PLANESCULPTORS.NET

We're proud to present our latest release, Purple Reign! -Jul 30, 2021

A set all about purple, Purple Reign is a spiritual successor to Planar Chaos! Purple was introduced first during an April Fools piece in inQuest Magazine, and was later playtested during Planar Chaos research and development. We have picked those purple pieces up off the cutting room floor, and turned it into a premise for a set! This set is similar to the various Masters / Horizons releases, with no particular constraints on returning mechanics or complexity.

Including 290 cards in the normal release; 104 common, 90 uncommon, 70 rare, 20 mythic, and 6 basic lands. Plus 16 tokens.

Also includes an additional 30 purple timeshifted cards as a supplementary similar to the Strixhaven Mystical Archives (cards too broken for a standard release; meant for limited and legal in eternal formats)

There is an ancillary 100 card Purple Reign Commander Expansion.

• 10 purple wedge commanders (partner up!)
• 30 purple colorshifted cards (cards we felt could have been purple, had purple been a thing. enables access to cards for mono-purple commander play.)
• 60 all new purple cards
• Plus 5 new tokens
• Available here: https://www.planesculptors.net/set/purple-reign-commander

Purple Reign and PRC combine for a superfunky total of 420 cards & 21 tokens!

During our previous set, Return to Dominaria, fantastic and unfamiliar forces began to emerge from the reopened rifts! Caverns emanating purple mana started to appear across Dominaria, along with strange new purple creatures.

Lead by the evil planeswalker Heliumdream, the Aetherborn and the Finori have emerged from the Rifts to find themselves on Dominaria!

Now that the set is finished, we need to come back in with a worldbuilding and story minded attitude and explain a bit more about whats going on in Purple Reign! The mysterious Finori have a culture of perpetual Masquerade, entrancing any and all partygoers. Meanwhile, villanous Heliumdream plans to utilize the Aetherwind Mill to help gain rule over Dominaria.

After several years of work, were ready to get started with iterative development and playtesting!

Purple Reign is a follow up to our previous set, Return to Dominaria!

We're kinda trying to do a three set block paradigm, trying to consider how 3x, 2/1, and 1/1/1 drafts might work. I was always a huge fan of the complexity of the draft format across more than one set whens blocks were still the thing. We've started plotting our third set to resolve the block, Urza's Resurrection.

If we could do it all again, we would maybe try to incorporate even more flux than is already present; introducing even more unconventional things outside their expected color and making things even more strange. At some point Purple became the main focus - so the other threads and themes from the canonical Planar Chaos release, like color-pie rearrangement and the 'alternate present', weren't incorporated as much and lost priority; which is probably okay...the set how it plays is unconventional enough as it is.

We had significantly more color breaks in the original exploratory design file than ended up in the set; usually because despite being fun designs and interesting breaks, they would start to drift off-archetype by being out of color and thus feel out of place in the set. We failed to decide to make breaks more fundamental in how we assigned colors to archetypes. So our desire for more breaks was left inherently at odds with trying to maintain some semblance of structure and pie integrity.

A truly high-flux environment would be best served by a 5x alternate color situation; similar to Off Colour - utilizing Purple, Yellow, Orange, Brown, and Pink. We may attempt something like it in the future; going down that road presents a new challenge of being unconstrained and unprecedented - goals that were antithetical to our vision for Purple Reign.

After playtesting and theorycrafting purple, we more or less organically arrived at many of the same conclusions Rosewater did during his last shared thoughts on Purple:"When asked about the theoretical case of adding purple as a sixth color, Mark Rosewater has said that he would nowadays add it to the center of the color pie, so that it would not specifically be an ally or enemy of any color but rather a totality of all the colors. This way, instead of it trying to carve out its own space in the color pie, it would borrow equally from all five colors. It would be a mix of abilities, almost all things the five colors can do, but mixed and matched in such a way that it could do things that couldn't normally be done in monocolor. This would also allow R&D to make some hybrid cards (probably a cycle) that are purple and another color. Finally, Rosewater said that if this were the case, he would look for a new mechanic that plays in a novel space that he would allow only the new color to have access to."

Our approach isn't perfectly consistent with this, but close. Purple happens to mechanically and thematically steal from blue/black/red mind control and rogue space - design space that has been slowly delved into since the release of Planar Chaos, design space we feel could have been granted to purple to give it a unique identity. So despite purple being central in the color pie and exhibiting keywords and abilities from all five colors, it does have a particular feel and slant it's trying to achieve.

We intend to reiterate and intertextualize the work of those who have come before us with regard to purple color pie integrity & philosophy:

Purple Primer by foo_intherain

Primer in Purple & Gentrification by Donovan_Du_Bois

We wanted to organically arrive at what our Purple things wanted to be and feel like before writing an overarching philisophic guide, that would have perhaps been nearsighted. We'll return to reiterate upon these ideas, and hopefully give a solid idea and meaning to 'what it is to be purple'.

Thank you for playing,

-heliumdream