New Magic set - Now with 100% more Substance
Another year, another 165 card set exploring the theme of the year's block.
Future Sight (the real one) will be about the future, whatever that means to Wizards. Time Spiral was about nostalgia (the past), Planar Chaos about alternat presents. While it wouldn't surprise me if Wizards snuck some future set cards into Future Sight, that approach didn't really interest me.
Instead, I tried to think of ways in which mechanics could combine or evolve to produce new ways of thinking about them. The core themes of the block - Madness, Rebels, Morph, Echo, etc - all got lots of explanations, but almost every mechanic ever printed in Magic (except some of the obviously abandoned ones - Banding, Phasing, Fading) shows up in some weird combination. The keyword density of this set is insane, probably more than Wizards would be comfortable printing. Several of the mechanics (notable Rebels ad Morph) would need some rules changes. Like that never happens.
With a few exceptions that are focussed on a temporal theme, every card has references to past cards in Magic. This actually represented an interesting design constraint, especially as I couldn't really coopt the ones TS and PC had already referred to. By the end, I felt that there were very few interesting reference points left to mine. There's also more bad puns in this set than usual...
Enough preamble. The cards are here. Feel free to post comments on the set or individual cards below. Usual caveats - mostly designed with limited in mind; tried not to break constructed and may have failed (or may be sneakier than you think). Thanks to Gavin for doing a quick beta and catching my more egregious mistakes.
Future Sight (the real one) will be about the future, whatever that means to Wizards. Time Spiral was about nostalgia (the past), Planar Chaos about alternat presents. While it wouldn't surprise me if Wizards snuck some future set cards into Future Sight, that approach didn't really interest me.
Instead, I tried to think of ways in which mechanics could combine or evolve to produce new ways of thinking about them. The core themes of the block - Madness, Rebels, Morph, Echo, etc - all got lots of explanations, but almost every mechanic ever printed in Magic (except some of the obviously abandoned ones - Banding, Phasing, Fading) shows up in some weird combination. The keyword density of this set is insane, probably more than Wizards would be comfortable printing. Several of the mechanics (notable Rebels ad Morph) would need some rules changes. Like that never happens.
With a few exceptions that are focussed on a temporal theme, every card has references to past cards in Magic. This actually represented an interesting design constraint, especially as I couldn't really coopt the ones TS and PC had already referred to. By the end, I felt that there were very few interesting reference points left to mine. There's also more bad puns in this set than usual...
Enough preamble. The cards are here. Feel free to post comments on the set or individual cards below. Usual caveats - mostly designed with limited in mind; tried not to break constructed and may have failed (or may be sneakier than you think). Thanks to Gavin for doing a quick beta and catching my more egregious mistakes.