A Card a Day: New beginnings

Hey there, Drion here!

So, the "a card a day" formula isn't really working. I'm really excited to make it, but blog posts are simply not the right format for it, and people are likely annoyed by it.

So let's do what all game designers do.. Iterate!

I'll move my Snowblind and custom magic set posts under a game design journal, also ask the lead designer if I can post a Gaia design journal on here. Random cards will likely stay blog posts but I try keeping them in places.

I'll also switch to varied daily content instead of only A Card a day content.

Please write me if you have any other suggestions for how I could organize my ramblings!

Let's quickly create a magic card called New Beginnings.
Based on the name it sounds like a white card, where you reorder or reorganize things on the board for a fresher start.
There are effects similar to this, but they are generally disliked when they just wipe the board and make the game longer, so instead let's try leaning into how can we get rid of things and replace them with new ones in a fair way.

Thematically we can make it about getting rid of things and rearranging them. I have the idea that we could connect this to the Tara world I described in Out of the Air, and this card would represent nomads and refugees coming to Tara where they cut and reshape the trees into new homes. Maybe even make a twist on this on another card or as an extra option on this card where nature destroys their homes and reclaims its deserved place.

Mechanically we can represent the chopped forest as the actual land cards that you need to sacrifice, or possibly as plant creatures, but it might as this would go into a deck based around humans destroying plants, having plant creatures would be weird. So let's say you can play this card to sacrifice a land you own to play a creature from your hand. Technically we could just give the player mana, but I want to emphasize the changing of something permanent to another permanent thing, it also avoids shenanigans with extra mana for spells. Might consider just discarding lands, but that is another non-permanent thing. So let's try this:

New Beginnings
1B Sorcery

As an additional cost to cast this spell,
you may sacrifice any number of lands.
You may put a creature with mana value
3 or less from your hand onto the battlefield tapped.

I would like to add an extension that allows this card to be played in backwards, sacrificing creatures for lands, but that sounds like a green effect and that color pair wouldn't make sense in a set based around humans VS nature as black would represent humans and green would nature (there is also no deck that would want both on the same card). That'll be a different card then. You know what, let's make that too:

Old Ways
1GG sorcery

As an additional cost to cast this spell, you may sacrifice any number of creatures with mana value 1 or greater. For each creature sacrificed this way, you may put a land card from your hand onto the battlefield tapped.

Sounds nice. The mana value caveat was added to prevent token sacrifice, as those can be summoned in mass and the goal here is to sacrifice something meaningful. Due to its nature reclaiming we might instead wish to destroy enemy creatures, partially to not use sacrifice, which is not really in the flavor of green. If it destroys enemies, we can rename it Nature Reclaims, but that might already be a card. Or rename the black card to New Days for the rhyme!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this!

Have a great weekend and take care!