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Pterapelagos

  • Role: Head Designer

  • Status: Prototyped and Currently Playtesting

  • Team Size: 1

  • Duration: 2 Months

  • Responsibilities:

    • Concepting Pterapelagos' core mechanics, intended player experience, setting, and story.​

    • Expanding core mechanics into a mini set of 119 original cards.

    • Selecting 25 pre-existing Magic cards to compliment the theme and playstyle of Pterapelagos.

    • Playtesting with the set to balance cards, tweak rules, and solidify card interactions.

Card Libraries

General Summary
--The world details are still a work in progress and will probably change a bit--
Pterapelagos is a custom mini set for Magic: The Gathering set in a society based around excavating and reviving ancient fossils on the Pterapelagos Islands. The set contains 150 cards; 119 new cards that I designed, 6 basic lands that come in every Magic set, and 25 reprint cards I selected from previous Magic sets. Pterapelagos sprung from a combination of love for fossils, archaeology, and prehistoric biology, as well as my general dissatisfaction with fossil-themed cards in card games I had played. I wanted to create a set that captured the feeling of excavating and reviving fossils for battle. Multiple card games touched on the concept but never really tapped into that feeling of awe that I got when imagining these ancient beasts being brought back to life. Pterapelagos is a graveyard-centric set that prioritizes cycling through your deck in various ways to "excavate" fossil cards and then revive them through a handful of new mechanics. I added 9 new mechanics in the set; a "Fossil" card supertype, 3 excavation techniques (Bore, Sift, and Sonar), 4 revival techniques (Restore, Awaken, Rejuvenate, and Synthesize), and a new keyword "Dive" (which is a tweaked idea I stumbled across and wanted to include from Reddit user: wyntrr). 

Factions
Three corporate factions (to be named later) preside over the islands using fossils and the revived creatures for their own gain. Each faction vies for control of the island with unique ideas about fossils, excavation practices, and revival techniques. All the factions meld cutting-edge technology and magic sprung from leylines dotting the islands for their fossil excavation and revival methods.​

  • The Red & Black faction is the first faction and focuses on mining and excavating fossils, digging out as many from the ground as possible with little care for their preservation. They reside in the vast tracts of churned earth left in their wake, which the general populace dubbed; The Scarscape. As the primary mining group, they make up a large portion of Pterapelagos' general populace. The R&B faction utilizes the Bore and Awaken mechanics to put fossils into the graveyard and reanimate them. When designing these mechanics, I wanted them to reflect high-speed industry, squeezing every drop from the resources available and moving to the next.

  • The next faction is the Green & White, who pride themselves on carefully excavating and preserving fossils. They are the policing force on the islands, attempting to regulate fossil excavation, trade, and labor. Many individuals in the factions are archaeologists or museum curators, displaying many of their finds for all to see. The G&W faction's mechanics are Sift and Revitalize, allowing them to look at cards from the top of their library to interact with and exile cards from graveyards to boost the stats of their creatures. 

  • The final faction is the Blue faction. They're the oldest faction of the three, with the Blue faction being descendants of the original island founders. The Blue faction now straddles the moral line with their fossil research and development. They experiment with the genetics of the fossils they dig up, creating hybrid creatures to study. Their mechanics are Sonar and Synthesize, which focus on card subtypes and allow you to get more cards of the same subtype by revealing one in your hand, and copy abilities and subtypes of cards you control on the battlefield. Copying abilities and card-type-specific mechanics already exist in Magic but not the combined strategy that I've developed for the Blue faction. 

Mechanics

  • Fossil Supertype - This supertype behaves very similarly to Ice Age's "Snow" type. Spells can all have the Fossil type and various effects in the set activate based on them. â€‹â€‹

  • Restore - Restore is an activated ability on double-faced cards that allows you to pay the card's Restore cost to return the card to your hand transformed. You can then play the transformed card from your hand. Transformed cards all have no mana cost to balance out having to pay the Restore cost.

  • Bore X - The Bore keyword requires you to send the top X cards of your library to the graveyard, and if a fossil card is among them, allows you to return one of them to your hand.

  • Sift X - Sift allows you to look at the top X cards of your library. You then choose one, if it's a fossil card, you can reveal it and add it to your hand. Otherwise, you place it on top of your library.

  • Sonar - By paying for a card's Sonar ability while it's in your hand, you can reveal and discard the card. Then you reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a card with the same type as the discarded card. You add that card to your hand and shuffle the other cards into your library.

  • Awaken - Awaken is an alternate casting cost that allows you to cast the card from your hand or graveyard as a 1/1 version of the creature. In addition to the Awaken cost, you must sacrifice a fossil card you control.

  • Rejuvenate - This mechanic is an ability that triggers when you cast a card with the Rejuvenate keyword. You can exile a fossil permanent from your graveyard with an equal or lesser mana value to the card being cast. The cast card enters the battlefield with X +1/+1 counters on it, where X is the exiled card's mana value.

  • Synthesize - Synthesize is an additional casting cost that allows you to target a fossil card you control or in your graveyard. The cast card gains the targeted card's types and abilities in addition to its own,

  • Dive - The Dive keyword is a combat mechanic that makes creatures with Dive unblockable except by creatures with Flying or Dive. It's essentially just a flavor addition to pair with water-based fossil creatures. (Source linked below).

Resources

- Dive Mechanic source

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