Something Different

Initially, I’d planned on doing extensive analysis of all of the Design Tests of each of the entrants. That fell by the wayside, because I’m a busy guy and totally not because I’m terrible at time management, and Challenge 1 is upon us now. In the interest of keeping pace, I’ve done notes on each individual designer’s submissions in bullet point format

Alex Werner — Horrors:

High concept I have no idea why Alex chose Horrors, unless he was the slowest guy to dibs a creature type. Horrors exist in the history of Magic as diet Demons from back in the 90’s during the Satanic Panic. Also, at least in principle they’re a very mechanically disparate tribe. Horrors immediately make me thing of isolation, asymmetry, subversion of normalcy, discomfort, confusion, and surrealness. So they don’t really work together, they don’t have square stats, they don’t do normal stuff, they make Opp feel gross, they’ve got weird text, and they’ve got a different kind of weird text. I really think Alex’s creature type choice is poison here.

Why do horrors sacrifice?

Why are horrors so small? Seriously, who thinks ‘the bulk of horrors should be medium sized tokens that trade with bears’ when designing for horrors?

I actually think the judges aren’t cutting Alex enough slack in the blue bending black. It was a natural byproduct of being Dimir the way that zombie discard spell from Shadows was, and it helps Corrupted Research sell the horror theme.

Shouldn’t the ‘horror’ of small horrors be the dies trigger? Just me drawing a card isn’t particularly scary for my opponent. I think on all horror cards, you should have a sentiment that’s very deeply saying “I don’t want it to do X”, like “I don’t want it to touch me” or “I don’t want it to do that to my creatures”. For the small guys, “I don’t want it to die” can be sufficiently horrifying, especially if it explodes into some effect that makes you really uncomfortable or unhappy.

Why 3/2 horror tokens? I get that they don’t have square stats, but spitting out the same horror token over and over, especially when it’s already the same Eldrazi token we got in Eldritch Moon, is really forgettable.

Icormantic pit is a trap. It looks like a horror tribal card, but it’s secretly a “man, screw horrors except for Steve. Steve’s the best horror” tribal card.

I’m inherently skeptical of tribal planeswalkers.

Also, it’s really sad that the recoil effect is locked up in a planeswalker ultimate, because that’s really iconically horrific in my mind. Looking for more recoil style “the synergy is more cruel and terrifying than the individual parts” interactions in blue black or in their respective monocolors seems important for horrors. Also, this brings up the question “why dimir?” I feel like a third color would’ve made horrors easier to implement and more able to have those diverse, horrific interactions.

I love that horror guy that can replace a token, although it highlights that Alex didn’t git gud at templating at all between rounds. It does something interesting, although it risks impinging on the sideboard ‘zone’ in such a way that it eventually becomes the third graveyard to exile’s second graveyard. Also, it’s probably the most horrific of the cards so far, in that it makes any time I spit out horrors with mana up into something scary for my opponent. That said, that becomes less scary the more consistently it happens, so always being able to do it by mere fact that you have a card in your sideboard runs the risk of ruining the punchline in Standard.

Ari Nieh — Insects:

My immediate temptation with Egg Tender is to instead make it a 0/1 defender for either G or 1G that dies into 2 1/1 tokens. A dude that dies into better bodies is a somewhat aggressive card inherently, because you can swing when you’re otherwise stable and Opp likely won’t block for fear that they’re enabling you. Also, I like the idea of having to work to build your swarm, and hitting your opponent in the face doesn’t feel like work to me.

Personally I think Carrion Beetle Mound should exile insects from your own graveyard, and should generate a larger reward for it.

Khal’xa, Hive Queen is, in a meta way, kinda hilarious, because it would be a much worse card as a green black Serra Angel.

I like the idea of buffing the power of your insects. I think you may just want to get rid of the ‘draw a card’ clause. This doesn’t really need a draw ability to be interesting or powerful.

Chris Mooney — Oozes:

Where some of the other tribes are hard because what they do hasn’t been explicitly described in the game, or because they do too little, Oozes are hard because they can do so much. Token production, counter production, etb triggers, dies triggers, and cloning are all in ooze’s wheelhouse. Notably, token production, counter production, and clones all fall into the category of “memory and bookkeeping issue jamboree” especially when used together in volumes. On the other hand, they’re also super sweet and some of the most popular EDH things to be doing by merit of that sweetness, so you have to work hard at protecting limited from imploding while also making the cards that keep our singleton friends turning cardboard sideways.

