Hello and welcome back to Magic Project: Omega!

Today we are going to be delving into the colors again and be making some instants and sorceries at Common for each color, starting with white.

To set some parameters and expectations, I am going to be making six instants and/or sorceries at Common in a varied combination of both. One may dominate the other because of how certain design principles work within each color.

The reason I say that is because looking at ABU and recently released sets, there is a massive disparity in instant and sorcery distribution at Common, which made things a little tricky.

However I did make some pretty interesting cards, let’s take a look!

Design Approach

As I said earlier, there is a massive disparity in instant and sorcery distribution in each color, not just from the old sets but in current sets as well.

Looking at white in the most recent set, Edge of Eternities, there are no sorceries at Common at all, and the same goes for ABU. Now this isn’t always the case, but it really made it difficult for me to figure out how to distribute the number of instants and sorceries.

In the end I decided that five instants and one sorcery would be good, which was a solid way to start.

The next thing would be to figure out what those cards actually did.

A lot of white instants tend to err on combat trick sort of effects, and maybe I leaned a little hard on that since most of them could fit into that category.

Of the combat tricks there was only so much that is available at Common for white that I had to get a bit creative with how to make them different from one another.

Another thing is that while these cards can interact with the archetypes of the set, that wasn’t the main focus for how I made them, though it did help in guiding what certain cards could do and how they could affect the archetype play for the set.

There is also a way to protect a creature of yours that is a direct reference to a cycle of cards from ABU, which wasn’t too hard to make but was a bit annoying to name.

We also have a removal spell that is also a callback to a Common white card from ABU, but has an interesting twist to it that I really enjoy.

As far as how I designed the sorcery, I decided that I would go pretty big on the upper limits of what a Common card could do. I will admit that it may be too much for a Common and it may need to be tweaked to be an Uncommon, but at the moment I think that it will be fine.

Cards

Here’s what I came up with!

This was a lot more challenging than I expected, and I realize that I have much more of an affinity for making creature cards than I do instants and sorceries because of how much of a difficult time I had making these.

Looking at Angelic Guard and Divine Strength, they are combat tricks that do something to make sure your creature stays alive, but from different angles. Divine Strength is a much more direct way to buff a creature and help them be able to block or to deal with an attacker while Angelic Guard gives a +1/+1 counter and a temporary exile ability.

Null is very much a take on Disenchant, but I wanted to make it a little better by giving you a bit more of a benefit depending on what you decide to destroy with it. It is probably the card I feel the strongest about.

The card I feel the second strongest about is Mark of Protection, which is a take on the Circle of Protection cycle from ABU. It is a temporary form of protection that can help get a bit of extra damage through or protect a creature from a kill spell, at the cost of it not being able to be buffed by any of your cards if they happen to share a color.

Hallowed Barrier is a fine card that can be used defensively by making a creature your opponent controls into a defender for a turn, but can also turn a creature you control into a defender for a turn if you happen to be playing the Defender archetype that is in the set.

Last but not least is Reawaken, which can bring a creature back from the graveyard of mana value three or less into play with a lifelink counter. This is the one I have the most doubt on being a Common card, but in my opinion it straddles the line of being better than most Commons but not as good as an Uncommon.

I’m back and forth on it, but if I do decide that it belongs at Uncommon, I will update it in the future.

This series of cards is preparing me for the future because I can imagine having a difficult time with the other colors, especially since the next color on the list is blue, which has an archetype in this set that deal with casting a lot of spells and an archetype that wants to cast big mana spells.

While it will be a challenge, I do think it will be a fun one at the very least.

Thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

Bluesky: @jmcasualnerd.bsky.social

Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/jmcasual