I have this memory of at some point writing somewhere, whether it was here on The General’s Notebook or in a TIA post, that once Leaders & Legends came out, I was going to be diving into its structure in the hope of figuring out how it was designed when compared with prior sets. I can’t find that quote now, but just in case I did say it, this is that article. As the first set designed entirely by Commentary is Magic instead of Enterplay, it bears asking if the new developers are going to be using a different philosophy with regard to their design.



Now, in addition to merely looking at the cards and running the numbers, this month I also had the privilege of literally asking the new developers about their design philosophy with regard to LL. I’ll include the full Q & A at the conclusion of the article, but first, let’s look at what my investigation uncovered.

Requirements

I’ve had a lot of exposure to Set 11 over the course of the past few weeks, not only in diving into the set to try building new Core decks, but also in creating the slides and figuring out ratings for the Meticulous Talks review stream. And over the course of that work, a couple of things leaped out to me right away. Number one, the requirement numbers in this set seemed high. I noticed a lot of 4’s, and enough 4/4’s to be relevant as well. In the past, cards with a 4/4 req were exceedingly rare, with only four of them before LL. Set 11 brings three more of them, in addition to what feels like a lot of 4’s and 3’s. But appearances and impressions can sometimes be deceiving. How does the set actually stack up against the others?

Requirement curves for every set in the modern era (post-EO). Note that multicolour cards are included in the count for their respective numbers, so 1/1 cards are in the 1-req count, 2/2’s in the 2-req count and so on. 4/4 cards are counted separately, though.

Stacked up against the others sets of the modern era, LL isn’t quite an outlier. In fact, in its construction it bears a strong resemblance to Defenders of Equestria. Yet even with that similarity, there are some noteworthy points about the new set that make it stand out. As can be seen, LL has the most 4 requirement cards of any set in the modern era (save EO, but as a huge set generally, the comparison there is a little harder to make). As discussed already, it also has the most 4/4’s. And, indeed, it has the most 3 requirement cards as well. It is in fact the only set in the modern era which has more cards at 3-req and above than it has at 2-req and below.

It seems like most of this shift to higher req’s has come at the expense of cards in the 2-req spot, and if we think about some of the changes that have come in Core after the rotation, a clear effect emerges. With the rotation of Singing Barrel and Trading Traditions, suddenly getting to 3-req in a third or fourth colour has gotten a lot harder. The primary replacements (Fire of Friendship, Infilitrating the Hive, Rainbow Generator) all work in two Power increments. Thus we should expect that getting to 3 Power in an off colour will be a lot harder in new Core, which we might expect will make running multicolour decks harder.

As CiM explained to me in our interview, this was very much intentional:

CC: My analysis indicates that LL in general has cards with higher reqs than most sets since DE. Was there a conscious decision to design more impactful cards that needed higher reqs? CIM: We felt that the ease of which a deck has historically been able to get into 3+ colors and get the capstone cards from those colors is a serious problem. With Trading Traditions and Singing Barrel no longer in core, our intent is that players should need to commit more resources to get the capstone cards from any color, and an increase in play requirements would be one result of this.

Instinctively, this feels correct to me. An eyeball look at what you got at the 2-req level in past sets reveals a lot of great cards there, and in the past decks absolutely have exploited this. While in LL obviously we don’t know what the great cards are yet, a look through the list leads to the idea that most of the really good stuff only unlocks at 3-req and above. Going by the CiM Individual Card Value Ratings (as announced on their stream, and they would hopefully be the authoritative source) the 2-req cards in LL have an average individual value of about 2.67, while the 3-req cards are about 2.96. Keeping in mind their rating system, this means that the average 2-req card in LL is in between minimal and moderate game impact, while the average 3-req card is squarely in moderate territory. (Note that for that calculation I ignored the three-colour cards. I don’t think they really count as having just 2-req, after all.)

It should go without saying, by the way, that shooting for higher reqs on the more impactful cards in the set isn’t necessarily a good or a bad design decision; it’s simply evidence of the philosophy that CiM is implementing, and we’ll have to see what effect it has on the metagame that develops. On the one hand it’s somewhat obvious that the higher requirement cards should be the ones with the more impactful effects. But in LL it seems this will be even more true than it was before.

Game Text & Abilities

The second thing that leaped out to me upon first inspection of the set was there seemed to be a lot of text to read. Game text, that is. It just didn’t seem like there were that many “simple” cards in the set, and it actually kind of gave me the impression of a Magic set, just a little. One of the things that I’ve always found interesting about Magic sets is that so few of the cards are simple. Almost all of them have some extra ability or piece of text attached to them, and most of these abilities are unique pieces of text which are only found on that one card.. Whereas in MLP there are usually a few cards with no text at all, and a few more with only a single keyword. So again, let’s have a look. In this chart, we’ll use War of the Spark as our comparison Magic set.

