Great Designer Search 2: Quiz

Round 2 of the Great Designer Search 2 was a fifty-question multiple-choice quiz. The top ~100 people in the quiz will move on to submit actual world and card designs, which will then be narrowed down to a final 8! Partly to share and partly to think through my own answers, I wrote my thoughts and reasons for answering the way I did on each question. I don’t have time to format this to show the question and my answer, so for maximum functionality I recommend opening up the quiz page in a separate window.

Some were easy, some put me through an absolute wringer. Here we go…

1) C: Black is the only color with both haste and lifelink.

2) A: Blackcleave Goblin says black can have haste + one other keyword ability at common, and in fact it doesn’t get haste at higher rarity often, and when it does it's never as a double scoop of French vanilla only, it always has something more complex going on.

3) C: Lifelink is only on white and black, shroud only on green and blue. The other four options all have a color that can do both.

4) B: Flash, redirection, and low power/high toughness are heavily blue, and redirection is also red, leaving blue-red as the best option here. Green has more flash, but red has flash as well, and in this case it's needed for the effect.

5) E: Discard is the only ability here that is mono-colored by current pie standards (and one of the reasons I opted to give red a sliver of discard in the essay portion).

6) E: While they absolutely have given "giant growth" to flash ETB creatures, it is the only one that could still have a use on a non-flash creature. All other cards would outright not work or be frustratingly terrible without flash.

7) A: White has an established corner of the bounce pie where it can bounce its own stuff.

8) A: Common. Simple bounce spells like this would be out of place at higher rarities. See Glint Hawk, Kor Skyfisher, and Narrow Escape. This is an interesting, not-broken ability for white to have in Limited too, another reason for common status.

9) E: The rules never allow a card you don't own to be in your hand, library, or graveyard, and returning to "controller's hand" would break this rule.

10) D: Red and white have first strike but not regeneration, so it could not be this combo.

11) E: Abilities that tend to render each other moot on the same creature are a design no-no that has been discussed in columns by Maro over the years. Also the other answers are just not even close to this one.

12) E: While green does have vigilance in limited quantities, blue doesn't, and that would leave the card with absolutely nothing blue about it. A, C and D *could* be monogreen cards, but at least those abilities are blue enough that it would feel fine to be blue-green.

13) C: A demon that forces discard is pure blackness. As stated above, black is the only color with discard.

14) C: Unless R&D costed to the point of unplayability, this creature would warp Limited at uncommon, but there's nothing particularly "mythic" about it.

15) C: The key is "as a demon." Demons historically have some controller-punishing drawback as part of the flavor of being a demon.

16) B: Interesting question, because there are ZERO pure vanilla "bears" in red, blue, or black. That would make all three inappropriate, but blue is the most inappropriate because it has the fewest 2/2 for 1U of *any* kind at common (three in regular sets, one "un"), and this is clearly a common card.

17) B: It would be an insult to development to suggest that design creates vanillas to "ease the burden" on dev.

18) A: Springjack Knight is the only common creature in Magic history that grants double strike in any way. The others have all appeared at common many times.

19) E: I answered this one before even reading the question. When I read the card, I thought, "Why isn't this an instant or sorcery? Being an enchantment does nothing for the card, and if a set wants more enchantments, then tweak this to have a reason it might actually stick on the creature for a bit."

20) B: You can't equip opposing creatures, making this one terrible spell in equipment form.

21) C: Lands are the only other permanent type that black has the ability to destroy without help from other colors, and there are several "destroy creature or land" cards in black's history.

22) A: Tumble Magnet at common in Scars of Mirrodin suggests that's where this would be, too. Large sets have common mill cards of a Tome Scour/Jace's Erasure level of impact, and that's where this card falls in terms of how much it would mill without shenanigans.

23) B: There are no artifact creatures in all of Mirrodin block or Scars of Mirrodin that care about having charge counters on them.

