Sort of an odd topic, just throwing this here and apologies if another forum would be better.
Planeswalkers as cards are supposed to represent certain themes of Magic, certain abilities within the color pie. But I was imagining what the plot would look like if instead characters were developed as reflections of major deck archetypes.
Imagining Oldwalkers as Vintage deck archetypes. You have powerful Blue control mages traveling the multiverse, fighting Dark Ritual-powered occultists, wizards specializing in raising Zombie armies from the graveyard, and all-powerful Artificers like Mishra developing powerful prisons against their enemies. And then sections of the multiverse where tribal civilizations rally around a few forms of protection like Null Rods to eek out an existence.
Legacy and Modern are pretty diverse so I have a harder time imagining what the archetypal Planeswalker is like. But I do like imagining various Eldrazi builds reflecting the fact that they are the scariest things in the multiverse.
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----- "I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
On the one hand, every planeswalker is already built to fill a mechanical niche within the limitations of its color identity (bottom-up design) and known abilities of the character (top-down design). For example, Chandra is unlikely to bounce permanents (a non-red ability) or create permanent creature tokens (a non-chandra ability).
Instead of giving planeswalkers an assortment of different abilities, however (EX: Chandra deals damage, gets minor card advantage, messes with instants and sorceries a little bit, and makes temporary tokens), you are saying that the mechanical range of a planeswalker's ability should be designed to strongly correlate to an established archetype.
In other words, Dovin Baan may be chosen to become the patron saint of Stax decks while Lilliana may be the mistress of reanimator decks (as examples).
I can certainly see some advantages to this strategy. Lovers of certain colors seem to love having specific guilds, shards, and wedges to "pledge their allegiance" toward. Giving the lovers of certain playstyles and archetypes a "patron planeswalker" could (potentially) deepen player engagement in the same way.
With that said, there are two major challenges to this approach: Crunch: Most popular archetypes (especially in older formats) have some really powerful cards and designing cards for eternal formats is incredibly difficult. Making a reanimation planeswalker that would see play in eternal formats (taking the plane of reanimation, entomb, or goryo) without breaking standard, for example, is a daunting task. If you don't make them powerful enough for those eternal formats, however, you risk making the walkers irrelevant to the archetype and defeating the entire point. Fluff: Making walkers specifically linked to archetypes is a recipe for alienating a bunch of players the moment things go wrong. For one thing, how could wizards ever kill a walker for story reasons? If you kill the Death and Taxes walker, the corresponding players may take that as a personal attack if there is no new walker in line to take their place. Even if you do replace one planeswalker with another (such as Garruk --> Nissa --> Vivien), though, the focus on specific archetypes makes it nigh impossible to mechanically distinguish between them... which isn't exactly good.
Instead of giving planeswalkers an assortment of different abilities, however (EX: Chandra deals damage, gets minor card advantage, messes with instants and sorceries a little bit, and makes temporary tokens), you are saying that the mechanical range of a planeswalker's ability should be designed to strongly correlate to an established archetype.
In other words, Dovin Baan may be chosen to become the patron saint of Stax decks while Lilliana may be the mistress of reanimator decks (as examples).
I can certainly see some advantages to this strategy. Lovers of certain colors seem to love having specific guilds, shards, and wedges to "pledge their allegiance" toward. Giving the lovers of certain playstyles and archetypes a "patron planeswalker" could (potentially) deepen player engagement in the same way.
That's a really interesting way of phrasing it that gets across what I was thinking about with a good analogy.
I think your points on the flaws are correct. I'm not sure if I'd want to see this translated into cards or just the fiction.
One point on the challenge of making planewsaslkers that fit eternal formats without tanking standard, an idea is simply that people who are playing these eternal archetypes could be drawn to new planeswalkers who evoke the style of play, even if at a much lower power level. Currently a lot of new planewalkers seem to be directed to new players who are excited by themes like tribal.
Like a Mishra planeswalker reflecting a colorless artificer with prison elements would be a nod to more established players, not new players.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
----- "I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
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Planeswalkers as cards are supposed to represent certain themes of Magic, certain abilities within the color pie. But I was imagining what the plot would look like if instead characters were developed as reflections of major deck archetypes.
Imagining Oldwalkers as Vintage deck archetypes. You have powerful Blue control mages traveling the multiverse, fighting Dark Ritual-powered occultists, wizards specializing in raising Zombie armies from the graveyard, and all-powerful Artificers like Mishra developing powerful prisons against their enemies. And then sections of the multiverse where tribal civilizations rally around a few forms of protection like Null Rods to eek out an existence.
Legacy and Modern are pretty diverse so I have a harder time imagining what the archetypal Planeswalker is like. But I do like imagining various Eldrazi builds reflecting the fact that they are the scariest things in the multiverse.
"I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
On the one hand, every planeswalker is already built to fill a mechanical niche within the limitations of its color identity (bottom-up design) and known abilities of the character (top-down design). For example, Chandra is unlikely to bounce permanents (a non-red ability) or create permanent creature tokens (a non-chandra ability).
Instead of giving planeswalkers an assortment of different abilities, however (EX: Chandra deals damage, gets minor card advantage, messes with instants and sorceries a little bit, and makes temporary tokens), you are saying that the mechanical range of a planeswalker's ability should be designed to strongly correlate to an established archetype.
In other words, Dovin Baan may be chosen to become the patron saint of Stax decks while Lilliana may be the mistress of reanimator decks (as examples).
I can certainly see some advantages to this strategy. Lovers of certain colors seem to love having specific guilds, shards, and wedges to "pledge their allegiance" toward. Giving the lovers of certain playstyles and archetypes a "patron planeswalker" could (potentially) deepen player engagement in the same way.
With that said, there are two major challenges to this approach:
Crunch: Most popular archetypes (especially in older formats) have some really powerful cards and designing cards for eternal formats is incredibly difficult. Making a reanimation planeswalker that would see play in eternal formats (taking the plane of reanimation, entomb, or goryo) without breaking standard, for example, is a daunting task. If you don't make them powerful enough for those eternal formats, however, you risk making the walkers irrelevant to the archetype and defeating the entire point.
Fluff: Making walkers specifically linked to archetypes is a recipe for alienating a bunch of players the moment things go wrong. For one thing, how could wizards ever kill a walker for story reasons? If you kill the Death and Taxes walker, the corresponding players may take that as a personal attack if there is no new walker in line to take their place. Even if you do replace one planeswalker with another (such as Garruk --> Nissa --> Vivien), though, the focus on specific archetypes makes it nigh impossible to mechanically distinguish between them... which isn't exactly good.
That's a really interesting way of phrasing it that gets across what I was thinking about with a good analogy.
I think your points on the flaws are correct. I'm not sure if I'd want to see this translated into cards or just the fiction.
One point on the challenge of making planewsaslkers that fit eternal formats without tanking standard, an idea is simply that people who are playing these eternal archetypes could be drawn to new planeswalkers who evoke the style of play, even if at a much lower power level. Currently a lot of new planewalkers seem to be directed to new players who are excited by themes like tribal.
Like a Mishra planeswalker reflecting a colorless artificer with prison elements would be a nod to more established players, not new players.
"I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles