Most of the blog posts I've done so far involve Snow as a theme, and I'd like to do something a little different today. Let's start with a past Card of the Day. (For you new folks, I plan to post a new card every day until the end of time to exercise my brain.)The mechanic on this card is Unaligned. Basically, it says you need to cast it with colorless mana. This guy is pretty good, because you don't need a lot for him to be effective. If you compare an Unaligned card to a colored card, if it costs 3 unaligned, it's the same as it costing GGG; not an easy cost to manage. That said, using Unaligned means you have to have a pretty solid colorless mana base, be it The Uzra Lands, Cloudposts, Supply Roads, or maybe one of these:
It's a lot harder to have more than one color in a deck with Unaligned cards. It might be easiest if you only use other colorless cards, or at the very least, cards that only need one or two mana of a specific color.
Let's explore Unaligned a little bit.
We'll start with an enabler. 1 and a card for 2 seems good. It can help get that extra colorless mana you need.
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| Unaligned creatures tend to be larger because if their restrictive costs. |
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| Colorless is pretty powerful when left alone! |
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| This guy seems to be the unofficial Unaligned Lord. |
The Clockwork Giant really likes it when you play with Power Plants. Luckily, in this set, Power Plants are in the basic land slot along with the other lands. Tournament Organizers will have these handy to pass out with other lands when needed.Another thing to note: Right now, the only creatures that have Unaligned are Constructs. I'm not saying there couldn't be other creature types that are Unaligned, I just haven't designed any yet.
Here's a sorcery:
Next week, we'll take a look at another colorless keyword: Forged.
Thanks for reading!
-Olaf
Updated Factories to Power Plants.
Updated Factories to Power Plants.
If your going to the go the rout of basic land creation, I would encourage it having a subtype. This would leave more design space open for future cards to interact with.
ReplyDeleteI always like to look to things Magic has already done, using my designs to make players use something old in a new way. Instead of the Factory being the basic land, how about a Power Plant. Power-Plant is already a land type (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=220952), it would just need errata it to make it a basic land type. Also, intuitively a Factory doesn't make mana, it uses it, where as a Power Plant makes mana. Let me know your thoughts.
I like a few of the things you say here. I'm going to rename it Power Plant, but I don't think I can give it a basic land type. It messes with the rules set in place too much. There's a lot of baggage associated with being a basic land type.
ReplyDeleteWe can make it Basic Land - Power-Plant, but it won't be a basic land type. I think doing it that way creates more confusion that leaving the type off of the card. That's why I chose to do it the way that I did.