niuttuc

[niuttuc]

Nah, +2 mace was fine for any database that has any amount of resources dedicated to it. Now, the six-sided cards, those were annoying to drop out of the blue.

Hey Mark, do you know if the Gatherer updates are going to make +2 Mace into a card that actually exists within the database?

I don’t think there is a card that has made database managers twitch more than +2 Mace. : )

[niuttuc]

Hydra's Tear

Recently, I've created a magical item for one of my MtG characters, and I tend to spend a lot of time refining unnecessary details for these, so I felt like writing down what I've got on it. Feel free to include it or a variation on it in your own creations. I'll put up the story side of things with the historical model and a short description first, then go into the unnecessary details under a read more.

The Myth:

The legend associated with the Hydra's Tear harkens back to days long past, and long forgotten, on the plane of Theros. It is but one small part of the tale of the Founding of Meletis, the story of the Aesthelith. It is known to only a few yet, woven as it is into the story of Kynaios and Tiro, the Guardians of Meletis.

After defeating the tyrant Agnomakhos at the goddess Ephara's behest, the two lovers founded a city who the goddess would be the patron of. To show their love to each other and devotion, they declared that the first ceremony to be conducted in Ephara's temple in Meletis, as soon as it would be finished, would be the kings' wedding.

Ephara was pleased by their dedication and success and delighted at this announcement. She set forth to find a wedding gift fit for two kings, and for a goddess to grant as well. After giving humans magic to fight in the war against Agnomakhos, she wanted to show the good magic could also bring in peace.

Knowing his skills with magical crafts, Ephara went first to her cousin Purphoros, god of the Forge, with her requests. Purphoros assented to help her, but only if she procured for him the centerpiece of a creation he had in mind, but escaped the grasp of even the god: a tear from a hydra. Cunning Ephara assented, with already a plan to extract it from such a beast.

In Nyx, she found the great hydra Polukranos in its lair hidden in the stars. There, she waited for it to sleep, then started telling him the story of Kynaios and Tiro, of their bravery, but more than anything, of their love. The story was so beautiful that the sleeping hydra wept a single tear. The goddess was swift to claim her prize and return to Purphoros's forge.

In Purphoros's hands, the tear became a gem, and holding it firmly, the god split the green stone in twain. From its halves, Purphoros fashioned two gold brooches to his and Ephara's design. She thanked her cousin, and took the jewelry to the city of Meletis, where a wedding was being arranged.

When the day came, the goddess officiated the wedding herself, and gave to each of the kings one of the brooch. "Behold," she declared, "by my word, you who were two are now one. These are a symbol of your love, and of mine. While a brooch can fasten clothes, these will fasten people together. Like the hydra it hails from, for as long as you keep it against your skin, you will be as two heads of the same body. You shall see what the other sees, hear what the other hears, and feel what the other feels. Never again shall you be alone, in life or in death."

And as she spoke, so it was. Through the magic of the brooches, even when their duty sent one of the kings to a far-off country, they were never alone. Never separated from the other's voice, or touch, for the rest of their lives.

Then, as it does for any mortal, their time came. Tiro died first, and on that day, Meletis wept, and Kynaios grieved. And nowhere on his body could the brooch be found. Ephara had spoken true, and the brooches, created by the gods, were not impeded by death. By the next night, Kynaios smiled once more, hearing his husband's voice, seeing through his eyes the groves of Ilysia, and feeling his touch.

With his husband's counsel, it is said that Kynaios reigned in his last few years with wisdom beyond compare, for he had seen sacred Ilysia, and could through his husband seek advice from heroes past. When his own turn came, he passed with a smile, and once again, his brooch couldn't be found.

Legend tells that they used their magic still that day to find each other in the vast and lush groves of Ilysia. And that they still wore them in the centuries thereafter, their love as strong or stronger as the day of their wedding.

In Practical Terms:

Hydra's tear sensory brooches, or Aestheliths, are pairs of rare magical items that allow the wearer of one to share one of the primary senses of the other, and vice-versa. The main uses are to share hearing, sight and touch, but taste and smell are also possible. Some more nebulous uses might be possible, but if they are, their use isn't as simple. All the current examples known of the items can only share one set of senses back and forth at once.

Having two sets of sensations for one sense is quite disorienting and overwhelming at first. It takes days of training with any one before one can learn to act normally with it active, and weeks or months before being able to make reflexive use of it.

It is entirely voluntary on both ends, and can be used by anyone, even if they cannot wield magic. While the item can be controlled with a hint of magic with thoughts, it can also be set and used by hand. It is done by turning parts of it to select the sense, and pushing lightly on the gem to activate it or accept the activation from the other of the pair. The effect can be interrupted from either end with a directed thought.

Despite being called brooches, these typically sit directly on the body of the user, under any clothes in the way. They don't have traditional pins or clasps, but they stick to one's body magically, and can be moved around their skin easily with a finger to slide it around.

Besides the lack of magic necessary to operate them, they are notable against other forms of magical communication devices because of their incredible reliability. They are almost impossible to disrupt or intercept, instantaneous, and can work even through planar boundaries and other magical limits. On Theros (and probably Kaldheim and other planes with similarly physical afterlives), this includes allowing direct contact between the mortal realm and the Underworld, which is otherwise particularly difficult. Of course, getting it there involves someone dying with one of a pair, and still wanting to contact the person on the other end after their deaths, so that makes exploiting it a bit harder a task.

The Unnecessary Details:

The Gem:

A Hydra's Tear is some form of magical gem. Whether or not it actually originates from hydras and their tears is unknown. It has a rough appearance due to its property to regenerate from its largest fragment when splintered or cut, a dark green lump of irregular shape. As such, extracting it from rock is fairly easy, you can just smash the rock and get the bit that regenerates from there, but further sanding or cutting it into shape is impossible, and each Hydra's Tear will have a unique natural shape.

When cut into two exactly equal pieces, the magic of the stone doesn't regenerate it, it instead acts magically as if the stone was never cut in the first place. This link transcends distance, Realms and Planes, and is almost impossible to disrupt, offering room for interesting enchantments.

However, cutting such a stone exactly in two is an incredibly difficult task, and has only been achieved by Gods or master craftsmiths with a divine favor. Even for those, it has required a lot of trial and error and sometimes days of work. As a result, the following experiment of further cutting the two halves into exact halves (quarters of the full thing) has so far never succeeded. It might not be fully impossible, but since each stone is unique, it would require succeeding in this arduous task twice in a row, and it's impossible to tell whether a failure is due to it being outright impossible or just the result of a minor mistake. The gem is pretty rare in the first place, as are those able to cut it once, so experiments such as those have been few in numbers.