There’s a weird question with +1/+1 counters that strikes me for that pump spell. That card would work as an enchantment with flash and some sort of end step sacrifice trigger. They were talking about spells that’re secretly creatures, but aren’t +1/+1 counter cards oftentimes secretly enchantments? It probably isn’t super relevant because most of the limiting factors on enchantments are more limiting factors on sorcery speed enchantments without upside beyond buffing your dudes body, but that’s what I think about.

Devour is weird as a mechanic because it’s mostly bad on its own. You need a rewarding keyword on the dude’s body, a lot of effectively worthless (in that they’re worse than the default size of the environment) tokens smaller than the Devour number, and/or some sort of Devour ETB for it to be worth it. Oftentimes, it’s inviting free upside to a removal spell if the creature doesn’t do something immediately.

For Recycling Slime, my first thought is to tie it to the Devour somehow. Maybe “When CARDNAME ETB, if it devoured…” or maybe “When CARDNAME ETB, return target ooze with CMC less than or equal to the number of +1/+1 counters on CARDNAME from your yard to the battlefield”, but that second one is legalese enough to make me skeptical.

One thing I think the judges were a little lax on is contextualizing that a big determinant of the difficulty of deciding for Devour is the quality of cheap creatures in the environment. If you weaken your small creatures, your dies triggers, your devour numbers, and/or any Devour triggers, it becomes an incidental upside effect and you can strengthen the pre-Devour body. If you weaken the pre-Devour body, you can strengthen the triggers, your token production, and your dies triggers. It’s analogous to Fabricate in that there’s a balancing act between the two ‘modes’ of the creature, although Fabricate didn’t have much in the way of other ETB or dies triggers attached to the body or tracking stats of the creature in question the way Devour does. Assumedly, that’s because that would devolve into trigger stacking and opponent responding nonsense that Devour, as a replacement effect, doesn’t suffer through.

Note that a lot of creature keywords end up buffing both the body pre-Devour and post-Devour, creating both a stronger creature and more incentive to Devour because you get more for each +1/+1 counter put on the creature.

I think Devour was a good choice in that there are a metric buttload of knobs on that mechanic, but I worry that it can be bad either because it encourages new players to make decisions that hurt them, has card text that can make new players think “why does this card even exist?”, and encourages some blowouts to be extra punishing in an unfun way. Doom Blade sucks a lot harder when it effectively Doom Blades three guys instead of just Doom Blading one. Unlike Fabricate, which feels bad in a woulda-coulda-shoulda sort of way, Devour makes that sting harder because you actually had those 3 1/1s or whatever that you fed to Dorkeater Slime and now they’re all dead.

That reminder text makes my brain hurt. Then, after making my brain hurt, the process of redistributing counters makes my brain hurt.

Devour on a land is a great way to bank counters, get a free proc out of dies triggers, and generally reward a +1/+1 counter subtheme. Also, it allows a deceptively risk-reductive use case of the Devour, in that you can slowly drip some of the counters onto mediumish creatures if you don’t feel like putting all your eggs in one basket.

If you’re committed to deathtrample, at least add reminder text.

That reminder of “Hey, Doubling Season does screwed up stuff to counters and tokens, and Cell Divider makes counters and tokens” is kinda silly in my mind. “Busted with Doubling Season” is like the EDH equivalent of “dies to Doom Blade”.

It seems like the artifact design from all designers here is a little squiffy, all for various reasons. This one is a tracking nightmare, but in general oozes open the door for tracking nightmares.

It’s been pointed out to me by someone both smart and cool that the reason Maro likely doesn’t get Oozes copying is because he didn’t grow up on Pokemon. Ditto is an iconic Ooze in pop culture, and all it does is copy.

In case anyone wasn’t aware, Chris did their own design notes on their design, and it’s just great. Wholesome, sharp, and insightful. Go watch it.

Jay Treat — Shamans:

This design was, for me at least, the most disappointing. The concept is excellent, and the idea of doing tribal in the form of rewarding activated abilities, instead of granting static abilities or flat creature combat buffs, sounds super freakin’ sweet. The execution doesn’t fulfill that desire for me at all.

A cast trigger, an activated ability, and copying all in one. It took me three solid rereads to be certain that you couldn’t repeatedly copy this if you have multiple shamans. This isn’t even complexity at common, it’s gotten so bad that this is an issue of legibility at common.

