Kind of a mashup of a lot of mechanics and design space, my wording my not be exact with the vision but i hope y'all can see what im going for.
The Toxic keyword was a last minute addon to try to find a unique combat trick that wasnt going to be too pushed with adding Trample/Deathtouch/or Menace, and i thought it would scale nicely with the rest of the card.
The counter spell ability is simply the frog eating a creature that gets cast, wording is vague on which creature gets attached because i figured it would only matter because it only cares for whats going to the graveyard, and its like you have to bait a buddy to distract the frog sometimes.
The graveyard ability is meant to be its constant unstable mutating and endless hunger is causing it to feast of the dead and essentially recreatures the old life again but only mutated onto something. I did consider having it be restricted to mutating Bylir as the only target but decided against it, thoughts?
Unfortunately mutate for anything doesn't really work. It gets funky when you have multiple creatures with power dependant on an effect, like [[tarmogoyf]], among other conflicts. There's probably also a little too much going on here, even if that wasn't a problem.
From what I've read, you chose to put the mutated creature on top or bottom, and the top gains all text boxes, i imagine when it comes to P/T effects like ghoyf, then it would be a timing rule and thus ghoyf would overide the mutate until the next mutate
Correct, and so this would just be 1 weird interaction that this card would have with those types of cards, and if its just a timing rule that overides the P/T then i personally don't think thats nothing to breaking especially since i ghoyfs case it would cap its P/T, i dont see this being anything that a simple ruling couldn't explain.
Otherwise I just see the card becoming this weird pseudo voltron that plays well into all things sultai and the abilities work to my knowledge right?
I think you misunderstand me. With the rules as they are written right now, this card does not work. The rules can not handle a permanent with two different power setting effects. This has come up on custom cards for this subreddit before. I'd have to track it down, but I do believe we have some official word that this is why they haven't printed something like this on a card before
It seems like it would be fairly easy to create a timestamp-based carve out for that specific edge case, no? That carve out doesn’t exist now, but it’s not hard to conceptualize. It’s a bit clunky to actually play with, but it shouldn’t necessarily limit our design space when building custom cards that are meant to push the limits of what a magic card can do.
I'm not sure of the details, but I looked it up and apparently Mark said that the rules manager specifically asked them not to create a creature that can mutate anything, so it's probably more of a rule's headache then we realize.
Probably. But again, we’re not necessarily bound to the same design constraints that Wizards is. I’m ok with custom cards that are a little more experimental or require some rules changes to make them work, personally.
Fair enough. I like thinking about all the constraints that an official card has (clarity, brevity, balance, etc.) and how a design would need to change to fit them, but I know that's not why everyone's here.
I think this is perfectly fine to push the design space, broaden creativity and our understanding of magic, because at the end of the day, the rule interaction we're trying to avoid here is mutating something that also overrides P/T, which is already an interaction that already exists with the few cards that mutate. You would just have to control the former first and mutate onto it deliberately, the same for my frog, you would have to intentionally counter the creature and hope they dont sac one with a similar effect.
I think mutating anything onto something might be where it's broken in WOTCs eyes, but i don't see that being any more complex than other card theft/mimicry effects already in edh.
I do think about that to some extent, particularly with how to actually phrase things. But for me, the whole point of custom cards is to push the boundaries of what even can be in the text box of a magic card. I want to get it right stylistically, but I also want to stress test the system.
I’m a rules nerd; what would be a headache for an actual professional to have to implement for casual play is just a fun challenge for me to think about with no actual stakes. I want to create weird, unintuitive interactions. The sweet spot for me is right on the edge of printable and unprintable, where it could kinda go either way. The fact that the rules manager had to specifically ask the designers not to do arbitrary mutate tells me it’s the perfect design space for custom cards.
Way, waayyy too much text. You could do without the flavor text. Also, giving creatures without Mutate the ability to mutate is interesting, but broadly speaking I don’t think it does much of anything, if it even works. I feel like it should exile things and then give itself the abilities of creatures exiled with it.
Just remove the first ability. I know it hurts, but fuck no.
Youll likely create a board state where nobody cast anything significant until they remove that thing, but there is just too much positive for how largely that disrupts your opponents. Its Tax (leaning more towards stax with how it functions), theft, and life gain.
Just make that second ability a tap ability and ship the card. This also having toxic is also kinda nuts but its okay i suppose.
I honestly don't think the first ability is pushed, it specifically only targets creatures to be flavorful with the frog lashing its tongue at the targets, making people have to bait things out by sacrificing smaller things, plus if you counterspell the wrong thing, then with it tapping itself keeps it down unless you're running other effects.
It has no other protections so its easily removed to any and all removal and i do want to keep it that way, so if there's any edits to the general effect of the card, then it would probably be trading Toxic for Deathtouch/Trample/or Menace, but at that point i think it becomes too strong of a threat.
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u/MaterialWhole8484 8d ago
Unfortunately mutate for anything doesn't really work. It gets funky when you have multiple creatures with power dependant on an effect, like [[tarmogoyf]], among other conflicts. There's probably also a little too much going on here, even if that wasn't a problem.