For the purposes of this analysis, a “simple” card is one with either no game text, or else just a single keyword ability. We can see that Leaders & Legends is absolutely the set with the most complex ability design out of any modern era MLP set, even being the only one to edge out WotS. That means more unique pieces of text, and more cards that do interesting things and can be built into new sorts of decks. Again, this was quite intentional:

CC: Was there a conscious decision to make the set more complex in terms of the number of distinct abilities on cards? CiM: […] Cards we design will tend to have richer possibilities for interaction with other cards. To put it in Magic terms, there’s going to be a bit more of a Johnny flavor: cards that reward people sitting down and thinking about the myriad of different things they can do, how they can interact with other cards, and those One Weird Tricks that they are capable of in niche situations. This is a consequence of us innovating and exploring new bits of design space, looking for new things that we think players might be fun, of finding ways to spice things up, of trying not to print more 4/0/4 vanilla Orange Friends. The points-matter theme of the entry cycle is an example of this: entry cards being useful late game is (hopefully) new and interesting.

And again, this makes intuitive sense to me. What’s most impressive is that CiM has managed to keep up the amount of abilities on their cards without actually increasing the number of abilities in the set. That is to say, there are more cards with text on them, but if you count the number of paragraph breaks in the OCR, we actually end up with a smaller number as compared to other modern sets:

Not smaller by that much, of course, but still notable. So again, what this means that while LL has about the same number of distinct abilities spread among its cards, it gets far more of its abilities from unique bits of text, rather than from new keywords or from reusing old keywords. It even has less usage of what I call “natural” triggers, which are things like enters-play triggers on Friends. They’re natural because they’re guaranteed to fire as long as you play the Friend, as opposed to triggers that require something else to happen. So there may in fact be more reading to do with this set than with any other, but I have to applaud the designers for their creativity, and in not falling back on old keywords to fill out the structure of the set. (Not, of course, that using old keywords is bad. It’s absolutely worth it to explore the spaces that they create. But there’s also a commendable ambition in forging something so novel in their first crack at designing a whole set.)

The Rotation

As we go, I’d like to show two more pretty pictures. With some help from Hithroc, I ran some more queries about the structure of Core, both as it was before the rotation, and as it is now. Specifically, especially given the requirement structure of LL, I wanted to know how the general requirement and cost curves of the format had changed with the rotation. Given that LL is quite heavy on the requirements, I had thought that Core as a whole might now be heavier with the EO Block gone. Turns out, not so much:

Actually, the proportion of 3-requirement cards has grown smaller in New Core, as the sets remaining in general have significantly more 2’s than 3’s. But the proportionate amount of entry has shrunk, which is something that again may give pause to those wanting to run 3 or more colours. The more interesting comparison I think is the one for cost:

Here, there was proportionate growth in every category except 1-cost cards, and the drop for 1-cost cards was quite significant, down 7.4% from where it was in Old Core. So the cards in the format are in general more expensive than they were before. My instinct is to guess that this might slow down the game a bit, but of course it’s not so simple as that. It does mean that AT is likely to be more precious moving forward though, which may provide a boost to those colours capable of making more of it. It certainly means that in New Core AT efficiency is a very important concept. But every colour has its own way of making that concept work. And, this is after all just the first set that we’ve seen from CiM. Set 12 may or may not follow the same philosophy. That will all depend on how this one works out.

Q & A

As promised, I’ll close out this article with the full Q & A that I had with CiM. It wasn’t super long, only eight questions and not all particularly-related to their design philosophy. But there were still some interesting tidbits here. As for me, I’ll be back in the New Year. Happy Holidays!

CC: How satisfied are you with the final product of Leaders & Legends?



CiM: Ultimately, this will depend a lot on how satisfied players are with the set.

It’s hard to speak objectively about this. Building a set is a lot of work - design from the ground up, test it in concert with a bunch of people, pick all the flavor (names, finding art, writing flavor text), arranging all of the art and text, proofing all that art, whargarbling over how to make the rules support all the new cards, and producing all of the documents.

There are cards that we aren’t happy with, ideas that didn’t pan out, lost flavor opportunities, but all in all, it worked out fairly well. Only time and the meta will tell if it truly is good.



CC: To what extent was designing the set simply a matter of making the cards that you guys, as players, would have wanted to play with yourselves?

(To each designer) What kind of cards do you like?



CiM: To say that we would completely remove ourselves from the equation when designing cards wouldn’t be accurate; after all, we are still players just like everyone else, and we’ll have our own personal tastes and preferences.

That being said, there was rarely a point where a card was designed for L&L with the thought process being “Bigcheese will love this card” or “Oh man, Grand Pause is totally going to break this thing.” In fact, those sorts of thoughts are red flags for deeper consideration of the design, and it was more common for a card to be designed with other players in the community in mind, knowing what sorts of decks players have tried to make work in the past and we felt would be fun to provide additional support for.

CC: (To each designer) What kind of cards do you like?

GP: I enjoy cards that increase my options or allow for new or interesting lines of play. Cards that are efficient and powerful are obviously great inclusions in many decks, but often times aren’t the most exciting; they just might do something that others cards do cheaper or faster. When a card or cards help to create a more unique play experience or open up deck strategies that might not have existed or been properly supported before, that’s where I start getting excited.

Bigcheese: I enjoy cards that have interesting and useful interactions. Cards that can have a high impact, and are usable in lots of different situations or types of decks.

