Cultivating Mox
Legendary Artifact
Level up
<Level 2 - 8> : add
<level 9+> : add . When you spend this mana to cast a green spell, you may draw a card.
The wise monk listens; The earth is singing for you; What does her song say?

starting to grade!

moxen are pretty hard to just come up with on the spot

Would a saga mox be considered to make mana "consistently"?

so it's a mox that doesn't turn on until turn 3, and only in a deck with the right lands? seems reasonable. maybe a little aggressive, since standard mana rocks also come online on turn 3 but they require mana to cast, but I don't think it's too far outside any bounds, and the land-type restriction does serve as a partial trade-off. still feels strong, but more control-specific than an all-round utility, and especially in red specifically I think it skates by.
3/5

it's the sac-a-creature part that makes this feel fair. otherwise it's sort of in lion's eye diamond territory, where it's trying to manage a broken effect with an extreme cost and just winds up being really abusable in a narrow set of circumstances, but free creatures are hard to come by, so this is gonna struggle to make mana early and still have a real cost attached to it late. maybe even too real a cost, but these sorts of cards should always err on the side of caution.
4/5

ironically I think having the option to tap a land makes it feel less useful even though it makes it strictly more powerful? but it just feels like a weird mana cylix somehow. which isn't necessarily fair, since the main purpose is the treefolk thing, which makes it also a weird springleaf drum but I do think tying it to a type makes sense to justify the drop in cost. I dunno. hard to pinpoint exactly what's not grabbing me about this, but it's not really grabbing me, y'know?
3/5

I worry about the rules-knowledge implications here. do players know you can use this for morph costs? I dunno, that's probably actually morph's fault, not yours, most of the time what counts as an activated ability is pretty obvious. might want to include reminder text of some sort to clarify what it can be spent on 'cause I could see a lot of players thinking rhystic study was activated, but that's solvable.
3/5

Jo I love this card. it's so cute and so printable.
5/5

so, I am gonna have to disqualify this, not 'cause it's not an artifact but because it only produces mana once, making it more like a lotus than a mox. that said I do like it. my one change is I'd say "creature or artifact" for the reference.

a mox with some sort of delay does make sense, although this feels maybe a little too demanding. you have to dedicate a creature with a specific type for multiple turns to get it working. then again it's all colors, and it's a potentially significant pay-off. I'm just comparing it in my head to lotus bloom, which takes one more turn but doesn't require any additional work. (admittedly lotuses and moxen are different, but if one is more powerful it's probably the lotus, so still feels like a fair comparison.) I don't think it's the end of the world for a mox to be a junk rare, but unless there's a lot of artificer support in the format I don't think this really goes anywhere, and that's a bit of a shame.
3/5

I like the idea, although I think I'd just have each player untap and gain control of it during their upkeep. this way allows for more multiplayer politics, but that version's simpler. (also guarantees that you at least sometimes get to use the card you played in a multiplayer game.) not sure on the tradeoff overall, just would've been my instinct. that said I do really like the idea of a mox that gets passed around, and having it enter tapped is a good way to howling mine away some of the more broken elements it brings.
4/5

kinda similar to amber's above, but more elegant. I like how instead of ramping you above your opponent, it just makes us all skip the early game. I do think this needs to ETB tapped for safety, but it makes the dynamic a lot less overpowered than a straight mox.
4/5

this feels a bit in that lion's eye diamond range where it's not actually any less abusable, it's just abusable in a narrower range of situations. there's plenty of creatureless decks, and they'd all be happy to have an extra land turn 1. of course, since it counts other copies of itself, you can't necessarily run four without worries. you can even just use it as a lotus petal if you don't want to play around the drawback, and being strictly better than a card that's restricted in Vintage is... questionable. (to be fair it's only restricted there for redundancy reasons, it's fully legal in Legacy, but still, this is strictly better.)
1/5

I dunno, I broadly don't love cards that care about what colors your opponent is playing 'cause that's just so random, and situations where you can really rely on it are probably degenerate formats. this also just seems mildly annoying to check: not terrible or anything, but with similar designs like meteor crater it's pretty obvious if there exists an available color (and thus if you can use it to pay generic costs if you're not worried about it) but this takes a bit more effort. again, not a lot, my bigger issue is that how usable this is in any given match-up feels deeply arbitrary, but that's a thing too.
2/5

