We had a conversation on the Black Commons Submissions about giving Black the ability to wish for Fortifications, and I mentioned that this would require us to have enough fortifications so that, if you took a wisher, you were almost guaranteed to get at least one fortification to wish for. I also made a suggestion that we add an extra rarity for fortifications similar to how Timeshifted, Double-Faced cards and Snow Lands work in Timespiral, Innistrad and Coldsnap, since that would give us wiggle room to put enough Fortifications in the file, while freeing space for the mono v. multi conflict.

No one refuted the concept, but no one backed it up, really. Does this sound reasonable? Or would it be better to squeeze as much as we can out of the artifact slot and/or add a few colored fortifications and/or only have colored fortifications?

The one concern that I have is that it's drawing a lot of attention to what's basically one-sixth of the set (given "multicolour" has its own identity).

On the other hand, everyone thinks that Coldsnap had Snow-Covered Island and friends in the "basic land" slot, but I believe they actually didn't - they were just distributed throughout the common runs and the number of commons was such that most boosters had precisely one snow basic, but there were some that had two or zero. So if we could imitate that with ten common artifacts (since we'll have about twice as many cards as Coldsnap did) then we might be fine.

I'm not sure about the idea of giving them low power deliberately so that they go late in packs, though. I suspect we should try to make them fair (without pushing them excessively), and I suspect the fact that they don't impact the battlefield directly ought to mean they don't go especially highly anyway.

I'm also against my initial suggestion of making them low power to let them ride in packs. It sounds nice in theory, but it won't do a very good job selling the set.

I'm currently looking up the distribution of Snow Lands. If memory serves me right, I have only seen one pack not have more or less than one Snow Land, and I opened up a box and drafted every Friday Night back then. At the time, I chalked up the one missing Snow Land to a misprint (especially since the pack was missing a card). On Gatherer, however, Snow-Covered Island takes up a Common slot, and not a Basic Land slot. Odd. I wonder if this is more a technical thing than reality.

I'm currently doing more research on this and dragging what I can to the surface. One way or the other, though, I can assure you that if they had normal common distribution, you wouldn't have seen them as much as you did. Compare to the ripple cards in Coldsnap, even with no one else drafting them away from you in an 8 person draft, could be really hard to collect. And that was a small set. 65 cards (60 not counting the basic lands) compared to a large set (Innistrad has 107 commons, for example).

Maybe the best way to do this is with example. I'm going to run some random boosters. Be right back.

Okay, so I just did a very unscientific test of opening up 30 Boosters of Clockwork Wings and looking for how many times I got one of the "Trick Cycle". There's 5 Tricks among 102 commons. I found 17 tricks in 30 packs... 5 packs happened to contain two different tricks in them, therefore 18 of 30 packs had no tricks.

Of course that tells us nothing about how people draft. That would have to be played by ear. I hate to use such rudimentary handwaving, but if we put 10 Fortifications in the set... yeah... that would be a little like putting one in each pack. Sometimes you'd get more than one, and sometimes you'd get none. If we assume that all Common Fortifications are useful, than that might work.

Unfortunately, right now we have 5 slots set aside for artifacts... and I'm pretty sure those are supposed to be the signets to help smooth out the mana. So while we can theoretically can put in 10 Fortifications and be happy about it numerically, I'm not sure how we do that. Any suggestions?

I can't seem to figure out what the real deal with the Snow-Covered lands in Coldsnap really was. I did happen to stumble upon 3 youtube videos of packs being opened. Every time, there was exactly one basic land on the top of the pack. That's got to be a slot, whether or not Wizards confirms it.

Oh, huh. If the snow basic was on top of the pack, then yes, that's a slot. I thought I remembered them being mixed in with the other cards, but maybe that was just because the people I was drafting with shuffled their boosters before passing them on. I certainly remember people claiming it was a slot, and other people claiming it wasn't, but perhaps I'm misremembered who turned out to be right.