Ara: I want to say stuff that can be played in the moment and doesn’t require a lot of thought to execute with, but then I go and play Pink/Purple which is 100% about setup and shenanigans. So maybe I’ll answer cards that are good answers to a need - going fast, removal, etc, and are generally high impact.

Ivory: I like cards that are immediately useful and don’t require multiple turns to return value. A card that I know will make an impact on its own while also helping me get closer to winning are what, in my opinion, have the highest value.

CC: In the past, it’s been understood that Block boundaries are placed on points of design change in the game. To what extent is the design of LL a departure from the DE block?

CiM: We’re designing it instead of Enter-Play! Merely because a new set of designers are behind the wheel for Leaders and Legends, there are going to be design philosophy differences despite our efforts to maintain the spirit of the game.

The next two questions, we feel, are investigating the differences in spirit in more detail so it makes sense to answer them first.

CC: My analysis indicates that LL in general has cards with higher reqs than most sets since DE. Was there a conscious decision to design more impactful cards that needed higher reqs? Or was this perhaps a rethink of how cards had been placed on the req curve before?

CiM: We felt that the ease of which a deck has historically been able to get into 3+ colors and get the capstone cards from those colors is a serious problem.

With Trading Traditions and Singing Barrel no longer in core, our intent is that players should need to commit more resources to get the capstone cards from any color, and an increase in play requirements would be one result of this.



CC: I’ve also noticed that compared to the sets that came before, LL has fewer “simple” card designs (cards with either no game text or just one keyword), and does it with unique bits of text rather than new keywords. Was there a conscious decision to make the set more complex in terms of the number of distinct abilities on cards?

CiM: There’s only so much room in the card pool for 2/0/2 vanilla Friends, and the expectation of players at this point is that cards do more interesting things than just be vanilla entry. Granted making entry more interesting than vanilla does cause some power creep; this isn’t great but some power creep is a necessity to keep the game interesting.

Cards we design will tend to have richer possibilities for interaction with other cards. To put it in Magic terms, there’s going to be a bit more of a Johnny flavor: cards that reward people sitting down and thinking about the myriad of different things they can do, how they can interact with other cards, and those One Weird Tricks that they are capable of in niche situations.

This is a consequence of us innovating and exploring new bits of design space, looking for new things that we think players might be fun, of finding ways to spice things up, of trying not to print more 4/0/4 vanilla Orange Friends. The points-matter theme of the entry cycle is an example of this: entry cards being useful late game is (hopefully) new and interesting.



CC: We all hear the legends of cards that had an initial design which was incredibly overpowered. Is the reverse ever true? Which happens more often in testing?

CiM: We will do a stream at some point about stuff that died in L&L playtesting, and there are more than a few things that were over the top and got whacked with the nerf bat. Broken cards tend to leave a larger impression in a tester’s thoughts of playtesting than offhand comments about “this is kinda crummy, can we buff it?”, and even with the buffs, the crummy cards may not be good enough to really show up in the competitive scene and leave an impression.

But yes, just like there’s stuff that’s absolutely busted and gets nerfed, there are cards that start underwhelming and end up getting buffed later. As mentioned previously, we’re going to be biased towards thinking about the overpowered cards, but underpowered cards that get buffed are far more common.

When coming up with the card initially, we have a pretty good idea of what constitutes an acceptable maximum power level for a card, and a lot of the time the initial design for a card will intentionally fall short of that. That said, sometimes there are things that were considered underpowered during playtesting that turned out to be ringers once they got out into the wild. Salina Blue is one of the examples that comes to mind.

One of the reasons for this is cards may not be good outside of the context of a larger meta - there’s usually not enough time for one to really develop during playtesting. There’s no such thing as too much testing, but an eternal testing cycle gets in the way of releasing cards.



CC: (To each designer) Which cards in LL are you most fond of?



GP: I previously mentioned that Pegasus Royal Guard is one of my favorite cards from the set; it’s a great aggressive card that becomes more difficult to deal with the longer your opponent leaves any copy of it alone, and can allow for some truly silly burst turns. Cozy Glow, Heel Turn is a card that has a lot of potential to shift momentum in the mid- to late-game, turning your earlier removal into even more added value. Crown of the Sibling Supreme is probably my favorite card flavor-wise; it was 100% a top-down design, and I think it really shines in that sense.



Bigcheese: Zecora, Curative Cach has unique and interesting wording, and was a fun card to get the wording right on. I additionally really like Pinkie Sense because of the way it’s abilities work together and with other cards like Same Day Delivery.

Ara: My favorites are going to be heavily influenced by flavor and art since that was my major contribution to the set. Of them, Silverstream, Abstract Artist is probably one of my most favorite. It has Silverstream on it and is just a great early game card against confront to flip manes. It extols Silverstream’s, uh, virtue?, of just wanting to see what you’re doing and getting in the way for the next four hours.

Ivory: That’s a tough one! Grogar, Legion of Doom and Pinkie Sense are the two cards I see myself playing with a lot. Both are scary, high impact cards and there are a lot of fun shenanigans you can do with both.