Big meanies

Hello everyone, happy new year! Welcome to this 113th episode of Ominous Designs. This blog is the last item on my rebranding task list, and I have been working a lot for that recently! As I have mentioned last week, you can now follow Ominous Designs at Responsible Gaming, on both facebook, twitter, even live on twitch and youtube! As usual from last episode and onwards, you can check out this article in the making as an episode on youtube here.

Today’s theme is bad, mean, not good villains, mostly casual and commander focused. Here we go!

Underwold Preacher is a fun one.
Whenever anything comes back from a graveyard, he will reanimate something else of the same permanent type for you.

I assume this will mostly be useful with other reanimator cards, though right now I’m thinking it’s also quite awesome with things such as Persist, Undying and Unearth.

If you push it a bit, it can also be used with Crucible of Worlds or Obzedat’s Aid. Note that preacher will also do fun things whenever your opponent reanimates things themselves.

Merciless Demonlord.
I wanted a splashy black bomb. And boy is it one!

Demonlord says whenever a creature enters the battlefield, destroy it. Just like that. The only similar effect I could find out there was Lethal Vapors.
I pondered the fact that it mostly means no more creatures, which isn’t quite as bad as Deathbringer Regent‘s ability, and still leaves the door open to some enter the battlefield shenanigans.
At the end of the day I think the game can survive a flying demon for 7 that says no more creatures, but it would definitely be fun for casual.

Those are your cards for the week! Creating my Responsible Gaming is definitely a bunch of work but I’m slowly getting the hang of it. I got some amazing logos made for it, and I’m quite happy with the state of the youtube channel already. Obviously you can expect a lot more progress to come.

Hope you’ll enjoy all of today’s content; do check out the videos, especially the latest one that I tried to keep shorter, and let me know what you think! I’ll be seeing you next week, until then have a great time.

Fallow Me

Hi everybody! I have a lot of news for this last post of the year so let’s get to it.

First, I just received my 2015 blog recap which you can find here. I was delighted to see that I had over 4 thousand views this year, most coming from the US but also a lot from Canada, Brazil, France and Germany. I was also pleased to see that my biggest daily post got over 175 views in a day, and it was not due to some referral anomaly but one of my solid designs of the year, Gruesome Sentence. Similar comment applies to my most viewed article of the year, which features two simple designs inspired by Magic Origins. Last trivia fact, I only missed my deadline and posted on a Thursday instead of a Wednesday 3 times for the whole year!

I am now going to keep the last piece of news for the end of this article, and proceed to introduce this week’s theme: the brand new mechanic Fallow – see terrible pun in the article title. The idea with Fallow is that you can discard a land as you cast the card, to get some extra effect. Simple! Now the cards themselves.

Plan for the Future is the first. Green uncommon.

Adding an extra effect to a fetch land when you discard a land is a trick that came very naturally to me. Plan for the Future starts as a Sorcery speed Rampant Growth, but there’s a twist…

If you discard a land as an additional cost, you get yourself a second land, this one in your hand. This is Cultivate for 2 and a land discarded.

Allegedly discarding lands isn’t what you want to do when fetching lands but if you look at it like a bonus, it’s an added fixing effect for your ramp.

Storming the Burning Fields. Red rare.

The idea of a damage spell as well as the name was given to me by follower Magstarcraft.
I actually quite like the idea of a spell that can switch between dealing 3 to one creature and to the whole board. I think even at sorcery speed and sometimes costing you a land, it is still a fairly powerful and very flexible spell.

The reason to discard a land isn’t the most obvious but I figured that it could be an affordable cost. Ideally such things would be supported in a block containing the fallow mechanic.

Harsh Sovereign is our common of the day.

One of the tricky part about this new mechanic is there won’t be unlimited access lands for you to spend into fallow in a regular game of Magic.
Plan for the Future doesn’t actually cost you a land, and Storming the Burning Fields is situational. Harsh Sovereign himself is a reasonable creature, with a nice upside if you do have a land ready to be fallowed.

Drain for 2 is a 4 points of life swing, not too shabby for a common. 3 Would get us into Siege Rhino territory!

And those were the cards for this 112th article. Now for the big news… You have known for a couple of months that Bullzzai will be rebranded to Ominous Designs. Well there is something even bigger on the way, and it’s coming fast. Responsible Gaming is a new Channel that I am now starting, and it will include Ominous Designs as well as hopefully a bunch of other Magic and other gaming content.

As an opening act I have started live streaming on twitch – see link here – the making of my weekly articles. I also made this episode accessible offline on my Youtube Channel, here. You can finally see my weekly process and hear some of the reasons motivating my choices! Lucky you. I still have a bunch of things to put in order, such as logos, templates, and finishing the rebranding of Bullzzai, but you can already start following my channel and find Responsible Gaming on Twitter and Facebook.

I hope you like all of this new content! I had a great time setting all of that up, and I have yet more to do. Let me know if you have any advice or feedback, I’ll be sure to factor that in for my future work. I’m quite excited with it all.
I’ll be seeing you next week now, you all have a great new year!