#triom

[reuxben]

Here’s our MTGinktober for “Hike,” starring Nahiri, the Harbinger and Sorin, Lord of Innistrad! Another session of Hike Club ends supportively with our intrepid hike buddies again encouraging each other to go take a hike.

Click this post’s Source link for this piece’s Making-Of.

More MTGinktober here.

Daily art updates on Instagram, Twitter, and Bluesky.

Reuxben

[dailymtgflavortext]

Nowhere on Ikoria are monsters more integral to the landscape than Ketria, where the river itself will stand up and roar. 

-Ketria Triome

[jasper-pagan-witch]

Crystal Carapace

Crystal Carapace is an Aura Enchantment card from March of the Machine. It costs one Green and three generic to cast and goes on a creature. The enchanted creature gets a plus three boost to power, a plus three boost to toughness, and ward for two generic. Ward is an ability that automatically counters a spell an opponent controls targeting something unless the ward cost is paid. Crystal Carapace also has cycling for two generic, so you can pay two of any color and discard Crystal Carapace from your hand to draw a card. The flavor text is a quote from the compleated planeswalker Lukka, reading "Why won't you die, wretched flesh-beast?"

Yes, yes, I'm back with another protection spell. No one is surprised, least of all me. I just happen to enjoy protection magic.

I started building this spell on May 1st, deciding immediately that I was going to use crystals for it. I pulled out my correspondence binder and started flipping through, marking down every stone associated with protection and strength. My "final" list was amethyst, blue calcite, howlite, hemimorphite, and jasper.

I went back and forth on the format - since this is an Enchantment, aka a long-lasting spell, I wanted the spellcasting method to reflect that. My initial thought was a spell bag, as I have a lot of bags. But I had just finished building a spell jar, and I wanted an alternative. So I turned to other mages I know to discuss other forms of long-lasting spells.

Today, I settled on an enchanted bracelet. I pulled out my box of crystal beads and examined my options. None of the stones I wanted, other than jasper, were available to me immediately in stone form. I revisited my list of options and my binder and settled instead on bloodstone, hematite, howlite, and malachite.

Then I did some research. I knew that this card took place on the plane of Ikoria, as that's where Lukka had been dispatched to take over, but Ikoria is dominated by triomes which are dominated by particular monsters which are dominated by an apex monster. Anyway, I came to the conclusion that this was in the Zagoth triome, which is the Black-Green-Blue (though primarily Green) land of Beasts ruled by Brokkos the Forever-Beast, Apex of Forever. Since this is a monoGreen card featuring a loosely-defined Beast, I figured this was a safe bet. So I wrote a jaunty little activation phrase for notes.

Having figured out all this and still holding onto braincells (though I appear to have misplaced them now), I grabbed a new, loose-leaf paper to write the final spell down on. I barely remembered to add the accoutrements required to turn it into a bracelet instead of just rocks on a string. I added a "charge the thing" step and left a note to myself to remember to recharge and reactivate it as needed. Then I added my keywords in the upper corner for quick search in the filing system I have for spells in my spell binder.

I haven't yet created my own Crystal Carapace, but I wanted to share the process instead of the finished result. What do you think? Would you have adapted the card differently? How would you convey the key parts of the card?

[theunwellkingdom]

Design Deep-Dive #5: Lands Week - The Tri-Lands

Perhaps the most powerful mana fixing in the Unwell Kingdom comes in the form of a set of tri-lands with a unique ability!

Traditionally, lands that tap for three colors of mana always come in tapped, to compensate for the powerful options they enable. These ones offer an additional option for players who just can't wait a turn: bounce another untapped land to your hand, and the tri-land enters untapped, letting you can use the mana right away!

My hope is that this gives players some interesting decisions in play, by prompting them to evaluate the rhythm of their gameplan -- Is accessing a new color immediately worth stalling out a turn on building your manabase? Even if the answer is often "no," keen players may be rewarded for spotting the rare "yes" scenarios!

It was difficult to decide on the colors to use for this batch of lands. This set is NOT a Streets of New Capenna, built to push 3-color decks above all else. I figure players will be happy enough building 2-color decks and finding their colors supported enough to splash into a third now and then, with the chance to go wild with a 4+ color brew if stars align! Here's where I landed:

Crestfall, Unwell Capital - Esper ☀️💧💀

Shipwreck Camp - Sultai 💀🌳💧

Bran Bramble - Jund 💀🔥🌳

Cobbleston - Naya 🔥🌳☀️

Glimmer - Jeskai 💧🔥☀️

While every color and color pair are represented, these are only 5 of the 10 possible 3-color combos (frankly, between these and all the other lands, I was running out of notable locations to pull from our D&D campaign!). This means you're twice as likely to get a tri-land containing some pairs (☀️💧, 🔥☀️, 💧💀, 💀🌳, 🔥🌳) than others (☀️💀, 🌳☀️, 💧🔥, 💧🌳, 💀🔥). This is definitely something I'll keep an eye on during playtests.

