Agreed.

Even then, the zones are really only relevant to the icons, and it's mostly specifically designed so that they DO have a function apart from the Avatars and don't compete for space in terms of flavor or design.

An early iteration of this actually had the avatars with dual creature types, but ultimately I abandoned the idea.

True, but it still leaves me wondering if we're stretching iconic races too far. I'm not saying we ARE, I'm just a little concerned that it's too many knots to tie together.

That's not necessarily bad. It feels like we have been trying to find and use races that almost fit the mold being put forward rather than having the races themselves emerge naturally from the plane itself into that mold.

Just speaking from my end on a more contained basis since I am still struggling to fully understand this plane.

U/G makes more sense with the library from my point of view.
Thus allowing U/R can deal with the hand.
This allows W/R to be in the battlefield

Green never really deals with the hand like Red does (nearly consistently having a block discard looter), while several green cards deal with the library constantly searching for lands and occasionally leaving the top card of the library revealed.

I dunno, I don't think of Red has dealing with the hand AT ALL. I honestly have no idea what you mean by "having a block discard looter". I guess you meant something like Mad Prophet but I want to point out that looting is a pretty poor way to deal with your hand and red is considered the second worst at card drawing, right in front of white.

Meanwhile, green has soared into second place for pure card advantage and packing the hand. Things like Garruk's Packleader, Hunter's Insight, and Soul's Majesty have really pushed green into their new place. There are other things I could mention too, but looting isn't what I would say offers much.

Now, looting still has more to do with the hand than red gets with the library, but a green sphinx is... eeeeeeh, it doesn't work.


As a total aside, I like naming our dragon species "The Vivan" from the Enochian language. It's the kind of thing I would have liked to put in Ellysium, except... the dragons were all dead before they could be named.

I am not sure why, after spending a little while at the gatherer I've come up with a bit of stuff.

Rummaging Goblin, Academy Raider, Aggressive Mining, Burning Inquiry, Curse of Chaos, Dangerous Wager, and Barbed Shocker have a discard looter effect.

Also, the hand doesn't have to be limited to card drawing, there are plenty that have to do with discarding.

Chandra Ablaze, Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, Hanabi Blast, Lightning Axe, Firefright Mage, Flowstone Channeler, Apocalypse, and Guerrilla Tactics are only about half of them.

And then there are cards that bounce back back to it like Archwing Dragon and Æther Membrane.

And some that simply care about the number of cards like Adamaro, First to Desire and Akki Underling

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Theros, Innistrad, and Mirrodin had only a couple of cards that even mentioned the library apart from scry effects and they were all rare - Prophetic Flamespeaker, Heretic's Punishment, Guild Feud, and Possibility Storm. M15 had a couple, but they were all exiling cards from it which would cause problems given that exile has been given to something else.

Compare that to green in just Theros - Font of Fertility, Kruphix's Insight, Nessian Game Warden, Ordeal of Nylea, Unravel the Æther, Satyr Wayfinder, Peregrination, Bow of Nylea, Commune with the Gods, and Courser of Kruphix.

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As of now, there have been no sphinxes in either Red or Green. White and Blue have a couple sphinxes, bant has nearly as many, while there is only one black and blue sphinx. It may make more sense for it to go to green since there is only one multicolored sphinx that did not have white in it, and white is an ally with green and another enemy of red.

That said, this is your project and I do not want to seem like I'm forcing anything on you.

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Searc ... spx?type=+[sphinx]||subtype=+[sphinx]&color=|[U]|[G]

See, the problem here is that I can't really tell you no without harming some of the reputation in working on this project, because I REALLY don't want to shut down ideas. I want to foster them, and not be discouraging to those working in it, but ultimately I feel the direction to be really discordant. The resonance you are pitching is all mechanical and quite frankly, I dislike almost EVERY card you linked just then. I absolutely DESPISE looting.
There's the other side of this that I can find the a lot of the same things to say about other cards in green.
Archwing Dragon meets Roaring Primadox, etc etc.

A lot of the cards you link aren't indicative of Red either, but are part of what they are. Spellshapers and cycles. Red is moving into a new area when it comes to gaining cards, Act on Impulse, which makes the hand choice so much stranger.

In dealing with the zones, I don't want it to care about the flux of that zone. Looting would be terrible for the hand because you don't actually get any net gain, you don't grow your hand so you effectively don't DO anything that influences it.

As to the sphinxes, you have to look at the flavor of this. U/R represents the Cosmos and all the secrets there of. U/G represents the World, which, yes, has huge secrets of its own, but ultimately I feel like it is less resonant than the boundless mysteries of the cosmos.
Bringing white into this also has absolutely no bearing because the sphinxes wouldn't have white either, and the friend of a friend doesn't make it a friend itself. I could say that red is friends with black, which Alara had plenty of splashed with, so making red the secondary color is just as viable a choice as green.



