Soradyne Laboratories: Comments

Addressing NLewis's question regarding variations on "Test":

I wanted to keep the Test mechanic as simple and straightforward as possible, especially since it takes a lot of copy space to properly explain. By WotC standards, it may actually be too "long" a mechanic for use on commons, but I feel that the end result is both flavorful and easy to understand/grasp. Once you've done it once, you'll always get it right.

The reason for not varying the number of cards tested was forth sake of maintaining a standard. 2 mana, 2 cards, every time. It's easier to do the math and spot shenanigans. I'd already decided that there was more exciting space in varying the KIND of card tested for, so re number of cards was less important, and restricting that part of the equation kept the mechanic as a whole more manageable and less breakable.

There's also a very interesting probability aspect to using 2 as a base; Testing for land is nearly always more effective than for other card types. Testing for a color in a deck where all non-land cards have that color is even more effective than testing for land.

Let's say a deck has a 40% land mix. Regardless of how far into your deck you are, if your land mix is still relatively consistent and close to 40% within the deck, it means that with any given card drawn, you have a 40% chance of hittin gland. Further, any Test for Land actually has slightly better than a 64% chance of netting at least one land (and a 16% chance of showing two.) In fact, if your first card is NOT a land, the ratio of remaining land cards to non-land cards goes UP, meaning it's even MORE likely to be a land.

Then look at WHY you might Test for Land. In a situation where you're land-flooded, you're less likely to need to dig for it, so you may not want to test. On the other hand, if you're stuck at three mana on turn six, you want land now, and getting it without the cost of a turn's draw is a HUGE boon. In this case, your deck is EVEN MORE likely to produce land on a Test, as the ratio of land cards in the deck to non-land cards is higher than the standard proportion.

There is virtually no down-side to the mechanic. It has a high chance to do what it needs to do when it needs to do it, and that's with the standard test quantity of 2 cards. Varying this value by Testing for three or more cards would likely just break the mechanic in half.

I agree that Testing shouldn't be for 3 cards. I don't think it would "break it in half", but it would make getting a land so common that the times you fail to find a land would be a large let down.

It seems obvious to me that test is more powerful on Sorceries and Instants. I wonder how often you'll go to that well, so to speak. Also, I wonder what kind of design you end up with when you are making cards for players who might be desperate for land, but would also be desperate for creatures in play as well.

Well, I couldn't just give you a common card that fixes ALL your problems, could I?

Honestly though, I did look at making some cheap instants and sorceries that could Test for lands instead of creatures that Tested for lands. I ran into a few problems.

1) If the instant or sorcery required a target, it could get stuck in hand. Creatures rarely need targets, so they were a good fit.

2) The card's purpose is to help fix mana. If the spell is too good, it draws more people into playing it for the first effect, rather than the second. Ideally, green should be best at helping to find land by any means, including Test. This meant that the color that typically has some of the least impressive early-game instants and sorceries would be getting the most playable of the five, while black, white, and blue would need miserable ones that felt like a drag on your deck. That notion seemed pretty disappointing, so I went for creatures instead.

3) I wanted cards that weren't absolute in-all-ways letdowns when drawn late in a game. They may be puny creatures, but they can still attack and block.

I think it's good if a mana-smoothing mechanic like cycling, clash or test lets people like either half of the card. I don't think you need to say "The card's purpose is to help fix mana. If the spell is too good, it draws more people into playing it for the first effect, rather than the second." It's good to have some cards with your mechanic that Spike can feel happy about playing in constructed, and those need to be good in both ways.

@ Alex: I think your assessment is a fair one, and I feel I've already begun to show a few more Spike-ish applications of Test. I stand by the decision to show Test for Lands on common creatures though to really encourage players, specifically in Limited formats, to use the ability. From a flavor angle, putting Test for Lands on a scout creature seemed very rich. From a mechanical view, limited format decks rarely go without creatures, and really playable common 1-drops are typically few and far between. Giving the player a creature they'd probably play anyway that also has the mechanic as an asset is a solid way of familiarizing players with how the mechanic works.

I clearly made a verbal misstep in saying that the card shouldn't be good if it were to Test for Lands. The card needed to be good enough to see play with or without the Test ability, but I didn't want to make the card so good that even without Test you'd grab it first-pick every time. I felt that the cards needed just enough tension that you'd really start looking at them around your fourth or fifth pick, so that you could determine whether your previous picks warranted the kind of utility the mechanic offered.

Reformatted Feint on a number of cards, and added it to Rotoskate, which seems to have an interesting interaction.

Doing what I can to trim word count and clean up various cards along the way.

Two points regarding word counts: flavor text skews things (I've contemplated losing it entirely at this point), and tracking (the space that follows a hard return in typesetting) is hard to control in HTML. In order to show separate clauses on cards, I've been double-returning, which makes cards look slightly more cluttered as a result of type going tiny.

Yeah, I hate the way that two-thirds of browsers ignore the bottom-margin I have set on the \
tag. Or maybe I don't hate it, because I recognise it's not standard, but I wish there was a better way.

Here's a thought; what if there was a switch to make flavor text visible/invisible? This would allow us to look at a card's rules text alone for reviewing clutter.

Hm. I've got plans for an "enlarge text" button to make card text more readable. But that doesn't help designers keep the number of words down in the first place (if anything it might have the opposite effect).

Interesting idea. I'll give it some thought.

