Today I’ll show you some mechanics I initially considered for the wedges I’ve already posted about. I believe each of these has some interesting aspects, but ultimately they didn’t fit their faction or the set as a whole.

WBR: Desecrate This mechanic was meant to encourage aggressive play, trading creatures early and giving some reach for the late game. However, that’s probably not how it would have played out. The main issue stems from how effective the mechanic is when blocking: if you block the same creature with several Desecrate creatures, you’ll get the triggers from each of them, even if you only trade off one or two in the process. This discourages attacks from both sides, ending up with a board stall and making a controlling build more appealing when playing WBR. Of course, there are ways to work around this. Making every Desecrate creature a terrible blocker (i.e. all but guaranteeing that they die if they block) would make the defensive tactic less effective. On the other hand, this limits design space and also makes your creatures trade off unfavourably on the offensive as well. There’s also the issue of the color pie: the mechanic doesn’t really do anything white, and red is a stretch as well. Because of this, I didn’t bother trying too hard to fix the game play issues with the mechanic, and instead sought out a new one.

RUG: Torrent This is the “fixed storm” mechanic I mentioned earlier. I think this works quite well as a mechanic – it just didn’t quite fit here. The only real issue I see is that it can be a bit unintuitive that casting an instant Torrent spell in response to another would let both get the additional effect. Still, this shouldn’t be a very common occurrence and it’s the kind of thing you only have to learn once. As for how I think it’d play, it would probably lead to some interesting decisions on when to cast your spells, without warping the game around it like the “one big turn” of Storm. Having a fixed effect makes it much easier to balance than Storm, even if it makes it a bit less splashy. As with storm, the mechanic is definitely a good fit for red and blue. For green, it might be a bit more of a stretch, but I do think it’s a better fit than black or white. For one, there’s cards like Vengevine and Talara’s Battalion that care about other spells being cast. It also fits the green theme of mana ramp, which helps enable Torrent.

RWU: Poise I wanted a mechanic that would represent the faction being adept at warfare. This mechanic aimed to do this by showing their ability to adapt and specialize at the task at hand. You may recognize this ability from Fortress Cyclops. Designing around this mechanic turned out to be problematic. For one, it only had a few interesting interactions with other mechanics, such as vigilance and first strike. I also wanted to make Poise cards of different colors actually feel different. This meant I had to skew the base stats of the creatures. This lead to things like red cards rarely having enough toughness to make them survive anything even with the toughness boost from Poise. In short, the cards would often be better simply having an additional point of power or toughness. The position of this mechanic on the color pie is perhaps the most interesting part. Blue gets P/T trading effects like Water Servant, so that seems quite all right. White both tends to get some fairly skewed P/T combinations (Daring Skyjek and Armory Guard are some recent examples), as well as having access to boosting effects like Fortify. Red is the hardest sell: it does get some +1/-1 effects and P/T swapping, but both are pretty rare. Valakut Fireboar does function very much like a Poise card, but it can definitely be argued that being (almost) functionally equivalent still doesn’t justify the toughness boosting in red.