Notably, once a gem is cut in this way, it doesn't lose its regenerating properties, but as far as its magic is concerned, it is still a single gem, so chipping or breaking it doesn't cause the link to fail or anything of the sorts. It simply regenerates whichever half got chipped or broken into its proper half.

The Brooches:

The most common (but still incredibly rare) item created from cut Hydra's Tears are brooches modeled and enchanted after the mythical pair, though not all those that have made them knew the myth. Those are called Aestheliths after the Theran term, or sensory brooches. As was mentioned earlier, they allow the wearer of both brooches to pick a sense they both have, and experience at the same time their end of that sense and the other wearer's. It is disorienting at first.

It does not function when the sense only exists for one of the wearers due to different species, but it does function if one of the wearers has that sense impaired but would otherwise have it, such as with blind or deaf humans, who can see or hear through the other wearer's senses. If both wearer share a sense but differ greatly in its characteristics, such as being able to perceive different wavelengths of light or a much wider sense of smell, it will still function but will be even more disorienting and difficult to parse for both people involved.

They technically can work with any sentient creatures, but are only really practical with sapient ones. Training an animal to wear, activate the brooch and then not immediately panic at the flood of sensations and interrupt the connections has proven beyond the skills of any who have tried it.

With the typical design, as far as manual (non magical) use, a ring of sorts surrounds the gemstone, and can be turned to select a sense, then pushing on the gem sends a "call" to the other wearer that makes them aware of the initiated link, that they can accept with a push of their own end of the gem, or dismiss with a thought. The sense shared is always the same on both ends, and there can only be one shared at a time.

The brooches adhere to skin, but can be slid around freely on there, like a magnet would behave on a large magnetic surface. They are impossible to pry off without removing the skin they're attached to when active, and require quite a bit of effort to remove by a third party even when inactive. The wearer can remove their own with much less effort if they want to. Much like other controls, they can be moved around one's body with a though and a hint of magic channeled at it, if the wearer is able to channel magic.

Here are some notes on stuff to expect with the typical senses.

Sight:

Sight is perhaps the most disorienting of senses to share at first. It helps to acclimate someone to it to start with both people involved keeping their eyes as close to each other as possible, and looking in the same direction. Learning to move your body according to a point of view that is not centered on your own head takes practice, and when that point of view is itself moving, it can lead to nausea at first.

While the brooches allow one to focus on a different part of the other's vision than they are, it doesn't allow one to move the other's eyes, or head. As a result, it can be a confusing and frustrating experience to want to look at something at the edge of the other's vision, when you physically can't turn your head or pivot your eyes to see it better.

Because sight can only be shared on its own, communication is difficult with it while in different locations. Many pairs of wearers eventually develop a code, often based on blinks for humans and similar, for some common actions... Or to switch to hearing for more complex discussions.

Between species with similar sight characteristics, there can be slight differences of color in how the world is perceived, or large ones in the case of some color blindnesses.

Between species with different sight characteristics, the mind of each will eventually adapt to recognize more colors they wouldn't usually perceive, but the process can be slow and headache-inducing.

Some have reported an unusual feeling upon seeing themselves through the eyes of another, likely linked to the fact people usually only see their own face through a mirror, whereas the brooches do not mirror the images they show.

Hearing:

Hearing is possibly the most often shared of the senses with Aestheliths. It allows conversations at any distance or simply seamless eavesdropping.

It is not typically as disorienting to share hearing as sight, though it can be when trying to locate the source of a sound. Your mind will associate the location depending on the position of the ears of the other wearer, not your own. This is even more disorienting when standing in the vicinity of the other wearer, but looking in different directions.

One of the quirks of sharing hearing is that both wearers hear a different voices than they expect for the other (and themselves), but not any other person. Because people hear themselves through not only their hear but the resonance of their own body, the voice they hear for themselves and the voice others hear are different. As a result, when sharing hearing with someone else, one will hear the "internal" voice for the other when they speak, and the "external" voice for themselves as well if they speak anywhere the other can hear. The speech of any third person will be heard the same as normal.

Due to sound moving relatively slowly in air, there can be a slight feeling of echoing when speaking and listening while sharing hearing, particularly as the distance between the two wearers grows larger (but still within range of hearing the same sounds).

When hearing is shared between two species with different hearing ranges, similar to sight, the mind slowly expands to understand sounds beyond the normal reach. But, similarly, those sounds can only be heard through another's ears still.

Touch:

Touch has a lot of unique traits as far as being shared. It goes beyond just being touch and some other characteristics are shared as well. Some elements of proprioception as well: sharing touch involves knowing the position of the other's body and how it feels in many places, though the mind will try to assign that perception of the other person's body to the wrong position in space. This can be changed with trust and training, and a learned pair sharing touch can move around each other without ever getting in one another's way or looking at each other.

While touch will share many physical sensations, be they pressure, temperature and pleasure, it also has a special handling of pain, that is... Othered, in a way other shared sensations through the brooches aren't. When sharing touch, you *know* the pain the other is in, but you don't feel it as your own. This peculiarity of the enchantment is very purposeful, and one of the reasons replicating the enchantment is an intricate and involved process.

Touching the other wearer while sharing the sense of touch with them feels like touching your own body in many ways, since you receive both the feeling of touching and being touched at the same time. A fascinating experience.

Smell and Taste:

Smell and Taste are separate, but I'll address them here together, as they're similar in being more rarely used, and less unique in their handling.

Smell can be very useful if one of the wearers has a much more developed one than the other, such as when a human and a leonin are paired. Similar to sight and hearing, one learns to decode those new signals with time and headaches. Unlike with hearing and sight however, some of those might become recognizable without needing to be sharing smell anymore eventually, as faint but present. It might even allow one to become receptive to pheromones they normally do not notice or react to.

Taste has a bit more to it being shared, like touch, in that you can also get the texture and warmth of what is being tasted through the link. Interestingly, individual preferences also are translated through the shared sense of taste. If something is found delicious by one of the wearers and disgusting by another, how it is experienced by both will depend on who actually eats it, it will feel either disgusting to both or delicious to both.

Other senses:

Beyond the five traditional senses, some might be able to be shared with the brooches, though they might require being able to magically choose the sense to share, as the selector ring doesn't typically cover anything beyond the five main ones (and an standby position to avoid accidental activations.)

Other senses that can be shared this way include magnetoreception (the perception of magnetic fields), thaumasthesia (the perception of magic), vestibular sense (perception of balance and acceleration, generally pretty useless and nausea-inducing to share with another), and more... As a reminder, both wearer need to have the sense, or the potential for it, to be able to share it this way.

