Day 1: Unterior Decorating

Hey! 

If you haven't already heard The Great Designer Search 2 has begun! If you're interested in Magic design period, and you haven't yet read the introductory article by Mark Rosewater, then GET GOING MAN. 

Stop reading this right now and read that. 

In fact, I will forgive you if you get all caught up in what results from reading that and completely forget (or purposefully ignore) about reading this blog post. For sure, man.

Actually, you might say that anyone who's interested in GDS2 shouldn't be wasting their time reading something like this when they could be spending their time creating and viewing content for world/block designs. Well, I'd like to think that somebody could argue that reading this isn't a waste of time (Off topic: I notice that I don't usually make definitive statements about things that somebody else could have a different opinion on.). There's content in this blog post after all, and there are card designs below that could spark somebody's imagination into generating ideas they didn't have before.

If you still managed to read this and know what I'm talking about in terms of Great Designer Search 2, I thank you so much for your valuable time. Time is VERY valuable now. However, here's something relevant: My world/block page. It was mentioned on this wiki page. Also, I'm part of the Team Color Pie design team for this competition, which has a world/block page belonging to none other than MTG Color Pie.

Anyway, for those that know what I was up for a majority of these posts, I was completing challenges from the last Great Designer Search, and I stopped short of the Un-cards. I will not be continuing any further in my practicing since I'll be focusing on doing things that are actually for GDS2. For now, that's creating my world/block. 

However, I did mostly create four out of five cards. The existing four cards aren't completely complete, however. Just the concept and the text in the text box. The rest of the card is also very important for Un-cards (art and representation of the card), which is why these cards aren't technically complete. Here, I'll show what progress was done:

The art is supposed to depict very gentlemanly and ladylike players dressed in formal wear doing a musical-chairs sort of thing. I think the sophistication in times of silliness is funny, but it could be terrible. I'm no comedian. 

Anyway, the card is tricky in that you'd have to time the death of a player while that player is under the control of another player (i.e. not your seat). 

The last sentence solves the problem where, in a multiplayer game, the player removes all the cards they own from the game, normally. However, since a player can be controlled by someone else, and that player loses instead of the player that would normally lose, that would have meant you'd take your cards under the control of another player, and that person would be out of cards. Unless I forced either the player to get up out of his or her set to replace the losing player or to stay where they are and the cards all move toward him or her. Neither solution was desirable, so that's why that sentence is there.

For all those players that bemoan the existence of Baneslayer Angel. This mostly mirrors Baneslayer Angel, but I figured I didn't have to exactly antagonize it. I just needed enough to be able to do the job: completely answer her in many fun ways. Originally, I had the requirement to put Angelslayer Elemental onto the battlfeild be to yell out, "I will avenge you Serra Angel!", but I didn't want to have more than one card that involved yelling out. Speaking of which, that leads into my next card:

All right, I did a lot of research for this one. There's all sorts of references in here related to MaGo. Actually, too many of it focus on his many names, but whatever. It's all about him! And, no, I'm not some Cult of MaGo fanboy. I just thought it'd be refreshing to do a card design of him instead of the expected gravitation toward designing a card of Mark Rosewater (making fun of one of the people that are the "faces of Magic").