24) C: The other reasons are definitely "positive effects this rule has on the game," but preventing a neverending game with a stalled board and empty libraries is the one that is why it has to be there. We hate draws!

25) E: All other answers are contradicted by exiting PWs. Jace 2.0 (A), Gideon (B), Sarkhan the Mad (C), any planeswalker with two versions (Jace, Sarkhan, Chandra, Elspeth, Ajani) (D)

26) B: Urza's Saga has a definite "enchantments matter" sub-theme throughout, certainly far more than any of the other blocks listed.

27) D: There are a couple of common white bears that sacrifice to destroy an enchantment, and white has a history of common creatures that destroy enchants when ETB (Aven Cloudchaser, Absolver Thrull, Cloudchaser Eagle) etc.

28) D: Modular mechanics do not necessitate the inclusion of other cards containing the mechanic. Infect is the only mechanic here that says to the deckbuilder, "You'd better include lots of this if you're going to run any."

29) E: This is the first question of the bunch that really had me going...wha?! They are all fairly odd cards, but all similarly so, such that it was tough to figure out which one had the “worst design.” So much so, I figured there was something I was missing. Then I think I found it. "Landfall" is not a keyword, it's an ability word. Per the rules:

"An ability word appears in italics at the beginning of some abilities on cards. Ability words are similar to keywords in that they tie together cards that have similar functionality, but they have no special rules meaning and no individual entries in the Comprehensive Rules."

It seems bad to have a card that gives a creature a bonus based on a word that doesn’t technically have any meaning on the comprehensive rules, so I’m pretty sure this is E. Maro said they weren't doing "trick questions" so maybe I'm wrong, but does having four keywords and one ability word constitute a trick, or is it an "on-board trick?"

30) D: Flavor-based decks like this are very Vorthos.

31) C: Agonizing question number 2! This is borderline unfair in the sense that there is not a clear answer you can point to with overwhelming examples from card history like you can with most questions in this quiz—particularly if you consider each of these abilities as literally stated below. I’ll consider each one by one.

A) "Ping" abilities feel more uncommon than common now (Prodigal Pyromancer (twice), Cunning Sparkmage, and Brimstone Mage), although Vithian Stinger and Viashino Fangtail are recent exceptions. Even though there are recent examples at common, the four pingers that have seen print since Vithian Stinger have all been uncommon. I think generally pingers should be uncommon to keep them from rendering one-toughness creatures so fragile in Limited, and I expect common pingers in the future only when it doesn't warp Limited.

B) This feels like the "trick" answer. While 1 point of damage prevention feels very common, there has actually never been a creature that prevents 1 to creatures and NOT to players, too. Ever. I don't think they would print this without printing the player clause along with it.

C) Only Ballynock Trapper and Minister of Impediments have had this at common without an activation cost, but it's worth noting that this ability has NEVER appeared on a card outside of common, and there are two commons that have had it in the last ~5 years.

D) This has never been done without a mana cost at common and is right out.

E) Only Ghost Warden has had this at common without a limitation or mana cost. Infantry Veteran gets it with attack clause. It feels like this is a definite possibility. The creature exists at common in tenth edition, which was the same era as the trapper example above. Leonin Battlemage had this ability at uncommon, for what it’s worth.

So this is a sick spot. I dismissed the trick answer B, leaving C and E, and narrowly went with C because there are a couple of recent examples of tapping a creature without a mana cost at common, and only one that pumps for +1/+1. I will be quite angry if the answer is B, because that specific ability literally does not exist on any card in the game, and annoyed if it's E, because it's a close call but recent history is still on the side of tapping. Still, this feels like it comes down to what Maro thinks, and I'm honestly not sure.

32) C: Last Gasp is the only one where scaling up the number doesn't have a dramatic impact on the card’s effect on the game. If you made the number "20" on all cards, Last Gasp is the one that's still just a one-for-one removal spell.

33) A: In http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr57 "harmony" is stated at white's goal, and white likes “order” which is reflected in the “pattern” comment.

