عزيزي الهلفوت؛ ليه بنفرح بكل بطولة فرحة الأطفال بالعيد، والعجائز بالتقاعد، والرجال بالنصر المظفر، والنساء كما لو كانوا قد عثروا على غايتهم!
لان الخيانة حصلت من اقرب حد كنا نظن انه واحد مننا! تركنا في بداية الموسم وراح كما لو كانت ثكلته امه فعليا! مفيش فلوس، مفيش امكانيات، مدرب بيسيبك لما سبق ذكره! بل وقال في احد اللقاءات، كنت بشتري مية عشان اللاعيبة تشرب، ف المقابل يا هلفوت انت عندك كافة الامكانيات، أنا بقاوم كل شئ في الوقت اللي انت بتغير مدرب واتنين وتلاتة زي السلام عليكم! معنديش اعلام! معنديش سيف زاهر وشوبير واحمد موسى ولا عندي رؤساء نوادي في نفس الدوري اللي بنلعب فيه بتطلع تحفز لاعبيتها عشان تكسبك! شريعي انبي الهلفوت، فرج لانشون الصهيوني، وتاجر السلاح ابوالعينين بتاع السيراميك، انت يا هلفوت كل شئ متوفر ليك وفوق كل ده عندك ناس بتساعدك مفروض انهم منافسين! بس دي حاجات انت مش هتفهمها عزيزي الهلفوت!
بضطر ابيع ٢ لاعيبة مهمين عشان يادوب اعرف اصرف ع نفسي، مش افك قيد ولا احل مشاكل ولا اشتري صفقات لا! أنا ببيع عشان اكل واشرب، وانت بتروح تجيب بدل الصفقة ٢ و ٣ و ٤ وبتطلع تقدمهم في شكل ساخر في مشهد سريالي كوميدي سوداوي لمكايدة أسيادك، ليه؟! لان الهلافيت فكرة ميعرفوش حاجة عن الشرف والرياضة، دول مجموعة من الهلافيت وسبحان الله، لو اخترت كلمة واحدة صح قالها العجل السعودي ف صدقا هتكون هي دي، عزيزي الهلفوت، هتعيش وتموت وانت هلفوت، متعرفش اي حاجة عن التشجيع غير انك عاوز تكسب، كتعويض عن انهزاميتك في الحياة، وزي ما انت مهزوم ع جميع المستويات وفي قوة قاهرة بتستخدمك ف السياسة والدين، ف كمان عندك ناس بتستحمرك ف الرياضة يا جحش..
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This blog's been pretty quiet for awhile, but that's because I've been hard at work putting together...
theunwellkingdom.com!
This project now has a dedicated site to host devlog posts, behind-the-scenes info, and most importantly, a full gallery of all cards in the set (including the ones that still need art)!
Seeing them all in one place makes me realize how far it's already come. It's very motivating!
So what now?
I've imported all existing posts from this blog onto the main site, with the added benefit of more reliable hyperlinks and card images that can stay up-to-date as balance changes happen!
However, I plan to continue sharing those posts here as well. Tumblr still has the benefit of better ways to share and reply than the site's clunky Contact form.
Hopefully, I'll be able to resume more regular posts now that everything is up and running. However you decide to follow along, I'm appreciative for all of the support and feedback I've gotten so far! Shares are much appreciated!
Originally crafted by wizards to prank their colleagues, the Un-Candle looks like an ordinary candle, but emits a sphere of magical darkness when lit! Even those with natural darkvision cannot pierce its inky void. In our campaign, our fighter Mishka once lit one in the midst of battle to slip right by an enemy the party was unprepared to fight, rescuing a wounded NPC along the way!
When designing this card, I wanted to create an answer to combat tricks (especially Inspiration tokens, which are at their strongest when buffing creatures after blocks have been declared). With the Un-Candle's shroud, however, players are forced to commit to their tricks before combat begins, making it much easier to plan attacks and blocks!
Design Deep-Dive #2: New Mechanics of the Unwell Kingdom
One of the first things I did when brainstorming for this set was to look for elements of our D&D campaign — be it lore, system rules, or whatever else — that would be good candidates for new card mechanics. These could give a distinct flavor to specific colors, and to the set as a whole! After lots of tinkering, I landed on these three:
(Examples and explanations below the cut!)
1. Inspire X/Inspiration Tokens
Create X Inspiration tokens. (An Inspiration token is an enchantment with “T, Sacrifice this enchantment: Target creature you control gets +1/+1 until end of turn.”)
Main color identity: RED
For those unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons, there are two mechanics called "Inspiration" and "Bardic Inspiration", which lets a bard character give a bonus to any player that they can add to one of their rolls. I've conflated them here into a new type of token, which acts like a Treasure token but for temporary stat buffs!
This mechanic is impulsive and combat focused, so it seemed like an obvious fit for red. This naturally developed a Bard sub-theme across many of the set's red creatures. Of course, other colors would have access to a few Inspire options too, but most decks that build around it will likely want to splash in some red!
This mechanic bears obvious similarities to +1/+1 counters, which are ubiquitous in real Magic cards, and one of the most fundamental mechanics to the game. However, I realized that it could get tricky to keep track of lots of temporary buffs from Inspiration alongside the permanent counters... so I decided to keep +1/+1 counters out of this set entirely! This became another mostly pointless but fascinating design constraint going forward.
You may also notice that unlike most small, crackable tokens, this one is an Enchantment rather than and Artifact. This meant I could print some cool Enchantments-matter synergies and have them function with both Inspire and...
2. Concentration
If enchanted creature is dealt damage or targeted by a spell or ability, sacrifice this enchantment.