In response to conversation that begins in "(((Intense Scrutiny)))"; RE: Multicolor.

Part of what I've done with this set is a condensing of the overall structure of Ravnica block. Ideally, yeah, I'd have paced out the color distributions and legendary creatures over a three-set bridge, but for several reasons, I didn't see myself having that luxury. A large part of that came from the fact that by doing this in my spare time, I wasn't sure how long a whole block would take me to design. I wanted a more finite and manageable project. Maybe it's a lazy answer — or solution — but it's what I had the ambition for at the time.

I also saw this as a snapshot. Initially, there was no real story, just a bunch o moderately mechanically overlapping factions. Bombshell actually deserts most of the credit for pushing for a story. Interestingly, he proposed very much the same thing that it sounds like Houlding's asking for at this point: spreading the mechanics and themes out over the span of a block. I pushed back based on something I found within Bombshell's critique of my initial goals.

Bombshell questioned why these factions happened without a story.

And he had a point. Funny thing about using Ravnica as a model: mechanically, I loved it, and the guilds were pretty flavorful by themselves. As a whole though, I was always disappointed that there wasn't much in terms of a linear story. Then there I was walking into the same pitfall with a much smaller canvas to paint on.

For the sake of condensing the conversations, Bombshell and I worked out that each faction needed someone as their figurehead, and that if SL was our "base set" built around the aftermath of a mysterious event, then it made sense that we needed space to tell the story of the event itself, if not the story of the buildup to that event.

Because I already had the general mechanical structure of the large set worked out, it was going to be difficult to change gears, make SL a "third set", and start writing the story in a linear fashion. From a dramatic standpoint, I really liked having the aftermath come first, as it left the audience as puzzled by the earlier events as the characters were. Making the story work "backwards", not unlike the movie "Memento", felt like a really cool way to tell a story, and it allowed me to keep SL in the first of the three set slots.

So that's why the nine mythic legendary creatures happen all in one set. The Planeswalkers? They really could go anywhere; they are very literally intended to be outliers in the scope of the story.

But the multicolor card distribution? I don't know. Houlding probably has a point. I could theoretically strip five gold cards out at the uncommon and common levels and redistribute those slots to the monocolored cards. I think I was probably initially doing it to reinforce the visibility of the factions, but truth be told, the gold cards don't really give even exposure to all the groups (and really can't if I do it properly — the R/B/W Nihilists just don't belong in "common" the way the other guilds do). I'll take a look at those again and see where I can nudge things around.

From a big picture perspective, the % of gold cards in Shards and Ravnica is about equal (23-ish and 25-ish, respectively).

Those sets also had, on the small side, 100-200 more cards than Soradyne does. So if SL gets to the size of a base set in a block, the percentages should work out in a way to fulfill the vision of the set.

With 35 gold cards, we may be at or near the limit of the number of multicolor cards for this set to keep it from becoming a Multicolor set but I believe there is some wiggle room that will allow for a multicolor set, if you take my meaning. There will have to be double the gold cards made for the rest of Soradyne Labs in order to equal what has previously been considered Multicolor sets/blocks.

It should also be noted that it was my intention that other legends would appear in the block as it went back and forward in time and new characters appeared as appropriate, young versions of characters like Pale or Aricus and so forth. While the number of legends might seem high, there is a story behind this block and I have been pushing to make it relevant in every way we can make it so; giving players characters they can follow gives people a thread to follow as we go through the block.

To Bombshell's point, SL is built on the modern card-count skeleton. This means that by the end, it should have 229 cards (not counting basic lands). I've currently got 42 slots for gold cards, so Houlding's observation that the set is roughly 1/5 gold is not irrelevant. I've already determined that I can and probably should cut back ten gold cards and convert those slots to mono-colored cards. This will bring the percentage of gold in the set from around 18% to about 14%. Hopefully that'll help curb at-a-glance misconceptions of the set's intent.

Then there's the Legendary creatures and story piece. Bombshell's been right about damn near everything in fine-tuning those elements so far. Unfortunately, that's a piece of the bigger picture that just doesn't translate well in this kind of design and development site/forum (by no means a shortcoming of Alex's work). I can only say that you've got to trust him on that one; I have so far and it's made the creative process of this project a thousand times richer and more structured. With a notable effort on my part to actually build some kind of site to properly present all the "external" creative, I have little doubt that SL should feel very much like a "real" Magic base set.

Note to M_Houlding: email me when you get a chance. Sean@thinkblotstudios.com

After a ton of examination, Test is coming out of the set in favor of something simpler and less likely to encourage improper deck building...

It was not an easy call. Test, untested though it was, was generally well received, was cumbersome (took a crapload of card space). It also had a hidden danger in that novice deckbuilders could very easily see the semi-search ability as permission to skimp on the indicated card type (i.e., Test for Land digs for a land card, therefore I won’t need to put as many land in my deck because this card usually gets me one anyway.)

In its place, I’m bringing in something I’ve been referring to as “autoscry”. Autoscry works the same way on all cards it appears on; when the card is put into your graveyard, you may scry 1. The ability is not tied specifically to where the card goes to the graveyard FROM, just that it has gone to the graveyard. This means that if you discard the card with the ability, or if it gets milled away, it will trigger. The mechanic represents clues turning up at sometimes unexpected times in a setting built around the mystery of a grand conspiracy.