34) A: Golgari is about black and green crossing over in graveyard-as-a-resource space, and flashback is the only mechanic here that does that.

35) E: This comes down pretty quickly to life gain and token making, but in the end, there are a similar number of instants and sorceries with lifegain, while token-making is heavily sorcery, as it is often a pseudo-creature card, and thus happens more often at sorcery speed.

36) E: That Spike does not need to be designed for is one of the classic misunderstandings about the psychographic. Magic is heavily designed for Spike, including any card you would think of as “just for Limited.”

37) A: Color and managing abilities relative to the pie is at the heart of design. As for the others, "Creature Type" is more creative, mana cost is development, P/T is development, and rarity is in second place, but is also more development, who tune the Limited play experience. Design does care about rarity, but not like design cares about color. They are the caretakers of the color pie.

38) B: Boils immediately down to Vigilance vs. Can't Be Blocked, with a nod to "as though it weren't blocked" because it's a rarely-seen ability, although fully green. There are more recent examples of green vigilance than green "two or more" (that don't need mountains). Also, green recently getting intimidate suggests that intimidate is the version of green evasion we will be seeing like this, and the two-or-more mechanic is so distinctly red I don't see why they would put it on a green creature.

39) D: Pretty straightforward. While they make "chase cards" at rare to help move new sets, the notion of moving a card to uncommon because it is a tournament-level card is silly.

40) E: Lots of great reasons for variance of the draw are listed here, but design is most concerned with design space, and without the variance of the draw, a huge class of cards--library manipulation--would be lost. For the game itself, I'd say the answer is C, but for design, it's E, having more design space.

41) E: Back to Nature says "Destroy all enchantments" is an uncommon thing now. Sorry Tranquility.

42) B: Cycling is the least parasitic, it does not force you into other cards in any way. You can decide to play a cycling card entirely on its own merits, it doesn't dictate any other card inclusions.

43) D: As Maro mentions in the article linked in the previous question, Kamigawa was very parasitic. Soulshift working only with spirit creatures and splice working only with arcane creatures made the set very parasitic. There were few older cards that worked with newer cards.

44) A: This one was the other ass-kicker in my opinion. I will be surprised if it is not one of these two, though:

A) Flanking not working against other flankers wasn't intuitive to many players and thus was often played incorrectly.
B) Flanking only worked on attacking and not on blocking, limiting the number of interactions it created.

Both of these are things bushido "fixed," so I feel it is one of the two. There are good arguments for each:

A) "Player intuition" has been a hot-button issue for the game, to the point that it led to many of the M10 rules changes. If people intuitively want to play your mechanic differently than it is designed, the problem is with the design, not the players. That being said, was this really a problem? Were people misplaying the mechanic? I don't know, I don’t think I did. If this was a legitimate thing that happened and not just a red herring, it's probably this.

C) This is another legit issue addressed with bushido. Creating more interactions is a good thing for a combat mechanic like this.

However, I found this Rosewater quote that has me leaning a bit. It is in reference to keywords vs. ability words, but it compares flanking to bushido:

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr342n

Flanking (Whenever a creature without flanking blocks this creature, the blocking creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn.)

Bushido (When this blocks or becomes blocked, it gets +1/+1 until end of turn.)

Can you see the important difference between them? Bushido works on defense, but that’s not the relevant part. The important part shows up in flanking. It’s the “creature without flanking” section. You see, flanking is self-referential. Flankers don’t flank other flankers. What this means is that the mechanic cannot work without a keyword. Without a keyword to reference, there is no way for the cards to know what they can’t “flank” against. Bushido, on the other hand, could work just fine written out on every card. The flanking mechanics of the world have to be keyworded, while the bushido mechanics are keyworded on a case by case basis.

I think calling this out demonstrates that the self-referential part might have caused some confusion, and he certainly dismisses the “on defense” part quickly. Keep in mind, though, this was not an aside on what was wrong with flanking per se.