There are rumors that one can also share a sense of self through the brooches, in a way that would allow two people to perceive each other's thought processes. While there has been successful activations with this idea, the process is so overwhelming, disturbing and disorienting that everyone that tried it ended the connection after a fraction of a second at most. It is possible something like that could be sustained, but it would take years if not decades of very brief and lengthening contacts to be able to maintain a usable link for any reasonable amount of time. And there are worries that doing so would permanently alter both wearer's personalities and thoughts to match the other closer in the process.

[niuttuc]

Could we see more Bees in White? They feel at least as white as other White animal species like Dogs or Horse with the hive structure and beekeeping, White actually gets flying, and even their sting could be easily linked to white's mechanic of dealing damage to attacking or blocking creatures. And they're Bees!

I’m also in the “Bees should be white” camp.

[niuttuc]

A commission by @duskguard of Zarunpel's bonded shadow panther and mount, Velumbra, with a cameo of the knight herself.

She was great to work with, and why I love working with artists that know the source material: They came up with the idea of the hammer at the end of Zarunpel's braids from me just stating it was weighted for combat, and the aesthetics and habits of Knights of Garenbrig.

Beyond that, there will be a dinner of elk meat and shadow that evening!

[niuttuc]

O wise deckbuilder! I was immediately inspired by the newly revealed Rydia, Summoner of Mist. I want to remove or otherwise skirt finality counters, but her color identity is miserable for it. I’ve got Quarry Hauler and a few artifacts. Any ideas?

Generally speaking, with most commanders, I'd say it's a trap to focus too much on wanting to remove finality counters. Doubly so with sagas, that will take on average several turn cycle before potentially going back to the graveyard. By the time you'd want to bring it back again, you have had plenty of time to fill up your graveyard (even just with Rydia's landfall, but even more so with other effects or Sagas cast from your hand expiring).

With that said, removing counters does work with Sagas to reuse the chapters you want, so at least the cards aren't fully dead when you aren't in the hyper-specific situation where removing finality counters actually would matter. I don't think it will most of the time, you'd need to get your commander out, activate her for some mana, wait several turns for a saga to run out after removing a finality counter (and not removing a lore counter from the saga to simply keep it around longer along the way), and then be in a situation where the same saga you reanimated on turn 3 or 4 is STILL your best target to bring back on turn 7 or 8. But if you're set on that...

Sagas from Neon Dynasty blink themselves to transform on their third chapter. This does mean they are sagas that remove the finality counter from themselves once they're done, so prime candidates for this.

Similarly, Summons from this set are saga creatures, they're relatively easy to blink if that's what you want to do, though in red green you'll mostly have stuff like Sword of Hearth and Home and Conjurer's Closet, which aren't the most efficient.

Nesting Grounds is an obvious one and I assume you already have it, but it's worth mentioning if you don't since you only mentioned a couple artifacts. It allows you not only to remove your finality counters if that matters, but can also move them to opponents' stuff to exile them upon death, or more fittingly in this deck remove a lore counter from one saga to put one on another, getting an effect early and re-getting another effect next turn.

Well, you know. Finality counters only work when the thing would go to the graveyard. So why not replace it? Warp World is a bit extreme, but you're a deck that's likely to play a lot of permanents with your spell effects being filled by Sagas. And all Sagas have a trigger immediately upon entering. So. That's an option.

[niuttuc]

Thormundar - Roswell, Lord of War

The title of Lord of War carries many responsibilities, and some require a personal approach.

A new piece of personal art featuring one of my OCs, Roswell; I had a craving to paint a forest and so I decided to draw an OC I haven't done in a long while!

[niuttuc]

Heyo everyone!

It's been a long while since I made an announcement here, but owing to several unrelated circumstances, I am now currently ✨In Between Jobs✨!

While I'm attending further education to make another career switch and while I'm looking for a part-time job, I'm temporarily opening commissions again!

Terms and Conditions + Contact Info:

Reblogs are much appreciated!

[niuttuc]

I've been building a deck for Ratonhnhake:ton and as much as I love shenanigans (esper equipment! What a concept!) Noctis from the FF set has caught my eye as a similar artifact reanimator, if less thematically unified. I definitely see a lot of pros and cons between them, but I'd love to hear your take on the pair, and which is the more interesting and/or more powerful commander, in your opinion.

Of these two, Noctis is almost certainly the one that can be built to be more powerful. He is usable the turn he lands into play without additional effort, repeatably, and doesn't need to attack and connect to get value.

Beyond all that, Noctis's specific wording also allows some infinite combos as long as you don't let the things he cast hit the battlefield to get a finality counter before they get back to the graveyard. As was already discovered by players, Mox Diamond's peculiar wording for example allows it by itself to be recast infinitely for 3 life every time by Noctis, never fully entering the battlefield, which as you can imagine can lead to more game-winning combos with known offenders like Aetherflux Reservoir. Similar stuff can be done without spending a paycheck on a mox diamond with Chalice of the Void.

But even if you don't combo with Noctis, just "fairly" reusing cheap artifacts one more time is likely the stronger and more reliable effect. It's actually one of the finality counter decks that I'd advise playing some counter removing in, mostly because some counter removing effects are already artifacts you're not too dissatisfied playing anyway. The play patterns with it will match other artifact decks for the most part, though.

Ratonhnhaké:ton would likely be a bit more unique, though I dunno if overall more interesting long term. Don't get me wrong, with Noctis, you'll be the PROBLEM, but at least you'll be fiddling with what you get every game, at least until you really get going. Trying to get Ratonhnhaké:ton to pull his weight would likely involve trying to get into your graveyard then reanimate very Expensive equipments (either to cast or equip) directly into play, and there's a limited selection of those that are impactful enough to be worth the effort. Kaldra Compleat, Argentum Armor, the Aetherspark,... It's quick to go down the entire list. And since you reanimate them post combat, most of them will awkwardly wait a turn on the battlefield looking very scary to your opponents.

I fear Ratonhnhaké:ton would want you to always go for the same few good cards, and encourage as a result tutoring to your graveyard to get them there (which black has a very easy time to do these days.) Which isn't the most interesting play pattern to me, or rather, it's one I'd get bored of quickly, doubly so if it's not actually very powerful as a result either without significant work.

I think if you want my opinion on which of those two to go with, go with Noctis. You have more range to do stuff there and tune the power to what you want it to be, and games can actually feel different without crippling yourself. From making it a flavorful Equipment deck in Esper less focused on reanimating Giant ones, to a fully tuned combo deck that can handle bracket 4 and might even be able to be tuned to be cEDH (likely a bit off meta) if that's where you want to go.

