MTG: January’s Custom Cards: Witness The Whiteness
WOTC Employees: This article is entirely about about unsolicited game designs, with example cards.
I partake of custom magic design over on a subbidy reddity thing over there, and I make good designs and sometimes, they do not appreciate them because, what, like, people have different tastes or whatever. One thing I’ve been trying to do of late is just do more stuff in general rather than give up on them, with some little once-a-day tasks to keep myself from falling into 2020’s rut of ‘what did I do all day?’ I’ve been seeing if I can find a theme I like, then building around it.
Presented then are the 31 cards of January, themed around the question of adding to white.
By default I’ll always be designing cards for Commander, and with the understanding that that format is not one with a power level banning situation but rather a casual banning situation. Things on the commander banlist are usually there for access reasons or for tedium reasons: They make the game boring and repetitive.
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- A flexible pre-emptive countermeasure to stop enters-the-battlefield effects.
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- A big removal commander that can do cleanup and close the game.
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- A powerful removal spell with a threat attached that plays with adventure mechanics.
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- A utility creature for monarch decks.
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- A powerful board clearer that becomes cheap in the extremely late games to clear clogged boards.
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- A card for rebuilding from board wipes.
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- A build-around card to reward white’s common tack-on effect.
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- A common utility effect in white that enables the monarch and protects it.
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- Building on my idea of letting white copy things.
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- Further building on white ‘copying’ – letting white copy an effect it wants regularly
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- More monarch enabling
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- A staxy card that encourages players to put things on the board.
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- Would you play Serra Angel? What if you got TWO of them?
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- Early threat that becomes late game dangerous
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- A defensive creature that threatens planeswalkers
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- Abzan-style enabler for double strike strategies
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- A white snapcaster mage riff
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- A mana intensive token engine
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- A slow flicker for pressure or value
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- A saga enabling card
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- More monarch enabling defensive creature
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- A repeated removal payoff for lifegain
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- A reinvention of the white Myojin with Ikoria counter technology
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- More ‘threat early, breakthrough late’ design.
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- A creature that encourages taxing opponents
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- More white copying with a funny theme
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- White’s idea of fairness, either catching up or levelling the playing field
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- Enabling white artifact strategies.
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- A complex commander that allows mystery attacking.
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- Card draw punishment in the vein of Hullbreacher
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- A commander for disrupting defensive positions.
One thing I learned from the custom magic subreddit about this, though, is that people are really inclined to measuring an optimal scenario for white cards. Devotion, for example, is always treated as if it is functionally infinite, as if a multiplayer commander environment isn’t this space renowned for board wipes and proactive removal.
It’s honestly really funny: Mono-white is underpowered and weak in a multiplayer environment, but at least as far as we’re talking here with custom magic creators, it can always get access to infinite resources to do what it wants to do. Weird!