If A is true, then I believe it’s a more significant problem for the mechanic than the “no defense” aspect, as there are many mechanics that are only relevant when the creature is attacking.

In fact, I think I’ve talked myself into more confidence on this one. There are plenty of mechanics that are only relevant when attacking, so can that really be considered the “big drawback” of flanking? If it ran against intuition, then it’s trouble, though, and none of the other options offered seem like big enough design problems to warrant an answer on the GDS2 quiz, while the issue of player intuition is a major big-picture issue for R&D that does warrant an answer.

45) A: White. Note that the one missing here is the one we had to identify above. I think Maro wrote one for each color, then split it off and turned it into two questions.

Black: "Morality? There's no such thing as morality. It's a construct of the weak to justify their actions."

Red: "What value is there in thinking about tomorrow? Who knows if we'll even be alive tomorrow?"

Green: "Everybody is trying so hard to change everything that they sometimes miss that things don't need to be changed."

Blue: "Any problem that is understood can be solved."

46) B: Devastating Summons edges out Clone. Clone isn't *super* Johnny like the other ones are, but copying a creature can certainly be part of wacky shenanigans more so than decimating your mana base for two vanilla creatures can Devastating Summons is more Spike.

47) A: Permanents that create creature tokens upon creature death basically always have the "nontoken" clause to avoid an easy infinite cycles with any cost-free sacrifice outlet. While vamp over zombie, the tap clause, etc. are all odd choices, the thing that needs to change for this not to be potentially broken is the lack of the nontoken clause.

48) C: Six!

• Æther Adept

total vanilla after first turn in play

• Ambassador Oak

total vanilla after first turn in play

• Gravedigger

total vanilla after first turn in play

• King Cheetah

total vanilla after first turn in play

• Rotting Legion

total vanilla after first turn in play

• Vulshok Berserker

total vanilla after first turn in play

• Bog Raiders

NOT vanilla

• Canyon Minotaur

Vanilla from first turn in play, not virtual, it is vanilla

• Riptide Crab

Not vanilla ever

• Squadron Hawk

Sneaky! French vanilla after first turn in play, but that ain’t vanilla!

49) C: The Heralds are mythic-fetchers in Shards of Alara, invokers are “8: do something” cards at common in ROE, Rest for the Weary is part of a cycle of landfall spells at common in WWK, and Steppe Lynx part of a cycle of +2/+2 landfall creatures in ZEN. Martial Coup by process of elimination as much as anything.

50) D: Mark Rosewater has raised his concern about the finite nature of Magic design space before, and the ongoing challenge it presents to R&D.

So all in all, I’d say there are two that if I miss—31 and 44—I won’t be totally surprised, because it felt like you had to be in Mark Rosewater’s head after narrowing it down to a couple options. (Although if there is a concrete declaration somewhere that I missed, by all means, share!)

There are about five where I felt super solid about my reasoning, but recognize that it’s just gray enough that I could be surprised with a wrong answer. If any of those turn out to be wrong, I will roll my eyes and demand an explanation, though.

Then there are about 43 that, if I got wrong, I will have to do some M:TG soul searching because I was pretty damn sure of them.

I look forward to seeing the answers and Maro’s explanations!

Great Designer Search 2: Essays

Great Designer Search Essays

As many listeners and tweeps know, I am participating in the Great Designer Search 2. Normally this sparse, utilitarian blog is just something people can RSS to alert them to my new Magic articles and podcasts. Since I have no polished Magic blog, though, I’m going to use this as a place to share GDS2 stuff as well. Sorry for the lack of web design, but most people only see the content of this site in their RSS feeds!

The first “test” was a series of ten essay questions. Full details here, but the basic gist was to answer each question in 250-350 words each. With the month I’ve been having, I had to crank these out pretty fast to meet the deadline. Primarily these essays represent a barrier to make sure only people serious enough to write 3,500 words even enter. I’m sure if I get to the point where these essays are read carefully, I will already be facing judgment on more important card and set design criteria.