[niuttuc]

Hi! Long time listener, first time caller.

I've been working on a Kynaois and Tiro of Meletis deck with a gameplay goal and a logistical goal. Gameplay goal is somewhere between politics and aikido; helping specific players while using others' momentum for my own advantage. Logistical goal is to use as few additional game elements and tracking issues as possible; tokens, counters, zones, ownership, etc.

I'm thinking effects like Jailbreak, New Way Forward, Take the Bait. I'd love to hear your ideas!

Thanks!

I will start by pointing to this previous answer, not quite the same, but some overlap there.

Some combat shaping is always nice, and Oracle en-Vec is some personal secret tech, forcing people to make choices well before they have all the information, and avoiding surprise haste creatures ruining your day. It can also turn some tapping effects into creature destruction, but that might not be something you want.

Master Warcraft is a classic for shenanigans. Just remember that while it allows you to choose which creatures attack, it doesn't allow you to choose WHO they attack, the controller still has the final say for this.

If you want to only give to opponents who are being good players and helping you, Ox Drover is very good card draw and Wrong Turn is a hilarious way to get rid of a problem with just a bit of shifting it to the side.

Life of the Party is less selective, but it's so fun! Doubly so if you're giving other creatures around.

Argent Dais is a reusable removal that gets powered up by your opponents attacks (and your own), and can answer anything threatening at instant speed, or be used to give cards as rewards to whoever you wish, including yourself.

Tempt with Mayhem is just a blast of a card that lets everyone profit from any scary spell someone might cast... But you'll profit so much more. Even cast on a simple rampant growth it becomes a cheaper Tempt with Discovery.

[niuttuc]

Alright, @ominousmotion as far as recommendations for Zegana in particular that DON'T show up on her base EDHREC page... I'll focus on more recent and cheaper (in $) cards for a first build so that they're easier to get your hands onto if you don't have them. As always, I'm not saying you SHOULD play all of these, just presenting them for consideration, your deck is your deck and you know best what fits in it.

Ornery Tumblewagg is a cheaper card that is fine enough by itself, though it gets better with other +1/+1 cards, it doesn't need them. You can play it on one turn, put its own counter on itself, saddle it with almost anything the next turn, give it its own counter, attack for another two, and your three mana got you a 6/6 that will keep growing. Great at enabling Zegana without requiring a thousand mana, and once Zegana is down, well, it can start doubling her counters to great effect.

Some ramp that's on theme for the deck or synergizes. Worldwagon can be a big power in your backpocket to enable Zegana and some repeatable ramp, crewing is relatively easy since you can tap a summoning sick creatures with power 4 or greater to do it and keep ramping. Fenrir hasn't been released yet but it's a creature that ramps you, sticks around a couple turns and ties into the theme of the deck. Beanstalk Giant is a ramp spell early AND a giant creature late.

This one I separate because it serves a different purpose. Traverse the Outlands isn't an early ramp card, it's a card for the late game that pushes your deck into overdrive. Its main weakness (other than being 5 mana) is that you need a big creature on board, and if the opponents kill your big creature in response, you're in a bad spot. With Zegana, you're likely to have two Big creatures at least: Zegana, and whatever enabled her to have power. This helps you make sure Traverse does its job, and doubles your mana available or more for the rest of the game. If you think you can get four or more lands with it, go for it, the earlier the better.

As far as sweepers in simic, options are fairly limited, but Oversimplify works great with what Zegana wants, making a single Huge creature, as well as actually getting rid of your opponents' stuff unlike mass bounce. That one does show up on Zegana's EDHREC page, but felt worth mentioning.

Illithid Harvester is a personal pick when it comes to blue and simic decks with access to not much creature sweepers. It can remove the abilities which are more likely to cause problems, if opponents already attacked without extra costs, or enable itself for a bit of mana (that Simic is good at generating), by tapping down the creatures first. Notably, the Adventure can also be cast to just tap down creatures to remove them as blockers as you prepare to kill someone with your giant creatures. And since you get to pick the targets, it leaves you with your own giant creatures and is always one-sided.

Cyclone Summoner is stretching my "recent" statement since it's now a few years old, but it's 20 cents, is a giant creature, bounces almost everything... Except himself and Zegana is also a Wizard. There are actually a lot of incidental Wizards, so sometimes your opponents get to keep a thing or two too, but usually Wizards aren't as beefy as this Giant or Zegana are.

Benthic Anomaly is a huge creature that's really good at making a HUGER creature, as you get the best creature your opponents have ability-wise, and then you get the combine power and toughness of everyone else's biggest thing.

Heirloom Blade is underrated outside of decks focused on one specific creature type. In here, once deployed, it can give you 3 additional power on anything for a single mana to equip, which is pretty alright already. It also gives you some insurance, with how creature types are distributed, you often have SOMETHING you'll find when whatever this is equipped to dies. Most things are randomly elves, wizards, or for giant creatures serpents, krakens,...

Im building out prime speaker zegna rn my basic strategy with it is big creatures and counter spells/ interaction any help would be super appreciated this is my first deck build

Alright, so, if it's a first deck, some of the advice I'll give will be pretty basic, some of which you're likely to already know, but I have no way of knowing exactly what you do and don't know in advance, so pardon anything that seems obvious.

First off, some generic resources: Scryfall is the place to go to search for cards that exist but you've never seen before, though their advanced search options or by learning its search syntax. EDHREC gathers data on the internet about commander decks and synthesizes it for each commander, telling you what other people are playing. It isn't necessarily good for your version of the deck (or for theirs, for that matter), but it's a good starting point for "obvious" stuff. Here's the page for Zegana.

Secondly, generic deckbuilding advice: In Commander deckbuilding, it's good to know what kind of essentials your deck has. Generally speaking, most decks want to:

Win the Game: Unless you're doing something particularly silly, every deck wants to have a plan for winning the game. "Hitting them with a couple of 3/3s and 4/4s for several turns" isn't something that will realistically work out often. As such, most deck want to know what their plan is in advance, and have cards that you know in advance will cause you to almost always win if they aren't stopped by opponents quickly. It can be single super-impactful cards (Avenger of Zendikar, Rise of the Dark Realms, Terror of the Peaks,...), it can be combos, it can be general strategies (make two hundred tokens, get a ton of giant trampling creatures, make one giant creature that can one shot people, sacrifice a dozen creature with three blood artists in play...), it can be spells that create a lot of temporary power (Overwhelming Stampede, Akroma's Will,...), there are plenty of options. But knowing that you have a plan to win, and knowing what that plan is, is good both during the game and during deckbuilding to help you structure the deck around.

