far from the beaten path! If you examine this closely it is quite akin to Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. I have even toyed with making it a 0/2 rather than a 1/1 so as to reign in the ease of flipping a bit. Mechanically I think this would be better but it just felt a lot less red. Regardless, this card is pushed. It is a bit vulnerable, a bit slow, and a bit conditional, all of which help keep the card slightly in check. And make no mistake, this is a lot of card. Flashing back cards is a lot more powerful in red than other colours as red has burn! Flipping this can also be quite a powerful swing, extremely so early, akin to the likes of Arc Trail. If you drop this on turn two, follow it with some Shock type card, flash that back flipping him then immediately using the -3 you have spread about 6 damage over upto 3 targets and only cost yourself 2 mana in the process. So far this has not been a problem as it can be seen coming and thus somewhat easily played around. If it does start to cause problems I might tinker with the loyalties, give a bit more + to the rummage and either add cost to the Shock or remove starting loyalty so that it can't happen all right away. This latter suggestion seems most wise, 2 is prently for something you can flip so quickly on the back of high tempo plays. I don't like walkers that offer minimal choice when you play them and so I initially avoided this. The cheaper flip cards are a little harder to get sufficient excitement and potential for power all packed in fairly but this little Prodigy tribute didn't disappoint. There is a trend here in the cards I copied and emulated more from Wizards did rather better than those which I branched out and explored my own ideas. 

Horn of War // Mars

Design 7

Balance 4

A bit over tuned, although comically mostly so on the front end. This is just far too good of a mana rock, you get to use it while you need it then return it to hand for value and have a relevant threat on the back of it. The Horn needs to come in tapped and perhaps even pay life to obtain red mana. Indeed, perhaps it would be a fairer card if it did something other than producing mana. The returning it should also cost more and given that this is not a picture of a horn one blows I should probably change the mechanism by which it is being returned! I like Mars himself, the card is a flavour win overall and Mars adds to this with good mechanical flavour. This is a good mana rock in any setting and the homemade cube turned out to be a format where mana ramp is really potent. 

Ferocity in the Forest // Reclaimed by Nature

Design 5

Balance 5

I tried to make a cycle of battles so as to understand them better. Fundamentally the mechanic is flawed. It is so hard to get the back end where you want it to be without breaking it in some way. The in game window for a battle being worth trying to flip is fleeting to say the least. The battle mostly ends up as all front end and becomes somewhat pointless. This green offering is my most normal of the five and it is the best and most played too, which is still not all that often. The front end is just quite good, it is in some ways a super Nissa as it ramps as well. Because the front end is so reasonable the battle should probably be 6 and not 5 to flip. Obviously with that fleeting window I spoke of the difference between 5 and 6 has yet to make itself known! If I am keeping battles I am fine with this one but battles are a bit sucky and silly. It is a lot of extra rules and phaff for negligible gain.

The Hordes of Balduvia // Spoils of War

Design 4

Balance 6

Mostly I made this as a joke. A tribute to one of my first obvious big mistakes with this whole project. I had a saga using Balduvian Horde art that made three asymmetrical token creatures with different keywords, each of which also came with a different noncreature artifact token! It was such a mess of tokens. I even made tokens for it to help solve it but it was still a logistical nightmare! Shame as the card was really enjoyable to play with and felt great. The front side of this is a little fixed, generally producing 3 tokens of the same flavour and no non creatures coming with them. Significantly reduced noise! The backside is a mess and intentionally so as it is almost never getting flipped. It is just so rarely worth the damage outlay. This card, with all its "fixing" just becomes boring. It might as well be a five mana sorcery than makes three 2/2 haste dorks and that would be a good 95% the same. This is something I have found again and again in magic - there is a card I really like that has some design flaws, however once you iron out the flaws you so often lose whatever it was about the card that was so fun and magical.

Battle at the Wall // Treasures of the Keep

Design 6

Balance 8

Simple flavour for a simple card. I like cheap card quality that can become card draw. I love a nod to the orgasmic textbox of "draw 3 cards". This sits well in most shells and plays fine. The quirky experiment on how this may be attacked proved fairly fruitless. It is some flavour but it doesn't meaningfully change the card that much, adding another defense counter or two probably just a cleaner way to go about things, if not quite as clever feeling. I tried to push out the boat and mostly just wasted mental energy and ink. Despite that this card is perfectly fine. Broadly playable and well balanced with an appropriate flavour. One pitfall is being two mana sorcery speed card quality in a format where consistency is not that big of a deal and over drawing can be! This is a card that would likely do better in other formats than it does here.

