Feedback on these is appreciated if anyone has any suggestion for improvements / other ideas. Shadell thank you for making such a wonderful story!
I love MtG so have some feedback. Please be aware these are just my own opinions, and at the end of the day these are your designs that you've made and put out there so please be happy that you have put the effort in and done that.
My first gut instinct is that I am going to get absolutely obliterated on turn 5 of a draft by Castitas beatdown and I will
not be happy about it.
Real feedback though angelic saints and abyssal beasts are extremely parasitic and dont play well in the greater magic ecosystem. Look at old school kamigawa and the plight of people who wanted to play with samurai or arcane or spirits in the modern day. Also I am pretty sure they count as Angelic and as Saint creatures separately so the templating of the tribal effects need to be tweaked as magic doesn't use card names as an identifier like yugioh does.
Castitas and Dilligentia are both fine tribal rewards for the archetype. Being legendary and mythic removes a lot of the scariness of low cost buff creatures.
I am not sure how I feel about the transform mechanic on Gula Shark. If I was designing a set as a whole I would either make two cards to represent her before and after becoming a magical girl, or make a story spotlight sorcery card or something to represent her shifting sides. Whenever I design transforming cards it can be really easy to overegg them and write too much on them so I try to avoid them where possible myself.
Gula is a really powerful control card that will generate huge amounts of value over the game. Honestly you never want to flip her because your opponent discarding a random card each turn is huge. Even though you have correctly templated it as an upkeep effect it is far too cheap for a recurring effect that will grind out value. Not to mention the ability to get lucky and strip someone's lands away making them incapable of playing the game. It will be oppressive to be on the other side of, plus she comes down on turn two to get started on ripping through hands right away so even if your opponent uses removal on her you are still gaining tempo and advantage. She would make for the most miserable counterplay imaginable.
Invidia Bat however I adore. Mainly because of the templating you have managed to force the controller to either continue pretending or to accept who she is and flip into a magical girl. An absolutely fantastic meeting of flavour and function. Although I dont think you have to add the line about the clone lasting until flipped face down? Fairly sure the game rules would revert that as soon as she becomes a face down 2/2.
HOWEVER. This annoyingly doesn't work under current magic rules as dual faced cards cannot morph as they are always considered face up unless transformed via their own effect. You have accidentally created a triple faced card (which mark rosewater did design for duel masters but shush). I am going to ignore that for the rest of this review though because the design is fucking awesome otherwise. And it works fine if you play with sleeves. Just not according to the comprehensive rules
The flipside I think needs some adjustments, mainly I think the activated ability should be WURG as magical girls should be defined as not having black as part of their colour identity. Also her static ability I think should be reworked because its a little confusing, magic doesn't often describe abilities like that outside of some weird green creatures, and it wont work on herself as she is a 1/1 which will confuse some players for sure. If you want my design, her flipside should on transform return all angelic saints to the battlefield from the bin and give them indestructable + hexproof until end of turn. Make her a one shot rez that you can hold in reserve until the critical moment when you transform her to save the day.
Definitely a broken card in terms of mechanics, and also probably undercosted as a repeatable clone effect, but fuck me it fits so well.
Avarita I don't want to review because I have a personal bone to pick with specialize, its like six cards in one, and also I dont play mtg arena so the mechanic can smeg off XD.
Superbia is a very cool design, very flavourful, and I like it a lot. Extremely extremely powerful mind you, I would definitely look to add some more restrictions on it because a 13/13 flying first strike is going to end games without a serious kind of drawback to hold it back. As it stands there is no incentive to block with Superbia which means you play it and next turn dome your opponent for 13 which is kinda good in just about any format. Even at 6 mana. The roles are cool as hell and a great way to represent what he has been doing to people in the story but Cursed is going to get out of hand real fast. Two mana to effectively neuter a blocker or attacker at instant speed and it's repeatable! Danger zone for sure. This card has very little counterplay and will win games with very little prompting. Giving roles and taking damage in the form of -1/-1 counters are the core of this card, I would look to reworking it while keeping those two aspects in mind as those are the core of what makes Superbia such a flavour win.
Overall you have an eye for flavour but a lot of the balancing suffers as a result. I wouldn't take that personally though as it's the easiest hole to fall into when making custom magic cards. Fuck I still end up doing it all the time. It's why feedback is so important. Big splashy effects that perfectly represent what a character can do are cool but flavour should always come second to making a card that plays well. At least from my perspective. If you are just looking at capturing the flavour and story beats in the bounds of a magic the gathering card you nailed it pretty superbly.
Mop up feedback for thinking about designing more cards in the theoretical A Little Vice set:
The angelic saints and abyssal beast being two distinct factions makes sense but I worry the transform cards were not the best implementation if you want the factions to be defined through colour pie. The bridging cards like Invidia and Gulia don't really work well in that role and would struggle in a deck built around either faction. Abyssal beasts should probably be core black stretching into blue and red with the Saints being the opposite, core white stretching into green and blue. Grixis vs Bant with blue being the overlap colour bridging the two. A good enough starting point for building a set around at least. Or maybe you want magical girls to be in Naya instead, or possibly even Jeskai. There is a lot of room to work with to stretch the flavour into mechanics but I would avoid costing anything with more than three colours just so you can build a solid mechanical identity that is consistent across a faction.
I would consider looking at The Brothers War and how that set was willing to have multiple versions of Urza and Mishra in the same set to represent stages in each of their lives. So in this case having a card for C, a card for Invidia Bat, and a final card for Humanitas. Might be a cleaner implementation for character transformations because that way you dont have to put loads of colours on each card for them to work which makes them hard to splash. An abyssal beast deck would want Gula Shark and never flip her, while an Angelic Saint deck wouldn't want to splash black just to run the shark and transform her to get their saint.
Transformation is such a core part of the magical girl genre that the transform mechanic I would reserve just for the saints and have them changing from regular humans to angels instead of mucking about with weird parasitic creature types. That way you can have other cards to represent Shark and Invidia Bat's alligences shifting freeing up room on their actual cards for simpler and cleaner designs.
...Whoops I wrote a bit more than I expected to. I really like mtg design is all. And please feel free to challenge or disregard any of this, these are your designs at the end of the day and it's not like I am an authority on any of this stuff. Just a nerd with too much time spent thinking about magic.