Shamanic Epiphany makes at least moderate sense if you have stuff that tracks when you activate the ability of a Shaman or that grant abilities specifically to Shamans, but it’s adding another piece to what is already going to be an archetype with a lot of moving pieces. It feels unnecessary to me. Why show off an unnecessary card?

Diabolist is coherent, concise, and rewarding. This duderino, along wth Jay’s previous stuff, probably kept him of the chopping block.

Granting activated abilities is only one narrow element of the possible swathe of activated ability tribal, so it’s weird to see it leaned on so hard here. I think it’s in part a byproduct of requiring such a low density of creatures in the makeup of this challenge. Activated abilities as a theme demand permanents, and unless you air out the Tribal supertype and get in an argument with most of R&D they specifically demand creatures. That said, there are other ways to reward activated abilities. What if you had a spell that did something, and then also had “the next activated ability of a Shaman you activate this turn costs 3 less to cast” or something? What about spells with affinity for abilities activated this turn? What about spells with an upside if you’ve activated an ability this turn, or global enchantments that trigger on end step if you activated an ability? The fixation on ability granting here seems like fixating on one of the most complex parts.

Making another rings of brighthearth seems somewhat uninspired to me. You could do all sorts of stuff with an equipment that triggers on activated abilities, so going for this one seems weird. You could do reattaching, or you could give the equipped creature +1/+0 for each ability of a shaman that’d been activated this turn. This is a weirdly safe card for a group of cards that was for the most part off the wall.

Both mythic rares here are creatures that primarily induce board state calculus. That’s not what I want out of a mythic rare. Where’s the stuff that makes me excited to put it down? What about like a hasty shaman that steals some other creatures activated ability until end of turn when it enters, except that activated ability is cheaper or something?

There’s also this weird vibe in that a lot of the things I want to be doing with this are in Temur instead of Jund. Black was here for a single, admittedly good, card, but because of that we don’t get any cloning or cool stuff like a time walk that skips combat but rewards activating shamans abilities or something. There’s a ton of spicy stuff that activated ability tribal seems like it could be doing, but this seems more focused on mechanically confusing things than on trying to find the core appeal of the sort of activated ability focus that you’ve pinned to shaman tribal here.

Moreso than any other design in the group, this one makes my brain burble with ideas about what shaman activated ability tribal might look like. That’s partially because this design didn’t manage to execute on it in a way that feels complete, but I think moreso because it is so rife with interesting possibilities that my brain gets buzzing with designerly glee. If you’re looking for a strength if yours hidden in an otherwise weak performance, this is it. You’re excellent at finding new or underused space where compelling designs exist.

Jeremy Geist — Rogues:

I know this probably isn’t true, but I love the idea that this whole design comes from the term “rogue’s gallery”. If making the gaming equivalent of a pun was the origin of this design concept, then Mr. Geist has allowed us all to exist in a more magical universe.

A situational ETB trigger is interesting, as is a draft card that almost literally has “Asynergistic with itself in bulk” printed in the rules text. I think MDT is being a bit disingenuous when she says she’d first pick it though.

I kinda wish Hulking Henchman’s reminder text said “Tokens usually have…”. Informal rules text has been a gradual piece of technology for R&D to adapt, so I have just about zero idea how well they would’ve received that, and I also have only a limited idea of how a newer player would respond to it. I assume they have the new player experience testing equivalent of an atom smasher hidden somewhere in an underground lab in Renton, so they’re probably more equipped to say what the ideal text would be, but demonstrating that you understand reminder text isn’t rules text and are willing to exploit that for legibility would’ve been good.

There’s a weird arm wrestle happening on that disguise between layers and types. You really wanna have the nonlegendary clause so people don’t randomly kill their own legendary guys by accident, and also so newer players don’t have to pause the game and try and figure out how renaming legendary permanents works. That said, text comes before type in layers, so you can’t check types to change text. The closest non-layers-broken version I can think of is:Enchanted creature is named Innocent Citizen and can’t be blocked.If enchanted creature is a Rogue, it has “U: Exile this creature, then return it to the battlefield under its owner’s control. It still fails at stopping accidental legend suicide, but this is a legally printable magic card.

