Board 8 > Magic: the Gathering Topic: Beware the Chupacabra

(+) Yeah! (+)

I just sent in mine. I'm looking forward to after deadline passes so I can talk about them in more detail, but I feel kind of worn out now. It probably didn't help I did 8/10 today.
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Yeah, let's all post ours once we're sure we can do so!
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I thought I was almost done

Then I spent like 2 more hours on it today.

Got it sent, though!
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I was too lazy and didnt bother. Oh well!
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Not gonna bother with posting the whole thing, but this is what I came up with for some of them, in no particular order.

I wanted to make a reworked bushido evergreen because it's a flexible mechanic that works on offense and defense. By reworked I meant using a new name, and I also thought it would work better as a static ability.

I wanted to remove evergreen status from trample. I don't actually think it would be a good idea to take away evergreen status from any keyword but I felt trample was the narrowest, had rules complications, and there were candidates for alternative green evasive abilities, like 'can't be blocked by creatures of power 2 or less' which they've been experimenting with.

I thought manifest deserved a second chance. I discussed how it got a lukewarm reception but had good gameplay that could be expanded on further, and suggested it might have been hurt by being included alongside morph due to that resulting in additional gameplay complications.

My favorite set was Theros, and I wrote about how it didn't deliver on its enchantment subtheme. This answer was a bit formulaic because it's been discussed to death, but I tried to provide some additional insight anyway.

My least favorite set was Battle for Zendikar, and I wrote about how it did a good job capturing the alien nature of the Eldrazi in a different and stronger way than Rise did.

I said Magic's greatest weakness was that it was a physical card game, which restricts design space and makes certain things difficult like applying errata. I tried to express how much I value when the designers subvert these limitations through things like double faced cards.

I said Magic's greatest strength was its customizability across formats. Pretty straightforward answer here.

I really got stumped by the last question for a long time, what one thing I would change about Magic. I ended up arguing there should have been a way to reduce the first turn advantage built into the rules, because it was something that bothers me personally, but that's not really the imaginative answer I think some others might have come up with.
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I wanted to make a reworked bushido evergreen because it's a flexible mechanic that works on offense and defense. By reworked I meant using a new name, and I also thought it would work better as a static ability.

oh hey this is what I chose too

I chose to demote Prowess though, which is a little awkward because part of my argument against Prowess (it's a triggered ability) also applied to Bushido
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If I had bothered to do these I probably would have picked to demote Hexproof. It's an unfun, non-interactive mechanic that is already barely used. Wouldn't be missed.
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That's what I picked btw The Mana Sword.

I'll go into more depth on my answers later but yeah
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I had a hard time justifying a removed evergreen keyword. I actually think hexproof is fine as is and would be opposed to removing it. Defender is the easiest to justify, but I'm personally fond of it. Prowess fits a useful niche but I agree you could probably remove that too.
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Looking down the list of Qs.

Would have made Cycling evergreen and it's not even close. It's simple and is an easy way to help make more of the cards in a set more useful. Doesn't require any kind of "hate" to fight against either, as long are you're not printing Astral Slide in every set.

Second chance mechanic I might pick Cipher. It was maybe a little too complex, but the idea of tagging a spell effect that triggers on damage was interesting. The few cards it got were boring and underpowered, so it never did much.

Favorite set is Time Spiral, but the problems with that have been well documented. Too many mechanics packed into one set/block, no cohesive mechanical theme.

Least favorite set is probably Born of the God, of sets I've actually played a reasonable amount of. Honestly having a tough time finding anything positive about it. Chromanticore was cool I guess.
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I think you can make a good case for removing Defender, it was probably second or third on my list.
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The biggest issue with cipher is that Wizards believes the design space is incredibly small and that they used it up already.
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The design space opens up a lot more if you don't just restrict it to Blue/Black. I think you can tweak the flavor of the mechanic to have it make sense in all colors.
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Yeah, but the flavor, by name and its Dimir associations, and mechanics, being a saboteur mechanic, both tie it pretty heavily to UB. That would be hard to change.

It could probably work fine in red, but it's not in white or green's wheelhouse really at all.
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Name and flavor can change, that's not as important.

I agree that you generally see that kind of thing in Dimir, but "when X deals combat damage to a player do Y" isn't foreign to any color. There are multiple green cards in standard that do it, and while admittedly the Naya Dinolord is the only white card in current standard to have such an effect, white has definitely gotten it in the past. White/Green literally had a mechanic build around it in Origins.

Not saying that Cipher is the best choice here or anything, it was just one that popped out to me when I scrolled through a list of keyword mechanics.
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Sceptilesolar posted...

I had a hard time justifying a removed evergreen keyword. I actually think hexproof is fine as is and would be opposed to removing it. Defender is the easiest to justify, but I'm personally fond of it. Prowess fits a useful niche but I agree you could probably remove that too.

The thing that sold me on dropping Prowess is how rarely it's used. It totally missed Ixalan block and only a appears on a few cards in the sets that do include it.
Aside from Defender its by far the least present keyword in standard currently, but I justified keeping Defender because it's so intuitive that it barely even needs to be learned. "That thing has Defender, so it just defends" is one of the easiest keywords to understand.
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Bite sized versions of my answers.

New evergreen mechanic: Kicker. Feel like it's a good way to help unpack how triggered abilities function for new players, and is a strong balancing tool/safety valve on powerful enters the battlefield effects. Versatile and not tied to a specific theme. Fairly easy to understand and doesn't necessarily contribute a lot of card bloat.

Removed evergreen: Hexproof. Unfun to play against, particularly for new players who may have difficulty understanding how to deal with it entirely as it often causes non-intuitive decisions to be optimal (using a board wipe to kill a single hexproof beast is kinda silly). Also kinda redundant with other evergreen keywords like Indestructible. Proposed Shroud as the superior untargetable keyword to be evergreen.

Second chance: Splice. Splice is a neat mechanic but the costs were generally not done in a way that made the splice interesting or feasible to use (need more things like Veil of Secrets and Horobi's Whisper) and making it tied to something less narrow than arcane spells (like sorceries, instants of cost >= x, etc) would make it something that plays better with the rest of the cardbase.

Favorite set: Betrayers of Kamigawa. Loved the flavor, had a lot of interesting mechanics that were balanced and fun to play with, and Kamigawa is probably the most fun I've had playing in limited. Unfortunately uhhh, stepping out of limited the set doesn't contribute much to the game as a whole. It's sort of on this island with cards being overly self referential. Related issue the new mechanics were poorly named. Ninjutsu and Bushido were great but too married to Samurai or Ninja flavor, which you obviously can't just be tossing into any world setting at will.

Least favorite set: Mirrodin. Felt really powercreepy at the time. Decks were more homogeneous right out of the gate with the high artifact concentration and poor balancing even at the common level (affinity so dumb with artifact lands). Best aspect of it is it introduced equipment (and more powerful non-mana based artifacts in general) which I felt were definitely good for the game in the long run for a lot of reasons.

Strength: That the expansion sets are designed in a fairly stand alone manner when it comes to balance and stuff. Lets new players basically jump in on whatever they want and have a functional deck, and enables a lot of different play environments with limited play.

Weakness: New sets don't pay quite the amount of attention to the existing card base that I'd like. Be it through infinite combos slipping through a bit too often, cards being strictly better than other cards or whatever else.

Change: Said I'd change the design paradigm for new sets and include a non heavily themed expansion once in a while in between the blocks. Kinda like the base sets or modern masters but with less focus on being new player friendly/premium cards and less reprints. It'd be nice to do something like I dunno make some more creatures in the samurai creature type, bring back an old mechanic like Cipher, throw in some fanservice cards tied to an old fan favorite legend like I dunno Baron Sengir, without devoting the entire world setting to it. Would increase player retention rate over time I think.
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I like that idea of an occasional nostalgia or callback product. Yugioh has the right idea, is a sentence I never thought I would say before now.
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Random note if anyone can be dqed from these things in this round it's gotta be "Kamigawa fanboy" since I don't think people, especially those in mtg creative, particularly liked that block, so I'll definitely be amused if I don't make it to the next round (as I understand it you're basically auto-in as long as you coherently answer the questions though?)