Ramp: Ramping means accelerating mana, making sure you play your land for turn every turn but also getting ahead to get more than one more mana every turn. The goal is to get faster to the point where you can do more every turn, and do more impactful things. Typical ramp includes land ramp (getting lands into play from your hand or deck), mana dorks (cheap creatures that tap for mana, usually cheaper than land ramp but more fragile to removal), mana rocks (artifacts that tap for mana, somewhere in between land ramp and mana dorks as far as cost and fragility, but also accessible more easily to more colors.) You typically want to ramp in the early turns, because accelerating towards later turns makes less sense when you're already in the later turns, so ramp is better the earlier you can get access to it, so the cheaper in mana it is.

Draw Cards/Gain Card Advantage: You want to be playing one land every turn, and then casting one or more spell every turn, if you can. Since you only draw a single card per turn, it's not hard to realize that if you do that, the math doesn't math and you run out of cards at some point. As such, spells that give you access to more cards are invaluable, they're collectively called card draw, with Card Advantage being the concept of having access to more cards than your opponents helping you win. Furthermore, seeing more cards also means you have more options between spells to cast, so assuming you always pick the correct one, you are advantaged further. Card draw is a very layered bag, it includes card draw engines (permanents that sit on the board and let you draw/get access to cards when you do something specific), spot card draw (something like a sorcery for two mana that draws two cards), burst card draw (something like Zegana that give you a big burst of card draw all at once), but also stuff like Looting/rummaging (drawing cards and discarding as many, letting you see more cards and get more options but not get more cards to cast), cantrips (spells that have a minor effect and draw a single card, replacing themselves) and more. Drawing cards is good at pretty much every stage of the game. I tend to throw tutors in this category too, cards that get you anything you want from your deck, even though they aren't necessarily card advantage.

Interact: If every deck has a Plan to Win the Game if not stopped, every deck likely should have tools to stop other decks from winning the game before they can. Interaction is a wide category that contains removals (usually things that kill/exile/bounce a small number of permanents off the board), board wipes/sweepers (that remove ALL of one or more types of permanents off the board, or at least off your opponents' board), counterspells (that can answer anything up to and including instants and sorceries, but need perfect timing), but also stuff that's a bit off to the side like Graveyard Hate (effects that exile cards from people's graveyard or entire graveyards, key to slowing down or stopping some strategies.) With some stretching stuff like Ghostly prisons/fogs could even end up here. Some is cheaper, some is more versatile, some has additional benefits... Decks generally want a varied suite to be ready for most threats, but doubly so ones they're particularly weak to.

Recursion & Protection: I tend to bundle these together even though they probably could in theory be dispatched into other categories. Commander is a singleton format, you only have one copy of most cards. As such, being able to defend the ones you have or pick what you want to reuse from your graveyard is valuable. Protection can range from Heroic Intervention to Lightning Greaves, depending what you need, and recursion typically includes reanimation to the battlefield or regrowth effects to your hand.

Lands: Every deck needs lands to cast spells. That's technically not true, but if you're building a deck that doesn't need lands, you should make sure you know exactly what you're doing first. A good number of lands is important, though I'll get to that a bit further down.

Fun Stuff and Theme Cards: At the end of the day, decks tend to be built because we like certain cards or want to build around a theme. It's important to remember that's the point, and this is much wider a category than any of the others. With that said, if you play your cards right in deckbuilding, you can hopefully fill the other categories with cards that are still fun and/or on-theme.

Different colors will have access to different categories at different power level or efficiency. Zegana is in green and blue, for example, so you'll have a very easy time finding ramp and card draw. For interaction, you'll have access to blue's versatile counterspells, but your suite of removals and particularly creature sweepers will pale in comparison to what the other three colors have access to.

This list of categories is not just an excuse to put down paragraphs and paragraphs of text: it's also a useful way to split your deck while building it into a workable number of piles, and see what amount of each you have. If a card fits multiple of these categories, assign it to the one it feels it will more commonly or more effectively fulfill. As an example, one of my decks sorted as such

Deckbuilding is an art, not a science, so what each deck wants exactly varies. But I do have some numbers I use as a barometer of "notice if you go under these numbers" for each category.

Ramp, Card Advantage and Interaction are the three main pillars of deckbuilding. I get worried if I go under 10 cards in each of those categories, though more usually leads to more consistency at the cost of some theme. In your case, since your commander, Zegana, is a big card draw spell at 6 mana, you might want slightly less card drawing and slightly more ramp, particularly if you aim to cast big creatures. As evidenced by the above screenshot, I'm also not above dipping just below, but it always needs to be pretty careful.

For ramp, the most important is cheaper pieces, 1, 2 and 3 mana. Bigger ramp pieces are more niche and dependent on the strategy.

For interaction, I prefer versatile and always useful to the most efficient, at least at the power levels I play at. I like to include 2 to 4 sweepers in most decks, ideally with some that leave my own board alone. The above screenshot doesn't have proper sweepers, but that's an exception within my deck, not the rule, this deck tends to be the one to present problem and is in mono green where sweepers aren't great... And is only playing permanents, which cuts further into options. A few counterspells are welcome in blue decks, but going too hard on them is not recommended. They require a bit more maneuvering than most removal, and are generally not great in term of card economy, you're spending one of your card to answer one opposing cards, and have three opponents drawing cards for your one a turn. With that said, they get better the higher power you play at, as instants and sorceries become must-answers and permanents spending any time on the battlefield is a bad idea.

Also always include some amount of graveyard hate, even if it's only a piece or two. These strategies tend to be very resilient to other forms of interaction thanks to a lot of recursion, so you need something that can actually make them stumble. As was outlined in the recursion category, all commander decks make SOME use of the graveyard, so the cards aren't dead even if you're not going against dedicated graveyard decks.

Wincons and protection&recursion have less fixed numbers, it depends heavily on the deck... But make sure you always have at least a reliable way to win you can get to each game.

As mentioned before, ideally, you can fit fun stuff into the previous categories, but then it ends up taking the rest of the space.

LANDS are an important point. Playing a land every turn is really important. All the ramp in the world is just wasted mana if you're not playing a land for turn, because that also gets you ahead on mana without having to pay for it. As such, I'm an advocate for a higher land count. As tempting as it is to cut lands to play more "real" cards, I'd never go below 36 lands, and feel more comfortable at 38. If I want to cut down from 38, I typically try to maintain the land count higher with spells that can also be lands. We have a few of these now, MDFCs (modal-double faced cards) with a land on the back and a spell on the front, from Zendikar Rising and Modern Horizons 3, but also the 1-mana landcyclers from Lord of the Rings qualify here, as well as the Adventure Towns from Final Fantasy. These half-lands half-spells are invaluable in keeping a high land count, and if I want some of the spells to be actually cast, it's not rare for me to go up to 40 or 42 lands including these, with 36-38 "real" lands and 2-6 "spell" lands.

