Welcome to the fifth season of Pro Tour: You Make the Card! This is your annual opportunity to put your fantasy fantasy card design skills to the test for a chance at internet immortality. Over the next several months, this competition will push you to be the best designer you can be to see which of you can join the ranks of YMTC legends.
Logistics
Judges
Rumor
Mown
Dudibus
razorborne
Q is 564453 (as needed)
Contest Overview
This contest begins with seven week-long open entry rounds. Each round is separated by a week for at least three of our judges to rank the submissions. Should we only get two lists of rankings, I will step in and judge as needed. After those seven rounds have passed, the top seven contestants will secure their place in the quarterfinals. Then, a wild card round will be held, in which all users who participated in all seven open-entry rounds will have an opportunity to clinch the last slot. After that, it's a single-elimination tournament to decide who will be come the fifth champion of Pro Tour: You Make the Card!
Quarterfinalists
Shaz
Libe
ParadOxymoron
Riorvard
OlahZep
EpicLevelCommoner
Tevish Szat
CuriousHeartless
Pairings
Quarterfinals Criteria
New sets and blocks in Magic: the Gathering serve multiple purposes. One of those purposes is to get fresh, new, exciting cards into the hands of Magic players to get them to buy booster packs and make Wizards of the Coast copious amounts of money. Another purpose is to tell a story, and in order to tell a story, you must have a setting. And a classic way to establish the setting of a Magic: the Gathering set is through land cards.
This round, your objective is to design two land cards to help establish the setting of an upcoming set.
The first card must be a legendary land. As is typical of legendary lands, it must be an iconic or significant location in the plot of the set it is in.
The second card must be a part of a five-card cycle. Use this card cycle as a way to visit the various locations of the plane that may not be as crucial to the storyline, but more to describe the general feel of the plane.
Fortress of Morendau Legendary Land (R) : Add . , : Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature with the greatest power among creatures on the battlefield. Osvul II lacks his father's interest in military engineering, except for an understanding that the fortress' high walls are well-suited for throwing insubordinate servants to their death.
Traitors' Gallows Land (U) : Add . , , Sacrifice Traitors' Gallows: Traitors' Gallows deals damage to target creature or planeswalker equal to the number of Rebel cards in your graveyard. "A thousand of our brethren were murdered here. Tonight we send the king himself to meet them!"
Sorry, I just couldn't think of what theme I wanted to do so it was a slow process.
Qassr Al-Wadi, Royal Mausoleum Legendary Land ~ enters the battlefield tapped. : Add or , : Exile all creature cards from all graveyards. For each legendary creature exiled this way, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life. "A hundred generations of a hundred royal families lie in Qassr Al-Wadi. It is the only place in Al-Aalm where true peace and unity is known."
Bustling Street Market Land ~ enters the battlefield tapped. WHen ~ enters the battlefield, you may put a +1/+1 counter on target green or blue Legendary creature you control. : Add or "You won't find any riches beyond your dreams at the local markets. But you will find everything you may need, whether it be material or otherwise."
Please vote for the contestant you feel deserves to proceed to the semifinals based on their submission this round. The poll will remain open until Sunday, November 11. I will be reserving my vote for tie-breaking purposes. Best of luck, Shaz and CuriousHeartless!
Joined: Jun 04, 2014 Posts: 13017 Location: Freedom
Preferred Pronoun Set: they
alright so the fairest way to do this I think is to compare like with like and see what comes up.
legendary lands
Shaz's land seems a bit too powerful, but a little number tweaking should bring it into line. it feels a bit utilitarian for a legend, but the flavor's nice. CH's, on the other hand, has the sort of punch I'm looking for in a legend, and it ties its own legendarity with an implied set theme that works well. flavor is also very evocative. giving this to CH.
cycle land
for Shaz's, I don't love that this implies a cycle of lands that all tap for colorless. I know it's been done, but it's a lot of colorlessness, and the best example I can think of is the blighted cycle, which was done for specific set-based reasons. both your lands tap for colorless, but neither gives an indication that this is a colorless-themed set. for CH, I kinda like how it's a tapland with an upside that gives you extra benefits late game. I'm giving this to CH too.
conclusion
well, gave both parts to CH so I guess I'm voting CH. sorry Shaz, you know I love you but I don't think this was your best work and I gotta be as objective as possible.
Pro Tour: YMTC: SECOND ONE IS OVER STAY TUNED FOR THIRD ONE The BLOCK I'm currently pretending I'll finish:Fleets Of Ossia (complete!) | Wavebreak (complete!) | The Second Flood (in progress!) Razorborne and friends teach music theory to chumps like you:12tone
Joined: Sep 25, 2013 Posts: 11847 Location: Kamloops, BC
Identity: Male
Shaz's legendary land has much more exciting mechanics. Even if it were balanced to be weaker than the other card, I think I would enjoy playing it more. As a standalone card CH's Mausoleum has more evocative flavour (text). The cycle lands are a reversal. Shaz's card has better flavour but CH has the better mechanic. I don't even really know what CH's card says about the world or even why it's the colors it is. They have markets on this plane but all the exciting stuff happens elsewhere. CH's mechanic immediately makes me want to jam the card into a specific sort of deck. Shaz's Traitor's Gallows pairs a potentially exciting variable to a target that doesn't care when I make that variable super huge. That makes my Timmy sad. And it requires not just a specific tribe, but for them to be in a specific zone- not necessarily a bad thing, but it puts the card into unexciting development workhorse territory. That doesn't really give us a winner, does it? Let's take a broader perspective. I like the flavour throughline between Shaz's cards, but CH's cards give me an outline of the set's mechanics. Still no winner here. Going of of more personal-feely stuff I can't break down so very good, I'm going to give it to Curious Heartless.
*"To YMTC it up" means to design cards that have value mostly from a design perspective. i.e. you would put them in a case under glass in your living room and visitors could remark upon the wonderful design principles, with nobody ever worring if the cards are annoying/pointless/confusing in actual play
Shaz: The Fortress has a very strong ability, provided you can keep ahead (which this card can help with). Sort of wish it wasn't a targeted ability so that it couldn't be countered by killing the targeted creature or by making a different creature suddenly stronger, which would make this ability a lot more interesting and risky.
I really enjoy how Traitors' Gallows ask you to check Rebels for a whole different purpose. Might have been fun to count each graveyard, but keeping it to your own is probably the better choice. I do wish this land tapped for Red instead. I don't like that both of the cards you're putting up for your set are colorless mana producers only.
CuriousHeartless: That's a potentially very powerful repeatable effect, but it's also potentially very useless, and unlikely to do much after the first use. Still, at a high mana cost, you can keep graveyards empty of creatures all game long. I would hope this land is correctly telling me that the set is about graveyard shenanigans and legends so that this is one of the few in-set ways of dealing with those shenanigans.
I like the simplicity of Bustling Street Market. It's a green/blue producer that enters tapped. If you have a green or blue Legend, you get the bonus of making that legend stronger. Great. Nice and simple, and gets across the set's themes very well.
Vote: CuriousHeartless
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Quote:
"If you refuse to use rock, you will never beat scissors." — Galef, Dakka Dakka Forums
Yeah I'll fully admit my designs were a bit messy, especially on what connects Bustling Street Market to being Green. I was just totally blanking on any designs ideas or themes mechanical or flavorful until near deadline. I still put in an earnest effort but it was hard for reasons that maybe shouldn't have been.
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