Besiege the Castle // Castle

Design 3

Balance 5

Much like the blue offering this is a small support card that is more nod and nostalgia than it is pertinent mechanics. Mostly this is Gather the Townsfolk. It is a lot of words and silliness just for a flavourful Gather the Townsfolk. Much like the blue offering, the attempted flavour of the absorb isn't interesting so much as it is tedious. Once you take the castle it is hardly exciting either. The flip side is a flavourful one but mechanically it is off, it is not what the deck that wants Gather the Townsfolk wants. It isn't so much the dull back end that is the problem here though, it is the lack of general playability. Only a white based aggro deck wants this and that makes it narrow on top of low powered and excessive.

Hold the Door // Hodor

Design 5?

Balance 1

Unlike the last two attempts at making a different battle this one really pushes the boat out. The notion of a battle that will complete itself if left unchecked eventually but at some cost is appealing. It is indeed quite interesting conceptually but an absolute chore to balance. There are just so many antagonistic moving parts in a card of this ilk. If you roll this out and ignore it you probably die to your own card. Roll this out and flip it immediately and you are doing very well thank you very much. That is not the range you are looking for ideally! I should perhaps have gone for something a little calmer like a point of life less or mill per ticking down counter. I might have another crack at a card like this but the lessons have been learned. This card was woefully underpowered and way too risky while still managing to be dangerous. While it was mostly a failure of a card it did seem to grab peoples interest.

Soratami Divination // Lake

Design 7

Balance 8

Lastly I did a cycle of MDFC lands with card advantage front sides. It seems like one of the purest forms of reducing a screw component in magic. The perfect antidote to screw and flood with the least capacity to be dead. I had been very impressed with the effect my one mana basic land cycling cards had on the format and wanted to push things a little further. The issue with card advantage on a land cycler is that both halves are bad tempo. You either have a land that cost a mana to get or an inherently tempo negative use of mana. I much preferred the chumpy low powered signpost dorks and cheap situational spells as things to have on the land cyclers, they felt right. The card advantage stuff not so much. Having lands that come in untapped at one end creates a much purer pairing. Draw cards or make mana at just ever so slightly sub par way! And these cards do play great, they get loads of play and are rarely anything other than healthy. They are however very marginal. They are low impact cards that are easily replaced, often with cards you don't even need to have picked or be in your pool! While presently I am happy with their inclusion, if I manage to make enough exciting and good cards I might really struggle to argue a case for taking up room with this cycle.  In many ways this is the perfect magic card, and in the other ways it is a bit of a waste of card. 

Ancestral Harmony // Hills

Red gets the punchier Harmonize level of card draw but it comes with the typical red time limit clause and never actually gets the cards to hand. Seems on point for flavour and power level. The only qualm here remains the cycle wide one of these cards being rather low impact.

Design 7

Balance 8

Necroboost // Bog

Design 6

Balance 6

This one is a little dodgy being as it scales at your command! The power of the card was also determined by how much pressure the opponent was putting on your life total. Suffice it to say this has been a bad swamp in a lot of games and outright unreasonably dominated some others. My gut reaction was to just up the cost to XBBB. In reality it might just be best to lock it into an X mana for X-1 cards and life loss. Anywhere in the 4-6 mana range would be fine for that. Could probably even look at 3 for 2 at instant or 3 for 3 if pushing it. Going with an X on this one was asking for a lot to line up. Especially when you look at how simple this line of cards is trying to be. Along the right lines but running before we can walk in the design process here. 

Abundance // Woods

Design 6

Balance 8

This played fine but had a built in feel bad. Obviously my unlucky friend hit three land with this on their first cast. He didn't want the Woods, 'tis why he cast Abundance. Going triple up on the thing you don't need and getting none of the thing you do need is not a recipe for a good time. I will likely drop it to 4 mana finding 2 cards but they can only be creatures. The alternative is a couple of cards at random returned from the graveyard... or perhaps by the opponent! I thought it would be fine drawing lands with this as all the other cards also can just draw lands. Turns out the fact that they are named in the mechanic makes all the difference. The land chance is artificially greater than it would be with normal draw and that brings with it resentment. 

The Inquisition // Fields

Design 6

Balance 7

This is clearly the lowest power of the cycle, and I tried to remedy that with instant speed... and failed. We were making clues, the lions share of the cost was already instant speed. That wasn't the issue, the shocking 3X +1 mana per card ratio is the issue. In the super late game where tempo is meaningless this can be pretty game breaking. Before then it is a lot less useful as card advantage. Being able to drip feed the clues over several turns helps with it being useable, but it doesn't do much for the raw power of the card or its tempo. There is also the issue with this card in that it is quite good at just making a lot of artifact tokens, The is is a one shot affinity super support card. With something like Urza or Tolarian Academy this is obviously nutty. There is nothing quite like that in the format but I am sure this card will limit design space or become problematic at some point. The fixes are all things that are sad and depressing. Like, it could go find X plains from the library, or it could cost XWW at sorcery and just make 1/1 Soldier tokens! That is after all how white sets about getting advantage much of the time. Basically X spells are just a little harder than normal cards to design, and the same is true of MDFCs, and they manage to be a multiplicative  effect!