LibraryPlane: expensive stuff matters theme

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This is a message to my future self regarding my thinking qua expensive stuff in magic. I tend to forget these things, and this is a good place to store my notes.

I take a card to be 'expensive' if it costs more than five mana. When I started playing Magic, people had only just realized that cards like sol ring ought to be banned. So, I never had access to a lot of good ramp. But contemporary magic is different; good ramp abounds. This means that the Magic I know, where getting an expensive card out on turn five relied on a little luck with birds of paradises and mind stones (not to mention smoothing land drops with impulses), might not have a whole lot in common with the magic of today (I'm mainly thinking of lotus cobra). While designing this set, I'm going to pretend that ramp is somewhere between the mid-90s wimpy stuff I know and the ramp of today. I'm going to come at expensive cards in this way because I don't find the design space lotus cobra opens up particularly interesting. This means I'll be assuming that a six-drop comes down on turn five with some effort and turn four in a dedicated ramp deck (and then only with some luck). I'll be designing as though third turn six-drops won't happen.

So there are two concerns I'd like to work my way through with regard to expensive cards: there's the problem of ramping into them, and the problem of removal making the investment unattractive.

First, the problem of ramp. RoE made expensive cards plausible by way of the eldrazi spawn mechanic. It's a pretty clever mechanic since it also slows down the game via chump-blocking. My set needs an eldrazi spawn analogue. At first, I intended on stealing the mechanic directly (reconcepting the spawn as animated books or somesuch). But that felt too shameless. Anyway, I wanted to design more traditional options for game-stalling (like defenders, also stolen from RoE) as opposed to depending on a mechanic. I'm still trying to come up with a clever ramp mechanic, but all of my ideas so far have only amounted to mangled versions of the gold mechanic used by one of the GDS2 contestants. This contestant designed cards that awarded gold counters that could++ be cashed in at any time for 1 colourless mana. The gold counters are stored in the same kind of way poison counters are stored. This means there's no interacting with them (or if there is, it's only by making cards that say something like 'target player loses a gold counter' which is parasitic). Eldrazi spawn, by contrast, are very interactive since they're creatures and vulnerable to pyroclasms and the like.

So let's say I want to reuse this idea of storing mana as counters. I can't store the mana in creature tokens since that's too similar to eldrazi spawn (I did consider creature tokens that are very different from the spawn, like 0/3s with defender that tap and mill you for mana rather than sacrifice, but they were too wordy to work at common). But I can't store the mana off the battlefield, since that's non-interactive. So what are my options? Here's two:

Store the mana in counters on cards, like charge counters on artifacts.
Store the mana in non-creature tokens, like artifact/enchantment/land tokens.

I'm going to do some 1. regardless of whether or not I do any 2., but then putting something like sphere of the suns in a set doesn't exactly constitute a set mechanic. If I want to store mana via charge counters, I'll need to find a distinctive way of doing it. Charge counters don't really fit the flavour of my set. That is, there's nothing in philosophy/library that says charge counters. Charge counters or something like them fit better in a set where the concept of scarcity is important, or at least an artifact set where we can talk about battery-powered objects steadily losing energy. So, I imagine I'll use a few, but I can't see mana-storing charge counters as a set-defining mechanic for LibraryPlane.

As for non-creature tokens you can sac for mana, I have two doubts. The first is that saccing for mana is still too much like eldrazi spawn. The second is that non-creature tokens just isn't design space worth exploring. I'm taking for granted that non-creature tokens don't exist in the way I'm describing (mirrorworks and prototype portal and its ilk don't count since they're making copies rather than a specific token like 'colorless artifact token that has 'sac this token: add 1 to your mana pool''). I don't think it's worthwhile to break into this design space unless I'm doing so with a really good idea. Of course, if I think of a really good idea, that changes things, but I'm skeptical I'll ever find one since I don't see how that idea speaks to a philosophy/library setting better than it would to an artifact setting (for token artifacts; for token enchantments, and enchantment setting is what you'd need, and the same is true for lands, etc.)

This means both options I've come upon don't seem to be working for me. I'm still looking, but I won't necessarily be disappointed if I never find a mechanic that works. I'm comfortable with just designing a lot of efficient ramp (not lotus cobra efficient; I think worn powerstone efficiency should be fine). I'm making this effort to find a ramp mechanic because I take that to be what contemporary design conventions would require from a set like this. Back when I was playing, far less was expected from a set in terms of mechanics, and since that's what I'm used to, building this set without a ramp mechanic doesn't bother me much.

I'll leave this problem of making a mechanic to facilitate ramping into expensive stuff where it is for now. Now I want to consider the 'dies to removal' problem. As I understand it abyssal persecutor doesn't see play, despite its obvious power, because there's too much good removal around these days. Squadron Hawk is very popular because any removal used on it is card disadvantage. So, if I want my expensive stuff to be worth playing, I need to move away from what makes abyssal persecutor powerful and try to reproduce what makes squadron hawk powerful.

The most obvious way to pull this off is to make powerful ETB effects. This is what makes the titan cycle worth the investment. And where ETB effects do the job, leaves the battlefield works too; sometimes both, as with pelakka wurm. These kinds of effects also work well with a flicker driven strategy, and are the defining attributes of cards with evoke. So, as long as I'm designing ETB and LTB effects, I might as well make a couple flickerwisp variants, enough to make this strategy vaible. Meanwhile, evoke is a great way of smoothing out curves with big creatures at the top. Getting an aethersnipe in your opening hand doesn't hurt as bad as a mahamoti djinn, since you can still get use out of it at three mana. When I first checked gatherer, I was a little surprised to find evoke on so few cards. But given how confining that design space is (always requiring either an ETB or LTB effect, or something along those lines). So, if I use it, it'll only be here and there and probably not at common. Fortunately, I can see evoke within the flavour of this set. It'll describe the transitory nature of an inscrutable universe, wherein the same object may in one instance realize being, while in another succumb to flux, or something along those lines.

Another bonus to ETB and LTB effects is that I don't have to overcost bounce (like regress in RoE). Without those effects, bounce really hurts an expensive stuff strategy. But with those effects, bounce isn't as effective (plus it provides more situations where you'll want to bounce your own stuff).

There are other ways to protect expensive stuff from removal. For instance, shroud and indestructibility. But these are non-interactive, so I'll probably only use them once each (like a sphinx of jwar isle and an ulamog, the infinite gyre). Flash is another option, since it requires instant-speed removal to prevent the expensive thing from having any effect. But flash is just non-interactive in a different way (and I really don't like the look of jin-gitaxias, core augur for formats that can play him).

So, it's decided. I'll solve the removal problem by packaging ETB and LTB effects into my expensive stuff. There's one last point I wanted to make, and it's about annihilator. As I understand it, the mindset going into RoE was 'battlecruiser' Magic. I've never played warcraft, but I get the sense that this means that the designers wanted to create a space where people could resolve giant creatures and pit them against one another. But annihilator doesn't quite accomplish this. If my opponent puts ulamog's crusher into play, ideally I would want to put my own battlecruiser into play, and we could watch the two blast away at one another. But that's not the play I want to make since even if I do get my own expensive creature into play, my opponent will attack, annihilator will trigger, and I'm looking at card disadvantage whether or not my battlecruiser wins the fight. This means that in the end the play I want to make is to play removal on my opponent's battlecruiser. Now maybe in warcraft, battlecruisers just ignore one another and blow up the other guy's base. But that doesn't seem as fun as having them fighting each other.

This problem is pretty easy to avoid: just don't use annihilator! I'm getting a sense that there's a "griefer" design requirement that R&D knows about, and I don't (this explains jin-gitaxias, core augur as well). But I'm not inclined to design cards for 'griefer' personalities, not just because I think it contributes to unfun play, but also because I don't see it leading to good design (again jin-gitaxias, core augur, as well as phyrexian obliterator, is so over-the-top as to seem a little amateurish, with silly casting costs applied like band-aids).

Meanwhile, it's worth thinking about abilities that reward putting your battlecruiser up against other battlecruisers. Even something as awkward as 'if this creature blocks or is blocked by a creature with converted mana cost 6 or more, gain X life' seems like a good idea.

Updated on 01 May 2011 by Putnam