FUR: Vision Design, Pt V: Common Cycles

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     Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! Last week in our series about FUR, the custom Magic set about a beast-folk festival, we crunched the numbers to find our set's structure. This week, we're looking at cycles. FUR is about art, culture, and creativity, and the setting is a festival on an island full of anthropomorphic beast folk inspired by the furry fandom; our cycles should reflect all of that. Note that what you see below are proof-of-concept mockups rather than final designs. (And hopefully the images work this time; I didn't realize until too late how broken they were in previous articles. Aaanyway~)


Mask Cycle

    When we first brainstormed mechanics, we came up with three core pillars of the fandom: Art, Community, and Fursuiting. Vibrant (If three or more mana were spent to cast this, [effect]) represents the first, Tradition (When this creature enters the battlefield, enact a tradition paired with Tradition: [Effect]) the second, and Crafting (Create your choice of Combat Claws or Protective Pelt and attach it to this creature) the third. 


    While I messed around with a third crafting option, it turns out that the stat lines required to balance crafting don't work well with abilities that don't boost power or toughness. That left Claws and Pelts, which make for a woefully incomplete suit. To solve this problem, each color gets a common equipment card flavored as a mask (in place of the auras that usually fill those slots). This also helps support the artifacts-matter theme in blue, black, and red, as well as the equipment theme in white. The cycle is tied together by a cute rider: "Equipped creature is a [type] in addition to its other types." Because tribal themes are light in FUR, this is mainly trinket text.



Egg Cycle

    Crafting takes up a lot of token spaces-- the idea is to have several artworks for each option to promote customization. As a result, there's not much room for another artifact token. Instead, each color will have a non-token Treasure with some sort of utility effect in addition to the mana ability. This helps enable Vibrant in every color, as well as color-fixing for multicolor decks and temporary ramp to help speed games up. (I'm a big ramp guy, if you couldn't tell. Playing cards is exciting, and playing more and bigger cards is more and bigger... exciting. Shut up.) They may end up as Eggs as a reference to a cycle of old artifacts from Odyssey that did something similar, or they may be flavored as cultural relics of the various tribes. Red and green will get the cheapest two, followed by blue and black, and tailed by white.



Vibrant Cycle

    Vibrant can go on any card type at mana value three or higher. As such, each color gets a 3-mana spell with Vibrant in a different card type. White gets an enchantment, blue gets an instant, black gets a sorcery, red gets an artifact, and green gets a creature. For each, I will try to find a famous piece of art from each culture and design the cards top-down around those pieces.



Rite-keeper Cycle

    To highlight Tradition, each color will have a two-mana creature with a Tradition ability and an enters-the-battlefield trigger. These will be the cheapest traditions at common. Red's rite-keeper will also be its only Tradition effect at common. The rite-keepers represent practitioners of cultural rituals for each tribe-- rites of passage, funeral rites, spring rites, etc.



Out-of-Cycle

    That's all for for this week. What sets have the most memorable cycles? If you were going to make a cycle for your own set, what would the theme be? Let me know in the comments below!

 

    The four cycles above give us 20 cards, a fifth of the set's commons, so that's a pretty good start. Next week, we'll have another worldbuilding push; the week after, it'll be the new set skeleton! Until then, go listen the new season of The Adventure Zone wherever you get podcasts. (I've definitely plugged it before, but damn, it's good.)


See you soon!


--P.S. Mockups were made with MTG.design, a free browser-based card creator.

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