I’ve recently contracted Magic the Gathering brainrot. Given my other proclivities, I’ve inevitably ended up a lot of spending spare time idly writing up a bunch of custom card designs. The existence of Food artifacts in the Eldraine set was my starting point, and I’ve ended up with nearly a hundred cards.
Color: Food is primarily Green and secondarily Black; I’ve added White to the mix in order to make a lot of cards work better with the color wheel.
Mechanics
Engorged Counters and Abundance Counters: When you feed a creature, you put an engorged counter on it. Engorged creatures can’t have flying, haste, or vigilance. At the end of your turn, half of the engorged counters on each of your engorged creatures get turned into abundance counters, which give -1/+1.
Flatten: Creatures with flatten stun creatures who they block or are blocked by.
Heavyweight: “Assigns combat damage equal to toughness rather than power” as a keyword.
Clothes: Clothes are equipment that can Stretch and eventually Snap when the creatures they are equipped to are fed, yielding beneficial effects. (They are probably too elaborate to be good, but I love the design anyway.)
Creature Types:Gluttons often reward you for feeding them, and Chefs generate Foods and can often feed your and/or your opponents’ creatures.
(Note on the location of this post: I felt this didn’t fit in Projects, and card games are technically tabletop games even if people usually mean RPGs when they use the term. I figure a set of 90 custom cards is basically the MTG equivalent of a module, so I put it in that category.)
As someone who also is addicted to cardboard squares, I might as well throw an idea in the mix. One mechanic that I’ve always wanted to see used more is meld (which is when you combine two permanent cards into one card). Here’s basically what my take on that concept would look like:
Buffet Crasher:
4 colorless, 2 green
3/4 human glutton with trample and heavyweight
When Buffet Crasher enters the battlefield, create two food tokens. When Buffet Crasher attacks, you may sacrifice any amount of food tokens, and have Buffet crasher gain -1,+1 until end of turn.
Flavor: “As guards fear a dragon approaching the gate, chiefs also fear certain ravenous customers appearing at their doors.”
Possessed Food Golem:
2 colorless, 1 black
2/2 food artifact creature
Pay 1 colorless and tap: create a food token.
Pay 3 colorless, 1 green, 1 black and tap: If you control Possessed Food Golem and a creature named “Buffet Crasher”, exile both and meld them into “Possessed Glutton”
Flavor: “Some spirits resort to trickery rather than brute force when it comes to possessing mortals.”
Possessed Glutton:
2/6 black and green Demon Glutton with trample and heavyweight
When Possessed Glutton attacks, you gain control of food tokens that the defending player controls.
Sacrifice a food token: target creature gets -1,-1.
Flavor: "When a jealous spirit meets endless hunger, many others will be starved.
I’m not too sure if every part of these cars is balanced or not, but I thought it was a fun flavor thing and a nice way to use mechanics to tell a story.
The trouble with meld cards is that you have to have two specific cards to pull them off. I have implemented these cards with significant buffs.
Adherent of Greed, a 2GG 1/4 Human Glutton creature with heavyweight and trample which tutors a Food (including the meld partner) on ETB and feeds itself when it attacks.
Sinister Confection, a 4BB Food artifact which returns itself to the battlefield when sacrificed, unless its fed to Adherent of Greed, in which case they meld into
Appetite Unleashed, a 2/8 demon Glutton which feeds itself multiple times when it attacks, gives a creature -1/-1 when it’s fed, and creates food tokens when it hits players.
If you draw Adherent of Greed and everything goes right, you’ve got an 8/8 trampler which attacks on turn 7, which is comparable to Ulvenwald Oddity.
If you draw Sinister Confection, it’s much worse on its own, but it’s got enough combo potential to not be useless without Adherent. For instance, you can use it with Ayara to burn opponents out of the game, especially if you have Sustentative Logistician.
I think the viability of meld depends on the format. In commander it would be pretty hard to search for you pieces in the 99 unless you have tutors, but in standard it would be easier since you’d not only have 60 cards to dig though, and you could have multiple copies of one or both meld partners. I’m not quite sure which format you have primarily in mind with this, for lack of a better term, set.
That’s true. I didn’t really have a particular format in mind when I was making these cards; most of them are too low power for commander, but I did make sure that there were a couple good WBG legendaries in there that could be used to turn the “set” into a (presumably terrible) commander deck.
I ultimately based the power level of my version of your cards on existing meld cards; it’s both moderately easier to use and moderately less powerful than Brisela, and more powerful than Hanweir but much slower.
Sorry, btw, for being all “your cards are bad, they should be like this” without even a “I like this idea, but” first, that was pretty rude of me.
It’s cool. Tbh I just kinda thought it was a cool writing exercise, so if you want to change them to be a better fit your overall creation that’s fine, I just hope you credit me if you ever make something larger out of this.
I mostly based the cards on Hanwier and the new Mishra, I was unsure about making the “possessed food” a pure artifact since there’s never been a meld card that uses an artifact, so I was sort of trying to follow the example of Phyrexian Dragon Engine, but with the flavor of Gingerbrute. Other than that, I’m satisfied with the cards. Making use of an underserved mechanic to tell an interesting little story using the mechanic.
I like this idea & have actually begun putting most of these cards into MSE2.I’ve even taken the liberty of rewording certain rules & cards to make them sound slightly more “official.” However, I’m sorry to say that I do have a few gripes with what you have so far…
First off, the story… I can see that you’re basically just making a modified version of the Throne of Eldraine set, including cards, mechanics & characters. This isn’t completely terrible, but it does feel a little “cheap” if you will. Part of the charm of MTG is that each set is based on a self-contained story in the Magic multiverse, allowing for it to be expanded with new & returning characters, all with an overarching connection. Using Eldraine as a base for certain mechanics in the set is understandable, but changing characters & story elements without building new characters or establishing a new world feels cheap. Reprinting cards is fine, WotC does it all the time. Making what could be a new character while super-imposing them onto an existing character feels like you couldn’t be bothered to come up with anything new…
Secondly, your set does not include any Red or Blue cards. I get that these colors may be the more challenging to make some feedism mechanics for, but every set ever dabbles in all 5 colors.
Other than that, I like what you have so far & I’d love to help expand this idea into something REAL!
First off, this set is meant to take place after the events of Eldraine, as hinted at by, for example, Kenrith’s flavor text. The idea is that, in the time of prosperity following the return of Kenrith and the Cauldron of Eternity, the Threebian philosophy of indulgence has taken hold of Edraine. But there are hints that this is somehow linked to Xonsax, an avatar of hunger which has taken up residence with the elves and fae in the nearby wildlands. It’s not the pinnacle of writing or anything, just a few sketchy fetish fuel plot points, but I’m not just mining Throne for character names and card ideas and calling it a day. In fact, the cards which directly reference actual Throne cards were often harder to design than the ones that don’t.
Second off, this was never meant to be a complete set; that’s why it’s…not a complete set. In addition to missing UR, it’s also much heavier on G than WB.
Also, I’m curious which cards you edited to sound more “official”; I tried to be very careful to closely follow the templating examples of official cards.