I would point out that Multiverse's booster functionality is purely random numbers. It doesn't even enforce getting one card of each colour like PyDraft does. I've had a potential enhancement to it planned, but it never seemed particularly high priority. If we used common runs rather than pure randomness, there'd be fewer packs with multiple copies in.

We do currently have a skeleton with 15 lands in, which is more than almost any set has. We could easily take 5 of those slots to be common Fortifications.

But my concern about drawing an undue amount of attention to one of the six aspects of the set still applies.

Having wishful fortifications is really going to make them stand out from the other mechanics.

What if the fortifications are colored and don't take up artifact slots?

Then we have yucky ewwy coloured artifacts...

(@Alex: I didn't get any duplicate cards, just multiple 'tricks' in one pack. That's normal for Magic. I assume that Multiverse can never get a print run feel that normal Magic has because... well... you'd have to find out how print runs work for every possible number of cards among various rarities. That sounds too hard to bother with. :p)

The colored fortifications don't bother me, but there will be a lot of people asking "Why did you do that?" and we won't have a very good answer for them. Sounds like a trap.

I don't know if having something stick out is strictly a bad thing. In fact, I think that if you have an interesting talking point about your set, that's good. Obviously, you've got to be careful with this practice. Urza's Saga, for example, is often thought of as the Artifact set, when, in reality, it was themed around enchantments. But the set had a lot of really good artifacts, so that's what people focused on.

Or, to put it another way, I don't think the Flip cards from Kamigawa take away from the themes of Kamigawa. Same thing with the split cards in Invasion or traps in Zendikar. It's just an interesting aside that eats up complexity and theme points... but if it doesn't come close to matching the quantity or the quality of the themes of the set, you're probably fine, and better off for it.

5 common lands and 5 common signets may be asking for too much. In a minor sense, having a bunch of colorless fortifications might help people's mana curves better than getting them to splash a not on color card and play a bad non-basic land anyway. I would suggest 1 extra common land or artifact, however. The rough equivalent of Terramorphic Expanse... though the Manacyclers might do the job better anyways.

So, my better guess is that fortifications is gobbling up one colored card per color and the common basic lands slot. Does anyone have a problem with this? While I do think that Alex's word of warning isn't unwarranted, I think we won't know how much it detracts from the set until we do it. We can always go back and remove a bunch of fortifications later if we don't like what's going on.

Oh, one more idea that isn't really connected to Fortifications but I'm going to put it here anyways: What if we didn't print a non-basic land in this set? We'd be saying something like "the land is very pure here. You can only tap for exactly one colored mana."

That would do three things. The first would be to make numerous non-land ways of smoothing over mana curves (which mana cycling and signets have been doing. We can also put a manacycler in each mono color as well. Something like ": Add to your mana pool. Draw a card.")

It would also keep land bases in front of players very simple, which would be a large boon for Fortifications. If you don't have to monkey with what lands are doing what to produce which mana, it isn't going to bother you as much when you have to monkey which lands are fortified for what effects.

It also makes it so that we can put more fortifications in each commonality, and let a lot of those fortifications do what a lot of designs will make fortifications do: Smooth over mana curves.

Ooh, I really like the idea of monocolour manacyclers. In fact, given the set's predilection for intensive single-coloured-mana costs, they seem like an absolute given. I wonder if 10 would be too many at common, or whether the monocolour ones would need to be uncommon? We should take this discussion to a sample card anyway.

The simple mana bases idea is interesting. I can see the validity in Link's arguments.

I quite like coloured artifacts, but agree that there should usually be a reason for them, and that fortifications would preferably be traditional colourless artifacts.

If they are coloured, wouldn't they need to be almost all black, if we're enabling a mono-black deck to draft them? I think it'd be difficult to turn an appreciable number of black commons into fortifications.

I agree with jmg that you'd need quite a lot of fortifications to let it be an (even minor) black theme, although I don't know exactly how many "lots" would be.

It's a good point that if we also hived off mono mana fixing to a manacycling cycle, we could rescue the common land slot for fortifications or something else. (Especially as monocolored fixing can always be improved by making your deck more full of the relevant basic land.)

