Earlier in the Summer a bunch of my friends and I all got together and decided to make a set. Since then it's been mostly me working on the project, and I'm actually at a point where I probably need help, since I'm at a weird place where I sort of have a good grasp of what each thing needs, but I currently have too many cards, too many unused art ideas, too many incomplete cycles, etc.
The idea was to make a set which focused on the 5 Color Wedges of the color pies- the enemy color combinations from Apocalypse, and featured in the first Commander set. The idea was that rather than making a new plane of existance, focus on the mythology of past cultures from around the world (so kinda like Kamigawa). Each Wedge would align with one culture.
We decided upon the following culture/color combinations:
(*Started as Mayan, but not surprisingly there is more fantasy art online depicting Aztec themes than Mayan themes, so at this point it's a messy blend that only snobby historians would recognize.)
Early on the decision was made that it would be a set that focused on -1/-1 counters (like Shadowmoor or Scars of Mirrodin) rather than +1/+1 counters, since they can't both coexist within the same block. This had lead to a few interesting choices, but it's gotten to the point where I just need to design cards with +1/+1 counters, but can't because of that restriction. Designing creatures that grow is way more difficult with that restriction.
At this point I'm designing the 5 separate sets for Sealed. You'd pick a Culture, you'd receive one predetermined booster with specific cards from the culture (mana fixing artifacts, mana fixing lands, mythic artifact, mythic creatures, etc.) and then 5 random boosters within that set. So if you pick Mayan, you get a predetermined booster just like everyone else that picks Mayan, then 5 random boosters within the Mayan set itself.
Afterwards, I might select 360 of the total cards and put them into its own 360 BOO Draft.
After a while I settled on each Wedge getting 250 cards, namely due to the high volume of cards I've already designed.
At this point, I have the final set skeletons, and I'm slowly filling in the gaps for some sets, and hunting on Google Image for the artist on the pictures I forgot to get the artwork for.
Here's the basic playstyle/flavor of each Wedge:
Egyptian
Pharaohs, Sphinxes, Mummies, Skeletons, Slaves, Jackals, etc. Focused on a slower game, with a lot of power late game, through recursion and other strong effects. A bunch of cards become stronger as long as there is a Pharaoh out. I have some cards that fit with the workers/Pyramids theme, but that's incomplete. A lot of the Mummies have moved into the color white, and the skeletons (and a few Mummies) have basically the same wording as Gravecrawler as their recursion mechanic. A lot of the Jackals (that look like Anubis) work the same as Slivers. Anubis, Horus, Isis, Osiris, Thoth, Slobek, and other gods are all featured.
Mayan/Aztec
Coatls, Rituals, Sacrificing, Jungle Warriors, Temples/Pyramids, and Underwater themes. This wedge has no focus; there's a few hyper aggro cards, a few tempo cards, and some controlling cards. There's two new mechanics: Mindleech creatures, whenever they deal damage, they make wach opponent discard a card and you draw a card, and Tribute, which lets you pay mana/life/sacrifice a creature to return Ritual spells to your hand.
Native American
Hunters, Trackers, Trappers, Spirits, Wolves, etc. all ranging from the forests, plains, rivers, mountains, and tundras of the United States. There's a lot of tempo oriented cards, as well as a couple of aggro cards and controls cards. One of the new mechanics is Track; whenever a creature with Track deals combat damage, you put a Track counter on any creature. Some of the creatures have positive bonuses to creatures you control with a tracking counter on them, some have negative effects for opponents' creatures that have track counters on them, etc.
Celtic
Humans, Elves, Faeries, Spirits, Banshees, etc. This set focuses a lot on the midrange strategy, and there's a lot of tokens involved. Since a large portion of the Faeries/tokens are 1/1's, a lot of strategies are designed to let 1/1's win in combat. There's also themes of either light/dark woods. One cool mechanic is permanently turning permanents into lands or vice versa, for good or bad.
Norse
Vikings, Valkyries, Dwarves, Giants, Trolls, Kraken/Serpents, Dragons, Elves, etc. Very much the most aggro oriented of the wedges, the Vikings are designed to hit hard and fast. One mechanic I'm toying with is bringing back Super Haste, from Unhinged, and blending it with the Pacts from Future Sight. This lets you attacks for free with haste your creatures, but then you have the steep upkeep cost next turn. Another mechanic that my friend suggested is Sailing, and currently it needs more work since atm it only makes land Islands in addition to other land types, which goes with other "Islands matter" cards.
