Pony Fanfiction Thread

The low toughness was intentionally designed into Rainbow for balance purposes, since a 5-mana, 4 power creature with flying and haste is itself plenty powerful, but getting a +1/+1 counter for each combat damage dealt makes it absolutely absurd.

Give a card with all of those traits an even power/toughness ratio and it would win a limited game eight times out of ten due to just how blazingly fast it can attack with evasion. There's always removal, certainly, but "dies to Murder" isn't really a good way to do game balance.

That said, this is one of the two Mane 6 cards that haven't been published in a story chapter yet, so it's still open for further revisions.

Pinkie, luckily, is the second card I've yet to put into a published chapter so she's also open for further tweaks. I actually bumped her cost up to five a few days ago specifically because she'd be so utterly broken in a Hollow One deck.

I'm thinking of either bumping her cost up to six or decreasing the cost reduction of madness spells, possibly both.

Edited by Zennistrad on Jul 7th 2018 at 11:15:40 AM

From a flavor perspective, I do want to note that you've made Applejack unambiguously stronger than Rainbow Dash. Like, Rainbow's card would need to land a free hit on a player and get her first +1/+1 counter before she'd be able to even break even in a slug-match with AJ - and AJ's tough enough that she can easily just block one of Rainbow's colleagues to pelt her out of the sky even then.

Nine times out of ten, if the two cards were set to fight each other, Applejack would stomp Rainbow. Their rivalry, at least as represented in the mechanics here, is pretty unambiguously Applejack > Rainbow Dash.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 7th 2018 at 9:47:55 AM

A bit of a revamp to Rainbow's card:

Had to remove the flavor text to prevent it from being too busy, but I think it works. The overall letter count is below Inalla, which is probably the wordiest legendary to be released in recent memory.

(Note: the flavor for Rainbow's second ability isn't so much "coming back from the dead" so much as it is "pushing on to help her allies one last time in spite of an otherwise debilitating injury.")

I've also made a couple minor tweaks to Pinkie, upping the color intensity of her cost a bit and reducing the cost reduction of her madness ability. She shouldn't be too much more ridiculous than Falkenrath Gorger, but I'm open to tweaking her a bit more.

Edited by Zennistrad on Jul 7th 2018 at 1:11:38 PM

I decided to make this a thing instead

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/414029/tales-of-times-past-and-present

I think the tweaks work pretty well. Pushing Rainbow up to 5/3 fixes the issue with her AJ rivalry, because it means they trade if they meet on the battlefield - with small advantages in both courts. Rainbow Dash's combat evasion means she can just soar over AJ and ignore her, while AJ can still take her out without trading by basically cheating and abusing Rainbow's ability. This feels like an apt depiction of their rivalry.

Her new second ability, I think, better complements the kind of card she is both mechanically and flavorfully. She's still a finisher, but in the event that your opponent manages to answer her, she can still be useful and help keep the tables from turning on you.

A few cards for other major planeswalker characters in the My Little Planeswalker:

Since Venser's dead, who else would be better as the resident Tenth Doctor expy?

Time Turner, in this continuity, is more-or-less the Big Good of the first Myth Arc, generally popping in briefly to offer exposition and guidance to the protagonists. At this point in the story I've hinted that he's doing something important behind the scenes, but what that is won't be revealed until the planned fourth entry in the series. He's also a former student of Teferi and the oldest living pony in Equestria, barely edging out Princess Celestia herself at roughly 1,200 years of age.

In addition to being a Time Master, Time Turner is also adept at manipulating bursts of sonic energy for self-defense purposes — by trapping a pocket of air in a fast-time bubble, he can superheat the air by increasing the motion of its molecules, and then direct the resulting shockwave upon release into a linear vector. This is represented in another chapter card, "Sonic Bolt," an instant for one white mana that deals three damage to an attacking or blocking creature.

Believe it or not, it's actually a coincidence that his abilities so closely resemble Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, since I designed this card before the Dominaria set was announced.

These four cards by themselves should give you a good idea of the general plot of the second entry in the series, Shattered Sunset, which involves an Enemy Within and eventual Enemy Without character arc.