Also, Maro is 1,000,000,000% wrong about fixing this by removing the name changing. The name changing is key to this card. It’s a bit of an ironic proposal considering Dominaria just had turning nonlegendary dudes legendary, considering the “I’ve got a legendary dude and a nonlegendary dude with the same name” rules literacy failure case happens in both circumstances.

I don’t get why Impersonate needs “You don’t control”. It’s actually pretty brutal if you Murder your own guy because he became a Pacifist, and then have one of your hired thugs assume his identity for just long enough to make your opponent’s life a living hell.

The thing that frustrates me about this tribal land is that it doesn’t really do much for the different name theme, in addition to being pretty milquetoast in general. Repeatability was mentioned by the judges, what about having repeatability but only being able to get rogues that don’t share a name with any rogue on the battlefield. That leads to some awkwardness where on a stable board you might intentionally hold Guy with Many Knives and Stanly the Smokebomber in your hand in order to try and get more copies of them, but I still like it a lot.

Alternately, there’s another iconic rogue land that comes to mind: the back alley where you get beat up by a bunch of thugs. Maybe a land you sacrifice to have an opponent lose life equal to the number of differently named Rogues you control?

I feel like this is the only design opportunity that seemed squandered to me, the rest were executed on very interestingly.

Diamond Falcon strikes me as a clear attempt to design for digital (fifty triggers from your swinging dorks sounds awful) that accidentally came with awkward combat implications. “Dead man walking” creatures can be very bad either if people miss them dying, or if people swing thinking their guy would live and then have their studious opponent note that their attack was accidentally suicidally dumb. Either way, I think partial credit is due here.

I do agree that the Falcon is also a bit of a top down miss. Part of the goal is stealing the Falcon, so what does it look like when you do that. What if it gave your opponent a bonus they didn’t care about, but that the Rogues deck really wanted, and on hitting the opponent you stole the falcon from them?

Personally, I think the ideal mythic rogue creature trigger would involve gaining control of a creature with CMC less than the number of differently named Rogues you control, and then turning that creature into a Rogue. I think that pairs better with the creature sacrifice unblockability, fits the idea of building a team of characters, as well as not simply burying the opponent after one or two hits.

Linus Ulysses Hamilton — Aetherborn:

I’m not sure off the bat that I buy Aetherborn as the dies trigger tribe. Sure, wealthy Aetherborn have fancy deathday parties, but is that all the aetherborn are? It’s kinda antithetical to the ‘live life to its fullest’ mantra that they seemed to have in Kaladesh, but let’s go with it for sake if interpreting designs instead of critiquing high concept flavor justifications for cutting out swathes of design space.

Kinda funny that we got the same card in both Aetherborn and Oozes. I’m pretty sure that makes Hamilton and Mooney common law married now.

It’s very un-resonant to the flavor of aetherborn to give them a way of coming back from the dead. I get that this is supposed to be presented as “hey my death was just a prank bro”, but the creature in the game actually dies for real before coming back. Also, considering just how much more personal and important an Aetherborn dying is, it’s even more in poor taste for them to fake their own deaths than it is for a human to do so. Aetherborn are, at least on a surface level, supposed to represent a lighter shade of black, an actualization of that ‘black is not evil’ thing that Maro harps on when talking color pie. In that context, this dick move is even more violating and damaging to the top down idea of tribal Aetherborn than it seems at first glance.

Again, the flavor resonance is just killing me. This is a fine aggressive equipment, but were Aetherborn aggressive last time we saw them? A quick Scryfall search suggested a pretty balanced spread of front ends and back ends. Sure, they were about doing as much as you can with the limited time you have, but that wasn’t a “lets rush and stab everything we can in three minutes flat” sort of thing. This is more of a rakdos birthday suit, and less of an aetherborn one.

I like the aetherborn death trigger doubler a lot. There’s some definitional problems as noted by Eli, but trigger doubling is one of the best things that Hearthstone has done, so I’m glad Magic has been gradually stealing a smart idea, as all games should.

I think the problem here is that this feels like a generic RB archetype that had some post hoc wall furnishing added to justify it being aetherborn. Unlike Maro, I don’t entirely like red being the secondary color here, or at least I think if red is the secondary color then some broader reinterpretation of what red black archetypes do has to be performed. Nothing in this stack of designs strikes me as something where if you replaced “Aetherborn” with “Vampire” or just struck Aetherborn from it entirely it wouldn’t be weird, where the Ooze stuff, the Rogue stuff, and even the Shaman stuff had a distinct and powerful identity that makes killing their tribal elements feel noticeable and like it’s destroying an important element of the card This… kinda just doesn’t.