I would like input because after spending two months working on this alone, it's becoming very difficult for me to shape all the ideas into unified cycles, and equal 250 card sets with an equal number of color/rarity/card type distributions.
Here's a sample of some cards I've made (many of these have been/are currently being reworked, so they're not final by any means):
I kinda hate multicolour sets (or at least heavy emphasis ones) but I have to say I'm pretty excited for your apocalypse style colour pairings set in our mythology.
I loooooove egypt as RBW and I can't wait to see more out of the alien unknowable BUG plan out of the mayans.
My council to you is that, first you have to draw a set skeleton, which is a table with card color / rarity distribution. Drawing the skeleton is very important as it gives you a idea of how many commons, uncommons and rares you need for each color and color combination.
After drawing the skeleton you have to 'fill it' with your card's ideas. It is also very important to keep the curve smooth (for limited's sake) and the balance of each card type when filling the skeleton. You don't want a set with too many expansive cards in certain color or a color that don't have a sufficient number of creatures. You can always take some set's skeleton (like shards of Alara) as base and change it as you wish.
About your wedge mechanics, i suppose there are two paths you can take. You can do a classical multicolor set were you just try to naturally combine the color's mechanic (this is more like Invasion and Ravnica) or you can create a overarching theme for each wedge and base your cards on this theme (this is more like Alara).
I started doing the whole 'overarching theme' scheme but decided i actually didn't like it very much (studying Alara to learn how to make a wedge set i kind grew some dislike with it's direction). It seems you, as me, are taking the more classical approach.
If I can give my advice to you, as someone who is engaging in the same kind of set as you're, is that the first thing you have to do is answer 'how those 3 colors combine in terms of gameplay ?'. In other words, what part of white pie plays well with red and black ? What part of blue goes well with green and red ?
Answering those questions was the turning point for me. In some wedge it is pretty easy (URG, WUR, WBG) in others it was very tough (WBR, BUG).
My council to you is that, first you have to draw a set skeleton, which is a table with card color / rarity distribution. Drawing the skeleton is very important as it gives you a idea of how many commons, uncommons and rares you need for each color and color combination.
After drawing the skeleton you have to 'fill it' with your card's ideas. It is also very important to keep the curve smooth (for limited's sake) and the balance of each card type when filling the skeleton. You don't want a set with too many expansive cards in certain color or a color that don't have a sufficient number of creatures. You can always take some set's skeleton (like shards of Alara) as base and change it as you wish.
About your wedge mechanics, i suppose there are two paths you can take. You can do a classical multicolor set were you just try to naturally combine the color's mechanic (this is more like Invasion and Ravnica) or you can create a overarching theme for each wedge and base your cards on this theme (this is more like Alara).
I started doing the whole 'overarching theme' scheme but decided i actually didn't like it very much (studying Alara to learn how to make a wedge set i kind grew some dislike with it's direction). It seems you, as me, are taking the more classical approach.
If I can give my advice to you, as someone who is engaging in the same kind of set as you're, is that the first thing you have to do is answer 'how those 3 colors combine in terms of gameplay ?'. In other words, what part of white pie plays well with red and black ? What part of blue goes well with green and red ?
Answering those questions was the turning point for me. In some wedge it is pretty easy (URG, WUR, WBG) in others it was very tough (WBR, BUG).
This is basically my skeleton for Rarity Distribution:
Each Wedge would follow this pattern. At a certain point I was going to insert a few more rules, like 33% of the instants had to be removal spells, 50% of the enchantments would be buff auras, etc. Probably the hardest part about sticking to this shell is that Rares and Mythics are way easier to design than Commons and Uncommons.
Based on the way we first came up with the idea, flavor/theme is going to be like the Alara block. Bant = three allied colors with the themes of aiding one big knight. Similarly, it would be the same as Egypt = three enemy colors all focusing around life/death, building Pyramids, etc.
When I set up the color/rarity distributions, I used Return to Ravnica as the basis, since I feel like the Alara block focused too much on multicolored cards. Drafting that set was awkward because drafting decisions were made based on color (specifically having multiple colors), not the cards themselves. For the mechanics, it's going to be more like creating multiple mechanics based on the color combinations and/or what the mythologies/races of each Wedge is, rather than one overarching keyword like Exalted or Unearth.
I also added some sample Norse cards above if anyone is interested.
Looking back for samples made me realize just how many cards I have without the Artist credited. I'm probably going to start most of the project from scratch to compensate for this. (It also means I need to go through the 1,223 pages from this site, where I got a good majority of the awesome art.)