• The name "Mark Gottlieb, Ph. D." refers to his Doctor Wombat name on Magic: The Gathering Online and follows the same format as "Richard Garfield Ph. D."
• Since MaGo is MaRo's archnemesis, I put the mana cost using the colors that what I think a MaRo card wouldn't use. MaRo would be a blue/red (representing creativity). However, I'm not being fair to Gottlieb. He even stated in his last article that all his articles in his House of Cards column have been about being creative. So, I would put him in red/blue at least, as well, if I weren't forcing him to be in the role of being defined by being the archenemy of someone else. Also, I justified the mana cost with the abilities in its textbox. May or not be "stretching it".
• The "supervillain" thing is a fun class to put instead of "designer" since during his time as Rules Manager implied that he could be evil and bend the rules of Magic toward his bidding.
• "Agrajag!" is his Starcraft name.
• He has an affinity with Rabid Wombat. I'm not sure if it's his favorite card ever or not (I can't spend too much time trying to find the source that confirms this.), but he definitely likes this card specifically. It's also the only Wombat (besides changeling cards and Mistform Ultimus), so he's specifically look for this card until the day Wizards prints more Wombats. ...And I'm sure he wouldn't mind being able to search for those new guys. He is also called Wombat for his puzzle masters thing or whatever (Such apathy! If you're reading this, MaGo, I could say I'm sorry, but the apathy also permeates how I care about your feelings. ...Joke. It's a joke. Don't be sad.)
• The second part of that search ability helps a Rabid Wombat if you already have one.
• The final part is the coolest part. "Mago" appears on Spanish cards who have "Mage" in the title in the English equivalent. For example, "Meddling Mage" in Spanish is "Mago entrometido". And, in Italian and Portuguese, the creature type "Wizard" is "Mago". You can read about it in MaGo's article about his discovery of this fact here. In fact, this also cites the source of all other MaGo name references on this card.
• The second ability hoses all Maro cards, except for the weird Molimo, Maro-Sorcerer. And yes, how I did that second ability is a risk in that there could be Cults of Maros appearing in all sorts of places, which would defeat the purpose of hosing. Though, it's fun to think that there'd be one legitimate one out there. But, whatever. I'm not going to spend too much time trying to decide whether "0" or "number of Cult of Maros" is the correct decision. ...Oh, wondering what the Cult of Maro thing is? It references the Cult of Mago that sprung up in Wizards' forums after his last article. Here, read this wiki from MTG Salvation (Yeah, that's pretty much where you'd get all the information
• He played upon the "Rules Manager" title with "Rules Man(ager)" in this article.
• There's no specialness for the 3/3 bit.

I never did figure out what to put in the art besides Mark Rosewater somewhere in it.

This was the last card I was trying to complete (in terms of gameplay). I obviously never finished (I planned to make fun of Jace, The Mind Sculptor by having five abilities a'la Greater Morphling.). I incorporated black's power thing (money = power) with some green abilities to justify green-ness (I saw that there wasn't enough green representation in my cards). The ultimate ability involves counting the total US cent value of the counters on this planeswalker for some effect. Obviously, I still needed to figure out how I would control it going out of hand (stating certain coins can only be counted, restricting all abilities to only deal with coins with a value less than 25 cents, dividing the total by a large number, and whatever other options) because there are dollar coins in existence that would be adding 100 to the total per coin if used.

Go, go card house building! I like the tension of trying to outspeed your opponent while still carefully building a card house. I tried to state the rules text for a card house in a way so that people don't cheese their way through this challenge. Is this card still costed too little for the amount of cards you could potentially draw? I don't want it to cost too high so that players can play this more often. I tried to offset this with more mana symbols and reasoning that a gambling red part gives the chance of nothing, so the cost is lower.

I want the art to show the tortoise and the hare building card houses. The tortoise's house is clearly stable, yet underdeveloped, and the hare's looks almost done, yet, just about to fall over.

So, that's that. Erm, what else? Hmm... Oh! Yes. OxyFrog in the comments of my last blog post pointed out that my Shapeshifter lord doesn't actually work the way it does since Shapeshifters lose their Shapeshifter type when they're copied as another creature. I forgot this fact, which is no bueno. Thanks for helping me see that, OxyFrog!

Cheers,

Brad

Day -6: Picture This

These cards are in response to the challenge "Picture This" from the first Great Designer Search. To summarize, the challenge was simulating the situation of designing cards to fill in holes so late in development that all the art is already in. So, in addition to designing ten cards that each need to meet specific requirements, it had to match one of ten pieces of art provided.

So, here are the ten cards:

White (uncommon)

We need an answer to all the token making in the environment. Be subtle.

Clerics from Onslaught block are surrounding a fighting-type guy. This guy looks uncomfortable among his peers. I thought of him feeling ashamed, then tied the "flicker" effect to feel like he took a temporary leave of absence. And, of course, tokens cease to exist when they leave the battlefield.


My one concern is whether the fact that all tokens have the same name is too obscure for enough players to use this as a token-hoser.

White (rare)

We're looking for a weird Johnny-style enchantment

In addition to a guy in very white civilized clothes, there's a zombie in the background. This implies that there's some tango-ing with non-white creatures. One way to explain this is that these are the enemy creatures.

