How do we make a real UGB block?

>>52478422
One of the main issues is that UB is a color "allied pair" but have no shared mechanics except one garbage one and no real actual pie overlap in terms of design space. It's why the pair doesn't even have an evergreen keyword to share yet. So designing a wedge with two colors that have nothing they can really lend each other and tacking on a third color that has strong ties with one thematically (B) but weak ties with the other (U) is just asking for a mess. Simic mechanics have always been garbage, and while Transmute was pretty okay, Cipher was a shitpile, and Transmute is honestly more blue than black, so it was a similar stretch to Extort being in white.

BUG is just a fucked wedge until WotC does some in-house re-arranging of things and spreads the color pie a bit more evenly. UB just don't share enough design space together to pull off anything interesting aside from gold cards that mash their best individual mechanics together.

>>52478511
Evolve works as a monogreen mechanic. They need something that ties in blue counter/spell/flying theme more. Graft worked fairly well because you could share abilities.

What do you think would work in terms of mechanics that combine UB or BUG?
Alternatively, why not just bugs?

>>52478528
Yeah Evolve was fine as a green thing, that's true. I meant it was garbage for UG, sorry. I realize that the guilds are all supposed to have their own "identities" that take influence from their constituent colors but are unique, but several guild mechanics are simply out of color for one of them.

The big issue is that, as pairs, mechanically, UB and GU share jack and shit besides GU getting Flash and Hexproof as shared keywords. BG have all kinds of great shit they can do as a pair though, with graveyard and "feeding" (Sengir Vamp ability), so you'd probably want to start there, but U gets little graveyard stuff, so I think that's why they went with Delve, because it was something they could actually do together, since blue's graveyard mechanical access is limited. Extort was a BG mechanic, and could have had a home in R too, but not U. I feel like some kind of "deception" mechanic would work, but I have never been very good at coming up with keywords. "Cunning" or something... possibly caring about the number of cards in your hand, or comparing that number to each of your opponents, since they all prioritize card draw in their own way, and value the trait of cunning?

>>52478562
Well to mix mechanically, it'd have to either combine mechanics or make something that engages spells/control, creatures/ramp and the graveyard/paying life which are what I think of when I think of the 3 colors.
Maybe evolve should have been get +1/+1 whenever you play an instant or sorcery with greater CMC or something.
Maybe that's a good start.
> Whenever a creature/spell is sent to the graveyard, you may exile it from your graveyard and tap target creature/discard a card/sacrifice a creature and return it to your hand
> Whenever anything is sent to the graveyard, you can sacrifice a creature and cast a spell with CMC equal or lesser to the sacrificed creature

>>52478635
U/G mechanic
Incubate: Whenever you cast a spell, you may tap a creature with CMC equal or less than the CMC of the spell. Place
+1/+1 counter On target creature

>>52478511
UB has card fuckery. Tutors and discard traditionally black while card draw and mill is traditionally blue.

>>52478422
Dude, Sultai gave us some of the most broken commons of the past few years

Shut the fuck up

>>52487190
That's not the point OP was trying to make. Thematically, nothing about UBG really works right. It's a very shallow wedge that needs to be expanded on and needs more interplay. Most of the good cards that came from it just came from mashing different mechanics from the 3 colors it's made of together.

>>52487260
I tried to figure up a wedges set a while back. White and Red are both ass at card drawing, so I made them run off handsize for shit. They were grumpy old cypress/mangrove treefolk wizards that wanted everyone else to get off their goddamned lawn.

>>52487190
The quality of the cards and the mechanics don't reflect the color identity. Sultai are more UB than anything else, with no real G connection at all. It's like if the Bant block had them as just really cool knights with no focus on the caste system, or the Rakdos were just demon summoners without any of the party goodness. You can see it in the lore, the Sultai are so shallow they're summed up in one paragraph, which is *demon pact and necromancy and lamias*. They're basically Dimir.

>>52478422
>G goals through UB means
Repo! The Genetic Opera except the Largo family are vampires.
The faction seeks aesthetic, physical and intellectual perfection and to sustain it for as long as possible.

>>52478511
>BUG is a fucked wedge
Maybe flavorfully, but competitively it gets to play some of the best cards in each of its colors for insane value. BUG Delver and Shardless BUG are magic at its finest.

>>52489980
But why no bug BUG?