The Cube According to Gatherer, Part 27 – The One In Which I Yell At the Neighborhood Kids to Get Off My Lawn

There’s an animation trend that’s been making the rounds the past few years called ‘real life doodles’. The basic idea is that an animal or inanimate object in a video is given more agency by adding a couple of arms, two eyes, and a mouth. This video, for example, originally belonged to an advertisement for the ‘Miracle Magnetic Duster’. By the time omgwerhvngafire_sale added animation, though, this duster became the pet you never knew you wanted.

There are many more where this came from. r/reallifedoodles is a subreddit dedicated to collecting these oddities. Here’s one of two dogs doing a Wild West stare-off at high noon. Add your own soundtrack.

Good real life doodles use minimal animation for maximum value. It’s one of those beautiful things I guess we might never have had without the Internet. Because this art form takes advantage of the sheer volume of media that’s out there for lone goofball animators to reinterpret in unique and surprising ways, and then requires a platform to share their skills.

Designing Magic cards is a lot like that. I’m not trying to directly compare what I do to these animators. I can’t do what they do, and anyone with maybe an hour of spare research time can figure out how to mock up their own Magic cards. But it isn’t lost on me how this ‘art’ of designing one’s own Magic set would be next to impossible without the Internet to support it. With the Internet I can:

Look at an up to date database of all the cards in existence, and quickly research the history and opinions about those individual cards.

Choose Magic cards at random without using an ungodly number of die rolls.

Read articles about Magic: the Gathering design and run Magic design ideas among other amateur designers on online forums.

Download and use Magic Set Editor to create cards.

Easily find info about Magic Set Editor and download patches when either it or I inevitably do something weird.

Share my creations through blogging, and receive feedback.

Some of these items don’t look like they require the Internet. For example, a person could read about Magic: the Gathering design in a magazine. Back in the day, computer programs used to be cracked and shared on the back side of 5.25 inch floppy disks. The network existed, and ideas and programs propagated. But niche ideas struggled. If I remember my own collection of shared cracked floppies from the late 80s, it consisted of a few simple games, a couple of text adventures I didn’t quite understand, and bonus Print Shop artwork.

Now I was a kid, and it was the 80s. But no matter how sophisticated the underground network of physically moved software would have become, special interests wouldn’t flourish. In order to be readily available, underground software needs to exchange hands many times, and every time it does, someone inevitably makes a decision about whether or not a program ‘holds value’. Our personal libraries would consist of cracked movies and games, and maybe a few public works like Wikipedia (which would almost always be found out of date.) Since most large collectors passing software along wouldn’t be accessing most of their software, a program’s value would be linked to its marketing campaign. Maybe your local Red Box (Steam Box?) would host a few local social programs like dating apps and meetups. But tapping into a community of fake Magic: the Gathering card designers? We’d be lucky if there was an inconsistent zine attached to our hobby.

I’m sure I’m sounding like an old man now. I guess you can only truly appreciate technology if you lived in a time when you couldn’t access it. It’s why I don’t get all goofy about the golden age of radio. If all of this talk of an alternate present without a world wide web of information isn’t doing anything for you, just assume I’ve been talking about a world where things were not constantly uploaded to the cloud, and you could lose your entire term paper because your laptop froze and you failed to save. Or the horrors of a world without the Nintendo Switch. Back on board? Good. I thought I lost you for a second there.

Anyhow, back to my morbid fascination with creating a cube out of Magic cards that only exist because my friends humor me. I need forty-five more cards before I can playtest this project that’s taken longer than the original mission of Star Trek. After introducing seven multicolor cards for balance in the last log, I return to find the mono-color balance is further out of whack, again. Despite my efforts, Red continues to trail.

This is dangerous territory. If each color is expected to catch up to White, then we need three Blue cards, five Green, six Black, and nine Red, for a total of twenty-three cards. Twenty-three out of forty-five doesn’t sound so bad. Not until you realize half the cards are chosen through sheer randomness.

Because this is the Cube According to Gatherer. I start each log by adding a random card to the cube via Gatherer. Then I design a card to give the cube definition. Rinse then repeat. It all used to be fun and games; put your hands in the air and wave ’em like you just don’t care. But now every time Gatherer feeds me white, four non-white cards need designing for to keep apace.