Mechanically, the three Sunset planeswalker cards here are meant to share a common identity tying them all together: a plus ability that deals 2 and/or gains 2 life, a plus that boosts a creature's power by 2, and an ultimate ability that thematically represents one of Sunset's magical transformations.

Edited by Zennistrad on Jul 8th 2018 at 1:01:07 PM

Oh, hey, another draft. It's always fun to visit old settings/details, realize I forgot exactly how they and have to go reread part of my own story to figure it out. >.>

Speaking of tabletop games, I've been homebrewing a humanised Fusion Fic setting of MLP and Warhammer Fantasy Battle^note most everyone's humanised [or elf-ised, etc] for ease of miniature collecting BTW, and I'm having trouble coming up with a proper backstory. I've decided to borrow God_of_Awesome's lore (with his permission, of course), wherein Chaos is somehow responsible for the second sun the world orbited around's destruction and the subsequent screw-up of the laws of physics^note which would be equivalent to the collapse of the Warp Gates in vanilla Warhammer - fittingly enough there's even a Chaos Moon in WHFB and the introduction of the aforementioned Winds of Magic to the world (I think), but then this begs the question of what to do about the world beforehand.

In Warhammer Fantasy, the world was basically an ice-age dominated by primeval creatures before the Old Ones arrived from space who reshaped the world, created the various fantasy races that populate the "present day" of the setting (at least before it was destroyed a few years back), and most importantly a series of Warp Gates that connected the planet to other worlds in their empire, before they collapsed and let Chaos in. Thoughts on what could be fit in here?

As a side-note, it should be noted that Sombra and the Storm King here are Chaos Lords in the north and south poles, which is sort of similar to the Chaos Wastes in WHFB that are directly connected to the Realm of Chaos, too similar, I think to just be left hanging as an odd coincidence. Any way to connect this to the main "sun explodes -> literal Chaos" narrative?

Edited by SantosLHalper on Jul 11th 2018 at 4:42:33 AM

From Dusk to Night's Chapter 73 is now live.

A few more cards:

I'd considered making Discord black/red, but pure elemental chaos in Magic tends to skew more mono-red, so I designed his cost and color intensity appropriately.

You'll notice there's a risk that Discord might accidentally zap himself with his own magic. That was unintentional, but I kept it because that sort of thing is pretty in-character for him.

This card was mostly designed with the assumption that Horse tribal would become a thing in future sets, and thankfully the Magic 2019 Core Set delivered. It was also designed to synergize with Crested Sunmare.

Magic that affects the mind negatively is often represented mechanically by mill effects, while magic that affects the mind positively is usually represented by drawing cards. Add that to an effect that synergizes with Sleep, and you have a mechanical representation of somnomancy.

While the wording on this card may seem odd, it's pretty much the only way within the rules to replicate the Splice onto [Subtype] mechanic without the need for a subtype.

Though I think this works fairly well for Sunburst, I'll be the first to admit that the card was designed almost entirely around a Magic-related pun.

This one was probably the easiest side-character to design.

This is the character that I had the hardest time deciding on a color identity for. I think it works well enough, though.

Vigilance was the easiest way I could think of to represent his sheer dedication to helping out others. The other abilities should be pretty obvious, considering his background.

It was actually surprisingly easy to represent infatuation as a game mechanic, both offensively and defensively. The chapter I've planned to put Cadance in is one where she tries to initiate a polyamorous relationship specifically, between Chandra, Gideon, and Nissa, so it's especially fitting that she works even better in multiplayer.

You'll also notice that her creature type line lists her as a pegasus, despite being an alicorn. There's a reason for that, and it should be obvious if you know her backstory.

This one was also easy to design, though I think the activated ability could still stand to use some tweaking.

Edited by Zennistrad on Jul 13th 2018 at 10:55:56 AM

I think your original black/red would have worked. Discord isn't pure elemental chaos. He is very specifically the Master of Chaos. The fundamental paradox therein is integral to his character.

