In a world of adventures and conspiracies, with competing factions of shape-shifting identity thieves, there is always a chance that something can go wrong, that even the best and most elaborate plan can be thrown into disarray. There is no magic you can lay out that’s so reliable it won’t have someone finding a way to pick at it, to undo it, to render all your own planning, your own strategy for nothing.
Sometimes it’s for the subtlest of reasons, the positioning of a Masqued knife in the right dinner meeting that means a careful machination simply fails to happen. Sometimes, a goon from another world can show up, and out of sheer pique, decide to punch you in the face.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
The theme of November is, as it was last year, NOvember. In any given set, you need a quantity of cards that constitute countermagic, protection, responses and removal, things that can infringe on an opponent’s plans both in general, and as a way of advancing their own plan. This is to make sure the game has some spirit of counterplay at work in it, and that’s why this month is where all the broad, utility countermagic, removal and otherwise ‘maybe that plan won’t work’ kind of cards gets to live.
It’s a tiny bit of a bad sign if you look at a line up of cards like that and think ‘oh gosh, some of these are so clever and cute’ and I worry that I have been too inclined to please myself. But hey, who you gunna please, otherwise?
We’re running out of room to talk about the remaining characters in the set, almost everyone on these cards has been mentioned before, and the flavour text mentions characters you know. There are three more legendary people coming up, but, spoilers, two of them can’t talk.
Cadoc, the Knight of Silence is a ghost controlling a specialised centaur-shaped husk who escaped from the Palace. I wanted to reference all the legendary creatures who could be seen as people (more or less) on the flavour text of other cards, and that’s why Cadoc is mentioned on Judge’s Herder. It’s normally easy to do that, to have a character quoted on another card, but Cadoc, uh, they’re a knight of silence? That means lore about Cadoc – like how they were a knight and rider pair, whose husks were put together for novelty’s sake – is nowhere to be found on cards.
Astar, the King’s Faceless is an agent in the pursuit of restoring the Horned King, an enemy of Gansukh directly. Their card has no room for flavour text (because it’s got Manifest on it!), but that meant to show the way they talked, the things they cared about and the rage they had to express at the unreasonable nature of an unfeelingly spitful and controlling avatar of death, had to show up on other cards.
Gan-Endel is one of Ullaine’s planeswalker victims, dragged into her confusing wake, and I like them a lot though I’m also a little unsure if she quite conveys the feeling she’s meant to. She wrecks things, steals things, recruits people, and if you don’t let her do it, she’ll punch you in the face. And yes, that use of she/they was deliberate, but good luck on my part trying to convey that flavour. I don’t know if she’s from Kaldheim or some other gaelic-themed plane.
Erhi is the other of Ullaine’s planeswalkers ensnsared in the wake of reckless love. Except Erhi is an extremely analytical, removed character, unimpressed with her surroundings and much more interested in pulling apart a single spell and understanding it perfectly than she is in understanding anything to do with the ways of wooing the paramours are trying. Don’t worry, she stays in the palace boats – they have good food and all – but mostly ignores the non-edible gifts people send her.
There are so many favourite cards here, doing things I find exciting and cute.
Oh man, I love this card. I love so much about it. I love the art I was able to find of this gleeful cackling asshole skeleton wizard. I love this useful little 1/1 menace creature, and the way the mechanics imply a spooky skeleton that wants to try and serve at the leader on the table, and the adventure where this skeleton goes out to try and weave a conspiracy against someone… and I love the mechanic of Conspire Against, where, in a multiplayer game, you need another opponent to be willing to not pay 0 mana.
An osteomancer is a wizard who can prophecy or draw magic from the power of bones, incidentally.
By comparison, Baleful Forfeiturre here is an absolute tome of text that’s designed for a very specific, challenging thing to do in as few words as possible. It’s a counterspell that deprives one player of a spell, but then in exchange, lets you and all other players copy that spell. Flash enchantments show up in this set more than a few times to represent the kinds of spells that you might see in Alchemy as instants that can maintain or memorise game information for the player.
Finally, here’s the second Totem Umbra Armor card that survived into the set. It originally had a much more rules-pushing text on it: As long as ~ is on the battlefield, it’s an aura attached to each creature you control and then with that, totem umbra armor. The purpose of it – being a pre-emptive protection to everything, that could also successfully protect multiple things if the things were destroyed simultaneously – was easily replicated without the totem umbra armor mechanic, and I guess it works out that it wasn’t nearly so complicated or likely to annoy people who talk about the rules on the subreddit.
I am also, if you’re aware, extremely resistent to what I call ‘Mel Candy.‘ Those are card designs that are interesting because that they exist at all; the first intersection of rules ideas, rather than caring about what those rules are representing or doing in a play space. You know, things like the sorcery speed counterspell or whatever. And for this one, I was very afraid I was approaching the Past King’s Masque.
This is one of the only cards that refers to the ruler of the Palace before Gansukh; the Horned King isn’t that king. The Horned King is a new god of death created from the plane itself, a vision of death as typified by the people of the outlands, that see death as a process of growth and rebirth, rather than a true tyrant like the vampire clans perceived the Palace’s purpose. But whatever the original king was, this is their last remnant, fabric from the palace that is both an idea, a gossamer immaterial that is a physical thing you can handle. Note that this equipment changes you and then dissolves, but you’re still, left behind changed.
I couldn’t think of a way to make this idea work outside of using the mechanics of a saga, with the natural procession of it, and having it be both an enchantment and an artifact. And while it feels like it’s a little unduly cute? I think this is the best execution on the idea, the notion that there are masques being worn at these balls that are made from the very material of the Palace of the Dead.
Oh and Green-Blue 5/5s for 3 Gang Rise Up.
The Usurper’s Palace (USP) is a collection of Custom Magic cards made with the general structure of a commander draft set. The cards are posted, one per day with different themes every month, to the Custom Magic subreddit, on my Mastodon and Cohost. Follow along for more!