What if Gatherer gifts me a herd of white elephants? I don’t know. I can’t afford to feed them, I don’t have the room for them, and I sure as heck can’t pay the vet bills. Let’s cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t happen. Hey Gatherer! What kind of junk do you got in that trunk?

Oh! Gatherer plays nice with a Red gobbo. And while Krenko, Mob Boss‘s ability might be questionably powerful in some low powered cubes, the lack of other goblins keeps him in check here. Raging Goblin would like to remind you that he’s still in the cube. That’s right little buddy! Clearly people will consider you a valuable pick now! You keep raging, my dude!

But Krenko could use more friends. So I strong-armed a few conscripts.

Red in cube dips its toes into sacrifice and suicide. So I borrowed from both columns to make this creature. How many sacrifice triggers are too many sacrifice triggers? Because someone is bound to put the deck together, sacrifice a creature, and win the next three games with triggers still on the stack. Meanwhile there still aren’t enough suicide rewards. I need to fix that.

But first, a card from Gatherer. Mmmyes?

Oof. Another card that’s devastating in the right cube, but is merely spectacular here. Admittedly, Door of Destinies might still be overwhelming with the thirty-five Humans in the set. And twenty-eight spirits seems doable. Ten walls? Eight zombies?

That’s not enough zombies splattering against the wall of destiny. I guess I know what comes next.

Now that I’m taking a better look, I realize I didn’t include the cards in the cube that make zombie tokens. That makes this ‘zombie number fifteen’. It’s funny how one lone Binding Mummy in log 18 filled the file with a revel of revenants. The token zombies don’t add counters to Door of Destinies, but they do leech +1/+1 off the charges. Cool, cool. Though I wish I was working with something more unique than zombies. If only Binding Mummy was a Mummy Hippo… the hippopossibilities would be endless.

Hey Gatherer! What’s the next item up for bid?

Ha! Warmonger’s Chariot! Fine! I won’t look a gift horse in the rump. This calls for another Wall, and a red one would be best…

I love how clumsy the Onnas are. They begin working when both players are underperforming. Do you have an excess of otherwise wasted mana and nothing better to do than impulse a card? Yes please!

It’s a shame that Kamigawa was so parasitic, considering how much I appreciated the mechanics. In general, the cards were bad. Though many of them were excellent in a total-value-for-casting-cost sort of way. It was as if someone asked “What if we built an entire block that moved at Thawing Glaciers speed?” Card advantage was everything because it was the only thing. And while you fiddled with the cards in your hand and library, crafting clever ways to use twelve mana to create two 1/1 spirit tokens, your opponent would back to back Tooth and Nail for two pairs of Kokusho, the Evening Stars, scoop their cards, and walk away.

This is the second Onna I added to the cube. I’d love to make this a cycle… but that means I need to design a white one. Maybe I’ll be happy with two Onnas, and everything will be fine. [edit: This is John-Michael from the future. I was not, and it be not. Honestly, if you presumed I’d take the easy way out then, Oh! Hi there! This must be the first article you read by me! How are things going on your end? Well, I hope. My name is John-Michael and I guess I enjoy banishing myself into riddle dungeons of my own design. I hope you enjoy forty-something beard-os who unnecessarily torture themselves with paradoxisms in what appears to be a misguided attempt at ‘fun’, because this blog is pretty much 350 articles worth of that!]

Oh Gatherer! You came and you gave without taking. But I sent you away! Oh Gatherer!

Well, this was bound to happen. I just balanced the gold cards last log. I was hoping I could sneak through these last forty-five cards without seeing another one, but the odds weren’t in my favor. So now what do I do?

Do I veto Captive Audience? Because this doesn’t only represent a minor color imbalance. I took pains to ensure one particular guild wasn’t pushed. But this would be the third card that was exactly Rakdos. Compare to the zero cards that are exactly Azorius (thanks to hybrid mana and triple costs.)

Wait, is that right? There are zero cards? Well, maybe I needed to fix that anyways. Sucks that this maneuvers me into adding a white card to the pile. But if I’m not taking daring maneuvers, then how else would I expect to captivate my audience?