Here's an updated Set Skeleton (this is 251 cards per Wedge):
Everything is distributed the way it should be, I think. In the Rare 2 Color slots, since there's only 3 card type rare slots for each two color combination and there's 4 total card types available, I changed it a bit so that each color combination has a part of the cycle based on the available card type: Enchantment, Instant, and Sorcery. So for instance, in BG for ZMayan, you might have one Rare Creature, one Rare Enchantment, and a Rare Sorcery, while in UG you will have one Rare Creature, one Rare Instant, and one Rare Sorcery, while UB has one Rare Creature, one Rare Enchantment, and one Rare Instant.
Wedge doesn't work as a theme for a set. It barely even works as a theme for a commander product. What makes each wedge unique? What mechanics and flavour do all three colours share? These questions aren't answerable for two of the three wedges (GUB and RWU) as the colours are just too different or share mechanics that don't work as a set theme.
It is also common curtesy (and expected if you want serious comments) to post text versions of renders in spoiler hierarchy (but no more than two or three levels deep).
I've explained my choices for Wedges in the OP. Essentially, we first picked 5 cultures, and we process-of-elimination assigned one wedge to each culture afterwards. For example, our thinking would go like "well UGBhas the feel of jungles (Green and blue) and the Mayan culture has a lot of death and sacrificing, so that would be B". Another example would be "Vikings are all about aggression and attacking, so that would be Gruul RG type colors, however historically they were sailors, so that fits U. U also matches Norse mythology with all of the serpents, krakens, sea monsters, etc."
We felt the overall flavor of the color wedge identity matched the culture we picked it with. If you really want an article on why each color combination matches the culture, and why each mechanic and flavor matches, I can write that later.
Valid point on the text spoiler. When I have the time I'll edit the OP to have text spoilers for the sample cards as well.
In terms of the set, two progress notes: A friend suggested a way for me to back-trace the photos I have that I forgot to get the artist credit, so I should be able to add more cards that way, and I fully finished my set skeletons, so I have 5 individual 251 card .MSE files that have all the color + rarity + type distributions already built in. At this point it's filling in the blanks, and gradually the set will be complete.
There's not a whole lot of poll data, but it's good to know that currently there's an equal distribution of interest in the 5 cultures.
I'm getting very close to being done. Here are the Celtic cards. Note: a few cards still need a card name, and I want to make some tweaks and changes with names and flavor text but the cart art and card design of all 251 is essentially done.
What do you mean wedge doesn't work as a set theme? It absolutely does, even mark rosewater has said that wedge is a 100% viable set theme. In fact, he has hinted that we may see an actual wedge block soon. Rwu and Gbu wedges do have design space as the many fan made wedge blocks attribute to.
The idea was to make a set which focused on the 5 Color Wedges of the color pies- the enemy color combinations from Apocalypse, and featured in the first Commander set. The idea was that rather than making a new plane of existance, focus on the mythology of past cultures from around the world (so kinda like Kamigawa). Each Wedge would align with one culture.
We decided upon the following culture/color combinations:
WBR: Egyptian
BWG: Celtic
RUW: Native American
URG: Norse
GUB: Mayan/Aztec*
(*Started as Mayan, but not surprisingly there is more fantasy art online depicting Aztec themes than Mayan themes, so at this point it's a messy blend that only snobby historians would recognize.)
Early on the decision was made that it would be a set that focused on -1/-1 counters (like Shadowmoor or Scars of Mirrodin) rather than +1/+1 counters, since they can't both coexist within the same block. This had lead to a few interesting choices, but it's gotten to the point where I just need to design cards with +1/+1 counters, but can't because of that restriction. Designing creatures that grow is way more difficult with that restriction.
At this point I'm designing the 5 separate sets for Sealed. You'd pick a Culture, you'd receive one predetermined booster with specific cards from the culture (mana fixing artifacts, mana fixing lands, mythic artifact, mythic creatures, etc.) and then 5 random boosters within that set. So if you pick Mayan, you get a predetermined booster just like everyone else that picks Mayan, then 5 random boosters within the Mayan set itself.
Afterwards, I might select 360 of the total cards and put them into its own 360 BOO Draft.
After a while I settled on each Wedge getting 250 cards, namely due to the high volume of cards I've already designed.
At this point, I have the final set skeletons, and I'm slowly filling in the gaps for some sets, and hunting on Google Image for the artist on the pictures I forgot to get the artwork for.
