Voidwarped Eldrazi (On Hold): Design Goals

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Mechanics | Skeleton | Design Goals | Spawn Production

Eldrazi

1. Ancient: Colourless and Devoid

2. Enormous: High Base Power and Toughness.

3. Alien and Hunger: Voidwarp and Milling

4. Interconnected: Spawn and Mill effects.

5. Lovecraftian/Incomprehensible.

Design Goals:

1. Use Voidwarp

   • Alien: Make the Eldrazi feel as tough they come from another game, one that uses damage counters and treats your library as your life total (ARC System).
   • Hungry: The Eldrazi will devour your library until there is nothing left.
   • Interconnect: Milling unites the Eldrazi into a single entity.
   • Lovecraftian: Milling invokes sanity points and going insane.

2. Make the Eldrazi feel more Lovecraftian

   • Create a sense of impeding doom: Use effects that reward you for revealing cards in your hand (like Titan's Presence, Dragons of Tarkir reveal effect).
   • Create a feeling of powerlessness: Do not including removal spells that can kill a sufficient large creatures alone. (Rise of the Eldrazi/Theros).
   • Make defeat feel inevitable? (Do not allow shuffling cards into library?)
   • Play up Eldrazi's alien intelligence instead of mindless hunger

3. Create an Environment that allows both rush strategies as well as ramping up to large creatures Eldrazi (BFZ speed)

   • Weaken Bounce.
   • A somewhat slowish environment favours the Eldrazi (Mill gets better the long game goes on, as well Ramp)

Make the coloured Eldrazi feel weird

1. White: Ineffiecient small creatures, Efficient larger creatures. (Mid-range replaces weenies and large angels)

2. Blue: High power, lower toughness. Aggressive aggro colour due to mill.

3. Black: High power as black can mill. The efficient small creature color.

4. Red: lower power, High Toughness. Same as BfZ block.

5. Green: Smallest creatures which make the most Spawn. Same as BfZ.

BFZ Complaints

1. Not-Colourless: BFZ Eldrazi used far to much coloured mana in costs.

   • Make more Eldrazi than don't require coloured mana than Eldrazi that do. (Voidwarp prevents Non-Eldrazi decks splashing creatures as often, with is why BfZ didn't do this according to Maro).

2. Non-Lovecraftian: Felt more like mindless force of nature that alien intelligence.

3. Eldrazi use both casting triggers and etb triggers making the eldrazi inconsistent. (Blight Herder is a cast trigger, but Ulamog's Reclaimer isn't.)

   • All Eldrazi use Casting triggers instead of Etb trigger for consistence and to make counter-spell less effective on them.

_ Untap symbol make the Eldrazi feel weird and aggressive. By making abilities better pre-combat that the goal is to make untap abilities as NWO-close as possible. _

_ Untap symbol design space (boost target unblocked creature - ninjutsu style), tap, spawn token, exile, Waste, can't block _

Sources: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/you-had-me-eldrazi-2010-04-23