I really do want suggestions and comments and for people to have fun doing this, but don't try to convince me if I shoot an idea down. You put me in a really awkward position...

Then just pretend that I never brought it up. I want to help create a plane, not cause problems or make you uncomfortable.

Okay, so what do people think we should work on next?

Well, we still have the icons to work on, but aside from that, we basically are at a stage where the last thing for us to do is begin to actually build cultures.
The only other alternative is to do more work on the geography.

This thing's starting to get tricky to navigate. So let's recap. For icons, we have:
: Angles, bleeding
: Sphinxes, bleeding
: ???, bleeding , presumably
: Dragons, bleeding
: ???, bleeding , presumably.

If we look at it this way, we have Angels aligned with Eternity, Sphinxes aligned with Cosmos, and Dragons aligned with Time. That leaves a black icon aligned with Fate, and a green icon aligned with The World.

I'm still thinking Treefolk can work, especially with the "The World," but black seems to make more sense for treefolk than blue does.

I don't know, I think they could work in blue. Wisdom and knowledge really aren't as far apart as everyone makes them out to be, I think. Maybe sort of mangrove treefolk?

That's true, we could certainly play up the wisdom/world knowledge aspect and it would fit better. Plus which, treefolk are probably pretty fond of, you know, water, which blue is often associated with.

Any ideas for a black-primary green-bleeder? I do think we could make demons work there if we play up a sort of pagan relationship with religion, and I think that ties into Fate at least somewhat. But if there are any other ideas, I'd certainly be interested in hearing them.

It's tricky, demons have kind of occupied that space for a long time now...

For reference: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Searc ... &cmc=+%3E=[6]&color=+[B]&subtype=+![%22Demon%22]&type=+[%22Creature%22]

I was reminded in looking through these of the fact that Banshees are a thing in Magic. For Fate, that might be well worth considering. In fact, the more I think about it, and the Fairy Goth aesthetic we're considering for the plane, the more that feels right to me. (Alternately, Lamias are a thing now too apparently. Huh. I missed that.)

So we take the Oona concept, shift it from blue to green, make her the mother of the Fae, and give her a more gothic feel. I like it.

We'll have our very own Fairy Goth Mother!

(I suspect Keeper set that one up for me...)

Yoooo I didn't even but wow well played there.

I actually have a problem with the Lamia in Theros. Just the design, not anything else, it's just irritating that they essentially made the gorgons Lamia and then went with the unresonant depiction of the Lamia from the 1700's that is completely unconnected to grecian myth.

The Banshee did have me thinking. The biggest problem with the banshee is that it is a spirit as a type, but I think there's actually something interesting that we can play off of using the banshee as a starting point.
I think we should go full blown Sidhe. Have dual typed spirits occupying the iconic slot. Maybe combine demon with the Bean Sidhe to amp it up a little, and then have the Cait Sidhe, Cu Sidhe, and all sorts of others to spread around if we want.
Traditionally they are tied to faeries and elves, but that's a bit odd here. Playing up their otherworldly spiritual aspect might help solidify some of what we're working with.

You know, I have to admit, I didn't notice that they have Spirit as the type. That... feels like a missed opportunity to me.

I was weirded out a little when I saw there was a lamia but it wasn't really... serpentine. I didn't know there was an alternate depiction from the 1700s, though. What... what is it? It's honestly kind of hard to tell from the card art.

I could definitely get behind digging into the Sidhe but I don't have as good a background/understanding of them and their different types as you clearly do. Glad the banshee suggestion went over well though

The best I've been able to distill, it's a large cat with dragon scales and a long forked tongue coming out of a human face.

I'm pretty versed in... well, I could name a lot of mythos. (African mythos is generally REALLY FREAKING HARD... There's some cool planar concepts that are really evocative, if we ever decide to try to do something with african myth.)
One of the more recent subjects of study were the lore of the fair isles, which is largely centered on the Tuatha de Danaan. Lot of cool stuff to be said about it, but Tolkien frankensteined huge swathes of gaelic legends for his works and it's actually been kind of harmful.

It's another reason why I kind of resent Tolkien.

Huh. That's really interesting, since he got on CS Lewis's case for mashing multiple myth traditions together willy-nilly for Narnia. Maybe he figured these were all broadly British Isles anyway so it didn't matter? Ah the English >_>

Anyway, got a good recommendation for how I can get up to speed with a very minimal amount of time drain?