Here's the basic playstyle/flavor of each Wedge:
Egyptian
Pharaohs, Sphinxes, Mummies, Skeletons, Slaves, Jackals, etc. Focused on a slower game, with a lot of power late game, through recursion and other strong effects. A bunch of cards become stronger as long as there is a Pharaoh out. I have some cards that fit with the workers/Pyramids theme, but that's incomplete. A lot of the Mummies have moved into the color white, and the skeletons (and a few Mummies) have basically the same wording as Gravecrawler as their recursion mechanic. A lot of the Jackals (that look like Anubis) work the same as Slivers. Anubis, Horus, Isis, Osiris, Thoth, Slobek, and other gods are all featured.
Mayan/Aztec
Coatls, Rituals, Sacrificing, Jungle Warriors, Temples/Pyramids, and Underwater themes. This wedge has no focus; there's a few hyper aggro cards, a few tempo cards, and some controlling cards. There's two new mechanics: Mindleech creatures, whenever they deal damage, they make wach opponent discard a card and you draw a card, and Tribute, which lets you pay mana/life/sacrifice a creature to return Ritual spells to your hand.
Native American
Hunters, Trackers, Trappers, Spirits, Wolves, etc. all ranging from the forests, plains, rivers, mountains, and tundras of the United States. There's a lot of tempo oriented cards, as well as a couple of aggro cards and controls cards. One of the new mechanics is Track; whenever a creature with Track deals combat damage, you put a Track counter on any creature. Some of the creatures have positive bonuses to creatures you control with a tracking counter on them, some have negative effects for opponents' creatures that have track counters on them, etc.
Celtic
Humans, Elves, Faeries, Spirits, Banshees, etc. This set focuses a lot on the midrange strategy, and there's a lot of tokens involved. Since a large portion of the Faeries/tokens are 1/1's, a lot of strategies are designed to let 1/1's win in combat. There's also themes of either light/dark woods. One cool mechanic is permanently turning permanents into lands or vice versa, for good or bad.
Norse
Vikings, Valkyries, Dwarves, Giants, Trolls, Kraken/Serpents, Dragons, Elves, etc. Very much the most aggro oriented of the wedges, the Vikings are designed to hit hard and fast. One mechanic I'm toying with is bringing back Super Haste, from Unhinged, and blending it with the Pacts from Future Sight. This lets you attacks for free with haste your creatures, but then you have the steep upkeep cost next turn. Another mechanic that my friend suggested is Sailing, and currently it needs more work since atm it only makes land Islands in addition to other land types, which goes with other "Islands matter" cards.
I would like input because after spending two months working on this alone, it's becoming very difficult for me to shape all the ideas into unified cycles, and equal 250 card sets with an equal number of color/rarity/card type distributions.
Here's a sample of some cards I've made (many of these have been/are currently being reworked, so they're not final by any means):
(idea from MadOlaf)
EDH Decks:
Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Tajic, Blade of the Legion
Oloro, Ageless Ascetic
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Ezuri, Renegade Leader 1v1
Prossh, Skyraider of Kher 1v1
Hythonia the Cruel
Trying to build:
Jenara, Asura of War
Designing a Custom Set:
Clash of the Cultures: 5 Wedges, 5 Cultures
Providing Artwork for:
Archester: Frontier of Steam
I loooooove egypt as RBW and I can't wait to see more out of the alien unknowable BUG plan out of the mayans.
Cube talk, design community and much much more!
After drawing the skeleton you have to 'fill it' with your card's ideas. It is also very important to keep the curve smooth (for limited's sake) and the balance of each card type when filling the skeleton. You don't want a set with too many expansive cards in certain color or a color that don't have a sufficient number of creatures. You can always take some set's skeleton (like shards of Alara) as base and change it as you wish.
About your wedge mechanics, i suppose there are two paths you can take. You can do a classical multicolor set were you just try to naturally combine the color's mechanic (this is more like Invasion and Ravnica) or you can create a overarching theme for each wedge and base your cards on this theme (this is more like Alara).
I started doing the whole 'overarching theme' scheme but decided i actually didn't like it very much (studying Alara to learn how to make a wedge set i kind grew some dislike with it's direction). It seems you, as me, are taking the more classical approach.
If I can give my advice to you, as someone who is engaging in the same kind of set as you're, is that the first thing you have to do is answer 'how those 3 colors combine in terms of gameplay ?'. In other words, what part of white pie plays well with red and black ? What part of blue goes well with green and red ?
Answering those questions was the turning point for me. In some wedge it is pretty easy (URG, WUR, WBG) in others it was very tough (WBR, BUG).