Maybe that’s just how I’m justifying the haste with which some of these were written, and the handful of shameful spelling and capitalization errors I corrected in what I’m posting below. Overall though, I’m happy. I took some stands, made some cases, and got ‘er done. Here they are...

1) Introduce yourself and explain why you are a good fit for this internship.

Hi there, my name is Ryan Spain, aka “Godot” on Magic Online. I’ve spent most of my ten-year career in the game industry developing traditional strategy card games for digital platforms, and I have been a dedicated Magic: The Gathering player since Fallen Empires.

A role on the team moving the first and best collectible card game forward represents the perfect intersection between my strongest professional skills and my deepest gaming passions. My great love for Magic, my deep understanding of game design, and my proven project management and communication skills would make me an excellent asset to the Wizards of the Coast R&D team; I’m excited to compete for that privilege in the Great Designer Search 2.

Beyond simply loving Magic as a player, I have an innate desire and ability to evangelize and teach the game to others. I have introduced (and reintroduced) countless people to the game, and I have spent many hours writing and recording content for the Magic community through my draft walkthrough column “Waiting for Godot” at PureMTGO.com, and through the “Limited Resources” podcast over at mtgcast.com, where my co-host and I have helped thousands of listeners get more from their Limited Magic experiences.

I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to compete in a second Great Designer Search, and that time has finally arrived! I love the format for the second search. Not only is it clearly is more representative of actual set design, it is more aligned with my skill sets as a designer: working with my ideas and the ideas of others to create a cohesive whole. I look forward to proving that in the weeks to come!

2) You are instructed to move an ability from one color to another. This ability must be something used in every set (i.e. discard, direct damage, card drawing etc.). You may not choose an ability that has already been color shifted by R&D. What ability do you shift and to what color do you shift it? Explain why you would make that shift.

The color pie is to Magic: The Gathering what the Constitution is to the United States of America: It is the defining “document,” spelling out the foundational rules of the land. You do not make changes to it idly. Making changes should require extensive, careful thought, and must have the support of a large majority of the caretakers.

The importance and sanctity of the color pie is why I find this to be easily the most difficult question of the ten. Magic made many sensible, much-needed shifts to the color pie many years back, but I frankly don’t see much need for too much additional shifting now (and as you will see below, I was extremely bothered recently by what I felt was a fairly frivolous toying with the pie.)

All that being said, if I were forced to find a mechanic that I would shift into a new color, I would choose to move non-parallel, random discard from black into red. While I wouldn’t move all discard out of black and into red, random discard in particular would be at home in red, whereas something like “look at target opponent’s hand” discard would remain fully in black.

While red has had synergistic draw-and-discard-at-random effects, as well as random discard as a drawback for the caster, it has never had a straight-up, “target opponent discards a card at random” spell. Random discard captures red’s haphazard, myopic approach to player interactions perfectly, and while I realize that random discard is powerful and potentially frustrating, in limited doses and appropriate costs, it could have a flavorful home in red. Random discard already has a foothold there with parallel cards like Burning Inquiry, so it’s not a huge stretch to bring non-parallel random discard into red—and when it comes to the color pie, I would not make any shifts that would be considered a huge stretch.

3) What block do you feel did the best job of integrating design with creative? What is one more thing that could have been done to make it even better?

The most impressive integration of design and creative the game of Magic has ever seen was in the Alara block. Building on the foundations of what could be done in a multicolor block established by Ravnica and Shadowmoor, Alara took the multicolor block to new heights with a simple “what if” framework that proved to be an effective inspiration for design and creative.

“What would each plane be like where one of the allied color combinations didn’t exist?”

This foundational question provided the creativity-breeding restriction for both design and creative in the Alara block. What is a world without the law, order, and intellectual pursuits of white and blue? Welcome to Jund, where the fittest survive, and everything else is dinner. A world without green and red mana? Welcome to Esper, where, with nothing to destroy it, artifice was all but invincible—to the point that every creature in the plane had artificial enhancements of some kind. A world without the chaos and greed of red and black magic? Welcome to Bant, a lawful, noble plane where disputes are handled with honor and grace in one-on-one combat.

