I assume I'm allowed to vote, but I wouldn't know. I don't think Parad did.

Splitting the color pie in two and distributing them between the two sides seems lazy to me. I think it's more interesting to show how a color adapts differently to different areas.
It's some sort of pet peeve of mine. Split the colors into regions and I split your torso, or something like that.

I agree with thatmarkguy that we should speed up the process.
Back on the wizards forum, when Theatog was doing his You Make the Commander Deck with No Planning,
he'd have mini-contests which would have a winner as well as runner-ups that ended up in the deck despite not winning.
So I don't see why more than 1 card from each criteria can't be added to the set, if they are good enough.

He did. In fact, his vote was the one that broke the 3-way tie.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come off as unprofessional or hypocritical by voting last round. I just figured, the person who sets the criterion should definitely be able to vote, because, not in spite of the fact that, they set the criterion—they should be able to vote for the thing they were most looking for.

That said, I'm fine with speeding up the process. Though I'd rather have multiple criteria for each round than have more than one person win. My reasoning is that we don't want more than one card for each mind-space the criteria offer.

All that said, here's my card:

Wall of Clouds –
Creature – Wall (U)
Flash
Defender, flying
At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice Wall of Clouds.
The clouds are the only sanctuary from the sunlight that Illpyre has.
0/8

At the very least, separate criteria for designing. even if only one makes it in, with multiple contests at once, that's multiple entries.

If we do that, maybe we should do separate threads to help preven congestion.
Each thread should have a common tag though... like Contest Starstill or something of the sort.

I'll leave that to Parad

I know what I'm going to do! I'll have a separate thread for each color.

No, it was just my bad memory at work. I don't have anything against it.

While it was sort of the point of the criteria, we should probably discuss how to differentiate the two/three environments (because your cards aren't telling me).
Enchantments vs Artifacts / Religion vs Technology
Diversity vs Quantity
Instant/Sorceries vs Permanents / Short term vs Long term
Etb vs Ltb
In play vs In other zones
Constructive vs Destructive (Untap/Tap, Search/Destroy, Life = #/Damage = #)

Both sides are probably pretty bad. There should be nomads all over each side, as well as people that hate it on their side and make the long journey to visit the other. I like the short term vs long term idea. On the hot side things would rarely last long, and on the cold side things would tend to slow down and stagnate.

Cloudheart Elemental
Creature - Elemental
When ~ becomes the target of a spell or ability, sacrifice it.
Instant and sorcery spells you cast cost less to cast
As fleeting as the art it creates
2/1

My card is telling you

Ice side cares about artifacts, sun side doesn't. It's not specific, but it's something.

I also think short term vs. long term is a great theme, although I wouldn't limit it to something so mechanically-specific as "permanents vs. instants/sorceries." Part of that is because that would imply fairly rigid color boundaries between our factions (which I agree would be bad worldbuilding) unless we make a really weirdly high amount of white, black, and green instant/sorcery love (which I think would be even worse set design). It'd be a great flavorful direction for top-down design, though.

Are we trying to tie each card type faction to a single half of the plane? I'm kind of against that, because it seems like kind of an unnecessary constraint, but I can understand why people might want to tie together the mechanical and flavorful themes.

I think that Artifacts should be solely from the Frozen side and Enchantments solely from the Sunny side, but that the rest of the card types should be free to both.

Another thing we might want to consider is Rare and Uncommon Planeswalkers. It is, after all, a card type, and players love them.

short-term/long-term best theme NA

Fleeting Cirrux
Creature - Elemental (U)
Flying, flash
Whenever a player casts an instant spell, return Fleeting Cirrux to its owner's hand.
Clouds are transient in Illpyre, and cirruxes even more so.
2/2


Also, Dehydration or something should be reprinted in this set. That's a fantastic example of a blue card with plausible "sunny" flavor.

Lower rarity planeswalkers seems bad. If there are too many of them, they stop being special.

I agree with Cato on planeswalkers, and I'd contend that even if you stretch them to a couple of uncommons it'd still be a pretty lame subtheme (see Kamigawa and its barely-there legendary theme).

I'd be down with "hot" enchantments and "cold" artifacts, though, if people are into that.

Players who love walkers are bad players.

I see no problem with cold enchantments, but hot artifacts would be hard, but possibly interesting.

Automation Expert
Creature - Human Artifcer
When ~ enters the battlefield, you may have target noncreature artifact become a 2/2 Construct artifact creature until end of turn.
1/1
If it's no good for anything else give it a pair of legs and make it carry something. That's my approach anyway.

Let's start the voting!















I vote for LilyStorm.

A cheap, one-sided arcane melee on a body, however fragile, seems... a bit much. And it's even a relatively efficient creature for blue.
I like prismatic rays, but I'm not sure how it relates to the plane.
I probably would have voted for Automation Expert if its effect were permanent. It also seems more cold-side than sun-side.

For now I vote for Altimis.

The idea is that the sunlight changes the appearance of the land.