Finally, another important way to look at your deck is through its mana curve: How many cards of each cost do you have in your deck. It's important to realize that costs aren't as linear as they seem. As a rule of thumb:

A 2-mana spell costs roughly three times as much as a 1-mana spell. A 3-mana spell costs twice as much as a 2-mana spell. The same is true for a 4-mana spell compared to a 3-mana spell, as well as a 5 compared to a 4 and a 6 to a 5. Anything 7 mana and above is in the Expensive Pile.

The math isn't mathing very well, but it makes more sense when you consider that to cast the more expensive spell, you need several turns to deploy lands and possibly ramp where they're just dead cards in your hand, and they're also much more difficult to fit into a turn, much less flexible. If you have five mana and a hand full of 1 and 2-mana spells, you have a lot of possible permutations of what you're gonna cast and when. If you have five mana and a hand full of 3 and 4-mana spells, you're gonna cast one thing and be done for the turn.

With that said, Magic's designers are aware of that, so higher cost spells are often suitably more powerful and impactful compared to lower costed alternatives. You get more bang out of a single card, which also has some value.

With all that in mind, a deck wants a healthy amount of cheaper spells, and fewer expensive spells. The more expensive, the fewer, in general. Because you want any given card to have a minimum amount of impact, it's not uncommon in commander for the peak of the mana curve, the cost at which there is the most cards, to be at 3 mana, though the more optimized and powerful a format become, the lower that number gets. Peaking at 2 is generally a sign of a more efficient and fast deck. Peaking at 1 is what is expected in more competitive environments, the more powerful the more common. Follows above a couple example from some of my commander decks:

This is from a green deck of mine, it peaks at 3 but has a LOT of 4s, 5s and even 6s. It is rather heavy a curve, and as such the deck wants plenty of ramp. With that said, a lot of the costs here are not accurate, the cards have alternate costs I use more often that skew the data down a bit too.

This is from a more responsible deck of mine, but also one with less alternate costs. The deck doesn't have access to as good a ramp package, though decent enough, and is generally more low to the ground, using synergies and cheaper cards to generate more values, and ending with more of pieces coming together than singular impactful cards.

This one is from one of my more optimized combo decks, and we can see the higher costs practically vanish. It probably SHOULD play more one-cost spells too and cut back on 3s.

Aside from sorting your cards as you're building by what they do with categories, you can sort them by how much mana you expect to spend on them. Not necessarily their costs, in case they have alternate methods to be used, but it's a good shorthand. Visualizing your mana curve that way gives good indications on how your deck might play, and can inform your deckbuilding if you're hesitating on which cards to add, or which of two cards to cut.

Alright, this is already a very lengthy essay on deckbuilding, much more involved than I initially intended... I think I'll post it as-is now, as something I can link to independently in the future. I'll come back to this post tomorrow with more specific card suggestions and other advice for Zegana in particular, in a reblog, sorry for the delay!

[niuttuc]

Im building out prime speaker zegna rn my basic strategy with it is big creatures and counter spells/ interaction any help would be super appreciated this is my first deck build

Alright, so, if it's a first deck, some of the advice I'll give will be pretty basic, some of which you're likely to already know, but I have no way of knowing exactly what you do and don't know in advance, so pardon anything that seems obvious.

First off, some generic resources: Scryfall is the place to go to search for cards that exist but you've never seen before, through their advanced search options or by learning its search syntax. EDHREC gathers data on the internet about commander decks and synthesizes it for each commander, telling you what other people are playing. It isn't necessarily good for your version of the deck (or for theirs, for that matter), but it's a good starting point for "obvious" stuff. Here's the page for Zegana.

Secondly, generic deckbuilding advice: In Commander deckbuilding, it's good to know what kind of essentials your deck has. Generally speaking, most decks want to:

Win the Game: Unless you're doing something particularly silly, every deck wants to have a plan for winning the game. "Hitting them with a couple of 3/3s and 4/4s for several turns" isn't something that will realistically work out often. As such, most deck want to know what their plan is in advance, and have cards that you know in advance will cause you to almost always win if they aren't stopped by opponents quickly. It can be single super-impactful cards (Avenger of Zendikar, Rise of the Dark Realms, Terror of the Peaks,...). It can be combos. It can be general strategies (make two hundred tokens, get a ton of giant trampling creatures, make one giant creature that can one shot people, sacrifice a dozen creature with three blood artists in play...). It can be spells that create a lot of temporary power (Overwhelming Stampede, Akroma's Will,...). There are plenty of options. But knowing that you have a plan to win, and knowing what that plan is, is good both during the game and during deckbuilding to help you structure the deck around.

Ramp: Ramping means accelerating mana, making sure you play your land for turn every turn, but also getting ahead to get more than one more mana every turn. The goal is to get faster to the point where you can do more every turn, and do more impactful things. Typical ramp includes land ramp (getting lands into play from your hand or deck), mana dorks (cheap creatures that tap for mana, usually cheaper than land ramp but more fragile to removal), mana rocks (artifacts that tap for mana, somewhere in between land ramp and mana dorks as far as cost and fragility, but also accessible more easily to more colors.) You typically want to ramp in the early turns, because accelerating towards later turns makes less sense when you're already in the later turns. Ramp is better the earlier you can get access to it, the cheaper in mana it is.

Draw Cards/Gain Card Advantage: You want to be playing one land every turn, and then casting one or more spell every turn, if you can. Since you only draw a single card per turn naturally, it's not hard to realize that if you do that, you run out of cards at some point. As such, spells that give you access to more cards are invaluable, they're collectively called card draw, with Card Advantage being the concept of having access to more cards than your opponents helping you win. Furthermore, seeing more cards also means you have more options between spells to cast, so assuming you always pick the correct one, you are advantaged further. Card draw is a very layered bag, it includes card draw engines (permanents that sit on the board and let you draw/get access to cards when you do something specific), spot card draw (something like a sorcery for two mana that draws two cards), burst card draw (something like Zegana that give you a big burst of card draw all at once), but also stuff like Looting/rummaging (drawing cards and discarding as many, letting you see more cards and get more options but not get more cards to cast), cantrips (spells that have a minor effect and draw a single card, replacing themselves) and more. Drawing cards is good at pretty much every stage of the game. I tend to throw tutors in this category too, cards that get you anything you want from your deck, even though they aren't necessarily card advantage.