Answering the central “What if?” question for each of the five shards provided so much deftly-integrated material for both design and creative, it was impossible to tell as an outside observer whether design was the primary influencer of creative, or vice-versa. I like to believe this is a sign that it was very much a two-way street, with many concepts from creative leading to top-down card designs, and many mechanics originating in design leading to flavorful implementations from creative. The culmination in the all-multicolor Alara Reborn was the cherry on top of an amazing design/creative collaboration.

I think Shards of Alara could have been improved by spending the middle block more on deeper explorations of the shards and less on the domain theme. I wasn’t done caring about the individual shards when Conflux started asking me to care about domain. I also think the devour mechanic, while flavorful, fell well short of what it could have been from a design perspective.

4) R&D has recently been looking at rules in the game that aren't pulling their weight. If you had to remove an existing rule from the game for not being worth its inclusion, what would it be?

A sacred cow of a rule that I don’t think pulls its weight in the game is the maximum hand size rule. For starters, the fact that breaking this rule is now about as free as an ability can get—it’s a static ability on a land that taps for a colorless mana and comes into play untapped—demonstrates that it doesn’t break things to have no maximum hand size. If it did, Reliquary Tower would see more play.

In general, the limiting factor for how much you can do when your hand is over seven cards is based on your available mana, not how many more cards above seven you have in your hand when you pass the turn. There is generally not a huge difference between passing the turn with over seven cards and keeping them or discarding down to seven. In either case, you are going to work from your best seven cards, and you can usually tell which seven those are. I discard down to seven all the time when playing my Pyromancer Ascension deck, and it has never had an impact on the result beyond making the game take a little longer as I think through my discard decisions.

The biggest argument for getting rid of discarding down to seven, however, is that it is psychological punishment for new players who are mana screwed. Experienced players know that, stuck on two lands, discarding the seven drop is functionally identical for the most part to holding it and never casting it. Every forced discard for a mana-screwed beginner, though, is simply salt in one of the game’s more punishing wounds. When I play with my 8-year-old, we disregard the maximum-hand-size rule because it only ever adds to his frustration without impacting strategy or game results.

The power level of certain older cards would change with the elimination of the rule, but it would also open up new design space for rewarding and punishing players for having more than seven cards in hand after their end steps.

5) Name a card currently in Standard that, from a design standpoint, should not have been printed. What is the card and why shouldn't we have printed it?

For the same reason question #2 was so hard for me, this one was pretty easy: Hornet Sting is a card that, from a design standpoint, I feel should not have been printed.

The last time green saw the ability to deal targeted damage to creatures without flying or players, it was in the wild-west days before the reorganization of the color pie, where pie bleeding was just a normal part of the game. Since then, green has never had instants or sorceries that deal targeted damage to non-flying creatures or players. Colors are defined as much by what they can’t do as by what they can, and this is something green was not supposed to be able to do.

So, why amend the Magic constitution now? Why for this? Hornet Sting bleeds the pie, but not in a way that has a major effect on either Constructed or Limited formats. While this may seem to some like a reason to do it, to me it is a clear reason not to do it. Giving green haste at higher rarities, for example, is a bleed with a purpose for competitive magic.

Hornet Sting erodes green’s standing as a damager of flyers by allowing it to damage anything, and as a core-set common, confuses green’s role for new players. Core-set commons define the pie for new players, so why is the game suddenly defining green as a color that has target-anything direct damage in its arsenal?

Hornet Sting seems to exist solely because one damage for one mana is an elegant card that was too weak for black or red, not because a one-point Lightning Bolt was something the game or the color actually needed. As elegant as Hornet Sting may be, it simply does not do enough for the game to justify an amendment to the Magic Constitution that is the color pie.

6) What do you think design can do to best make the game accessible to newer players?

