Deadly Designs: Predicting the Throne of Eldraine Mechanics

Hey there! I’m Scott from the top four of last year’s Great Designer Search 3. Welcome back to another installment of Deadly Designs, where we talk about Magic card design from an outsider’s perspective.

Last time we talked at length about Risen Reef, but this time I want to focus on the future, specifically the next set that’s coming out in the fall: Throne of Eldraine.

We’ve seen a lot of art from the set and heard that the inspiration behind it is “Grimm’s fairy tales meets Camelot,” but we still don’t know much about the actual mechanics. So that’s why today I want to take the hints that we’ve gotten and try to figure out what the cards in the set might actually do.

It might seem silly to try and guess the mechanics when they’ll just be spoiled in a few weeks, but as a design exercise it can still be fun. Even though we probably won’t guess right, perhaps the ideas we come up with could inspire some custom cards or sets of our own!

There’s two mechanics we can guess about, so let’s go ahead and start with:

#1. The Main Set Mechanic

This one unnamed card is all that we have for the Throne of Eldraine cards themselves. The left card is the regular version, and the right card is the premium version.

Just looking at it, we can deduce some things:

First, the ability has a mana cost associated with it, and here it’s 5GG. That means it’s likely an activated or triggered ability.

Second, it has a book frame to it, making it feel like it should have something to do with stories/tales, which makes sense given the fairy tale theme of the set.

Could Tale’s End from M20 be hinting at ending a story by countering an activated/triggered ability?

Third, notice the dark-green line under the 5GG mana cost on the card. The ability must need it for some reason.

under the 5GG mana cost on the card. The ability must need it for some reason. And finally, there has to be a reason for the unique frame. Magic rarely uses new card frames, and the times we’ve seen it in the past have all had significant reason for it.

The miracle frame helps you pay attention when you draw, aftermath shows how it’s played from two zones, and the sagas would be messy on a regular frame.

So with those criteria out of the way, here’s three ideas for what the mechanic could be, roughly in order from possible to crazy.

1. Chronicle (COST: Return this card from your graveyard to the battlefield as an enchantment with a remembered counter on it. It’s no longer a creature.)

Something like this fits all of the above criteria. It feels like you’re remembering the deeds of a creature after they’re gone (a story), and also gives a reason for the unique frame (to separate the creature from the enchantment’s ability and to help you remember it’s in your graveyard).

Alternatively, it might also be possible that the mechanic could turn the creature into an aura as well. During the GDS3, I created the mechanic Ancestry, which exiled a creature from the graveyard onto a creature on the battlefield as a pseudo-aura, and Mark Rosewater had this to say about it:

“You made a mechanic that is very hard to track. So much so, as I said above, I think you would need a play aid of some kind to help remind the players of all the things they have to track. Because the card is exiled to use, a new frame seems like the likeliest option.”

If the creature comes back as an aura, having a unique frame could help you remember the abilities it grants, and they could overlay like this:

Or the mechanic could be something simpler, like just flashback but for creatures. The flavor would be the creature’s enter-the-battlefield “deed” being remembered after they die.

This ability also hits most of the criteria, except it still leaves the dark-green text box a mystery.

2. Tell Story (As long as SOMETHING happened this turn, you may pay COST any time and tell this card’s story.)

Now we’re getting a bit crazier.

Again, this one fulfills all the criteria, and it has great storytelling flavor to it. You can imagine all the possibilities of having to set up “stories” on the battlefield by killing creatures, sacrificing a permanent, gaining life, whatever.

However, the biggest issue with this one is that paying 5GG is already a high cost. Tacking on another requirement might make it too hard to activate.

3. Spin a Tale (COST: Tell the story of this creature and each other creature you control with the same genre.)

Oh lordy, we may have gone too far!

Similar to the other two possibilities, this one hits all the criteria, but it is out there. There could be a couple of different genres (horror, comedy, action to name a few) and they could be spread out between all the colors. Each color would get two or so of each, so you could have a blue/black horror deck, or a black/red comedy deck, or a red/white action deck, encouraging to build around “genres” just as much as colors.

Imagine the crazy tales you could tell when all the abilities are activated at once!

However, there’s a big issue with this one: it’d be really hard to balance. Activating a bunch of strong abilities for one cost could just end the game on the spot, so they’d have to be weak enough to not do that, but still strong enough to reward building around, which might prove too difficult.

But there’s still one other mechanic to muse about in Throne of Eldraine: white’s new “Commander” mechanic!

#2. White’s Mechanic

A few days ago, Mark Rosewater had this exchange on this blog:

petruscaex asked: Is White getting any new effect or ability that it didn’t had before? It’s doing something in Throne of Eldraine it’s never done before in our ongoing quest to help white in Commander.

So what could it be? Here’s two guesses.

1. “Catch Up” Draw (If an opponent has more cards in hand than you, draw X cards.)

White has had a history of getting things at a more efficient rate when it’s behind another player, potentially even doing things it normally doesn’t do, like put lands onto the battlefield with Knight of the White Orchid.

I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to see a card like this in Throne of Eldraine:

2. Each Player Draws

This one isn’t as exciting, but it has a historical basis to it. Red got its ability to exile cards off the top of its library and play them until end of turn/until next turn from Elkin Bottle, an artifact from back in Ice Age (Blogatog source).

Similarly, white might get its own card draw ability from artifacts too. There are plenty of artifacts that let both players draw cards, such as Howling Golem and Runed Servitor just to name a few .

Each player drawing cards isn’t exactly card advantage, and it stays within white’s “balance” philosophy.

Could something like this in Throne of Eldraine? Both players draw, but the creature’s controller is up a 4/4 on the battlefield.

No matter what white’s new ability is, I’m looking forward to seeing it. I think that giving red the “Elkin” draw on cards like Light Up the Stage, or even straight-up card advantage if you’re hellbent like on The Flame of Keld or Bedlam Reveler, has overall done good things for red. Hopefully the same can happen for white.

So what are your ideas for the new Throne of Eldraine mechanics? Let me hear the tallest tales you have!

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