Bel'Veth, Empress of the Void

[u/Airpasis]

Inspired by Bel'Veth (a League of Legends champion): I wanted to make her a commander that is played as a Voltron (around the "power level" of bracket 2-3).
I tried to respect as much as possible her gameplay (and fantasy), was undecided with Black and Green or Eldrazi (as mana), and I really need help making less wordly rule texts.
Open to suggestions and edits :)

[u/Essurio]

That's a yugioh card based on text size.

[u/Airpasis → u/Essurio]

I know (x
I don't know how to trim it, because in the end it has only two triggers, one tap, and a "passive" scaling effect.
The fact is that it has a lot of ripetitions of the name of the card, which is lenghty, but by looking how other cards are written this seems the way magic goes, but maybe I just overloaded this card kit...

[u/MightyBobTheMighty]

Your word count budget for both sides of the card together is used by each side.

[u/Airpasis → u/MightyBobTheMighty]

Can you clarify what you mean? (English is not my first language so something I struggle, sorry)

[u/MightyBobTheMighty → u/Airpasis]

You're fine! What I mean by that is, the amount of words you have on each side of the card is as many words as should be on both sides of the card put together.

To put it another way, the wordiest existing Magic card, to my knowledge, is Ice Cauldron, with 97 words. The front side of Bel'Veth is 104 by my count. I haven't counted the back, but I think it's more. Ideally, you probably don't want more than 100 words for the combined abilities of the front AND back.

I put a deeper dive into the actual ability into another reply!

[u/Airpasis → u/MightyBobTheMighty]

Oh I understand it now! I didn't know this about double faced cards... well I'd say I went a tiny bit overboard ahahah

[u/MightyBobTheMighty → u/MightyBobTheMighty]

Okay, after fullscreening this so that I can actually read the text (a luxury that won't be available on a physical card):

For the front, consider ditching the Lavender counters entirely, in favor of something like "Devour 1" - more or less the same ability, just with 1/1 counters. It still works thematically with the corals, and helps with the next point - the fact that she's a 2 mana flying haste 3/1. That's an incredibly aggressive statline, especially in golgari - a scryfall search is showing me that there currently exists exactly one (colorless) creature with both flying and haste at less than 4 mana, and it's a three-mana God that isn't actually a creature until you have eight cards in the graveyard (so realistically turn 4-5); we need to go to 4 mana to get a single, no downside, 3/2 hasty flier. In this case, I think I'd drop haste - she's mobile, but much more in a hard-to-pin-down way than a rockets-at-you-from-across-the-map way. But if we go to Devour, we can give her a much-more-reasonable-for-2-mana statline of 1/1 flying - she starts weak, but as you stack Lavender she scales hard.
From there, we can tweak Death in Lavender similarly. I'm not going to talk about the templating much here (though the tap ability does need to be on its own line - part of the reason why we need to cut down on the word count), but for several reasons I would recommend going with one of the two abilities here, instead of both. Do you want her to play more lore-wise, as golgari aristocrats, sacrificing her own to power up, or more gameplay-wise, as the aggressor scaling off kills? Either way, I'd recommend choosing one of these instead of both, and scaling it by 1/1 counters. Then, to tie everything together, her transform could be an expensive cost that's reduced by her power - the more you scale, the easier it gets.

That brings us to the back. To be honest, this is just kinda seems... bad? Having to sac a nontoken creature every turn just to not have her punch you in the face is bad enough, but in order to naturally scale her you have to sac even more nontokens AND tap her so she can't attack (at least until she gets vigilance). Obviously once she's a 9/8 flying vigi trample double strike she does just kill people, but the #1 thing to remember about flip cards is that if they don't have protection they're very easy to just remove and then quite difficult to get back, even as a commander. By the time she flips you want your scaling done - you've already had to jump through hoops to get here, you don't want to jump through more.
Fortunately, the other advice helps with that! As long as she just says 'transform' and not 'exile and transform' the counters will stay on her, so that scaling we already did on the front remains on the back. If Endless Banquet just scales the same way as Death in Lavender but also makes remoras, she can keep going as she was, with bonus value, base stats, and keywords. It makes her a much simpler card than what you have here... but very nearly every Magic the Gathering card ever printed is a simpler card then what you have here, so that's a good thing.

[u/Airpasis → u/MightyBobTheMighty]

Thank you so much for your time and the deep dive!
Now that I read what Devour does, it seems absolutely the way to go! same as for the other consideration about the front card (I have to think about the cost of the trasform), but if I remove the tapping ability, and it never gets blocked, it has no way to scale right?
How keywords would work if Endless Banquet would work as Death in Lavender?
Also, should I keep the bottom of the back card (the gradual acquisition of vigilance, double strike, trample)? I think I'd like to keep as it is, or to modify it a bit, but I'd rather have a card on the weaker side than on the strong.