Monday, October 22, 2007

Programming Lorwyn

MTG Forge has a few cards from Lorwyn, around 12. Many are just plain creatures that haven’t been done before. Thankfully I was able to program 3 planeswalkers: Liliana Vess, Garruk Wildspeaker, and Chandra Nalaar. Vess is definitely the weakest, and Chandra is the strongest, since he can burn your opponent for 10, ouch!!!

The blue planeswalker looks really, really weak and I’m not too interested in him. The white one looks OK, but I’m not over-the-top enthusiastic about him. Planeswalkers seem good as a “I’ll put one or two in my deck to surprise my opponent.” Like legendary cards, having 3 or 4 of them in your library seems like overkill. I have died to them occasionally in sealed games, and to me that is the sign of a good card. As an odd factoid, according to Wizard’s September Magic podcast, planeswalkers were supposed to be Future Sight but they got pushed back, who knew?

Oblivion Ring seemed cool so I added it. Ring is a 2W Enchantment that says “When Oblivion Ring comes into play, remove another target nonland permanent from the game.” Don’t forget that it can get rid of planeswalkers too.

Incendiary Command was an insane card that probably took 2 hours to program. In my phone interview with Wizards, I was asked how I would program Lorwyn’s Command cards so I told them. Later that night I thought it would be cool if I could add one of them to MTG Forge so I picked the hardest one. I’m not sure how good Incendiary Command is, but I do smile thinking of all the time I spent coding it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I noticed that "Incendiary Command" didn't allow you to target one non-basic land. It's not really that useful anyway, but I wondered why you left that part out? Can't you just look for cards with land in the type but not just land?

Forge said...

Incendiary Command will only let you destroy a non-basic land if there is one in play. I ran the code a few times, but there still might be an error. Incendiary Command is probably one of the weakest Commands cards.