Hello and welcome to my formally inexperienced thoughts on game design as an amateur enthusiast. Here I will discuss the many facets of designing an unofficial Magic the Gathering set, with a focus on what I see as common mistakes and why I think they should be avoided.
[b]Fundamentals[/b]
Core Idea- Basis
All sets have a starting point, this should develop into the essence of the set. It could be anything from a block structure (like with KTK), a world idea (like Innistrad) or a mechanical card theme (like Mirrodin). The terms top-down and bottom-up are used to describe this origin, with top-down referring to a "flavour" basis and bottom-up referring to a mechanical basis.
Design Goal
This should be a short statement, one to a few sentences, describing what your set is about. The focus is on the basis, which you should normally expand upon a little in how you will implement it. For example, as set with the basis "Pirate World" might have a design goal of:
"A set that uses cards, mechanics and general themes to represent the idea of a pirate world. Exploration, represented through the library and lands, being the primary theme which is used to do this."
Mechanics
These are strong mechanical (hence the name) themes, most often referring to ones that are named on the card, like Outlast. These are used to create and highlight set themes and concepts. You should have (in almost all circumstances) 4-6 of these in the first set of a block and 4-7 in the second, including returning mechanics. A good starting point is 5, then 6, where the five in the first return.
World
This varies in importance to the design, sometimes being largely irrelevant and sometimes very much important. This can affect your design in a few ways, your basis can obviously be this, the design goal might feature it, the mechanics might be based on it, or individual card designs may reflect it. It is always good to have a sense of what world you want even early on in design.
[b]My advice[/b]
-Start with commons. Always start with designing commons. If you come up with some other rarity designs early on, that's not a problem, put them down, but start intentionally with commons. This allows you to get a better sense of whether your themes may work and in what ways they will appear, as commons are the most simple, and therefore difficult to vary, of all the rarities.
-Mechanics should reflect at least two aspects of your basis according to your design goal. In the pirate world example, you would want a library mechanic and a land mechanic that fit with the exploration idea and execution. Other mechanics can be used to fill a more mechanical role of making the set work, like cycling, but you can have all mechanics fit the basis.
-Mechanics shouldn't care about something you can't effectively control. Normally, this means something to do with the opponent. Mechanics are meant to be exciting and interesting to build around. If you can't control them, they can be frustrating and unreliable, especially for new players. This is not to say that if you don't always control it, it's a bad mechanic, but that if you really build around it, you should be well controlling it. This isn't an exact rule, so it really depends, but it's usually pretty clear when this issue comes up.
-Develop your theme. When you start a set, brainstorm all the concepts composing your theme and the ways in which those concepts might be represented in your set. From this, you can get a sense of what direction your set design should be going. This information is particularly useful for making mechanics, as it provides clear areas of importance to your design idea.
-Playtest at some point. A set is never truly finished until a bunch of playtesting has happened. This isn't always possible for some time, as most of you and me included have jobs and studies and things to do. You don't even have to do it ever, but not doing so will mean your set is not the best quality, so you have to be OK with that. Playtest an only commons draft at some point as it is a good diagnostic test for the larger set without the need for a somewhat polished completed file.
-Create a design goal earlier rather than later, write it out, put it with your set. Not having a design goal will make decisions harder. It's a lot easier to evaluate mechanic X vs mechanic Y if mechanic X is an artifact mechanic and your set is a world/set with very few artifacts.
-Set themes should be multifaceted. This means that a theme like artifacts matter isn't enough on it's own. Simply focusing on one basic game component can't support a high quality set. What you can do is expand upon that. If you want artifacts matter, then explore things that go well with that, mechanically and flavourfully.
-Returning sets need innovation. I like to call this the "Ravnica problem" because that seems to be the most common variation on this. The issue is that doing a set with the same themes but different execution is not enough. You need to introduce some new themes, new ideas and not just rework old ones. Some players are perfectly OK with the same themes again, but they are by no means a majority, most players will want something new as well, some expansion of the existing space. This doesn't mean redoing everything from the very basis of the previous block, just adding a little something like colourless mana matters for a return to Mirrodin, for example. Return to Ravnica is not a good example, as Mark Rosewater, the main creator of the original and the return, has said he thought it should have been more innovative, [url=archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/262]here[/url]. Scars of Mirrodin is better in this regard as it features the Phyrexian themes.
-
And that is a brief look at creating custom sets. I hope you found this information useful. Your feedback would be appreciated and thoughts on the issues discussed are welcome.
Thank you for reading.
Comments
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Comments