Part of a cycle with Shifting Gears, Shifting Sickness, Shifting Vertigo and Shifting Inertia. The secret 5 commons missing from Magic 20XX because I don't know what to do with this slot. I still don't... but I might as well deal with this now, since I'm on a drive to finish putting this set on Multiverse so I can print and finally test 20xd6 with it.

When I first designed these cards, I thought I was being really clever. 20XX wants cards that 1). dump out of your hand for cheap because of Hellbent, and 2). wants to include a lot of activated abilities because of Wisdom (and Hellbent. Something to do after your hand is dead).

So I came up with a cycle of 'Enchant Creature Seals' that you could dump on the board fast before the proper permanent appears. Then you could waste time later attaching the enchantment back and forth to other permanents of the correct type. Sounds great!

It stank. Maybe it would have been fine as a rare cycle, but these cards continuously confused players. I added the word "Aura", then removed it (since it doesn't really do anything anyway). Both ways, players couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that this didn't come into play enchanting a creature, even though the card made no claim to be an enchant creature to start. People just blew past the text and did what their minds told them must be right.

So by playtest 3, I turned these cards into artifacts that became enchantments. This way, players would be forced to accept that the card had two states. Players responded negatively to the flavor... but most importantly, it still confused new playtesters. Now they weren't making mistakes about what happens when the artifact came into play... they were just confused. I think I fielded 5 questions on that day from people who weren't sure if the artifact was supposed to come into play enchanting something.

There is, I'm noticing now, a MTGO/Melvin problem going on with these cards, since they create multiple instances of the same ability on the card. I may have worded it differently... I'm going off of memory right now. My file is upstairs.

So, these can't stay. I guess I have one of three options

1. Make these come into play like normal enchant creatures that can be reattached, and stop being so damn precocious.
2. Come up with a new cycle of 5 cards.
3. Make something else using similar mindspace. Though I have no idea what.

The truth is that I really like these cards, warts and all, but they can't stay. They're stinking up the place.

~ becomes an Aura with "Enchant creature. Enchanted has 'yadda yadda yadda.'" Attach ~ to a creature.

Does not help (and have tried it. I've tried a lot of permutations). People don't read the card text, and play the card wrong no matter how you word the ability. It's just human nature: They assume the card says something it does not, because they want it to say that. No amount of rewording will stop people from believing the first line of the card is 'Enchant Creature'.

give it morph. make it an aura.

Morph is interesting, but the sets complete at this point, and this cycle would be the only cards with morph. That wouldn't be very fun.

I'm just going to pull the band-aid off and make these enchant creatures proper which can be reattached. It's clearly how the players want to play them, so why am I getting in the way of their fun? Stubborness, mostly. I'd prefer to have something functionally different. Ah well... at least the game doesn't have enough re-attaching auras anyway.

I'm surprised that this trips so many people up. I guess it's easier to change the card than the player, though. Speaking of which, why not grant defender?

Might as well, eh? Defender it is.