Gensou Magic

Created by Magus0

Hello and welcome to Gensou Magic, a Touhou themed draftable large Magic the Gathering set. Not my first time designing custom magic cards, but it is my first foray into designing a draftable set.

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What is Touhou?

Story

In this set, Tibalt has come into Gensokyo while planeswalking through various worlds; he has seen a prime land to sow chaos and revel in the madness. The denizens of Gensokyo have become xenophobic, distrusting each other in the ensuing chaos with more unusual things crossing the Great Gensokyo Barrier than usual. The youkai have been going crazy and indulging in hedonistic and crazy things while the religous factions have been strengthening their zealous fervor. Some are using this to further their own goals, and others have just reclused further into their youkai ways. Several people in Gensokyo have awakened their planeswalker spark in the chaos: Sanae Kochiya having traveled through the Gensokyo barrier before she was already attuned to crossing different worlds but when madness hit Gensokyo, her spark lit trying to return Gensokyo to normal while prostelyzing for her shrine. Yuyuko Saigyouji as well ignited her planeswalker spark after more and more youkai and humans kept coming to Hakugyokurou causing trouble. Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame as well are trying to solve this incident, but it's quite different from incidents in Gensokyo before.

mechanics

All of the mechanics appear in all the colors, but mainly appear in one or two colors.

Mechanic Spellcard Border Coalesce Sealing Strike Xenophobic Offering Ability Rather than cast this card from your hand, you may pay a cost and exile it from your hand stored on a creature. When that creature dies return it to the battlefield tapped and cast the stored card. Spellcard only at sorcery speed Exile the top card of target player’s library and create a 1/1 illusion creature token When creatures with sealing strike deals combat damage to another creature, those creatures are removed from the game until the beginning of the next turn. Ability word that targets and cares about things that don't share creature types with a creature. You may cast this card any time you could cast an instant by sacrificing a permanent. If you do, the total cost to cast this card is reduced by the sacrificed permanent’s mana cost. Main colors Blue All White Green/Black Red Thoughts Spellcard is probably my favorite mechanic designed, it perfectly encapsulates deathbombing in the touhou games. Spellcard gets blanked by sealing strike which I feel is fine; it makes combat more interesting and calculated. It was slightly inspired by the cipher mechanic in RTR of saving spells onto creatures, but this is much less broken in that it can only be played once and effectively regenerates a creature; since the mechanic is less broken I can put it into much more interesting effects, wheras wotc had to put cipher on underpowered effects. Border coalesce was hard to get right, and even still doesn't feel elegant, but it works. I needed something to generate tokens, but still exiles things for the exile theme. Exiling anything on board would be too strong of a tempo play, so I decided to have something like ingest where it exiles top card combined with token production. It's supposed to represent lost or magical things crossing the gensokyo barrier and sometimes becoming youkai. To aid in the exile matters theme, sealing strike is a triggered ability when a creature deals combat damage to another creature. If the other creature didn't die, then it gets exiled until the next turn, making it strong on offence. It acts like deathtouch light, with the theme of sealing something away temporarily. This ability made creature types matter in the set, and made designing the creatures in the set a bit of a pain. For the most part, I've found that these cards are generally able to affect most enemy creatures which is what I was looking for. Offering was actually used in Kamigawa before, but I felt like it was not really utilized that much as it was only ever used on the 5 card rare patron cycle though this time used more on sorceries. Even though in the official rules it calls for subtypes I do use a type in a specific instance. If WotC can change rules for colorless mana and faced down cards for manifest, then I can tweak some too.

Themes