Regardless, these will go a long way to getting players into the colors they want to play! I decided to print them as commons, meaning they won't take up rare slots in packs and there will be four copies of each!

Mana fixing is now looking much more reliable, but that's not all lands are designed to do...

Tomorrow on Lands Week: Discard/Sac Lands!

UWK Lands Week Designing the Illusory Palace >The Tri-Lands Discard/Sac Lands Utility Lands Back to Basics

[joan-deactivated20230204]

genuinely surprised to find that they made the vintage cube fun again. after 2 and a half years. and all it took was massively overhauling the cube and not trying to force shit like sacrifice or "35 assorted rares from the latest sets"

[markrosewater]

Hi! This is sort of a random question about the reskins we've seen with universes beyond cards vs. functional reprints to change the flavor of an in-universe card to another in-universe card (like llanowar elves vs. fyndhorn elves).

I could run Paths of the Dead (from LOTR commander) in a standard deck, since it *is* cavern of souls. I could not, however, run fyndhorn elves in place of llanowar elves in one of the formats where llanowar elves is legal but fyndhorn elves isn't. The tradeoff to this is that in commander, I can run one fyndhorn elves and one llanowar elves, since they're not the same card, but I can't run a Paths of the Dead and a Cavern of Souls from another printing (ex. LCI), since they're the same card. Would it be possible to print in-universe cards as reskins instead of functional reprints to change the flavor? For example, say you're designing a faction set with tri-color factions, and you want to use the triome lands with cycling, but you're not on Ikoria/New Capenna, so the names don't really fit. If you did a functional reprint to change the flavor, then players in eternal formats could double the number of triomes they run. Is reskinning the card an option you have at your disposal for this kind of situation?

Reskinning is an option, but a resource we want to be careful with.

[affinityforanime]

The triomes reimagined as Nintendo Switch card frames with scenes from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I came up with this concept because the triomes all enter the battlefield tapped, so when you play them the art will be "right-side up". Also the buttons on the right joycon are all T for "tap" and then the three colors of mana the land produces instead of A, B, X, Y.

Any other "enters tapped" land cycles I should do in this same card frame treatment?

[mad-god-of-dungeons-and-dragons]

explaining why i refer to the three colour combos as ikoria/capenna instead of tarkir/alara

as i have said once before, i refer to the three colour combinations as ikoria triomes and new capenna families, rather than the typical shard/wedge way that players usually do. i have decided to put it out there in case anyone else uses these terms.

it’s mainly because i only really got into the game around 2019-2020, and didn’t interact with the fandom at all until this year. so the first exposure i had to the three colour combos were the names given to them in ikoria: lair of behemoths and later the allied combos in the streets of new capenna. they were the only names i had really seen for them.

for the families, it’s for that reason. i saw new capenna before i knew anything about alara. i’d heard about in bits of lore i had read, but nothing on the colour combos. so i just refer to them as the first name i knew for them.

but for the enemy wedges, i have a bit more behind my reasoning. with the families, each trio was centred around one colour. for example, brokers is white-centred, with green and blue as its allies. then each of the other families follow the same pattern. even alara did this. however, tarkir broke this pattern. instead of the central colour having both its enemies as it’s companions, it focused on one and added an allied colour and an enemy colour. for example, abzan is white centred and has black and green as companions. but this breaks the pattern previously established, as the white centred enemy trio should have red and black as companions. tarkir does not do this, but ikoria picks up the pattern. and i only care about the patterns so much coz i am autistic, and if you have any autistic friends you’ll know how much we love our patterns.

so, for example, my two main commander decks are my cabaretti bright-palm deck and my indatha ixhel deck.

if you have any questions feel free to ask.

[favoritemtgcard]

I'd like to nominate Raugrin Triome (IKO 311) and Hexdrinker (MH1 168)!

Raugrin Triome (art by Robbie Trevino)

Hexdrinker

[swordandsable]

Indatha Triome + some subtle shimmer details

[the-odyssey-magic-set]

Hello! It's me again. In keeping with "I think Ikoria had some really good design decisions" I decided to just nick the rare triomes whole cloth. Give them a new name, get some new art, Hey presto that's some new magic cards. And! Magic Set Editor, the program that I'm using, allows for the Godzilla name bars too! So I can pog out :)

[inventors-fair]

Ba-sick Designs

Burgeoning Frontier by @reaperfromtheabyss

Ooh, a classic Serra Avenger land. Honestly? Power level wise, I think this is pretty good. It’s obviously better in slower formats, but then again so is Temple of the False God, and no one is calling for that to be banned. I’m not sure if I want this to have a regular “T: Add C” ability just so it’s not a completely dead draw? I know I would just glance over an opening hand with this and two other lands, and only realize my mistake after keeping. Anyways, the name is pretty evocative, that of a developing frontier town that needs a bit of time to really get up and going, but I really think you could have slammed this one into a home run with some flavor text giving me a specific example. Maybe this is on the vaunted Wild West plane? Or maybe it’s the folks of Eldraine expanding into the wilds? Who knows? I want to, that’s for sure.