There's an old quote from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. In the midst of a triumphant victory song that is just riddled with examples of how little the protagonist has actually thought through what he's doing, Dr. Horrible exposits his desire for social change to be

"Anarchy! That I run!"

That is Discord. Nothing about him is truly random. His spontaneity and unpredictability are very specifically honed and used to carry out a self-serving agenda. He is not a servant to the whim of chaos; he harnesses chaos in a controlled fashion and bends it to his own whim, using it as a means to empower himself.

He is, without question, the Master of Chaos.

As you note, magic that negatively affects the mind is represented by milling. It bothers me that the Dream Warden, whose job is not to provide happy dreams but to specifically fend off nightmares, has no ability to actually protect the player from being milled.

Quite the contrary, by making her player draw cards, she actually helps the nightmares break your mind faster. This is a card better suited to crushing minds than protecting them.

Perhaps an ability that shuffles your graveyard into your library would better suit the Dream Warden?

Vigilance works well for Spike. Love him or hate him, one must admire his work ethic.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 13th 2018 at 9:26:14 AM

I'd respond to the latter point by saying that Discord has never been in anywhere near as much control as he thinks he is, but I think that's less important than what my actual, in-universe rationale for this color pie decision is.

In my own specific series, the moniker "Spirit of Chaos" is explained to be a title he'd given himself to disguise his true nature. He's actually a living avatar of the Blind Eternities themselves, transformed into a more comprehensible form of chaos through the filter of planar existence. His chaos dimension isn't a "plane" per se, but a roaming pocket of interplanar space where the chaotic energies are dulled to survivable levels.

Red's affinity for elemental chaos makes it the color that most closely represents his failure to adhere to any nominal understanding of any plane's rules. If he hadn't spent so much letting himself be shaped by planar reality, he'd probably be colorless like the Eldrazi. (Though a friend of mine who wrote another MtG crossover series gave him the same colors as Yidris, which I think also fits extremely well for him.)

If I were to make another card for Discord in a future chapter, I could probably fit him into red/blue, red/black, red/green, or any combination thereof and it wouldn't fundamentally contradict my own interpretation of what he is.

Flavor-wise, card draw isn't usually portrayed as inherently damaging to the mind, except in rare cases like Forced Fruition where it's shown as more "information overload" than "mind rot." It's one of those things where the mechanics of the game don't exactly match with how those mechanics are portrayed in the narrative.

While I can agree with your anti-mill ward from a conceptual standpoint, from a mechanical standpoint I don't really see a way of making that concept interesting to play with in any format. In limited mill is useless enough that you won't have any need to run anti-mill, in Standard mill isn't really a thing anymore, and in Modern, Legacy, and EDH there's no better way to guard against mill than to just slap a single copy of Kozilek into your deck, so anti-mill would be redundant.

This is one of those instances where I'm willing to break with thematic resonance to a limited extent for the sake of making a card more fun to use.

Edited by Zennistrad on Jul 13th 2018 at 12:15:59 PM

And since we're on this, the final few character-specific cards that I've designed. There are a few more but I don't have any stories planned for them yet, so I'll leave them unposted until I can draft their chapters.

First up, canon MtG Planeswalkers that will show up in future stories:

In one chapter of Sideboard Stories, I'd had it explained that Tempest Shadow's petrification grenades were actually weapons sold to her by Vraska, who literally encased her own gaze in glass.

It's only vaguely hinted at in the chapter, but while Vraska remains hidden in shadow so that you don't see her described fully in the narration, there's a couple hints that she's not the same as she is in Ravnica. Her body appears to hiss as though her hair was made of actual snakes instead of simple tendrils, and she no longer seems to be able to control her petrifying gaze.

It was eventually be revealed in a later MLPlaneswalker chapter that any planeswalker that ends up on Ungula is transformed into an appropriate creature that already exists on the plane for their duration of their stay in the plane. (Jace and Chandra are pegasi, Gideon is an earth pony, Nissa is a deer, Liliana is a unicorn, Tamiyo is an anthropomorphic rabbit, etc.) For Vraska, she's transformed into an Equestrian gorgon, which is sort of like a monstrous hybrid of a gorgon, a naga, and a horse.

