MTG Salvation

                I’ve played Magic since I was a kid and I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that I can create my own cards. While most of my friends either stopped playing Magic or moved onto other games (notably Warhammer), I persisted with my designs. This blog will be both the story of my experiences with Magic and my fumblings at design which are now leading into my first true set.

                A logical place to begin would be at the beginning, but equally valid would be to begin in the now. Currently I have four custom blocks, each with two sets following a two year cycle of the new set rotation coming in autumn 2015. Each set is built around a core mechanical concept and a real-world flavourful location. I came upon the idea relatively early while brainstorming that each world would thematically lean towards one or more colours. Much of the early concepting for these worlds happened before the rotation shift, and I still like to think of a complete block as a Magic “year”:

Year One (Autumn-Winter): Cazia, Deadworld

                Cazia is a desert world, the life-giving mana floods no longer flow. Ancient evils lie beneath the sands in great tombs as the inhabitants of this harsh world struggle for survival.

                Cazia’s central flavourful theme is an obvious one which Magic will no doubt do sooner rather than later, Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian culture was defined by their relationship to the seasonal flooding of the Nile. The reverence with which the Egyptians regarded the dead and the resources which allowed them to express that reverence all come from the life giving, dangerous flood. When the dry season was in effect Egypt was a dry dusty region, society only a couple bad harvests away from collapse. Slavery and the strict relationship between the demi-divine royalty and their servants was a huge part of all ancient cultures, Egypt’s particularly well known as antagonists in the Jewish Bible. Egypt was also surrounded by similarly rich cultures each with their unique characteristics a product of geography and circumstance.

                When deciding the mechanical focus of Cazia I wanted to capture what made Egyptian, and by extension other ancient civilizations, so unique. I wanted to capture the dichotomy of the seasons, between dry and flood, coupled with the split in terrain between desert and Nile. The cultural division, between royals and servants, was a distinguishing feature of all ancient cultures but Egypt in particular. I wanted to include elements of the Bible and similar religious stories which have survived, both to achieve resonance with the audience and because I think there’s some decent stories buried among the religious elements. I knew I had to mechanically hit all these points:

• The desert
• The seasonal flooding of the Nile
• The demi-divine pharaohs
• The religious variety and turmoil of the ancient world
• The pyramids, tombs, and the afterlife
• The conflict between slave and master

                The first concept I tackled was the simplest, but would go on to have a huge effect on how I thought about the set. I needed some way to represent the desert and its oppressive ability to slowly destroy. At the same time I wanted to bring something new to Magic (note that new doesn’t mean original). What simpler way to represent the deserts than by making land cards which were deserts? Why not represent the ability to slowly destroy by giving players the ability to destroy each other’s access to coloured mana? These two ideas came together into my first design, a rather clunky adaptation of flood counters:

Put a dust counter on target land. (Land’s with dust counters on them are Deserts instead of their other types and have “T: Add 1 to your mana pool.”)

                I really liked the idea in principal and early playtesting proved that it worked in theory. However the execution was severely lacking. Having lots of counters on lands created messy board states with lots of opportunity for misunderstanding (and thus cheating/forgetfulness). Having lots of abnormal counters floating around also made it much harder to design cards which used normal token types, and was a severe drain on overall complexity. At this early point I wasn’t yet looking at how the mechanic fit into the various colours, but it was in the back of my mind that a mechanic like this could not be in all five colours. My second pass attempted to solve the counter problem, but created a new problem all its own:

Destroy target land. Its controller puts a Desert land token onto the battlefield with “T: Add 1 to your mana pool.”

                This version played much cleaner, but introduced the rules headache of land tokens. Land tokens seemed like an interesting space to explore, the first set having just Desert tokens while the second set had the other land types. I wanted to do something new and land tokens seemed interesting enough. This current version of the mechanic was unnamed and seemed more like a rider to “Destroy target land” than an actual unique mechanic in and of itself. One afternoon brainstorm session later and I had this:

Ruin a/target land (Destroy that land and its controller puts a Desert land token onto the battlefield with “T: Add 1 to your mana pool.”)

                The flavour of “I’ll ruin your last Island” was exactly what I was looking for. But something still wasn’t right. Destroying the land became abusable as I started to include more effects which cared about sacrificing and retrieving cards from your graveyard. While situationally it’s exciting for the best play to be to ruin your own land, this version of the mechanic (combined with Restore, which I will discuss at length when I discuss the other half of achieving the desert theme) was effectively allowing non-green colours to filter their decks for lands. “Destroy that land” had to become “Exile that land”. However this ended up having the opposite effect. Now simply bouncing one of your lands would destroy it. This wasn’t an issue within the set, but certainly in formats with powerful bounce or flicker effects the ability to abuse would be phenomenal. In order to push the power level of ruin to be Constructed playable something else had to change as well. Instead of land tokens, why not just bring in a new land from outside the game?

Ruin a/target land (Exile that land and its controller puts a Desert basic land card from outside the game onto the battlefield under their control.)

                Now this was all well and dandy, but Desert is already a card (whoever named that card was not thinking long term). My sixth basic land, meant to represent the harsh, sandy deserts of Egypt, needed a new name. Being a big fan of sci-fi, what better place to look than the original desert planet and inspiration for Tatooine? Dune is flavourful, simple, and accurate (this piece of naming would also lead me to RG’s surprisingly obvious archetype). I was also still encountering the mana abuse problems, leading to two final edits:

Ruin a/target land (Exile that land and its controller puts a Dune basic land card from outside the game onto the battlefield tapped under their control.)

                This is the current version of Ruin, representing the desert’s ability to sap strength and slowly erode the mana of your enemies. Next time I will look at the other half of developing the desert theme, surviving in such a harsh environment.