Kamigawa was awesome though and I'll fight anyone. I still have a samurai deck and a ninja deck as well as Masumaro First to Live and Sakashima the Imposter commander decks. Ninja deck is wacky as hell with a bunch of manifest cards and non-ninja creatures in it (manifest is such a ninjaey mechanic I'd love a ninjutsu card with manifest interactions) since what can you really do the creature type wasn't fleshed out much but yeah.
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Flavor-wise I think Kamigawa was good, and triple Champions was a fun draft format. Betrayers was alright. Saviors was a mess of a set.
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Yeah I in fact specifically said Betrayers as my favorite because I didn't think Saviors added anything of value (and noted as such)
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The block definitely had a lot of cool mechanics that were misused, as you mentioned in your answers with Splice, Bushido and Ninjutsu.

But then Saviors comes along with "heavy hitters" like SWEEP and CHANNEL and COUNT THE NUMBER OF CARDS IF YOUR HAND and it's like what
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Count the number of cards in your hand wasn't the worst idea-- could see that being cleaned up and keyworded in a potentially interesting way, but yeah I don't think the other two were salvageable mechanics for anything interesting. Evoke I guess would be channel done right. Sweep is just, that's never going to be an interaction you even want to be good I don't think.

I also kinda liked Epic in a way though it's not really a mechanic you can do often and I think the only one that was done in an interesting way for deck construction was the white one.

Overall a lot more bad than good there though for sure.
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I don't think Channel was that bad, it has similar problems to Bloodrush but that mechanic also wasn't bad. Though I think it's such an obscure, underused mechanic Maro has never even bothered to storm scale it.
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Epic was neat in theory, but yeah there's only so much you can do with it.
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I guess my problem with channel is you already kinda had it done better with other mechanics like gempalm cycling. It wasn't unusable as much as boring. As I edited in though Evoke is channel done right I think.
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The Mana Sword posted...

But then Saviors comes along with "heavy hitters" like SWEEP and CHANNEL and COUNT THE NUMBER OF CARDS IF YOUR HAND and it's like what

Don't talk shit about Sweep!

Charge Across the Araba is legitimately my favorite Saviors card.
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it frustrates me that there are five cards for sweep, but it's not actually a full five color cycle... how did they settle on four commons and then an extra white uncommon?
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It's actually four if that makes you feel better unless I"m missing one for some reason

Course green is probably the color that could most efficiently use the idea and of course it's not one of the colors that has it
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sweep was deemed too broken with fastbond so they needed to clamp down on it

obviously
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I made a monk deck back in the days of saviors

I wanted to put a good sweep card in to synergize with COUNT THE NUMBER OF CARDS IN YOUR HAND

Turns out most monks were green and while I did splash red that left my only option the awful Barrel Down Sokenzan

Maybe I should've made it Green/White to use Charge Across the Arabica
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Lopen posted...

It's actually four if that makes you feel better unless I"m missing one for some reason

Course green is probably the color that could most efficiently use the idea and of course it's not one of the colors that has it

oh oops, I hallucinated a green one somehow

that's somehow both better and worse... why even bother naming a mechanic that's only on four cards?
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Aura Swap was only on one card!

RIP Aura Swap :(
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Future Sight might be the actual best set in the history of magic.
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I would've almost certainly voted Future Sight or Planar Chaos for favorite set were I playing during that time. I took a break between 2006 and 2009 though. Bad timing!
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I actually kinda stopped around Time Spiral through Scars, so I missed most of it too. But I still love that whole block.
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Yeah I still love it too but I'm a big fan of limited so not being able to experience that aspect is gonna put it below a lot of the sets I have played limited in

But conceptually that block is aces for sure
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My understanding is that it's fairly well liked (sprout swarm notwithstanding), though not a top tier format. Very complex and almost cube-like given how many different mechanics and cards there are.
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I don't think Future Sight is a contender for being the best set ever, because vomiting out weird card ideas doesn't make for good set direction, but all that mattered for the question was that it was your favorite, and I certainly see how it would be.
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It's not something I'd want to see often, but there is a certain charm to Future Sight being so unique without being a trainwreck and I do think seeing a set like that once in a while isn't a bad thing.
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Lopen posted...

It's not something I'd want to see often, but there is a certain charm to Future Sight being so unique without being a trainwreck and I do think seeing a set like that once in a while isn't a bad thing.