At first, Vraska finds the experience of being transformed into such a creature horrifying, but she quickly grows to find it liberating, since she no longer has any reason to pretend to be respectable to people who won't respect her regardless. (Worth noting that this story will place before the Ixalan block, where she softens up a bit.)

This one's for a story I plan to write that's set after the first Myth Arc, and takes place on the plane of Theros. I can't really say anything more about the story for that at this point publicly, but I wanted this to fit with the overall theme.

I will also note that Gideon's first ability here was also designed to be a direct "fuck you" to Goblin Chainwhirler.

This one's also for the Theros story, but I can't really say much more than that about this, either.

A few spoiler characters, too. Be warned that these ones can be pretty big.

That's all the cards I have for now. I also feel like I'm forgetting something, but I can't quite put my finger on what...

Edited by Zennistrad on Jul 13th 2018 at 1:47:43 PM

Err... anybody?

I don't know enough about Warhammer to comment, I'm afraid.

I've also gone ahead and designed cards for the Humane 7. I've gone out of my way to make sure these ones have different color identities than their counterparts, though admittedly this was less based on my interpretation of canon personalities and more based on what I think would make interesting contrasts. I'm planning on writing a few side-story chapters that explore the differences between counterparts in a bit more detail.

You'll also notice that the creature types "Druid," "Mystic," and "Wizard" are used a bit unusually here. This is because, unlike in normal sets, they're actually creature races instead of creature classes.

While she's no less intensely passionate about her work, human Twilight is a just a tad less meticulously organized than her counterpart, dropping the white color alignment for more traditional mad scientist colors.

Human Rarity, while still a creative type, tends to be far more concerned with having all of her materials and designs perfectly in their designated place, in contrast to her counterpart's tendency towards "organized chaos." As a subordinate of Prim Hemline, she also tends to work less independently.

Her black sub-color is mostly due to her having inherited sangromancy abilities during her "awakening", where each of the Humane 6 absorbed their geodes into themselves, and gained new abilities in addition to what they already had. It's possible that her awakening was influenced by her counterpart's nature as a vampire, due to the mirroring influence both parallel worlds have on each other.

Human Dash, while still fiercely protective of her friends due the sheer strength of personal attachment, tends to veer even more heavily towards self-aggrandizement. In her aspiring sports career she's especially quick to center herself as the most important team member where her counterpart wouldn't.

Human Fluttershy, unlike her counterpart, has mostly only worked with animals that are already domesticated. She's a bit more squeamish towards the deadlier aspects of natural ecosystems and doesn't really want anything to do with them.

Human Applejack is still devoted to her family, but is far less of a hardline traditionalist and is even willing to break with her family's values when she feels it's right for everyone. She's a tad more willing to do her own thing, even showing interest in leaving the farm to pursue an environmental science degree.

Much of this could be that her parents aren't dead, which brings her into conflict with her counterpart when they meet.

Lastly, there's Pinkie. I'm putting her card behind a spoiler, for reasons that will become obvious when you read it.

Edited by Zennistrad on Jul 21st 2018 at 2:26:40 PM

Oh, hey, a draft that's less late than usual!

A quick new one-shot by me.

i know this is a bit late, but god DAMN I am still sad that Insert Author Here died. :( He was a fellow lunaverse author, and someone I liked overall.

Lessons in Chaos, Chapter XIV is drafted.

How are Sonic/MLP crossovers viewed here?

With disdain and scorn. We chased the last guy who tried out with pitchforks and torches. We found out where he lived and hounded him death threats. We dug him up all of his secret, spread it all over the internet until he finally made an example of himself that we don't tolerate that sort of thing here. /Joking Mode

That being said, go ahead, man.

Aww, that's no way to talk about what we did to Hextar.

We went full Obok Meatgod on him.

Ok, so my story is called Sonic and EQG, has a tv tropes here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/SonicAndEquestriaGirls

the story and others can be found here: https://www.fimfiction.net/user/257066/SonicAKG/stories

Chapter XIV of Lessons in Chaos is now live.