Ryan Siegel-Stechler — Imps

Conceptually, I like Imps. The idea of responding to a gap that faeries and goblins leave in potential small guy design. Imps are reactive dudes with spell-like ETBs, so maybe imps are proactive dudes with spell-like ETBS? Goblins go wide, so maybe Imps are more tempo oriented with a few creatures and some good support? You sold me.

Tiny Pitchfork at common also has a weird vibe in that it would show up with a very high frequency, enough to potentially be one of the defining elements of the imp tribal archetype. Do you always want imps to have access to tiny pitchforks? Is that iconic enough to be the thing that makes you think ‘imps’? Personally, I’m fine with it, and I think the distinction between Imps and Devils is kinda dumb, but it’s something to consider.

Pun names are fine, and Impulse being the name of a blue card and a blue effect is detrimental to red’s slice of the Magic the Gathering name design space.

Leave an Imp-ression does nothing or next to it the majority of the time. Punisher cards in general are bad unless there’s some structural feature that allows for the possibility of the opponent making the wrong choice. Here, there isn’t one.

Why are so many of the lands rare? I get that rare lands sell packs, but it seems so pavlovian that people mentally precluded their tribal lands have to be rare when it’s probable that the set would want the rare land cycle in it to be something more usable outside of the tribal archetypes established in that set.

I think the easiest to identify flaw within your designs here is that the two largest themes, tribal discard and punisher effects, are both not particularly good.

Worse, tribal discard has this weird property where it self selects for having a bunch of imps in your deck that you never play. This has what I’m going to call “the Devoid effect”. Your imps that are discard fodder cease to be meaningful cards with traits and values of their own, and instead become arbitrary markers that your discard engines are rewarded with. Unless you have imps that come out of the yard, or black instants that bring back imps, you have very little reason to consider most of your ‘bad’ imp creatures as anything other than a blank piece of cardboard with the word ‘imp’ scrawled on it. Functionally telling players they should’t care about a significant portion of their deck feels pretty bad.

Scott Wilson — Samurai:

I’m going to go the opposite direction and say that the fix for Crysanthimum Crest should be to have it turn your the enchanted creature into a Samurai. I like the idea of promoting a creature to the tribe you care about, and I don’t think the incidental upside is too much. This turns the natural decision into pinning the Crest on the non-samurai guy if all else is equal.

I love ritualistic disembowelment. Altar’s Reap, sometimes with upside, that can late game launder itself into a face-only fling, is super nice. This card is secretly modal in a very nice way. Modal spells that don’t look like modal spells are basically my fetish.

Brother in Battle is mathy as all heck. Your samurai often have Bushido, and often have nonsquare stats, so your Bushido guy buffs another Bushido guy so opp has to add one to its power, add one to its toughness, add its Bushido on both ends, and then compare the non-Bushido damage to the trading or non-trading that might happen when blocking its Bushido size. That’s a freakin’ flowchart right there, and it only gets worse when you go more combats in, although by that point their decision tree likely devolves into a one branch tree labeled ‘be dead.’

Love of the Fight is almost always “kill your opponents two worst creatures” unless the game has spiraled entirely out of the Samurai player’s control.

I’m genuinely surprised nobody went with an actual colored artifact. Hunh.

It seems like you want to do a lot of ‘real’ power and toughness buffing because Bushido only affects creature combat and that often means swinging with worse than or near vanilla guys that are effectively unblockable because of their Bushido count. Bushido can be boring because it’s a foregone conclusion that they beat most similarly costed creatures, while also not being a particularly fast race, but I’m not sure stat pumping is how you want to be fixing that problem.

Umezawa is going to be a buttload of clicking online, but that’s slightly okay in that you mostly when the game when it happens if you’re running any significant number of Samurai. I don’t think it’d be as fun if it were one trigger for the total Bushido of all your guys.

Creature Type Tier List:

Rogues Gallery of Rogues Features Shamans (the platonic ideal for the best possible implementation of this theme that I hold in my heart of hearts) I couldn’t think of anything funny to say for Oozes but I like them Foolish Samurai Warriors Impin’ ain’t Easy ‘Aetherborn’ Shamans (actual) Tiny horrors that mostly just kill themselves