The challenge for the player is being able to keep up life-gain and managing the number of creatures you control to maximize your chances of triggering this ability. You'd pretty much have to build your deck around this card to accomplish this. Go, Johnny, go!

To make it feel more like random creatures from your opponent's army are swayed by your diplomacy skills, I had the opponent choose the creature. And it's more interesting that way. Bringing over the best creature from one side to the other can turn the tables quite a bit and the focus on this enchantment then fades away.

Blue (common)

We need a sorcery. No card filtering or drawing. No bounce (aka returning cards to hand).

This card shows the mage discharging two streams of magic. And there's blue hues. Thus, the two targets in this blue card. The mechanic here is like Sleep, but I wanted to tap into other card types to further explore the "sleep" effect. Of course, since it can affect noncreatures, the flavor was changed to simple holding magic. It's "nonland" to prevent players from keeping an opponent's mana base tied down.

Blue (rare)

We need a creature. Something splashy for Timmy.

Go, go, Shapeshifter lord! In the art, instead of showing the "real guy" and the "fake guy", it's actually the Doppelganger of the Urn (so, he's fake) passing on his copy to another Shapeshifter (great, another fake!).

Black (uncommon)

Make an aura you want to put on your own creatures.

I'm a little wary of whether the restrictions on this card aren't severe enough. First of all, your most expensive card will have to decide between being used for whatever it was summoned for (attacking, for example) and tutoring. Also, I wanted to make sure that whatever creature was enchanted really did feel like the superior one, as depicted in the art. Secondly, it's vulnerable being on a creature.

Black (rare)

The idea here is that you're given the gift of storytelling, entertainment, and humor (a jester's gift), but the "Fool's" part shows that it comes with just the opposite (Fool's Curse). The gift is also a curse. The curse slowly is killing the enchanted creature, which means that the zombie-looking guy used to not be such a zombie-looking guy.

Also, the enchanted creature is "entertaining" creatures from participating in combat (the crowd in the background), thus the exiling. It's not until the entertainer passes away that the creatures remember that they've got a duty to attend to. I would have put "can't attack or block" instead of exiling using joke counters, but that's more white. So, I took a page from the "faceless" book, and temporarily exiled them.

Red (common)

Instant or sorcery. No direct damage or destruction (artifact or land).

The red background and the emotions depicted on these faces tilted toward a red card for me. This card design is a little unorthodox is very much designed "top down". The moment here is being filled with rage after being informed that a fellow comrade has died.

Red (uncommon)

Creature. Want a build around me for draft (aka something that will encourage players to go down a path or paths he or she wouldn't normally had they not drafted this card early; examples of this type of card are Lightning Rift, Mark of Eviction andMomentary Blink).

The art depicts an Orgg. I love Orggs. Also, there are only four Orggs in Magic, and the most recent one printed was actually a reprint of the original Orgg in Time Spiral block. Wizards of the Coast, print another Orgg, please! But, anyway, yeah.

All Orggs previously have been rare and big. This has to be an uncommon. And uncommon red creatures are not typically 6/6. What to do? Bam, a baby Orgg, But, it has metal on its skin. Like a karate chop solution, the title explains that the metal is soldered on from melting down artifacts. We've got our build-around: artifacts!

And, finally, it's be sad to have your ever-growing Orgg be chump blocked for a while, or even killed by enough creatures. Thus, Intimidate is there! Besides, who WOULDN'T run from a monster with four metal arms?

Green (common)

Creature. Something that costs four or more mana.

This one was a toughie. The images here don't scream "green". For this art, the green cape hues, the hand-crafted weapons he's wielding, and the morph creature husk (I made it seem like it's just an artifact. It's hard to tell, so I could get away with it to the untrained eye.) were justifications for this being in green.

So, destroying an artifact, check. But, it needed something more. We already have Viridian Shaman for ETB artifact destruction (I'm hoping that this guy is fine at common depending on which environment he comes from), so I looked to the art for clues. He looked like he was surfing that explosion, so I thought of how he was riding along with a spell being cast to help him to his destination (landing on an artifact at instant speed!).

Green (rare)

Non-creature spell. Green's lacking in "wow" factor (aka something that will impress the player by how different it is).

The trick here was that instead of making it seem like that metallic object is breaking itself open to shoot out a beam of colorful destruction on a dude, you make it seem like that you broke the artifact yourself and caused it to rupture a beam of colorful hate from within itself. You just turned a metallic object on the enemy's side into your own weapon.