Although when we're doubling up on functionality by putting mana fixing on another card, the other card shouldn't be something which is too highly drafted, else no-one will be able to get the mana fixing.

Similarly wrt not making fortifications too high in power level at common, although I don't think we need to power them down, just not push them incredibly aggressively. For instance, we may want to emphasise "quite useful, but quite high cost and/or equip" in order to make the black sac to wish/attach more relevant.

OK, I've been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of possibly-common fortifications design. They may never be as versatile as equipment, but I think we've enough ideas we can rely on having enough cards for this set (whether that's just three, which are produced solely on tokens, or whether we have ten common fortifications).

­Q1. Do we want fortifications in the set, even if the black connection doesn't work out?

I think this is 50/50. I think our fortification designs are nice, and go well in this set, but other than the black connection aren't necessary. So I'm definitely very happy to put them in, but if we're squeezed for space, I'd be happy to punt them en mass to some future set someone designs that would make good use of them.

­Q2. If we have them, how many do we need?

If we have them at all, we probably need enough that it doesn't look odd to have introduced them. I would say a minimum is about a dozen on all rarities -- that's what rebound had, and that seems a reasonable example of a "small" keyword. There could be fewer, but there's no reason to be.

However, jmg's right that if we expect them to be drafted with black, we need enough per pack that that's plausible. There was a discussion elsewhere, and I'm not sure of the answer. The possibilities seem to be:

1. Have none, have them be tokens which are created by black slaves.
   ii. Have enough that players playing black can hope to draft at least one (for searching/wishing).
   iii. Have enough that players playing black can hope to draft enough to naturally draw one along with a relevant black creature?

I'm not sure, what do people think?

­Q3 Now we have fortifications, what's the best way of capturing black's "slaves make fortifications" mini-theme? (I think the flavour was what was interesting.) (I agree we probably want another one or two mini-themes as well or instead.)

The trouble is, the ideal flavour would have black working the slaves to death, ie. "sacrifice a creature: wish/search/put otb/attach", but that's only worthwhile if the fortifications have a cost or equip much worse than "sacrifice a creature". I like the flavour of fortifications that are really hard to build, but then they have to be powerful to be worth playing, and then they're not really common. What's the best combination of fortifications that can be played by any colour, and yet having black jump through a hoop to get them is still a worthwhile investment?

I like these questions. I'd respond, but you know... I'm the arbiter, so that would be unfair. I'm definitely listening, though.

I agree that "do we want Fortifications at all" is 50/50. For Q2, I think I'm in favour of them being present in normal boosters, to some reasonable distribution: say 4c/3u/3r (rebound is actually fairly large compared to many small set keywords; cf battle cry (which had 8 total) or living weapon (5 in Mirrodin Besieged, and a further 4 in New Phyrexia)). I'd view that as a "normal" distribution, and I'd want us to have some specific reason for deviating from it.

It's interesting to compare this to past draft formats. Should I assume that most people reading this have played in a Scars of Mirrodin draft? Alex mentions that a "normal" distribution of a new keyword is similar to the distribution of Living Weapon. Let's say that black, in Scars of Mirrodin, had two commons that wished for a Living Weapon. Do you think there was a large enough saturation of Living Weapons in Scars of Mirodin block that you would be comfortable drafting a few Living Weapons and putting them in your sideboard?

Oh... you know what, I was mixing up small-set keywords (such as living weapon) with large-set keywords (such as rebound). Since this is a large set, yeah, 12 is about the minimum we'd need to have them be reliably wishable.

As for the hypothetical... It's a great hypothetical because it produces interesting insight. In this case, it'd feel bad. The living weapons are generally pretty good; I'd normally rather just have Skinwing in my deck than have a wisher for Skinwing. But if I've got two wishers... then technically, that gives me greater chance of getting a Skinwing than if I just maindecked it... but I want to maindeck it!

