I'm developing a villain who has the power to create large quantities of something out of thin air. Like, large enough to make a good sized island in the middle of the ocean out of it. Right now I'm stuck between three possibilites: diamond, gold, and iron. Diamond is an extremely hard and strong substance, plus an entire island made out of diamond would lend a certain sense of mystique to it, I think. With gold, I could play around with comparisons to King Midas. Here he wouldn't be creating gold out of thin air, it would be that anything he touched turns to gold — including thin air, which I guess means he's creating it out of thin air anyway... Iron would help create a darker setting, though. Not flashy and showy like the others, more like an oppressive industrial environment. Everything is gray, the ground and the buildings are all made of the same metal, and the towering structures would cast the lower levels into constant shadow. Which do you guys like best?
All of those are great ideas, and I think you could go with any of them. Iron would be useful in the making of weapons as well as an island and other things. The greyish look of everything would lend a uniform look to the world and create an interesting world. On the down side, iron rusts and the island would eventually fall apart. Gold could be interesting, however, I personally see to many draw backs. The biggest being that the villain would need a reason why they have not ruined the economy of your world. Gold is also a very soft substance, so you'd have the same problem of as with iron with the island falling apart. Personally I'd go with diamond. My reason is that it comes in many colors and would make a very cool island. You could have different colored flowers and everything, only they would be made of diamond. You have the same problem as with gold, the risk the villain would ruin the economy. But dimond gets my vote. Hope this is helpful and best of luck. Edit: format
Diamond would be good for making your villain rich. But I think an island made of it would be surprisingly fragile. What happens when you hit a very large diamond with a sledge hammer? I suspect the answer is that it shatters. Air turning to gold inside the victim's lungs doesn't sound like the most useful super power ever. So I'd go with iron.
Iron sounds like the most useful to me. It won't shatter like diamond and it's much stronger than gold.
Across many cultures, Iron is frequently associated with magic and the supernatural. Gold is too, sorta, but it only has value once separated from the rock, plus it loses its value if there is too much of it. You might be able to play around with that fact. Maybe the gold island is built by making gold disappear from somewhere else. Iron also has to be smelted, but Iron can be refined into steel, so the magic could get stronger, but iron by itself could still hold magic. Gold has only 1 level of magic. Maybe even rocks of either metal could have a low level of magic. Diamonds? Sorry, I got nuthin', they leave me cold. Their value is artificially maintained primarily by the DeBeers company. Metal is inherently valuable.
Money and the economy isn't an issue here, because (for plot related reasons) his island is completely cut off from the rest of the world. No trade, no selling, and nobody is going to try to go there and steal any of it, so his island of diamond, gold, whatever can exist and leave the rest of the world unchanged. As for it breaking, he just fixes it. He routinely takes trips to the lower sections of his island to replace any parts that may have been eroded by the sea. There is virtually no limit to how much of this stuff he can create, to the point that he'll often conjure building sized blocks of it to drop on his enemies.
I wanted to say that the idea of villain living on an island with the power to turn things into gold, reminds me of Maximilien from the video game Evil Genius 2. Although in his case, he just had a gun that could turn things into gold, and stuck to having a single gold room in his evil lair. This room was his inner sanctum where he planned out his evil plots and such. He also built a super weapon to turn the world to into gold.