Interact: If every deck has a Plan to Win the Game if not stopped, every deck likely should have tools to stop other decks from winning the game before they can. Interaction is a wide category that contains removals (usually things that kill/exile/bounce a small number of permanents off the board), board wipes/sweepers (that remove ALL of one or more types of permanents off the board, or at least off your opponents' board), counterspells (that can answer anything up to and including instants and sorceries, but need perfect timing), but also stuff that's a bit off to the side like Graveyard Hate (effects that exile cards from people's graveyard or entire graveyards, key to slowing down or stopping some strategies.) Some stuff like Ghostly prisons/fogs could even end up here, if you want to stretch the concept. Some is cheaper, some is more versatile, some has additional benefits... Decks generally want a varied suite to be ready for most threats, but doubly so answers to things they're particularly weak to.

Recursion & Protection: I tend to bundle these together even though they probably could in theory be dispatched into other categories. Commander is a singleton format, you only have one copy of most cards. As such, being able to defend the ones you have or pick what you want to reuse from your graveyard is valuable. Protection can range from Heroic Intervention to Lightning Greaves, depending what you need, and recursion typically includes reanimation to the battlefield or regrowth effects to your hand.

Lands: Every deck needs lands to cast spells. That's technically not true, but if you're building a deck that doesn't need lands, you should make sure you know exactly what you're doing first. A good number of lands is important, though I'll get to that a bit further down.

Fun Stuff and Theme Cards: At the end of the day, decks tend to be built because we like certain cards or want to build around a theme. It's important to remember that's the point, and this is much wider a category than any of the others. With that said, if you play your cards right in deckbuilding, you can hopefully fill the other categories with cards that are still fun and/or on-theme.

Different colors will have access to different categories at different power level or efficiency. Zegana is in green and blue, for example, so you'll have a very easy time finding ramp and card draw. For interaction, you'll have access to blue's versatile counterspells, but your suite of removals and particularly creature sweepers will pale in comparison to what the other three colors have access to.

This list of categories is not just an excuse to put down paragraphs and paragraphs of text: it's also an useful way to split your deck while building it into a workable number of piles, and see what amount of each you have. If a card fits multiple of these categories, assign it to the one it feels it will more commonly or more effectively fulfill. As an example, one of my decks sorted as such

Deckbuilding is an art, not a science, so what each deck wants exactly varies. But I do have some numbers I use as a barometer of "notice if you go under these numbers" for each category.

Ramp, Card Advantage and Interaction are the three main pillars of deckbuilding. I get worried if I go under 10 cards in each of those categories, though more usually leads to more consistency at the cost of some theme. In your case, since your commander, Zegana, is a big card draw spell at 6 mana, you might want slightly less card drawing and slightly more ramp, particularly if you aim to cast big creatures. As evidenced by the above screenshot, I'm also not above dipping just below, but it always needs to be pretty careful.

For ramp, the most important is cheaper pieces, 1, 2 and 3 mana. Bigger ramp pieces are more niche and dependent on the strategy.

For interaction, I prefer versatile and always useful to the most efficient, at least at the power levels I play at. I like to include 2 to 4 sweepers in most decks, ideally with some that leave my own board alone. The above screenshot doesn't have proper sweepers, but that's an exception within this specific deck, not the rule, this deck tends to be the one to present problems and is in mono green where sweepers aren't great... And is only playing permanents, which cuts further into options. A few counterspells are welcome in blue decks, but going too hard on them is not recommended. They require a bit more maneuvering than most removal, and are generally not great in term of card economy, you're spending one of your card to answer one opposing cards, and have three opponents drawing cards for your one a turn. With that said, Counterspells get better the higher power you play at, as instants and sorceries become must-answers and permanents spending any time on the battlefield is a bad idea.

Also always include some amount of graveyard hate, even if it's only a piece or two. These strategies tend to be very resilient to other forms of interaction thanks to a lot of recursion, so you need something that can actually make them stumble. As was outlined in the recursion category, all commander decks make SOME use of the graveyard, so the cards aren't dead even if you're not going against dedicated graveyard decks.

Wincons and protection&recursion have less fixed numbers, it depends heavily on the deck... But make sure you always have at least a reliable way to win you can get to each game.

As mentioned before, ideally, you can fit fun stuff into the previous categories. But once you have those down, it ends up filling the rest of the space.

LANDS are an important point. Playing a land every turn is really important. All the ramp in the world is just wasted mana if you're not playing a land for turn, because that also gets you ahead on mana without having to pay for it. As such, I'm an advocate for a higher land count. As tempting as it is to cut lands to play more "real" cards, I'd never go below 36 lands, and feel more comfortable at 38. If I want to cut down from 38, I typically try to maintain the land count higher with spells that can also be lands. We have a few of these now, MDFCs (modal-double faced cards) with a land on the back and a spell on the front, from Zendikar Rising and Modern Horizons 3, but also the 1-mana landcyclers from Lord of the Rings qualify here, as well as the Adventure Towns from Final Fantasy. These half-lands half-spells are invaluable in keeping a high land count, and if I want some of the spells to be actually cast, it's not rare for me to go up to 40 or 42 lands including these, with 36-38 "real" lands and 2-6 "spell" lands.

Finally, another important way to look at your deck is through its mana curve: How many cards of each cost do you have in your deck. It's important to realize that costs aren't as linear as they seem. As a rule of thumb:

A 2-mana spell costs roughly three times as much as a 1-mana spell. A 3-mana spell costs twice as much as a 2-mana spell. The same is true for a 4-mana spell compared to a 3-mana spell, as well as a 5 compared to a 4 and a 6 to a 5. Anything 7 mana and above is in the Expensive Pile.

The math isn't mathing very well, but it makes more sense when you consider that to cast the more expensive spell, you need several turns to deploy lands and possibly ramp where they're just dead cards in your hand, and they're also much more difficult to fit into a turn, much less flexible. If you have five mana and a hand full of 1 and 2-mana spells, you have a lot of possible permutations of what you're gonna cast and when. If you have five mana and a hand full of 3 and 4-mana spells, you're gonna cast one thing and be done for the turn.

With that said, Magic's designers are aware of that, so higher cost spells are often suitably more powerful and impactful compared to lower costed alternatives. You get more bang out of a single card, which also has value.

