Card of the Day - Gladiatorial School, Slum, Rancid Marsh, and Tincture of Madness

Doublethink arose when my English class was assigned a project on 1984. A friend and I determined that we would make a 1984 set of Magic cards. We got fairly far along before ditching the idea (making a set is a great deal of work) and hooking our fortunes onto another group's work. And by "hooking our fortunes," I mean I worked my ass off for the new group while my set-design partner did jack shit.

We had gotten far enough before ditching to work out the two major themes - doublethink and sacrificing stuff. And by "work out," I mean I worked it out. "We" had also decided that we would introduce five new basic lands. Not land types. Lands.

A Plains by any other name...

Factories were Mountains and Laboratories were Islands. Railroads were Forests because we couldn't think of anything better. I don't remember what we renamed Swamps.

I still have a lot of our card ideas from back then. Nobody knew about Magic Set Editor, so all our cards were on paper. That means no rarity (we were still in the brainstorming phase) and no art. I'll post them in their original text-only form as soon as I re-find them.

But let's get back to doublethink. Actually, let's get back to growing. Shenafu suggested this alternate mechanic in the comments for yesterday's cards. I like growing. It has a more magic-y name and, far more importantly, it has significantly shorter rules text. True, it makes for slightly different rules interactions, but that's no problem. This next card could not be possible using doublethink due to text length, but growing solves that problem.




Rancid Marsh lets you choose when you use its colored-mana-producing ability, which a doublethink card wouldn't. I could change the wording a little so that it worked in the same way, but that looks ugly on the card (it has a fair amount of repeated words) and is not as exciting or useful to the player.




This is something you could never do with doublethink. It just keeps on growing more and more maddening so not even Trusted Advisor can save you. And it never resets. Once the madness count hits seven, there's no going back. Unless you play Naturalize or something. But who does that?

I imagine that this might have some synergy with The Rack. But I could be mistaken.

NOTA BENE: The substance depicted in Tincture of Madness's art is actually a dust of some sort. No tincture is involved. I guess that makes the name an homage or something. Who knows?

Original Art - Gladiatorial School
Original Art - Slum
Original Art - Rancid Marsh
Original Art - Tincture of Madness

Card of the Day - Jungle Raptor and Cave Giant

Doublethink is the winner! Seven votes out of Eight. A veritable voting block. Doublethink, like vanishing, starts the card with a number of counters then gets rid of one a turn. But when the last doublethink counter is removed, instead of nuking the permanent, you just fill 'er right up again with counters. And maybe do something. But that's not part of the ability.




Woohoo! 10/10! And you only have to wait 6 turns! Doublethink's biggest problem is that it's wordy. I wanted to make a land with doublethink 2 that gained "T: Add [B] or [G] to your mana pool" until end of turn when the last counter went away, but there wasn't room for all the text. In fact, even with their relatively simple abilities, these two both violate the text length rule of thumb. If you can't fit it within seven lines, it's too long. Jungle Raptor and Cave Giant both take up eight. Oops.

That's actually the reason I gave up on doublethink. Sure, the name doesn't really fit in a fantasy card game, but names are easy to change. What isn't is the sheer mass of text that all doublethink cards have.

Doublethink origins tomorrow, with more doublethink cards. And by tomorrow, I mean Thursday.

Original Art - Jungle Raptor
Original Art - Cave Giant