BGU Control
R Aggro
Standard - For Fun
BG Auras
This is basically my skeleton for Rarity Distribution:
Each Wedge would follow this pattern. At a certain point I was going to insert a few more rules, like 33% of the instants had to be removal spells, 50% of the enchantments would be buff auras, etc. Probably the hardest part about sticking to this shell is that Rares and Mythics are way easier to design than Commons and Uncommons.
Based on the way we first came up with the idea, flavor/theme is going to be like the Alara block. Bant = three allied colors with the themes of aiding one big knight. Similarly, it would be the same as Egypt = three enemy colors all focusing around life/death, building Pyramids, etc.
When I set up the color/rarity distributions, I used Return to Ravnica as the basis, since I feel like the Alara block focused too much on multicolored cards. Drafting that set was awkward because drafting decisions were made based on color (specifically having multiple colors), not the cards themselves. For the mechanics, it's going to be more like creating multiple mechanics based on the color combinations and/or what the mythologies/races of each Wedge is, rather than one overarching keyword like Exalted or Unearth.
I also added some sample Norse cards above if anyone is interested.
Looking back for samples made me realize just how many cards I have without the Artist credited. I'm probably going to start most of the project from scratch to compensate for this. (It also means I need to go through the 1,223 pages from this site, where I got a good majority of the awesome art.)
Here's an updated Set Skeleton (this is 251 cards per Wedge):
Everything is distributed the way it should be, I think. In the Rare 2 Color slots, since there's only 3 card type rare slots for each two color combination and there's 4 total card types available, I changed it a bit so that each color combination has a part of the cycle based on the available card type: Enchantment, Instant, and Sorcery. So for instance, in BG for ZMayan, you might have one Rare Creature, one Rare Enchantment, and a Rare Sorcery, while in UG you will have one Rare Creature, one Rare Instant, and one Rare Sorcery, while UB has one Rare Creature, one Rare Enchantment, and one Rare Instant.
EDH Decks:
Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Tajic, Blade of the Legion
Oloro, Ageless Ascetic
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Ezuri, Renegade Leader 1v1
Prossh, Skyraider of Kher 1v1
Hythonia the Cruel
Trying to build:
Jenara, Asura of War
Designing a Custom Set:
Clash of the Cultures: 5 Wedges, 5 Cultures
Providing Artwork for:
Archester: Frontier of Steam
It is also common curtesy (and expected if you want serious comments) to post text versions of renders in spoiler hierarchy (but no more than two or three levels deep).
GWU Rafiq
RWB Zurgo
WBG Ghave
WUB Oloro
WBR Kaalia (Archived)
My Blog, currently working on series about my custom set Cazia.
Steam Trades - I play Dota 2, CS:GO, TF2, and trade cards heavily. Add me if you like.
We felt the overall flavor of the color wedge identity matched the culture we picked it with. If you really want an article on why each color combination matches the culture, and why each mechanic and flavor matches, I can write that later.
Valid point on the text spoiler. When I have the time I'll edit the OP to have text spoilers for the sample cards as well.
In terms of the set, two progress notes: A friend suggested a way for me to back-trace the photos I have that I forgot to get the artist credit, so I should be able to add more cards that way, and I fully finished my set skeletons, so I have 5 individual 251 card .MSE files that have all the color + rarity + type distributions already built in. At this point it's filling in the blanks, and gradually the set will be complete.
There's not a whole lot of poll data, but it's good to know that currently there's an equal distribution of interest in the 5 cultures.
EDH Decks:
Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Tajic, Blade of the Legion
Oloro, Ageless Ascetic
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Ezuri, Renegade Leader 1v1
Prossh, Skyraider of Kher 1v1
Hythonia the Cruel
Trying to build:
Jenara, Asura of War
Designing a Custom Set:
Clash of the Cultures: 5 Wedges, 5 Cultures
Providing Artwork for:
Archester: Frontier of Steam
I'm getting very close to being done. Here are the Celtic cards. Note: a few cards still need a card name, and I want to make some tweaks and changes with names and flavor text but the cart art and card design of all 251 is essentially done.
EDH Decks:
Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Tajic, Blade of the Legion
Oloro, Ageless Ascetic
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Ezuri, Renegade Leader 1v1
Prossh, Skyraider of Kher 1v1
Hythonia the Cruel
Trying to build:
Jenara, Asura of War
Designing a Custom Set:
Clash of the Cultures: 5 Wedges, 5 Cultures
Providing Artwork for:
Archester: Frontier of Steam
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice