For Challenge # 092. I was working backwards from the Duel Decks here. Thinking about interesting ideas for Duel Decks, I stumbled on the idea of doing Archenemy as a boxed set, with four duel decks. The idea is that people's biggest complaint with Archenemy is a power level issue. The schemes are too strong against some decks, and wimpy against others. Instead of packing 10 schemes with a forgettable deck of the correct power level that most people would ignore, what if you boxed the entire set together, and acted like the boxed set was a stand alone game?

To really cement the idea in people's heads, you'd want a classic match-up. And the most obvious choice, to me, would be Nicol Bolas versus the Planeswalkers, fighting over the fate of Alara. The 40 schemes in the set, therefore, would be tailored to Nicol Bolas' 100 card monster deck, and the players would each play a Planeswalker. Cool beans. I'd pay $50-$60 for that product.

Moving forward, then, the most obvious choice would be to time the Archenemy product with a return to Alara. My first idea was to say that the planes weren't coming together, but were moving past each other and forming wedges. What I really wanted to do was a Wedge Ultimatuum, but wedge doesn't really belong in the Nicol Bolas deck, and that's the deck I wanted to design a card for.

I thought for too long. Then it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with the five mechanics from Alara. They were all solid, and returnable. What if Alara just focused on what happens when you smoosh those mechanics together. It's kind of weird, when you think about it... Wizards' design was so focused on world building, that they never showed us what happens when you combine Devour and Exalted, or a mechanic that Unearthed 5 power creatures. I'm not sure where you take Alara from there, but it seems like a good place to start, at least.

Cascade and the all-multicolor were considered to make the overall set complex enough not to do combinations? Not to mention that the length of the reminder text for devour and unearth makes combination hard (and on that criterion alone, this card should be a rare). They did put out one combination, but with cascade: Ardent Plea.

I do love the concept of Archenemy built sorta like Commander or Planechase, though.

And IIRC design generally take the view that if they don't need a generalisation on a concept, they don't do it if the set is interesting enough already. It's easy to think "hey, I had a great idea, coloured artifacts", but design refused to do them for years...

Alara Reborn did include a cycle of five two-colour commons showing the overlap in adjacent shards. Ethercaste Knight was the most memorable, because its flavour perfectly shows how (some elements on) Bant would react to having Esper merged with them. Sigiled Behemoth, Gorger Wurm and Etherium Abomination are the other natural overlaps, because in all four of those cases despite featuring two shards' key mechanics, the card only needs one keyword mechanic. The problem was the Jund-Grixis overlap; they didn't think having both devour and unearth was sensible on a common (or perhaps any card; it's a bit of a trap). Their solution was Kathari Bomber, a common with Unearth but which merely works very well with devour.

That said, jmg is right that Wizards never went as far as combining mechanics from opposite shards, like devour and exalted, or unearth plus Naya. They didn't even have any artifact creatures with power >=5 in Alara Reborn.

Aaaanyway. I very much approve of the idea of a big Archenemy box of 4 precons, though I imagine it would have to be pretty hefty in cost.

This particular card... I'm not sure how well it'd play in a Nicol Bolas duel deck, actually. It only gets to burn the opponent at all if it gets to devour artifact creatures? So you need to have drawn some artifact creatures (from your 100-card deck?), and have them disposable enough that you're happy to treat them like a Simic Initiate?

I don't know, either. I kind of assume the Bolas deck is 35%-40% artifact creatures. Enough to get a taste for the potential this card could be. The teaser cards are supposed to be a tease for what's coming down the line, after all, not the point behind the duel decks.

On the subject of combining Alara abilities: I agree that you don't want to just put two abilities on the same card and call it a day (especially because Unearth/Devour is just painful to look at.) But I'm sure there's space to use the five themes and fuse them together in a way that only got hinted at toward the end when multicolor and cascade took the spotlight.

Return to Alara is a tricky nut to crack, to be honest. There's a lot of questionable branching paths to take that set down. All of them seem like poor choices for one reason or another. Focusing on the abilities is complexity creep. Wedge is a bit predictable, but also comes with... um... flavor complexity creep. More of the same is more of the same. I'm pretty sure there's a radically different approach from these three, but I can't quite put my finger on it.