In my last post I introduced my first custom set, the desert world of Cazia. I walked through the thought process I went through to create Ruin, a mechanic which represents the desert’s ability to destroy. In this post I will walk through the second (and third) mechanic of Cazia, representing how the people of Cazia respond to the harshness of their desert home.
Deserts are a difficult environment to survive in. They require careful planning, toughness, and a fair amount of luck to succeed. Desert animals tend to be very unique, developing a variety of water saving and anti-predation tools, or as the hawk shows becoming a deadly predator themselves. Desert peoples in real life tend to mirror this dual-natured survivalism becoming great warrior peoples (like the Arabs or the Jews) or great builders on what little sustenance they can find (like the Egyptians or the Babylonians). However the harsh rule of the deserts means sacrifice is mandatory, no matter your cultural leanings. This theme readily lends itself to Magic, the terminology is even identical:
Sacrifice a creature or land: [effect]
Sacrificing creatures for immediate advantage is a very common ability throughout Magic’s history, showing up in all colours in various different forms. By including the mechanic at higher rates and adding the “or land” clause I have created what is both a new variation on the existing theme and a unique mechanical character for the peoples of Cazia. In playtesting these types of mechanics played extremely well, creating an interesting way for players to expend their resources in the search of the ever elusive crown of victory. However this simple version of the mechanic had some quite glaring flaws.
A single big misplay, especially one which involved multiple lands, tended to be overly punishing. It was too easy for a player to simple sacrifice three creatures and two lands to a Nantuko Husk only to watch the card get Shocked in response. I knew going in that including lots of sacrifice effects at common would be risky (at the start I had 8, one per colour plus an extra in Jund). However this proved too many. The vast majority of repeatable effects were pushed to uncommon or higher and pretty much every effect got some additional cost or rider to limit its abusiveness. This type of broad stroke development is extremely useful for identifying problems early, giving time to correct and underlining the value of early playtesting.
The other major flaw of this basic form of sac-for-value (would love a new name if you have one) is its potential for blowouts. Simple combat tricks and removal are too good in the world of sac-for-value. If sacrifice was going to be a major theme both it and the combat tricks surrounding it would have to be limited in scope. Instant speed tricks and removal had to be intractable or preventable somehow, meaning direct destruction or protection was absolutely out the window (this decision regarding removal would have a huge effect on the balancing of the commons, leading to a couple of interesting subthemes I will discuss in a future post).
It was at this point that I needed something more than just redesigned costs and limited removal to make sacrifice work as a mechanical theme, especially one which involved sacrificing lands. I needed some form of restoration or card filtering (perhaps both?) to provide players the consistency in card value needed to make for a less swingy (read: more fun) limited environment. Ideally I wanted something which could interact with the graveyard and passively increase the play value of sacrifice with a carrot rather than a stick. I had seen this idea years ago on this forum, and this seemed like the perfect place:
Restore a [card type] (You may put a [card type] from your graveyard on top of your library.)
Extremely simple and something which already exists in Magic, Restore seemed like the perfect solution to my problem (note that it’s not the *only* solution, an idea I will discuss at length in the future). However restore has another, very difficult, problem: it’s boring. Restore is naturally low power level, not actually gaining you much in the way of value and oftentimes becomes completely unplayable. Magic has been doing restore for a long time (though pretty much exclusively in green) and a lot of the interesting design space has already been tapped. To try and make restore more interesting and allow for a dramatic increase in power level, I decided to severely limit the scope of the mechanic by colour:
White – The weakest restore colour (white gets enough mechanics already), white can restore enchantments and at higher rarities creatures.
Blue – The second weakest restore colour, blue restores sorceries and at higher rarities instants. I decided to split instants and sorceries to give blue and red restore more unique identities and to preview a theme for a future block (spoilers).
Black – The second strongest restore colour, black restores creatures and at higher rarities lands and planeswalkers (In a future post I will go in depth on black restore and the relationship of each colour to Planeswalkers as a card type).
Red – The third strongest restore colour, red restores instants and at higher rarities sorceries and creatures. While black is the second best at restoring permanents, red is the second best at restoring spells.
Green – The strongest restore colour, green restores creatures and lands and at higher rarities can restore anything. The ability to restore anything is already a green ability, I saw no reason to change.
By limiting the ability to restore of each colour I was able to design cards which include restore as effectively a zero cost ability. It also allows me to increase the total amount of restore in the set without making limited stale due to too consistent card quality (which filter mechanics like Dredge and Transmute have gotten dangerously close to before). At the same time thinking about how to limit restore helped me to further define each colour’s identity in the set.
Looking at restore and sac-for-value as two different classes of response to a desert environment led me to an interesting realization about the flavour of Cazia and what cultures might exist. One class of cultures would be far more aggressive, responding to the limited resources of the deserts with shows of strength, competing fiercely. The other class of cultures would respond with increasing reverence and reservation of their limited resources, becoming like the great builder societies of our own world. It’s no coincidence that the Pyramids were built in one of the harshest habitats an ancient civilization inhabited. This flavourful separation lends itself well to the colour wheel, with red and green naturally favouring the more individualistic, freedom oriented cultures of the first class. Meanwhile the colours of order (white, black, and green) naturally tend toward the ‘great builder’ class of society typified by Ancient Egypt. Join me next time as I continue to explore this flavourful separation and the birth of Cazia’s “big bad”.
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