An Uncommon Alliance: Winners!

This week’s challenge asked you to find the fine line between common and rare when it came to commanders, and you all did a fantastic job!

Winners: Gurah, the Forerunner by @scavenger98​ and          Tarah, Warfront Armorsmith by @dumbellsndragons​

Two Winners? Of course! They Have Partner! Gurah is a lesson in keyword management, encouraging you to fill your deck with all manner of tramplers to fuel your onslaught! However, being red/black means that their power level is going to be restricted by what colour you pair them with (green obviously being the best choice). Tarah is an early game threat and a late game helper, coming down on turn 2 to help give all your creatures just a bit of a boost, their power level staying around the same no matter what colour/s you pair them with.

But wait, there’s more!

Double Masters is so close I can almost taste it. Anyone who’s looked at even a fraction of the spoilers for it knows that the set would be more accurately named “Artifact Masters”.

So, to celebrate (or rebel, you do you) we’re going to spend the week building up to the set by making artificers!

BUT NOT MONO BLUE AND/OR RED ONES.

Your design this week has to be an artificer, but they cannot be Mono Blue, Mono Red, or Blue and Red. You can use any other combination of colours (green/blue for example), and of course, being an artificer, your design must Deal with Artifacts in some way, shape or form.

We’ll have 3 categories for winners this week:

Best Mechanical Design Best Legendary Design Best Flavour Design

I’ll be around all week to answer questions and queries, and you’ll see update and suggestion posts throughout the week.

As always, you can submit your designs by clicking HERE And Our Discord is seeing a flood of new designers HERE Get your welders ready, designers. the Inventors Fair eagerly awaits your works of Artifice. er. Works of Artificer.

~Mod @thatboonguy​

A SECOND CHANCE TO BE LEGENDARY - WINNERS

This weeks winner is Kolaghan, Tempest Incarnate by @whuh-oh​ A red/black commander that rewards aggression, this card keeps in the flavour and mechanics of Kolaghans brood by being especially powerful when combined with the Dash mechanic! A very well thought out design that captures both the original flavour of the card it’s based on the set the originals were based on, while encouraging an aggressive playstyle. Well done.

Runner-Up #1: First of the Cabal by @misterstingyjack​ Making haunt viable is a fantastic design that opens up a whole new deck building opportunity, and reanimating your haunting creatures means you can keep your haunts relevant throughout the whole game. This creature is well costed, my only sticking point being that this card should have been black/white to fully embrace haunt as a mechanic. Great design that barely missed it’s full potential.

Runner-Up #2: Lord Konda, Eiganjo Sovereign by @snugz We’ve needed a samurai tribal commander ever since Yuriko was given to the ninja players. Lord Konda being mardu allows you to run almost every samurai, which is a great design decision. What let you down is the trigger of the ability. I really think it should have been “Blocks or Becomes Blocked” to evoke the bushido mechanic in his ability, and to balance out the third mode a little more. Fantastic concept, slightly flawed execution, still a great design.

And that’s our podium finishers for this week! I’ll have commentary for the rest of the designs up in the next few days. We received a ton of entries this week, so It might take me a while to finish the whole write up. Follower of Lilliana will be back on Sunday with a brand new contest for you all. Have a great weekend, everyone.

FORGING AHEAD

Here’s our winners of the New Metal contest!

Mechanical Winner: Mage-Ring Saboteur by @ irenefondorn Simple Technicality. This is such a beautifully made engine for an artifact deck dipping their toes into the UBx artifact deck. The first ability triggers off of the activation of the second, letting you get a scry before you draw and discard, while putting light pressure on your opponent. This is a fantastic design of a mechanics-forward signpost uncommon. Great work.

Legendary Winner” Lambick the Reborn by @teaxch While mono-white commanders that deal in equipment are a dime a dozen, Lambick is the only one that brings her own personal armoury! Lambick can apply some VERY early game pressure, and apparently death is only the beginning as Lambick refines her swords every time you cast her, Making Certain cards like Fencing Ace and Mirroden Crusader into potentially lethal threats. A very cool design, well done.

