We've some ideas for fortifications, and a discussion about how they should be slotted into the skeleton, but I wanted to talk about what fortifications should look like themselves. I was never sure it would be possible to design fortifications, but I'd like to if we can, and I like the flavour of black building them with slaves (if it works out mechanically).

The trouble for me is that I think fortifications should have some reason to be fortifications. That is, if most of them just say "Fortified land has : blah" or "whenever fortified land is tapped, do blah", they're very little different to a normal artifact with ", : blah". That's ok some of the time, but if they're all like that, I think it makes it questionable to embrace a new card type.

There's several designs of fortifications I like in the cardlist, but I'm worried that I've seen essentially none that say to me "this is a common fortification" the way "equipped creature gets +2/+0 and blah" does for equipment.

What troubles me is that it only feels like the equip matters if it matters which land it's on, and I can think of a few ways to do that, but none of them seem very good.

One way to do that would be to have a fortification which interacts with powerful non-basic lands, but that doesn't work well because firstly, this set shouldn't have many complicated lands, and secondly, complicated lands are plenty powerful already due to minimal land destruction being played, so the idea of fortifying them as well is rarely better than simply playing another copy.

Another idea would be to have lots of cheap land destruction in the set, so fortifying lands that makes them hexproof or indestructible matters. But that's a bad idea because cheap land destruction can totally blow up multicolor mana bases and make the game no fun to play.

The fortification which seems best and possibly common to me is the "becomes a 0/4 wall creature" because that's useful, but not overpowering, and it matters what land it's on, because the land can be killed.

That leads me to wonder if maybe many fortifications should make wall creatures (probably with some other ability such as player-damage, or animating). Becoming a wall seems thematic, and it makes the land matter, since you can afford to have one or two lands die but not too many. But it's still problematic because too many Walls will make the set too prone to limited board stalls, and too many non-walls will be too complicated for common and make fortifications just feel like creatures. (A high equip cost -- especially if it's black's sacrifice a creature -- could make a creature-fortification a fair-ish trade.)

Another possibility is one I suggested before but didn't like as much, which is to have a small number of fairly solid designs, as tokens, and have black create them (or alternatively fiddle the rarity so they appear often enough, but maybe you only need one or two to make it relevant to your deck). I don't really like that idea, but it's another possibility if we don't feel we have enough variation in designs.

So, do people agree with my suggest design constraints, or do you think it's ok if fortifications don't really matter what land they're on?

Do you think any other of the designs we have (or you can come up with now) are good for common fortifications?

I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I'm worried that I like the idea of fortifications, but they may not actually work well as a theme. Do you think we're ok to proceed with fortifications as a theme, or do we need to throw some more ideas around first?

I had been thinking a bit on fortifications and what we need to see, but didn't want to talk about it for fear of it mucking up the conversation on Fortifications Slot?. That seems to be over with, now, so onto the tricky work.

Ideally, I want to see as many weird and offbeat ideas as I can, though (and I know how impossible I'm making this sound) I want to see them be commons as well. I do think this is hard, but I also think we can come up with 10 commons between the lot of us. Some thoughts:

Since we're taking away a colored spell for each color, I don't see why we can't have a cycle that fortifies to a specific basic land. "Fortify to a Plains " for example.

That all seems reasonable to me.

I agrere "equip: sacrifice a creature" or some other hard-to-repeat cost makes sense. What I'd really like is to see a way a harsh equip cost like that could tie-in flavourwise with black. Eg. if all/most of the fortify costs were "sacrifice an X", and black gave you token creatures or bypassed the equip cost, that might capture the slavery effect, but the flavour isn't perfect as we'd hoped to have more slavemasters and fewer slaves.

I agree we could do colour-aligned fortifications; ideally they could be used by C and by black (however black uses fortifications), then black will probably get lucky and pick some fortification up late, but not always the same "weaker" one.

I was thinking of other ideas; I don't think any is complete, but I'll post a couple of them. I do hope we can come up with 5-10 decent common ideas (if you assume that each individual card doesn't have to justify the complexity of fortifications as a whole), I just wasn't sure.

If we want slavemasters, then 2-3 black creatures that are the equivalent of Brass Squire sound sensible.

I agree with Jack's point that most "Fortified land has ': Do foo'" fortifications don't need to be fortifications. Doing other things to the fortified land could work at common though: Slipstream Highway.

I just want to clarify a few points:

­

­
• What colours are fortifications available to (in this set)?
­
• (flavour) Who's making the fortifications and why? (This should be flavour's job, but would be nice to get a steer)
­

I'd like to hear people's responses to those questions as well. From what I've garned off of people's responses and submissions the answer to both questions seems to be "everyone has access, though fortifications are more desirable in black". That, and fortifications seems to accidently work well with some green mechanics. I don't know if we want what we're accidntly producing however, and would be happy to hear some contrary opinions.

So far, people's initial response to seeing fortifications is a bit of snickering, followed by "Oh, that one thing in future sight. Whatever." Later, when they read them and get to play with fortifications, they're won over. It's clear that they're responding to all the design space that we clawed out of this mechanic, and noticing our clever use of the space. Good job everyone.

Cool!