One of the biggest things that design can do to make the game accessible to new players already began with M10: reboot the core set to incorporate comfortable, familiar “basic fantasy” flavor, and have it accurately represent the core elements of the color pie.

Taking the theme of “basic fantasy flavor in core sets” further, I would push linear tribal mechanics in core sets even more than they are pushed currently. While experienced players don’t want Wizards to “build their decks for them” through overly-linear mechanics at competitive power levels, the opposite is the case for new players. Magic is a daunting game, and linear mechanics help new players feel like they are building their decks correctly by taking advantage of obvious linear synergies.

I would apply this linear philosophy in core sets to tribal themes—which consistently have strong appeal for new players—by introducing a cycle of “lords” at uncommon in the core set. Lorwyn proved that uncommon lords don’t break Limited, and arguably improved it, as you frequently had the opportunity to draft a lord early, build around it, and potentially secure a second or third lord in the process.

New players generally don’t have the access to cards that an experienced player does, so making lord cycles uncommon in the core set would allow new players to secure the cards they need to create a deck they love without having to hunt down rares. Also, by being at uncommon, new players would be more likely to be exposed to a lord early on. What player doesn’t remember fondly the first time they read a lord card, and immediately began dreaming of the killer deck they were going to build with it?

In place of the rare lords, there could be splashy, powerful instances of that tribal type that would make great one-of or two-ofs in a tribally-themed deck, but a deck wouldn’t feel naked without them the way a tribal deck does without a playset of lords.

7) What do you think design can do to best make the game attractive to experienced players?

One of the things I feel Magic needs to do to help keep the game attractive to experienced players was pulled off with unparalleled success in Rise of the Eldrazi (ROE): create Limited environments that appeal to all three psychographics.

Making sure each set contains individual cards for each psychographic is a standard aspect of Magic set design at this point, but we had never seen it fully executed on all fronts in a Limited environment until ROE.

For Timmy, the appeal is fairly obvious. ROE had 8/8s for 8 at common, for crying out loud! It contains the biggest creatures the game has ever seen, and fantastic, Timmy-friendly occurrences came up in almost every Limited match. “Battlecruiser” Magic is, at its core, a Timmy experience, and if you didn’t like ROE Limited, you probably aren’t a Timmy.

Johnny is tough to please in Limited, but ROE pulled it off. There were more common and uncommon “build-around-me” cards in ROE than in any previous Limited environment. By providing enough narrow cards that had synergies with a high volume of the staple commons and uncommons, Johnny could put his cleverness on display in ROE Limited like never before.

Any Limited environment can be approached with a “win” mentality, so what makes Spike prefer one to another? Spike likes Limited environments that reward superior skill. If an environment heavily favors the player who opens, draws, and resolves the biggest bomb, Spike dislikes it because Spike’s superior play skill is not rewarded. Environments with lots of decisions and ample opportunities to outplay opponents appeal to Spike. Again, ROE had this, particularly with the constant flood of decisions presented by levelers: Level guy #1, guy #2, or cast this spell?

Magic had never before seen a set that hit a Limited home run for each psychographic like ROE did, and because prereleases are typically the first experience players have with a new set, taking care to repeat the psychographic triple crown that was ROE Limited in future sets will help keep the game attractive to experienced players.

8) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the best designed? Explain why.

While there are many great mechanics in Extended, the one that delighted me most was Shadowmoor’s wither.

I fully approved of the underlying philosophy behind controversial M10 rules changes: if new players consistently expect the game to function differently than it does in a given area, the problem is in that area, not with the players. Magic has identified and fixed some of those problem areas, but others simply cannot be “fixed” without radically changing the game, completely unbalancing the power level of a large class of cards.

One such place where the rules don’t reflect player intuition is in creature damage. I don’t think I’ve ever taught a player Magic without having to explain carefully and repeatedly that a damaged creature doesn’t stay damaged, it heals at the end of each turn. While the “healing” metaphor eventually makes sense and becomes accepted, it is not without having to overcome the initial feeling that those creatures were injured, and should stay injured.

