I can't believe that I forgot to say as much earlier, but this latest deck is also wonderful. I continue to just be blown away by your ability to really capture the Jakkard flavor in these cards, CKY!

I'm a huge fan of Sage and the Jailkeepers -- they're spot-on, both mechanically and flavorfully. The fact that Brax is a legendary fox citizen just tickles me, for reasons that I can't fully articulate. And, like Keeper, I want to call special attention to the Stormbringer flavor text, because it's pretty freaking great.

I'm assuming that the Husher Twins are Hush-Hush? If so, I guess I'm just a little curious as to why they're in sort of a more generic persona, as opposed to being a legendary creature?

Anyway, this is all pretty darn super. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series!

You're continuing to hit these out of the park, CKY! Not having any familiarity with the nuances of NGA constructed, I confess that I have few interesting thoughts to offer about card design or balance or anything like that. But, again, from a flavor perspective, this deck is just one gold nugget after another.

I'm tickled to see old Josiah T. make an appearance -- or maybe pickled would be the more appropriate description. And I'm especially excited to see the specific piece of flavor text you chose. Of all the bizarre and random things I've written -- and there have been a lot of them... -- Josiah T.'s dry-cleaner-esque guarantee of "All Work Done on Premises" is one of my favorites. It feels a little bit cracked in the right sort of way.

Similarly, I'm also enamored of Antine's quote on Twister Season. Poor Antine. Ditto Blown Out of Town -- I can just see Presto nodding his head in agreement with that sentiment. The "Six-Shooter" callback on Boomstick Blast is similarly wonderful.

Dust Devil is a neat, Jakkard-flavor variation on one of my favorite real-life cards, too.

Anyway, bravo, CKY!

Another good one, CKY! The flavor of this one was very musical!

Ah, more good stuff! This whole project has been really fun to see. It's always cool to see stuff we've created here influence other mediums, like cards and artwork. Thank you for the massive effort this whole series clearly represents (and for reading so many Jakkard stories, of course!)

Seconded! (And thirded!) I've enjoyed all of these CKY, and this latest deck is no exception!

I'm especially fond of your treatment of Diamond Jane. The sort of Mind Control-unless-you-pay-life mechanic is a perfect flavor fit for Jane. She had a remarkable talent for getting her claws into people, and the poor souls under her sway paid a high price to break free from her. Sax, for one, paid with his life, and even Red Jackie herself had to die (albeit slightly less permanently) before the scales really fell from her eyes when it came to Jane.

Anyway, wonderful work, as ever. Thanks so much for sharing!

Under Jackie's rules text, you have this line:

But shouldn't "quickest strike in the Waste" be capitalized as a keyword? (i.e. "Quickest Strike in the Waste")

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Slimy Turncoat has the flavor text:

But that sounds a bit more like a rattler's kind of speech, and it's type is Viashino.

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Overall, I really like how you have this set up. Going with preconstructed decks rather than a whole set or block, even though it was probably as much work and cards, really let me get a sense of what mechanically you were going for. I understand how each deck is supposed to play just in reading the cardlists. This is especially true when considering the environment they're made to play in (i.e. the Wild Cards format).

Even so, there are a couple of really stand-out cards that I really liked in how you tied flavor and mechanics together. The first that caught my attention was Hush-Hush, which you brilliantly made cost for each one of them. I probably would have done the same for their activated abilities, but I can see mechanically why that would be a bad idea. The second that I noticed was Josiah T., Sloshed Sawbones, although it took me a moment to realize it. You manage to perfectly encapsulate the Old West doctor in that card's mechanics (note: reading the comments tells me that he is from some story, but I have no recollection of reading anything in which he appeared). Light a Cigar caught my attention for how well it calls to Fisco's influence on Verkell. I'll admit I don't quite understand the need to make opponents discard on this one, but injecting the "fear" mechanic into the card was a great callback. While not exactly having her own card, I like that The Duchess shows up on a few cards, to show that she is part of Jakkard but never in the limelight.

I want to make special mention of Cosette Desandro. I kind of hate direct combo cards on principle (by which I mean that you only get the special effect while you have a specific card in the game on the field). I quickly got burnt out on it with Yu-Gi-Oh when they started doing it with some impossible-to-get ultra-rare card, which left me with more than one utterly useless card since I never had that rare creature (the "creature lvl.X" cards similarly left me with generally bad cards). I still don't like that it's done here, and moreso since there is no Fisco card in the deck, but at least Cossette isn't completely useless as a card without him. Her second ability is fantastically flavorful, in my opinion. I just wanted to point her out because the card does leave me truly ambivalent as I both love and hate the card at the same time.

To put my opinion in more concrete terms, if this were an actual, physical product, I would actually be interested in it. (For now I'm ignoring the fact that it would probably cost more than I'd be willing to pay for it.) So, for that, I give this a Yea.



As a post-script, I'd like to just give a quick note to compare this to Tevish's Taramir block which I abstained on several weeks ago. I think it has to do with conveyance of purpose and amount of information.

What I mean by conveyance of purpose is that, given the way you present the information, I can see how the cards work in synergy with one another, and can vaguely grasp what playing this set would look like. With the cards of Taramir being broken up by color and rarity, it takes a lot longer, reading in order, for the synergies to come to life. Now, obviously this is coming from a pretty big bias as I have never played nor even understood the rules for draft play.

As far as the amount of information, that much should be obvious, with hundreds of Taramir cards (I'm assuming, as I didn't read very far into them) vs. about a hundred for Wild Cards. I also don't have to really digest more than about 20 cards at a time for Wild Cards, which helps in my understanding of how it's meant to be played.

He's from a relatively new story called "Mistakes of the Past," written by OrcishLibrarian and, I don't know, some other guy.

That explains it. That's one of the stories I have yet to catch up on, though it is one I look forward to.

Keywords like quickest strike in the Waste are always formatted without capitalization. Quickest strike in the Waste is a bit of an exception, since "the Waste" is a place name.

Slimy Turncoat is based on Tirk from "Two Bullets and a Pocketful of Hate" who was a lisping viashino.

Cosette is much more valuable for her 2/1 stats than for her Fisco lifegain ability. That's mostly there as flavor text.

I'm glad to hear that you liked Wild Cards!

To be honest with you it's been ages since I've read Two Bullets so I don't recall Tirk off-hand; though I wasn't saying you should change it, just noting that it seemed off. I try to write down everything that seems off as I read them so that if any edits need to be made they can be found easily.

I wasn't aware of the multi-word ability word thing, though I don't really spend any time in card design, so I hope you'll forgive me for that.

As for Cosette's card, I can understand that, though I'll say in my defense that I am not a person who looks at or even necessarily cares about a creature's actual P/T as long as the effect does something worthwhile.

Man, I lurk so much, I really should just muster the energy to comment on this stuff.

I've been following this from the start and (it should probably come as no surprise that) Dealbreaker is my favorite deck, yet. I like the card for Mal and Lucy, and Diana's effect is pretty cool. I like that you pulled the flavor text from How to Trade a Planeswalker. It's sort of weird reading something and going "...Wait, did I write that?"

Haha, yeah, Dealbreaker is probably the deck I'd play, but then, I've always played the sort of exhaustive control decks that just grind your opponents into the floor through superior resource management.

Thanks for posting, CKY.