Since it has all the colored rings, I chose green for this since green's the color that is most in tune with dealing with all five colors, being the land color and mana-fixing color. And because it's a green spell, I needed you to depend on land types and having the different land types allow you access to those color's effects. 

I like how it's flexible for whatever green/X-color deck you want to make.

So, that's that. Now, to move on to the next challenge, which should be my most challenging, yet: Un-cards.

Cheers,

Brad

Day -8: Mythic Cycle

As you regular readers know, here's the final, optional cycle I've decided to do for the Great Designer Search 1's "Gimme Five" challenge.

For this cycle, I knew I wanted to do "big" spells. When I say "big", I mean spells like the the Decrees, Myojins, and the epic spells. That's why these cards cost so much. I don't want to give the impression that I think that "bigger is better" whenever I attempt to design something mythic.

Anyway, since I did two loose cycles and one tight cycle for the other rarities, I decided it would be fair to put the constraint on myself of a tight cycle. The types have to be sorcery, too, as another restraint (I haven't done the sorcery type, yet.) All the mana costs have to be the same, and there must be at least one thing they all do similar yet differently. And that was... choosing to do emblems. Here's a refresher on the rules for emblems.

Whoa. That's serious business. An emblem can't be touched by the opponent! And only planeswalkers give that! The ramifications, Brad! RAMIFICATIONS! It's O.K. I created these rules for myself when designing these emblem-giving sorceries:

• The emblem can't directly negatively affect the opponent. (Such as: "Your opponents skip their main phases.") The spell's effect can be negative for them, but not the permanent emblem effect. This is so that the game is still fun and doesn't feel "unfair." There are no answers to emblems unlike enchantments with cards like Naturalize.
• The emblem can't be used as a drawback for a "big" spell upside effect. (For example: "At the beginning of your upkeep, you lose 5 life.") This is because the cycle is supposed to sell sets. And having a drawback on what is supposed to be a really cool spell doesn't have as much appeal as a spell that's all upside (in terms of effects, not counting the mana cost and other costs). Sure, a spell with a drawback does more for less of a cost is great, but the audience that would love the spell (or go buy cards from that set) becomes more narrow. So, it has to all be big and positive, even if the cost goes higher.
• Lastly, the player has to work for it. The planeswalkers that give you emblems, like Elspeth, have to endure surviving all the way to their "ultimate" ability before giving out an emblem. It takes three to four turns to achieve this as long as they're unhindered among Elspeth, Koth, and Venser (those last two are from Scars of Mirrodin)

So, here's what I came up with:

Tight Sorcery Mythic Rare Cycle

This card is Final Judgment at eight mana (as a trade-off for the extra ability). This spell's one of the more straight-forward ones. 

As you'll see with the rest of the cycle, I ended up making the emblems do something once a turn for the rest of the game for you. However, I didn't want to do the upkeep because, by that time, after casting three spells, you won't be able to immediately reap the benefits of your hard work. Also, a few cards work better with "beginning of the end step" instead of "upkeep" triggers for their effects. 

Finally, the "Judgment" part of the name is both a nod toward Final Judgment (and Day of Judgment, inadvertently) and an aspect of a person. "Judgment" feels like it deals with the white slice of the color pie.

And here's the other straight-forward card. There's Decree of Annihilation's cycling, Bust of Boom/Bust, and removing a divinity counter from Myojin of Infinite Rage that all do the same effect. For the emblem effect, it was a little tricky to not make it feel green to get lands back from the graveyard (or to fetch for 'em), since I wanted the player to be able to recover if he or she worked for the emblem, but then I remembered Fossil Find. Hooray! Color pie intact.

The spell effect compares with Distorting Wake. Of course, if there weren't an emblem clause, this card would be strictly worse, but because it's there, I felt that I had to make the card so that, even though Distorting Wake has an advantage of being variable, it has one less target than Distorting Wake when 5UUU is paid. Four's still a lot, though.

