In my free time, I am currently working on a custom Magic the Gathering set called Enter the Eternities - a hypothetical sequel to one of my favorite sets, Edge of Eternities. Below are a couple of my favorite designs that I have come up with so far.

Link to my design notes and planning: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tK4a_t9eqkeFltfkb-eTNJNS16A6ZLtmckIFHUJ6gnM/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Magic Set Editor file: https://github.com/c67f/Enter-The-Eternities

The Eldrazi are mentioned in the original Edge of Eternities set, even being the archnemeses of the Drix species, but are rarely seen. They only appear in one card in the whole set, and show up as a secondary danger in the climax of the story. Focusing more on the Eldrazi thus was an obvious choice for something new to do in my sequel.

I ended up with the Eldrazi as a sort of bonus/half draft archetype. All the Eldrazi will have “twobrid” mana in the cost, and many can be cast for entirely colorless mana. I’ve brought back Adamant to care about casting them with their corresponding colored mana, but unlike previous uses of it, it will not always be a benefit. Instead, all Eldrazi cards will essentially have two modes based on whether you cast them using their colored pips or not.

In this case, Eldrazi Berserker actually gets a detriment (discarding a card) if you cast it with red mana. This is because doing so allows you to cast it for cheaper than the normal rate - getting a 6/4 creature with haste for only 4 mana. If instead you cast it for 5 mana (using only one red pip), it becomes a standard 6/4 with haste for 5 - perfectly on rate!

Flavor wise, I imagined that in their ejection from the Chaos Wall, these Eldrazi were “infected” with colored mana - and many don’t react well to the infection.

I decided to challenge myself and do an unorthodox set of draft archetypes - rather than the standard 10, with each being a color pair, I have 7 (8 including Eldrazi), with a mixture of 2 color, 3 color, and even a mono color archetype. The latter is the monoblack faction, the Monoists.

I struggled initially to figure out how to differentiate my iteration from the original EOE representations of the Monoists. What I ended up coming up with was bringing back Devotion for their mechanic. Devotion not only fit flavorfully (the Monoists are a cult that worship death and endings), but also helped address the problem of differentiating a monocolor draft archetype from other archetypes that included its color. Devotion encourages players to play cards with lots of colored mana pips. Because I would only be using devotion to black, players that drafted Monoist cards would want to play fully monoblack cards, rather than cards that just included black. I also was already planning on making Monoist cards specifically have higher-than-average colored pips to discourage splashing them outside their archetype, which synergized with devotion.

The Ilvoi, and in particular the subfaction the Uthros Combine, are a species of jellyfish scientists. In EOE, they were mostly blue, but for my sequel set, I expanded them into fully blue/red. When coming up with their archetypes focus, I didn’t want to just do classic blue/red mechanics like artifacts or spellslinging, but instead something more novel. What I settled on was “hand size matters”. Some Ilvoi cards will care about having many cards in hand (specifically, five or more), while others will care about having few or no cards in hand. To support this, Ilvoi cards also manipulate hand size, Ilvoi Researcher being an example. Its first ability discards a card to exile the top two cards of your deck, which provides card advantage while at the same time actually lowering your hand size. This helps enable its second ability to draw a card if you have less cards in hand than its power.

Research Hoarding was actually a card I created before starting this set, but it works very well within it as it cares about hand size. My impetus stemmed from thinking about how very few spells in Magic have more than a +1 in card advantage. Any that do are very high costed. I wondered would it would take for there to be a cheap spell that drew more than two cards (without discarding any or putting any back) that wasn’t broken? What drawback would it need?

I settled on Research Hoarding: An enchantment that refills your hand back up to seven cards and costs only three mana, but then prevents you from casting spells if you have fewer than seven cards in hand. It also can’t be sacrificed, so it can’t be gotten rid of easily, but there are ways.

This card is an experiment, basically. Is this strong enough that it would see play? Is it too strong? I think it's high-power but still reasonable, but I would be excited to see where it would actually end up.