Flavour Winner: Gravel-Hide Salvagecrafter by @demimonde-semigoddess Step 1: Pick up Rock Step 2: Smash! This is an absolutely flavourful design that ties shows that gruul don’t just smash and forget. A great design that I can see in any Ravnica/Gruul set.

And those are our winners! I’ll be splitting the commentary in to MANY posts, so keep a look out for those as we head into a solid month of

PROVING GROUNDS.

Our four Mod finalists are taking over for the next month, each taking a week to run a contest to see if they have what it takes to become a full-time mod. @illharg-the-rave-boar is kicking things off on Sunday for week one of PROVING GROUNDS.

Here’s the commentary for all our entries for the Second Chance to be Legendary contest!

Due to popular request, this will be a longpost with the commentary directly under each entry.

A Grave Concern: Winners Circle Overall Winner:  Raging Spirit by @mistershinyobject​ This card does some crazy backflips in order to fit the contests rules, but I was impressed with how well this design works, while also encouraging green/red’s “Can’t be countered” motif. Even without cards like Rhythm of the Wilds, A successive onslaught of raging spirits is a really cool basis for a deck and I would love to play gruul aggro featuring this card. You should feel really proud about this design. Runner-up 1: Timetwist Tideturner by @teaxch A neat little draw engine wrapped in Time Spiral’s bizarre obsession with combining several disparate creature types. Well done. Runner-up 2: Grafworm Spawning by @demimonde-quasigoddess Using Retrace as your recursion mechanic is a great incentive to try and find a way to dump this token-spawning engine into the graveyard. A great design.

Congratulations to our winners, and thank you all for your entries. I’ll be dropping commentary on all the entires over the weekend.  ~ @thatboonguy P.S. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for the new contest on Sunday. After all of our necromancy crimes, Ablezumi will be dishing out some... 

Haakon, Stormgald Scourge by Mark Zug

You know what’s really cool? Being able to cast cards from your graveyard. You know what’s really interesting? ONLY Being able to cast a card from the graveyard. Whether it’s our leading man Haakon here, the plethora of aftermath cards that Amonkhet gave us, or the recently released Titans from Theros, cards that can only be played from the graveyard have an added layer of puzzle solving to them. How do you get them to the grave? Do they put themselves there, like the Aftermath Splits or the Titans? Or do you need to trick it in there, like Haakon? That’s your goal this week.

Design a card that can only be cast from your graveyard.

You are allowed to use the Aftermath Design if you wish

You are allowed to use the Titan Design if you Wish

The main goal here is a card that can only be cast from your graveyard. Whether you give it a way to put itself there or make the player figure it out it up to you.

A God Among Mortals: Special Mentions

Before I post the rest of the entries, I thought I’d take a quick second to shout out some designs that came very, very close to winning.

Exos, Vortex of Souls by @memnite-shyamalan This card is cool. Really, really cool. There was a slight problem with it though. It didnt feel like a god. In a different contest, this might have taken the top spot. But we feel it didnt quite have the “God” factor.

The Neon God by @starch255 This is a fantastic design with a truly unique mechanic. The only thing that stopped you from taking one of the top slots was the syntax of the effect, which could be worded better. Great design though.

Aclazotz, the Eternal Night by @opalosprey This card was a fantastic twist on the god style, and much like I mentioned for the other two cards in this post, nearly made it into the winners circle. My only problem with the card is I feel like it might need slight balancing tweeks. While active it’s a one-card win engine, depleting your opponents field and giving you back threats every single turn as long as your life total is higher than 10/20 (depending on your format) and if it’s offline, you’ve just paid 4 mana for a land that gives you BB every turn. And potentially gaining life. Seems a little too strong for its cost for me.