I'm glad you changed your card, I like this one better. it's still a bit questionable, in that it doesn't really prevent degenerate uses, only fair ones, but at least it's a bit self-limiting in that if you get a second copy you can't use it again without gaining life. but it's still a free way to kickstart a combo on turn 1, which is the thing the moxen were scariest for. I think that's probably the hardest part of this challenge: heavy restrictions like this only matter in fair games, and the balance issues of a mox are at their most significant in games that are deeply unfair.
3/5

same basic feedback as Parad's above, but with the added note that this doesn't have the same self-limiting effect because it doesn't hit you hard enough to block a second activation. (it's legendary, but I can just choose to keep my second one if I want more mana.) I've been mentioning lion's eye diamond a lot in this round, and I think it's relevant here: this is just as degenerate as a normal mox, it's just slightly narrower in terms of the contexts it can be degenerate in. or, ok, this one's a little less so 'cause it makes colorless, but color is rarely the problem and off-color moxen are still very playable.
2/5

a little balanced by needing your opponent to have a colored permanent before it turns on, so in most cases you can't combo off turn 1 on the play. I feel like it's still too strong, but normal too-strong, not mox too-strong. it's just not that uncommon for your opponent to have a colored permanent of some sort, making this a perfectly viable mana rock in fair games despite costing , but the drawback curbs it pretty effectively in unfair games. that's cute. I just think this should probably still cost at least .
3/5

blunt and direct, but effective. similar in principle to lotus bloom but trades the greater power of lotus for turning on on its own if you draw it late. not the most exciting entry, but possibly one of the most printable.
4/5

it's an interesting drawback 'cause the sorts of decks most likely to be able to abuse it are, like, Elfball, where it really matters that this isn't a creature. still probably runnable in that deck, but while it does have a bit of the Lion's Eye Diamond problem I've mentioned in other comments, I do think the restriction here is enough to change the character of the card. neat!
4/5

there's a part of me that wants to quibble that, since you have to spend mana to level it up, it's not really a mox, but honestly I just think it's adorable. the one thing I'd say is I'd swap out "draw a card" for making, like, a 3/3 beast token or something, because this very much wants to be a part of a cycle, and "draw a card" is the natural choice for blue. (I mean, you could just say "draw a card" on all of them, but it's more fun if there's variety.) but, like, you didn't submit a cycle so it wouldn't be fair to grade you on how this impacts the hypothetical one I just made up.
5/5

cute. I like how it does the howling mine thing of giving your opponent the advantage first to prevent abuse. it doesn't feel the most mox-like, partly because it can (and often will) accumulate treasures for a large burst rather than be used consistently over turns, but you did ask for a definition and I gave you one and this fits it, so that's fine. flavor's really nice. I could see this existing, although I don't know if it actually should.
4/5

I do like how it requires you to cast a spell before using it, but it does still feel a little on the lion's eye diamond scale: the sorts of decks where moxen are scariest are the sorts of decks that are gonna cast a lot of spells anyway, so the drawback is more severe in fairer matchups. even if it does limit it out of some degenerate strategies, there's still plenty of others that can easily take advantage of it. although it does have the pretty significant impact of not being a combo starter, which is often the scariest thing with fast mana. if there's a spell you need to cast to get the ball rolling (a ritual, say) this can't get you there faster than you would naturally. so that's pretty useful. I like the flavor text.
3/5

tough round, as balance rounds often are: more than most, they really do just come down to what each individual thinks is ok, so it's very possible that I'm just too conservative for some of y'all. if so, I apologize. anyway, of the two 5/5s, I think the clear winner, and one of my favorite cards I've seen in a while, is Jo! congrats, nominating now.

That is excessively fair and accurate.


I change my mind: I should win!


For the contest itself, perhaps. But for the design alone, I'd probably leave it as is.

Yay! I worked on that haiku for 2 or 3 days

I mean, I think the mox reference makes more sense if it can target artifacts. otherwise you're just making a birds of paradise.

tbh I do think my card is probably kind of gross in most eternal formats where you play a lot of cheap spells, whether it's aggro decks, tempo decks, combo decks or control decks. But to some extent, Mox Opal and Mox Amber both exist and I feel like their conditions are just getting easier and easier so I just went with it. For a brief moment I had it count your opponent's spells, but that seemed rather dumb.


Mox Tantalite is right there

But who ever heard of an artifact having moxy!

(Also, apparently it's moxie. Oops!)

yeah but Modern Horizons isn't real

Mox Tantaheavy
Artifact
Suspend 3 -
: Add one mana of any colour.

Vis a vis Mox Tantalite- objectively less real, probably better designed.