While it would be disastrous to change the creature damage rule to reflect player expectation and effectively give all creatures wither, I love it when mechanics like wither are introduced that cause spells with that mechanic to behave the way players think the game should behave in their early play experiences. (Provoke is another one: every new player thinks creatures should be able to attack other specific creatures.)

Wither is elegant, flavorful, and powerful, and it felt particularly good in the Shadowmoor environment, where provided a beautiful foil for the persist mechanic. I would have loved wither had it been introduced in any set based on the quality of the mechanic alone, but the fact that it had an extremely relevant interaction with another keyword ability in the block put it over the top for me as the best mechanic in Extended.

The fact that it has returned as part of the infect mechanic is a testament to its quality, but I prefer straight-up wither, where my creatures deal damage to players in the form of damage.

9) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the worst designed? Explain why.

In a continuation of my thoughts on what could have been improved about the Alara block for question number 3, I am naming devour as the worst-designed mechanic in Extended.

When a mechanic requires other creatures in play to do anything, and further requires the player to sacrifice those creatures to gain any effect, several problems are created. The first one is that the cards are going to be very swingy. To make the effect worth the hefty cost of creature sacrifice, the effect needs to be a powerful one. Putting that much power into a single creature then creates blowout situations, either where the devour creature survives and dominates the game, or the devour creature is bounced or killed, blowing the game out in the other direction.

Also, while it’s true that many players in the Timmy archetype probably liked the big effects that could result from a massive devour sequence, even Timmy isn’t going to be entirely comfortable with the all-in required to truly do epically big things with the mechanic. Players tend not to like mechanics that require doing things they don’t like to do, and players definitely dislike sacrificing their own creatures.

Finally, devour is also counterintuitive in how it plays out mechanically. Players are quickly conditioned to expect enters-the-battlefield effects to stack in Magic, leaving a window to respond. Multiple times at FNM, someone would resolve a creature with devour and name their sacrifices, only to have their opponent then indicate their intent to respond to the devour ability. I would step in and point out that there was no window to respond between a devour creature entering the battlefield and the player making his or her sacrifices, which was often met with anger, frustration, and disbelief, with a chorus of people weighing in on both sides, certain that they were correct.

That kind of rules conflict is not healthy for the FNM experience, and the devour mechanic simply doesn’t deliver enough on the other fronts to justify the rules conflicts it created during play.

10) Choose a plane to revisit other than Dominaria or Mirrodin. What is a mechanical twist we could add if we revisit this plane?

Because I feel it was the most successful integration of design and creative, I would love to see a return to Alara one day. I can think of a couple of interesting approaches for revisiting Alara that would be fun ways to take a fresh look at a familiar world.

First would be the “prequel” approach. A return to the world of Alara could portray the events leading up to the divided Alara that we find in Shards of Alara. Mechanically, the prequel Alara could have hints of what each shard would come to care about most when split off from its enemy colors. We find Esper colors dabbling in artificial enhancements, Grixis colors exploring the graveyard as a resource, and so on.

With the enemy colors still around, though, these mechanical explorations would be held more directly in check by the opposing color pairs. Naya colors might still care about beefy creatures, but black and blue would have tools particularly good at containing high-powered threats.

Another approach to a revisiting of Alara would be in a far-future scenario. It is a long time after the events of the original Alara block, to the point that the modern inhabitants of Alara regard the pre-Conflux era of a divided world as little more than myth and legend. That is, until Alara is torn asunder again, once more finding itself divided into five worlds.

The catch? This time each world represents a single color stranded with its two enemy colors. Five planes, each with one color scrapping to stay relevant and alive in a world where it is outnumbered by two enemy colors, battling their devastating multicolored spells with whatever resources they can find.

The “shard” theme of Shards of Alara begs the question of what the five “wedge” worlds might be like, so it only makes sense to go back there someday to explore it. Perhaps that’s where I’ll go for GDS2…