Making a Mess

Hello everybody! Welcome to episode 166 of Ominous Designs, were we make big cards for wacky casual games. I took both of those out of my vault, and this is probably as much introduction as you need! The two cards don’t have a ton in common so let’s just have a look at them.

Begetter of Singularity

This one is definitely the bigger and messier of the two. What we have here is a huge Eldrazi creature that will exile everyone’s cards from their hands when cast, keep them all nice and warm under it.

What happens next will surprise you… Every turn, the massive 5/9 returns one of the cards at random to the active player. You are going to end up playing your opponents cards, which is always fun. I can tell people are going to complain that the effect is too symmetrical though, unfortunately I couldn’t fix that in few enough words to fit in there.

Kerathan War Axe

I wanted to create an equipment with multiple colored activated abilities. I very much did so here, making sure there is also an initial, static and colorless bonus of +2/+2 for all.

With Jund colored mana, the war axe temporarily gives the equipped creature deathtouch, first strike or trample, most combinations of which have deadly synergies. Keeping that in mind I decided to make the sword easier to cast but one more to equip than a sword, to prevent endless attacking and blocking with first strike and deathtouch.

That is all for the day! Hope you are excited as I am at the idea of testing those in a commander game. They should be a ton of fun.

Do let me know what you think and I will be sure to answer and maybe talk about it next week. Until then have a great time and play responsibly!

United Colors of Colorless

Hi all! Welcome to another edition of Ominous designs, episode 116 to be precise. This week’s making of episode is already accessible on Responsible Gaming youtube channel for you to see. Today, following the Oath of the Gatewatch release, we are going to look at colored devoid creatures with abilities using the new colorless mana symbol. I am loving those and I want more of them!

Void Born Replicator is the first one.

This one is very simple to understand. He is the Eldrazi cousin to Kiki-Jiki and the recently banned Splinter Twin.

In classic Eldrazi tradition, replicator at the same time has a competitive body and a very potent ability that uses the colorless mana to justify its power level.

On the other hand I am reasonably happy that using a mana to activate will protect it from being abused the way similar cards have been.

Æther Eraser.

If you watch the video you will see me go back and forth a bunch on this design. Part of it was a top down design from the picture, with the theme of the week in mind.

I tried to make eraser be a hate bear, but this is the closest I got. Just like I said for replicator though, eraser has good stats and a powerful ability fueled by colorless mana. I don’t think it is bad and I don’t think it is too powerful either. Being able to remove an enchantment each turn is ok, it would have been much wilder to remove artifacts that way.

Simple, yes? Those are your designs for the week, I hope you liked them! I think they look good, hopefully they are reasonably balanced as well. Do let me know what you think and comment anywhere, social media or streaming services. Next week I’ll be announcing my upcoming holidays but we have one more article before that.

Until then, you all have a great week!