Making a set, part 4

Unfortunately I was not able to mock up the cards that I have made and get some games in. This article is going to be about the direction the set is going and the challenges I already see on the horizon.

The first challenge is the amount of Phyrexian mana I want to have in the set. Ideally the Phyrexians have several tight cycles to show their unity. The Phyrexians are many different colors in the set. They take up the allied color pairs. They are fighting the Alarans, who are also many different colors, but who don't have as core an identity. The hope is that tight complete cycles of Phyrexian cards and the looser, less defined cycles of Alaran cards get that message across. The challenge is that the best way to convey the Phyrexians is through the use of Phyrexian mana. Dual color Phyrexian mana is very cool, but I don't think it has a ton of printable space. Remember, I intend for these sets to be capable of seeing print. The essential problem with multicolor Phyrexian mana is the identity of the cards involved. Phyrexian mana is supposed to represent a hybrid of artifact and colored spell. Having a card with P/U and P/B means that card is colorless, blue, black, and blue+black. That's a lot of options. As such, dual color Phyrexian mana cards will be used with the frequency of hybrid mana cards on Ravnica, ie one cycle at each rarity. This helps enforce the allied pairings without overloading on these cards that don't have too much depth. I would like to keep the Phyrexian mana card count low, so that means doing free spells is unlikely, but having cards that cross colors with Phyrexian mana is great.
So we need a cycle of:
1C cmc, (P/C) activation
and allied P mana cards.
at each rarity.
That totals 30 Phyrexian mana cards in the set. That feels like a good ratio, but it is a constriction since other Phyrexian mana cards is essentially locked outside the cycles.

The second challenge is going to be the similarity between Devour and Bulk. Bulk is essentially the reverse of Devour. Whereas with Devour you eat all the creatures you have already played, with Bulk your play more creatures and it grows the creatures you already have. They work on the same axis but from different directions. The challenge is going to be making the cards feel different enough and not just mirrors of each other within the same faction. It has been brought up that repeating mechanics to reduce complication is a bit foolhardy since new players have to learn the mechanic anyway. To that end, it might behoove me to just replace Devour. There isn't that much mechanical space left to explore. That would leave a hole for the Grixis+Bant faction. I'll try the first playtest with the Devour cards but I'll also be brainstorming ideas to replace it.

The third challenge is artifact density. In order to make Compleat work there has to be a lot of artifacts. Way more than usual. This is not hard to do in a set that has both Phyrexians and Esper, but the inflation in the number of artifacts might be too much. If greater than 50% of the permanents have to be artifacts than Compleat will probably have to change.

That's about where I'm at. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity to get the cards input into MSE and printed by this Thur/Fri and get some real feedback.

Thanks for reading!