I’d say it’s nice this card puts more Zombies on the field. But there’s no real advantage to the zombie player taking this card (besides sheer power) since it would require a convoluted turn of events for the zombie deck to take advantage of your opponent’s zombies.

Let’s move on. We need a White/Blue card. And I wanted a cycle of onnas didn’t I? Might as well combine the two.

Himitsu Onna roughly translates to ‘secret woman’. Though I admit, it probably doesn’t sound nice to native Japanese speakers. That’s because ‘on’na’ isn’t a word for ‘woman’ that one uses in polite company. It’s too direct. It’s what’s written on the outside of a bathroom. You’d use ‘josei’ if you didn’t want to sound crass. We’re using onna because the original cycle is based on the myth of the snow woman, commonly referred to as Yuki On’na. But it might be more appropriate to call Yuki On’na a ‘snow hag’.

Anyhow, something funny happens when you type on’na in Google Translate. Google doesn’t want to lead you down the path to insulting someone, so it maneuvers on’na into josei. Keep swapping English for Japanese, then back to English, and the system continues to update and alter the meaning of your words. Since written Japanese sometimes includes unclear breaks between syllables, with many syllabic combinations meaning a number of different things based on context, the translator goes wild. Eventually it breaks your clumsy gibberish into something completely different. Otherwise minor tweaks turned ‘secret woman’ into ‘relaxation woman’, ‘vine woman’, or ‘Tolna, South Dakota’.

I played with the system until I stumbled upon ‘Himitsu On’na’, which Google wouldn’t translate any other way except for ‘secret girl’. I hope that’s not verbal mush when a Japanese speaker read it. But it’s possible I stumbled into a horrible insult. I now feel bad for every time I laughed at a poor translation of Engrish. But not so bad to not enjoy any new ones I might read.

Okay, Gatherer. I did the dirty work and gave myself a White card. Don’t go breaking my heart…

You couldn’t if you tried. Gatherer is playing nice despite my shenanigans, seeding the cube with another red card. Though I doubt the presumed emergency that Cave-In is built to solve will ever happen. What kind of crazy environment must this cube create for Pyroclasm to be too slow?

I suppose I still need a green Onna that somehow solves all my gold imbalances. Maybe this will do?

Does Aki Onna, or ‘Autumn Woman’, count as a multicolor card? I guess it doesn’t matter if it gets the job done, encouraging players to pick up any color combination as long as green is involved. And the less green in the Aki Onna deck, the better. It sure would be frustrating if she hit the battlefield and dumped two Forests in your yard.

Okay Gatherer. One more card and we’re out.

I can’t even be mad. I’m the one who added an additional white card to the file, so I could balance out a cycle that didn’t need to exist. Now I’m set back two white cards. At the top of this article, I said I needed twenty-three non-white cards to balance the colors. After designing this upcoming final card of this log, I will need twenty. I’m making progress, but at electric scooter pace. I’m gonna need a bigger scooter. I would veto all white cards starting now, but a simple white card that destroys artifacts is such a welcome sight that I’m staying my hand until the next log.

It’s funny how one card can spawn a number of choices. I’m still sneaking in sources of colorless mana for Mirrorpool to use, ever since it was added to log 25. There weren’t any Red cards adding colorless, and we needed another red spirit. Done and done.

Time to add some Wastes to the cube.

Since Kami of Lava’s Ruin leaves calderas in its wake, I went searching for a caldera wasteland. Justinas Vitkas supplied one on a far off world. At first I thought the rosy pink and dusky blues made this too pretty for the wastes. So I tried washing the colors out with a few filters. I was wrong. Draining the color didn’t make the piece more fitting—just less interesting.

We’re playing catch-up, so I need to do more with the ‘token section’ then add a Wastes. And looking through the file… have I not made a Zombie token yet?

A basic zombie for a generic creature creature type. I’m adding yet another token since I’m behind. Looks like there’s a clear homage to Fire Elemental in the file. Might as well use the original Melissa Benson artwork.

That’s twelve more cards and three tokens down, with forty-three cards left to go. You can go to the next log here. Or if you prefer, you can always check out the According to Gatherer Archive. TTFN.