I feel like Fortifications deserve a bit more space than we're giving them, given that we have 4 other distinct mechanics. However, if they are only a minor subtheme which are built upon in the next block (say by having black working with other colours) then I have no issue. I think the living weapon analogy is good.

Hm. Let's assume that if we do fortifications at all, they should be playable and draftable in their own right, even without black. That means a standard ~12+ distribution of them. We very probably don't have room for a lot more than that (we could consider it if we could double up fortifications with mana fixing and something that's usually a coloured common slot. I'd quite like that if we could, but only if it seems natural, and I think it probably won't.)

That means we have at most 5% of the set being fortifications. That means at an 8-person draft, you'd have 16 fortifications total. Assuming some are good enough to be drafted by someone regardless of color, that means there probably are enough left to make the core of a dedicated fortifications deck.

Can jmg or anyone comment on my maths, I don't have any experience estimating this sort of thing..?

However, that suggests they need to be the right ones. Since it supports the flavour, and the ideas of having cost-bypassing effects in black, it suggests that fortifications that are less first pickable should still have serious board affecting abilities, but be a bit weak for their cost, rather than ones that are cheap, but weak.

So, where does that leave black? Despite suggesting it, I'm not convinced by wishing any more. It seems likely black will interact with fortifications in a few different ways (eg. bypassing cost, bypassing equip), which suggests that you should want your fortifications in your deck so they work with non-wish effects, which means wish effects should just be search effects after all. Probably. Does that make sense?

Now, costs. Should we strive to have "sacrifice a creature" as a common fortify cost, and give black ways to bypass that? Should we give "sacrifice a creature: search for a fortification" to a black common or uncommon? I assume we'll have some "granite squire" effects? Is this going to add up to a viable deck archetype, where sacrificing creatures to reliably build fortifications is a viable strategy?

Well, here is some good news: 5 non-basic lands gone and a common from each color isn't crushing the set. In fact, it probably calms our monocolor themes down a bit, and the set is more likely to be fun among a larger number of people. Good news number 2 is that, since we don't have non-basic lands, people will be drafting more cards that take up spell slots (as opposed to land slots) in their deck... so they will have a couple more cards in their sideboards to begin with. In fact, if we continue this policy into uncommon, we'll bear the fruits of having no non-basics there (maybe we want a rare land cycle. Personally, I think if we're going to have none in common and uncommon that we might as well take them out of rare as well. It's an interesting statement. Clever people will figure out why we're doing it, and those that won't devote the mindspace to that quandary won't notice their absence.)

Personally, I'd prefer to stick it out with the two wishes we have right now and see if it works. If it doesn't, we take them out... that's simple enough. I'd hate to pass on something that gets people excited, though, because it may not work. If you think I'm wrong, though, say something. I'm easily persuaded.

As for what the rest of black looks like... I don't know. We've got a lot of interesting ideas floating around, but no solid focus. I'm thinking, at this point, of 'stone souping' black, throwing everything we've got at the color, making a mess out of it and letting playtesting and development sort out what they like best. I wonder if Wizards has ever taken this tactic... it seems like a decent way to solve deadlocked design problems. When we send the bloated black mechanics to development, I'm expecting a 'devign' phase for black where dev plays with it, says they like thing X and not Y and could you make more X? How does this sound?

I think that sounds fine, and indeed sounds like what I've heard MaRo or someone describe as one of their early stages of design, when they playtest all the mechanics they've got to see which ones turn out to be fun and which ones don't.

Yeah, I think any sort of playtesting at all (even solo) is likely to bring things into focus. I keep meaning to print some proxies for the set and try it, but I've been really busy (in fact, I think we're very very overdue -- in other colours, we've made lots of provisional decisions that seem good, but without really testing our core mechanics in play to see if they're fun).

I'd suggest something like "make a pseudo-draft deck with 18 lands, a bunch of fortifications, a couple of wish creature, a couple of squire creature, any other fortification-bypassing effects, and a bunch of generic black commons from the file, then play it and see which seem fun" :)