With all that in mind, a deck wants a healthy amount of cheaper spells, and fewer expensive spells. The more expensive, the fewer, in general. Because you want any given card to have a minimum amount of impact, it's not uncommon in commander for the peak of the mana curve, the cost at which there is the most cards, to be at 3 mana, though the more optimized and powerful a format become, the lower that number gets. Peaking at 2 is generally a sign of a more efficient and fast deck. Peaking at 1 is what is expected in more competitive environments, the more powerful the more common. Follows below a couple example from some of my commander decks:

This is from a green deck of mine, it peaks at 3 but has a LOT of 4s, 5s and even 6s. It is rather heavy a curve, and as such the deck wants plenty of ramp. With that said, a lot of the costs here are not accurate, the cards have alternate costs I use more often that skew the data down a bit too.

This is from a more responsible deck of mine, but also one with less alternate costs. The deck doesn't have access to as good a ramp package, though decent enough, and is generally more low to the ground, using synergies and cheaper cards to generate more values, and ending with more of pieces coming together than singular impactful cards.

This one is from one of my more optimized combo decks, and we can see the higher costs practically vanish. It probably SHOULD play more one-cost spells too and cut back on 3s.

Aside from sorting your cards as you're building by what they do with categories, you can sort them by how much mana you expect to spend on them. Not necessarily their costs, in case they have alternate methods to be used, but it's a good shorthand. Visualizing your mana curve that way gives good indications on how your deck might play, and can inform your deckbuilding if you're hesitating on which cards to add, or which of two cards to cut.

Alright, this is already a very lengthy essay on deckbuilding, much more involved than I initially intended... I think I'll post it as-is now, as something I can link to independently in the future. I'll come back to this post tomorrow with more specific card suggestions and other advice for Zegana in particular, in a reblog, sorry for the delay!

[niuttuc]

My commander: Omnath. Which Omnath, you ask? Yes. Mana- big green stuff that gives all my creatures [x]; Rage- landfall; Roil: elemental kindred; Creation- awakened lands; All- offspring with Zinnia as the secret partner commander

That's a lot of decks, so I'll keep myself to one suggestion or two per deck.

Omnath, Locus of Mana:

Mirage Mirror seems like nice tech for Mono-Green Omnath: You have an abundance of mana, likely floating at all times, and you're in only one color, which limits your access to certain effects. Mirage Mirror is perfect here, the ability to dynamically change into anything on the board is hard to grasp without actually playing the card, as long as you can keep up the mana. The ability to stack the copy effect multiple times can lead to some weird tricks too, though that's rarer. What isn't rare is also that Mirage Mirror is almost impossible to remove. At the drop of a hat or the first sign of removal, you can activate it to turn it into a land, and removals/sweepers that affect lands are very few and far between.

Omnath, Locus of Rage:

I'll refer you to the last time you asked about this deck specifically.

Omnath, Locus of the Roil:

A lot of really strong elementals happen to have Evoke, none better of course than the MH2 free evoke elementals. Evolutionary Leap gives you a way to get even more value from these, keeping you finding more Elementals from them, as well as generally having some more resiliency to sweepers that Kindred decks generally want.

Omnath, Locus of Creation:

Ok, this one may not be making you popular. But, if your lands are also your creatures, well, you break the symmetry really easily on Storage Matrix, you get to untap your resources AND your creatures, whereas your opponents have to choose. It's not the most awful stax piece there is, but it WILL get you dirty looks because it resembles some of the worst offenders.

Omnath, Locus of All:

If you're gonna be basing things on Offspring, you likely want creatures who's power and toughness are low or irrelevant, that gain power from their ability. Selfless Squire is a great candidate that doesn't see that much play, basically a fog that you can offspring to get two giant creatures. Of course you won't double up on the damage prevention, but they both get buffed from however much you get hit for.

[niuttuc]

I've been eyeing Kain, Traitorous Dragoon to make a Voltron deck based more on Combat tricks rather than Aura and Equipment so I get a bigger benefit from him than my opponents. Any that come to mind?

The main issue I see with Kain is that if you build your deck to take advantage of him, your opponents are very much incentivized to trade him between each other and never give him back to you, since you can abuse him so much more. So I'd advise looking into ways to mitigate that aspect. But if you want combat tricks:

If you want a lot of power and your deck has enough creatures, these two are pretty efficient. Bonus points to Soulshriek, since it's a sacrifice effect nowadays, Kain will survive it if you give it away before the end step.

Free is a pretty nice cost for an effect you want!

Kain's treachery is costing you life, so the combat tricks that give lifelink are pretty important here to avoid dying.

The actual spice you might not have found... Mono-color decks usually have no trouble having plenty enough colorless mana to use, and this does a lot of different jobs in the deck. +3/-3 is not only a removal option on most boards, it also conveniently leaves Kain alive with 1 toughness to draw 5 cards and make 5 treasures. The blink mode doesn't have to target your own things, and brings creatures back under the owner's control, so it can allow you to reclaim your Kain too. And then the Scions are gravy on top.

And in the same buffing vein, Nameless Inversion is a combat trick and a removal both, depending what you need in the moment.

[niuttuc]

Send me an ask with your Commander in Magic (and your broad strategy if it's not the obvious one)

And I'll try to suggest recent, niche or obscure cards I believe you aren't running that could fit in there. I see a lot of cards and a lot of them get overseen these days, and then there's also the older stuff.

[niuttuc]

More ravnican bonds like the bond of flourishing cycle which is an effect made by two guild members of a shard with a shared color! Wedges could be done or maybe even other factions entirely!

Relatively simple here, but that's the point after all.

[niuttuc]

Have you ever done a werewolf? I'd like to see your take on a werewolf (use whatever mechanical approach you prefer). 🐺

Werewolves are pretty awkward nowadays. Their Innistrad mechanics are likely the best mechanical/flavor implementation of the idea, but they both have some major issues, and also there's a "both" issue in that they're inconsistent. I have technically made cards for at least one character who happened to be a werewolf in the past, but that was several years ago and not focused on that aspect. A third option would only make it worse. And of course, the "people not casting spells" part is actually pretty awkward in practice. Let's see...

I ended up sticking with Daybound because for Werewolves specifically, it does work well. Kinda wanted to do a classic two-part story for it. You can't play it in your Gruul Werewolves decks even if it's support though, sorry!

Since it rewards transforming often, it's also set up like many werewolves to give you something to do with your mana on your turn other than casting spells, cracking Clues, and on the back to help you cast spells to flip it back. Nothing groundbreaking here.

[niuttuc]

Custom card concept:

A rooms commander with less than 5 colors!

(I personally have an idea for one and I’m curious what else someone might make)

Alright, so color-wise, I think I'll go with Jeskai: Blue-Red was the Rooms archetype in Duskmourn, and White-Blue was Eerie, which has overlap, so it feels fitting to have a legend that bridges the two. I didn't keyword Eerie here because the once per turn made the wording a bit different from how it is used in the main set, but it could as easily be.