I agree with this completely. Future Sight is a market tester, a proof of concept and a completely unique limited play style. All of those things together make it so utterly unique in the general slog of the general sets we get.
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Future Sight and Alliances are the two best sets of all time, just because of the weird stuff crammed in them.
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IIRC when future sight came out they didn't have supplemental sets, so i doubt they'll ever be so daring in a standard set again

future sight turned into unstable, conspiracy, etc
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Now on the trainwreck note... Alliances...
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Well first of all unstable is its own thing from Unglued not Future Sight.

Things like Conspiracy and Commander though-- not really like Future Sight. They're a bit more normalized and focused I feel. There are similarities but I don't think they're really the same thing. You may be right that MtG would treat them as the same thing, though.
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Alliances is...not the worst set of all time.
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Do they ever do any more challenges like the "fight the hydra" thing they did for theros? I felt like that was really cool.
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No, that was a Theros-only thing as part of the "Hero's Path" promotion. I enjoyed giving out those trials to my customers though. If we go back to Theros, they might do something similar again.

Anyway, essay question summaries:

1. My main selling point beyond being a pretty good tournament grinder and judge is that I have experience running the Magic portion of an LGS, so I have experience with Magic as a business as well.

2. I'm going to break the mold here -- I chose Renown to become evergreen. It can fit into almost any color, it's easy to understand, and it ties into other fairly common set themes like +1/+1 counters-matter or power/toughness checks. My first response was also Bushido, but in my memory it made combat feel more awkward than it did dynamic; I feel like Renown did the opposite. Obviously we wouldn't want to go too nuts with Renown, but I think it'd be fine to have here and there.

3. I'd remove Hexproof from evergreen status. It isn't fun to play with/against, but my main angle is that, like Protection, it hurts red and green disproportionately compared to the other three colors -- the two colors whose removal is already limited in scope. I did note that I don't think it actually should be removed though, especially since it is useful for giving creatures Hexproof via spells.

4. Meh, you guys don't care about this one.

5. Magic's greatest strength is the color system, hands down. Unlike any other CCG, you can mix and match as many colors however you want in Magic (at your peril!) so the colors guide card design and balance without forcing players to make cookie-cutter decks. The philosophy behind each color also is a major boon. Lots of people identify as a player of a certain color as opposed to just "being a Magic player."

6. Magic's greatest weakness is the amount of non-games caused by poor land draws/mulligans. It just feels bad since the resources are part of the main deck, so if you can't find any, you aren't even playing. Unfortunately, the game is made such that guaranteeing the resources like Hearthstone would cause linear combo decks to fly off the rails, so the problem is tricky.

7. Bring back Ninjutsu! Everything about that ability was sweet, and I think there's a lot of space left to explore. Since it focuses on combat damage and avoiding opposing blockers, I think there's some space where Ninjutsu could branch into Red as well.

8. My favorite set (but not necessarily block!) was original Zendikar, but man, playing stuff on your opponent's turn (and blocking!) in Zendikar sucked. Landfall was just so powerful and difficult to react to since playing lands doesn't use the stack, so if they played a fetch, it was super awkward.

9. Ironically and to little surprise to all of you, BFZ was my least favorite set, but the flavor was spot-on. Even though the mechanics were questionable from a game standpoint, they captured the feeling of a desperate fight for survival against a consuming alien brood quite well.

10. I would stop Wizards from releasing so much ancillary product and focus their design resources back on Standard-legal sets. The amount of banned cards is just inexcusable, and while some ancillary product has been fantastic (Eternal Masters, Unstable), a lot has been mediocre or worse (Archenemy NB, Explorers of Ixalan, Conspiracy 2).
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One thing I did when looking for mechanics I wanted to become evergreen was immediately cross everything off the list that only worked while attacking. So tired of that. Renown is a fine mechanic and all and I don't see any particular issues with it becoming evergreen, but it's really not what I was looking for personally.
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I ruled out all the mechanics that use +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters immediately because they're not allowed to coexist in a set, so something like Renown couldn't be used in New Phyrexia or whatever

they barely use -1/-1s, so maybe it's not a big deal, but I wanted to play it safe
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