Cliffside Arboretum by @hypexion

This is probably the simplest land on the podium this week, and it’s that simplicity I love. Conditional duals are hard to design, especially since most of the “balanced” design space is taken up already. However, in a simple, clean ability, you made a dual that actively gets better when your land base gets worse. I’m a huge fan of that, since it’s definitely not designed for high power tournament play, but is the perfect thing for little Timmy to slot in his new Gruul deck. It’s not overly punishing either which is nice, but it’s great in your opening hand, and still good if you’re running mostly basics or fetchlands. I don’t have much else to comment- other than the fact that a cliffside arboretum sounds fantastic and makes me wish that we could commission artists for this silly little contest.

Thirsting Jungle by @nine-effing-hells

Conversely, this one is probably the most complex land in the top 6, but again deserves that position because of how smoothly everything fits. This land carries some super interesting tension between when you want to play it- turn 1, so you have an untapped triome for the rest of the game? Or forgo the early color fixing and hold onto it until you have some sac fodder, in order to turn this into an absolute beast that dodges most forms of removal? It asks you to make some hard decisions but rewards you for them both, which is what I love seeing in a design. I was going to comment on the lack of haste, before realizing it enters tapped, so that’s irrelevant. All in all, it’s an awesome card, and a manland that weirdly wants to push more aggro than control, which is awesome.

And that's that! I'm on vacation this week, but hopefully will be able to get the commentary to you good folks sometime soon.

Ciao!

~judge @naban-dean-of-irritation

[theunwellkingdom]

Design Deep-Dive #12: Even More Tri-Lands!

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.

Click through for a closer look at each of them:

[vorthosjay]

Hey, do we know on which triomes the companions live?

For some, yeah. The five clades are tied to specific biomes. The ones that fall outside of that I don’t know.

[niuttuc]

New “budget” Commander cards: Lord of the Rings: Blue

You know these by now, we'll go color by color, mixing main set and commander set. Reprints can be included if they brought the price down under our bar. All the cards presented here are under $2 at time of writing. Cards will be evaluated as part of the 99, even legendary creatures.

Cantrips are neat, and always useful somewhere. Birthday escape giving you a bit of evasion for one mana will make it playable somewhere, and Borne Upon a Wind allowing to flash in not only sorceries or creatures but enchantments along with cantripping means it'll likely be a decent cantrip in a few decks. Nothing groundbreaking here however.

The one mana landcyclers this set are in general very good. A lot of their power comes from the fact they can fetch typed nonbasics, which these days is a huge upside even on a budget. This is a better, instant-speed Lay of the Land that in the late game turns into a bad harmonize, which is perfectly serviceable to refill a hand. Just make sure to include a couple typed duals in your deck, or if you have access to them, triomes, in your deck.

Not all decks will want Ioreth, but any deck that wants untappers will, she's a very good blocker to boot. The floor on her is ramp, as she can untap lands (double ramp if you got a bounceland laying around), and untapping two legends makes it easier than usual for an untapper to go infinite. Oh, and she doesn't have to target your own stuff, so you can make deals.

It's worse than a Castle Vantress because of all the conditions, but hey, every deck in commander should have a legendary creature on hand, and scrying never hurt anyone. With that said, I would only play this as one of my utility lands in mono-blue, the upside is just not big enough for me to play it in any deck with more colors (unless I'm specifically scry-themed, like Eligeth or Galadriel).

Usual spiel about loving sagas. This one doesn't do anything flashy, but for three mana, it does a lot of work, grabbing you a sol ring or a pair of boots for a couple turns, and drawing you at least a couple cards, while also toning down the aggression a bit. It'll be decent in any deck, though not very exciting in most, and sometimes the board will get wiped before the last chapter and you'll cry.

However, if you can manipulate counters to either keep it around forever (and keep stealing artifacts or drawing cards) and possibly also proliferate those stun counters repeatedly, it becomes pretty exciting, it's a very versatile saga to toy around with in those decks because it does a bit of everything and is pretty cheap to deploy.

And we close things off with Goldberry, who's... Alright, I mostly included her because I like this kind of design on legends, most decks won't want her, but for those decks built around counter shenanigans, she's a great enabler as a two-drop. Also the art is gorgeous!