While this effect is mostly on white cards, it doesn't mean green can't have it as evident with Fracturing Gust. O.K., so this one might be underpowered compared to its brethren when casted without getting the emblem. However, once that emblem is obtained, the potential is great. Depending on the deck(s), this could either suck or be totally "bah-roken". I feel like it'll tilt more toward the former, but it depends on the environment. Your friends' artifact deck won't like this. Decks built around cards from the Mirrodin and Scars of Mirrodin blocks (maybe not poison) would probably not like this either. As for everything else, I'm just not sure. Poor Green. It's still not easy being you.

This is the one I'm most excited and nervous about. This just might be purely broken. I know, I know, I should do playtesting of these cards. But, my whole Magic collection is in storage! So, what am I gonna do? Make a 60-card deck of index cards? Or... use certain programs that let you play Magic online without it being Magic Online? Craziness! (*cough*)

Anyway, with the cards in this cycle, white got rid of creatures. Red destroyed lands. And green dealt with artifacts and enchantments. That leaves one permanent type not affected: planeswalkers. I didn't want to create a card that specifically said it destroyed planeswalkers since it didn't feel right. Planeswalkers are powerful wizards, man! However, black has a couple cards in the form of Aether Snap and Vampire Hexmage that indirectly deal with planeswalkers. So, sweet. The fifth permanent type is not safe. 

I have no qualms with killing planeswalkers as I hate seeing how most of these cards are all upside, even in terms of their mana cost. This leads to prices soaring and many decks just needing to include them because they're so good, and they're mythic rare, to boot. Ugh. Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that there are planeswalker cards. Just how it all turned out has gone amiss in some way. ...I'm going on a tangent. Let's get back to the card.

So, dealing only with planeswalkers, what we have happening here is sapping every planeswalker opposing you and yours being fueled, if you have at least one, and if you got the emblem. Parasitism is black, indeed. For those of you that think the emblem might only be useful for that one single turn, don't forget that using any "minus" abilities on your planeswalker during your turn means you get to put them back on your planeswalker at end of turn. You could even put them on another planeswalker!

Yes, I am aware that if you end up doing the work to achieve this emblem and getting Sorin to 8 (He's gotta stay alive.), you pretty much win the game. But, that's a bunch of work needed to accomplish this. And you should win, then. Just like with any infinite combos involving Mindslaver.

And, yes, other ultimates will end up going off easily, too. If you get the emblem. And if you control a planeswalker with your opponent controlling one, too, with a decent amount of loyalty counters. Or if you control two planeswalkers. Good luck with that, sir or ma'am.

...Let's not forget those +1/+1, -1/-1, charge, and other types of counters you could redistribute! Wee.

Whew. Second challenge done. Eight days or so left until the Great Designer Search 2 begins. I've got my work cut out for me if I want to accomplish doing all the challenges of the Great Designer Search 1 before the sequel begins. So... HERE I GO!

Cheers,

Brad

Day -12: Common Cycle

For those of you just tuning in, I'm preparing for the Great Designer Search 2 (announced here) by going through the challenges that participants went through in the first Great Designer Search. This submission of cards is the common cycle for the three five-card cycles challenge.

The common cycle needed to be simple and easy to understand while not being too swingy in Limited. I chose to design a new keyword mechanic for this cycle as an easy way keep them interesting, and I hadn't done one for the uncommon or rare cycles. Because this new keyword mechanic is supposed to permeate all sorts of cards in the imaginary set they're from and not just these five commons, I needed to have the five cards to apply the keyword in some way, but in one of the most basic ways. Here's what resulted:

It's Friday Night Magic, and you're in a Limited game where you're in topdeck mode. You have a few creatures out, but you really need to draw a bomb. You take your turn and draw a... 2/2 bear. Great. Oh, wait a minute. This one has boost. Most likely, it's going to be at least a 3/3 with trample. Hooray-ish!

Part of the restriction of this challenge is that an effect may be used on no more than one card. I had a blue card in the enchantment cycle that granted flying, so that was ruled out for this guy. First strike and vigilance was used in the red card and white card of that same cycle, respectively. I didn't want to use lifelink because of how this creature's power is variable and this card might become too swingy for Limited. That leaves protection (of the common creature keyword abilities for white). So, why not?

Another spin on the common blue large serpent. 

I used Nether Horror for reference on power level. Traded a point of power and added a drawback in exchange for having boost.

Even making this guy a 0/1, I'm still nervous whether this is overpowered. I changed its creature type from "Goblin Warrior" to "Human Warrior" just to make sure that Goblins wouldn't abuse this too much because of the nature of the creature type.