Main Color Identity: BLUE
Another mechanic pulled straight from D&D rules, Concentration spells demand that whoever casts them must maintain clear, steady focus or risk the spell being interrupted. I chose to translate this into a keyword for aura enchantments, as they're a perfect way to visually represent a persistent spell as well as tie it to the creature casting it.
A Concentration Aura can be knocked off whenever the creature it's attached to is damaged or merely targeted by anything (this will feel familiar to long-time Magic players, as some Spirits and Illusions have similar triggers on them). This can be a real restriction, as you could knock off your own Concentration spell by targeting your creature with an Inspiration token, or even attempting to attach an Equipment or another Concentration Aura to it!
This makes them strictly worse than ordinary Auras, but opens up some interesting design space. I can give them enters-the-battlefield effects, so they do something right away and don't feel like a waste of a card if an opponent can simply knock it off. Alternatively, I can create greedy spells with snowballing effects, which reward you for finding ways to protect your creature for as long as possible!
3. Hoard Counters
Exile one or more cards and put a hoard counter on each of them. Then cheat out hoarded cards, even from opponents!
Main color identity: BLACK
While this may not be a strictly new mechanic (ex. Tasha the Witch Queen stealing spells by exiling them with "page" counters), I really wanted to expand this idea and build support for it across the set.
Dragons are, unsurprisingly, a pivotal part of our campaign. In our story, they are born from the coalesced anxieties of people, literal manifestations of fear which compulsively hoard whatever they lack. As such, their hoards are not the stereotypical piles of treasure and gold, but can instead be a bit more abstract: knowledge, experiences, even the souls of the dead!
For this set, I've decided to add several cards in black which can put cards into the exiled hoard, and a key payoff card in each 'black + ___' color combo which allows you to play cards from the hoard of a specific card type. Stay tuned for examples of these.
This will be a tricky sub-theme to keep an eye on in playtests. There's a fine line between recurring value and accidentally creating and infinite loop, and the shared-pot structure of hoarded cards has the potential for trouble in cases where multiple players are trying to use it. But for now, it's very flavorful, a bit fiddly, and hopefully fun!
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A few months ago, I did a Deep-Dive on this set's tri-lands, and the inspirations behind their design. Since then, they've proven to be extremely successful... so much so that I decided to make more!
First, the good: after several rounds of playtesting, these lands have done exactly what I hoped they would. They feel fun, fair, and reliable! Their inclusion as commons means the official set cube has four copies of each, so players can expect to find several in a given draft.
They allow players to mana-fix into any 2-color combination, and even support some very solid 3-color decks (Black/Red/Green has been THE deck to beat so far), without letting games devolve into 5-color soup. As important as it is for lands to provide multiple colors for decks to function, it's crucial to maintain the restrictions of each color identity that are baked into the DNA of Magic.
So what's the problem? This original 5-card cycle was designed to ensure each color pair was represented, in much the way MtG has released triomes in their actual sets. However, This inherently means half of the pairs show up twice as often as others! This became a clear factor in pushing players toward certain colors and away from others when deckbuilding, more than I had expected.
It didn't help that one of these pairs, Red/Green, has been dominant so far, with a straightforward gameplan, tons of support, and some of the best top-end bombs the set has to offer (More on that in a future post). With both Bran Bramble and Cobbleston fueling these decks, it was was simply too good to pass up, while other archetypes like Blue/Red Wizards struggled to come together with only Glimmer to back them up.
With all that in mind, I set to work on an additional 5 lands to fully complete this cycle! With all 10 in the set, the math becomes much more stable -- each 3-color combination now has a dedicated land, and each color pair exists on 3 lands. My hope is that it will now feel more consistent for a player to build into any color combos they want.
This also introduces a new problem however... If these all remain Common, there are now DOUBLE the total tri-lands in the set cube. I don't have the wiggle room I'd need to shift all of them to Uncommons, but I liked the frequency of their appearance before. As a compromise, I've decided to keep them in the Common slot, but only include two copies of each. So players should expect to see them just as often as before, but now with a more even color distribution.
In all, I'm very excited about how these turned out! I haven't even touched on the art/theming, but it was a fun challenge to find 5 more fitting locations from our D&D campaign and illustrate them. I think they're visually some of my favorites in the whole set so far! Once it's time to print physical copies, there's a good chance our Commander pod will house-rule these to be legal outside of this homebrew set.
It's all too easy to lose your bearings within the Giantwood, to forget that the trees towering above are merely the uppermost boughs of its canopy, that the ground beneath your feet is no ground at all but great, coiled branches. It is at all times growing, changing, alive.
Enchant creature, Concentration (If enchanted creature is dealt damage or targeted by a spell or ability, sacrifice this enchantment.)
Enchanted creature is goaded, cannot block, and has "Whenever this creature is dealt damage or targeted by a spell or ability, its controller discards a card."
Whenever enchanted creature attacks, its controller discards a card.
I won't lie, this card is MEAN. Black's twist on the Concentration mechanic is a highly disruptive curse to apply to an opponent's creature, and demands an immediate answer. Goading the creature and removing its ability to block is already irritating, but the clear threats are the discard triggers.
If a player is unable to deal with it, they'll lose a card a turn until they're put into desperate top-deck mode. But even if they're able to get rid of it right away — either with a targeted effect like an Equip or Inspiration token, or even replacing it with a Concentration aura of their own — they're guaranteed one last discard, making it a very safe 3-mana investment for the Crown of Madness player. The only clean way to avoid the discard would be to use direct enchantment removal!
