It was brought to my attention by Doombringer that I should be more explicit up front about my design goals and the nature of Cazia. I think in general design goals are unnecessary, but can be a useful tool to help explain your thinking to others or yourself. As such I was intending to hold off on stating the design goals themselves until they naturally came up, but I have had enough confusion when discussing Cazian mechanics in the past and with my recent post advertising this blog that I will answer Doombringer’s main question in full.
What is the design goal of Cazia?
As I discussed in my first post in this series, Cazia came about as a result of exploratory design looking at what an Ancient Egypt themed block would look like. The key cultural point of Ancient Egypt was their relationship to the Nile. The Nile was lifebringer in an otherwise lifeless desert. It was also something to be feared, home to vicious wild animals and dangerous diseases, not to mention the flood itself. The Nile provided the excess resources needed to develop the level of cultural and engineering sophistication Ancient Egypt is famous for to this day. Any Magic set hoping to capture even a drop of this sophistication would have to establish the environment first and let the culture flow from it, not unlike a river (this idea of cultural environmentalism I will revisit when I start my discussion of the blocks following Cazia).
With a two set block structure and a dual-natured environment the focus of each set was obvious: one set would focus on the deserts and the dry season while the other focused on the river and the wet season. With only two possible combinations it was a simple matter of trying both and seeing which fit better. If we put Nile theme first then the player gets a relatively “normal” Magic experience followed by a depressingly bleak one dominated by colourless mana and the deserts. The emotional impact of the change is lessoned, in much the same way that the transition from Act I of a story to Act II is never as powerful as the transition from Act II to Act III. But if we swap the order and have deserts as the focus of the large set we get a much more interesting experience.
The desert set should feel stifling and limiting, creating an emotional response of desperation. That desperation, for things to return to the “normal” time of Magical Christmasland, drives the player and the story. The central design goal of Cazia, Deadworld is to create a feeling of desperation in the player. Cazia Restored has the opposite design goal, to relieve that sense of desperation and restore life to the play experience of Cazia block.
How do I achieve the design goal of Cazia?
Desperation is a difficult emotion to express in a game, especially one like Magic. If the player feels the negative emotion too strongly, it makes the experience less fun (a pitfall Magic has seen before with Infect and Scars block). However if there isn’t enough pressure then the emotion is lost. The challenge is as much one of implementation as one of balance. Indeed the desperation paradox is really one for Development to solve, balancing the numbers to get the right effect. If Development is where the emotion is primarily going to be perfected and expressed, it’s worth looking at the tools Development has even this early in the design process.
The first knob to look at is cost, or more accurately price efficiency (a concept I will go into depth with in a future post). Players should feel a strong desire to push up in cost, desperation to get bigger. This naturally leads to the second set of knobs, power and toughness. Magic is a game about creatures, and always has been (anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand the game very well). Giving creatures on average higher power than toughness is an easy way to manipulate these essential tools of Development while the set is still in design. An environment where creatures have on average higher power than toughness means that creatures are going to be dying a whole lot more, making the player desperate for more creatures to stem the tide (I will expand on this idea when looking at the design of the colour archetypes).
Card availability is another tool of Development that design can start playing with quite early. Availability affects all formats, Limited and Constructed alike, and is an extremely useful tool for making colours and strategies unique (I will discuss this idea further when I look at the size of formats and the Magical Christmasland epidemic). Players should not be able to have access to everything they want, indeed the less they have to work with the better. Things players take for granted in the various archetypes need not be present. This lack of “normal” abilities will serve to create a feeling of desperation in the player, and naturally force new ways of solving existing Magic problems. Not only does this line of thinking lead to the development of a more unique environment, it also serves to help define the role of each colour in the world of Cazia.
Join me next time when I talk about what I promised in my last post, the creation of the first peoples of Cazia the birth of the “Big Bad”.
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