So, there's my cycle. Finally, here's the third version of one of the cards from my rare cycle of cards, thanks to the responses of MTG Color Pie and my friend Josh.

Up next, mythic rares. After that, I finally move on to the next challenge. I gotta pick up the pace if I want all this done before September 29th!

Cheers,

Brad

Day -14: Sixteen Servings of Pie

At the end of his article last Monday, Mark Rosewater confirmed that the Great Designer Search 2 will have a written test followed by a multiple choice test.

Perhaps you want to practice by answering last year's essay test. Though, I imagine the subject matter of most of the questions this year will wildly different from last year. At least, if you don't know the answer to any of those questions, go ahead and figure out your answer. It'll be good for your understanding of Magic. Either you're reinforcing what you know or exploring something you never thought about before. Get the blood flowing and working for when you do answer GDS2's questions.

As for me, I'm rereading all the color pie philosophy articles by Mark Rosewater. There's one for every color and color pairing. That makes for fifteen articles. Oh, yeah. Then, the embodiment of the absence of color: artifacts. So, that's sixteen. It's important to know the color pie, and I believe these are good resources for learning about each individual part of the pie.

I'm also reading MTG Color Pie's take on the color pie in his MTG Color Pie Identity Project. I'm reading it because I believe it's useful to see others' views on things. As you consider others' two cents, it only solidifies your own, making them that much closer to darksteel cents. Or something.

And then there's these Magic Design Seminar articles I happen to have bookmarked. Supposed to help you design Magic cards better. I think. I need to refresh my memory, see?


Of course, there's a bunch of material everywhere that isn't on this list of stuff that would help you. But, what's listed below is what I'm using to help myself. You can, too, if you like.

Anyway, here's the links:

Great Designer Search Written Exam and Multiple Choice Test

GDS1 Written Exam Questions

GDS1 Written Exam Mark Rosewater's Answers

GDS1 Multiple Choice Test

GDS1 Multiple Choice Answers

Magic Design Seminars

"The 10 Mental Locks"

"Looking Within"

Color Pie Philosophy

White

Blue

Black

Red

Green

Green/White

White/Blue

Blue/Black

Black/Red

Red/Green

White/Black

Blue/Red

Black/Green

Red/White

Green/Blue

Artifacts

As usual, I have revisions to a couple of cards from my last submission of card designs. The Pulverize Progress card was bah-roken with the land destruction effect in there. And the Memory-Made Mantis card was only changed to feel more flavorful. These were a result of MTG Color Pie's helpful criticism. And, no, that's not why I mentioned his Color Pie Experiment articles earlier.

Technically, it's "mantises", but I'd rather not change the card name.

With the way the mana effect is done, you'll never get more mana than you started out with before you cast this spell. Either X will be too small, or the countered spell's mana cost will be too small. The most bang for your buck that you can get is two mana less than what you paid when you cast this spell. I think that's legit.

Cheers,

Brad

Day -15: Rare Cycle

Here's my rare cycle submission in response to this challenge from the last Great Designer Search. I looked over carefully the requirements of the test to make sure whether or not they specified that the cards had to be monocolored. I didn't see any such rule, thus, I went ahead with my idea for four-color cards, each card in the cycle having a missing color.

But, these aren't like the Nephilim cycle. I used hybrid mana symbols to allow for greater flexibility in what colors to use for the spells. (For example, a (W/U)(B/R) cost can be paid with WB, WR, or UR) Also, I decided to make them X spells. And, they had to be instants because of my simulation of the challenge.

One challenge of having these restraints is to have card effects that, no matter what colors were used, still matched up to what those colors can do according to the color pie. The first decision I made was pairing ally colors in the hybrid mana symbols. Then, for each hybrid mana symbol, I needed to know what both colors had in common so that no matter what color was chosen, it'll still be O.K. For example, white and blue both share the flicker effect (though, in this list, it's all white cards) as seen in the cards Turn to Mist and Mistmeadow Witch. I did use the flicker effect on one of the cards in the cycle, in fact. So, I turned to Gatherer to find all the hybrid cards for each ally-color pairing to find out what each color did to get a list of effects I could do for each color pair.

Another challenge was to have effects that accommodated the scalability of the X-ness of these spells. But let's see the cards already:

Rare Instant Tight Cycle

(Note: I decided that having the same mana cost and the same X component with four-color hybrid shenanigans meant this could count as a tight cycle.)

I believe this is the weakest card of the cycle, but I could be wrong. This is the card I used the flicker effect on.. For the black/red part, in case you didn't get the throwback from the title, I chose the common effect seen in the card Scar. There's synergy here in that you could save your own creatures from the -1/-1 counters being placed on them. 

However, there's two variables here (at least): how many creatures of your own can you save and how many -1/-1 counters can be placed on each creature. I solved this, which happens to also temper the possibility of this being too powerful, by requiring you to flicker your opponents' creatures as a meter for how many counters to place. (Those -1/-1 counters are permanent, after all.)

Both blue and black do milling, and I copied Giantbating's placement of red and green creature tokens (except those were temporary, and I made my token permanent). However, I didn't want a Giant creature token, so among the sea of many red/green hybrid cards that had Goblins and Giants, I found Giant Solifuge, an Insect. Perfect!

Again, there's two variables: The amount of milling and how big the creature could be. I didn't want to be boring and tie the X value to each effect (only two cards in this cycle do this), so, as you can see, the milled cards' mana symbols were incorporated. Besides, I need the two different mechanics to work together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts (which was one of the criteria that they were judging on for this challenge). In this case, the reason for the milling mechanic is that it's an insect manifested from the memories of a planeswalker.

So, how big does the insect normally get? Well, I only did a rough estimation, so I figured that about two-thirds of the cards revealed will be nonlands. And, of those cards, you'll get around three mana symbols on average. So, on average, if you paid 5 total mana, you'll get a 3/3. But, I could be way off.

Yes, the flavor is you eating the creature. But, it's for nourishment! This one's the most "boring" card as dealing damage and gaining life is quite obvious for their black/red and green/white color pairs. But, they're perfect to go together since the effects mirror each other. 

There are existing cards like Death Grasp, Drain Life, and Heat Ray that are similar to this card. Let's compare with Death Grasp. 

It costs the same amount of mana, but you straight up gain the life. What's with that? Well, that's because it's a sorcery. This one's an instant, so something's gotta give. So, in exchange for being an instant, Loathsome Lunch can only target creatures. And in exchange for being flexible in the colors that could be spent on this spell, it has a condition for whether you can gain that life.

Heat Ray is an easy comparison in that it also does X damage to creatures, it's an instant, and you also pay a red to do it. So, obviously, paying an extra mana means you get the benefit of another effect. Hooray, it's still balanced. And then there's Drain Life, but I think you get it by now.

This card counters the way it does because white and blue both have counterspells that do the "lapse effect". The other ability, destroying lands, stumps the opponent's mana base. 

So, what happens here is a three-way wonderfulness of blocking the opponent from progressing. There's stopping the spell temporarily, there's replacing their next draw with that same card, and then there's the possibility that they won't be able to cast that spell again because of the lost lands. Hooray!

But, destroying lands is serious business. That's why it's half of X, rounded down. So, to destroy two lands, you'll have to pay six mana. That's like Rain of Salt. Except, you know, this spell is better. But, in my defense, Lavaball Trap costs 8 for an instant, but it also does 4 damage to each creature. Last I checked, that's more than the two extra mana spent to get this additional effect. Which narrows down the land destruction being pretty much O.K. I know the fact that you could scale the spell with X means the card should have a bit less power, but it's fine. I'm just "pushing the power level" in this case, if anything.

This one's "interesting decision" comes with when to cast this card. You could cast it during your turn to gain unblockable beefed creatures (possibly), or you could cast it during your opponent's turn as a combat trick and get some card advantage (possibly).

I included the "at random" clause because I didn't want the opponent to choose what benefits you get. They'll always choose the worst one for you. Luckily, revealing cards at random seems to be perfectly O.K., anyway.

So, that's all the cards. On a side note, I think of my card names like fancy playtest names. They're not something like "Insect Mill" or "Counterspell Land Destruction", but neither do they seem to be finalized card names. That's O.K. They're not important, but I still try hard, for some reason. Somebody slap me or something.

Two cycles left: common and mythic.

Cheers,

Brad