Zaberoth: Concept and Design

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Mechanics | Place Names | Concept and Design | MWS File | Changelog (2.06) | Proposed Archetypes

Introduction

Perhaps, long ago, Zaberoth was once a prosperous world. The lore of the Eltis Circle describes a beautiful landscape, pristine and peaceful. The Saranis also hold ancient scriptures and hymnals of their old order, a sacred knighthood overseeing a flourishing kingdom. Whether these stories were true or were, even then, products of a wishful mind, has been lost to time.

But the Zaberoth now can only be described as a land of nightmares.

Human settlements have been cut off and isolated from one another, separated by vast expanses of barren, desolate lorns. The dreambane, horrific apparitions that would be terrifying enough to see in one's nightmares, stalk the physical world, threatening to pull its inhabitants into insanity and delirium. The fabric of the Æther itself is crumbling, creating gashes in time and space that pose further danger. Every day is a struggle for survival.

In the dead center of this bleak world is an immense, gaping pit known as the Eye of Zaberoth. Fierce lornwinds, gusts of debilitatingly powerful mana, pour from its maw. Most agree it is also what gives the dreambane their hold in reality, and many blame it as the source of the world's endless misery.

The inhabitants of Zaberoth, of course, have adapted as best they can to this terrifying world. An established order of runners - highly trained, disciplined scouts - brave the dangers in the lorns, carrying messages and warnings from town to town. To resist the constant threat of insanity posed by the dreambane, they rely on willpower and a solid psyche to ground them in reality. Knowledge is power here, as it is everywhere else - but more than that, it is the only chance for salvation.

Still, the dreambane continue their grim oppression, and the Eye grows in size every day. How long can the survivors continue to survive, on the despairing plane of Zaberoth?

Psyche

Zaberoth is a block that's about exploring "knowledge" - how one can gain it, how one can use it, and how one can strip it away. In terms of mechanics, one way this is approached is via psyche, a keyword that interacts with card drawing.

A card with psyche allows one, while drawing a card, to immediately "trade" that card for a certain effect. This effect could be as minor as a +1/+1 boost, or as powerful as a guaranteed Shock (or beyond!). The card is still drawn, so you do need a card in your library for psyche to happen (and can't stop yourself from drawing cards with it!). With psyche, the draw step often becomes a time for a critical decision, as to whether the effect is better than the card you are trading it for.

Cantrips

While they are not a true mechanic (when are they ever?), cantrips are plentiful in the set. The extra card draw may represent the constant boosts of arcane knowledge that the casters of Zaberoth attempt to gain from their spells. For other cards (as with the runners), it may symbolize a message successfully carried across the lorns. In any case, the extra draw will surely help a player find another helpful spell, or perhaps boost psyche an additional time.

Dementia

Dementia is a keyword that only appears on creatures with the type Nightmare - the "dreambane" of Zaberoth. It functions like infect - damage dealt to a player by creatures with dementia results in the player exiling that many cards from the top of his or her library, instead of losing life. In this way, Nightmares eat away not at life totals but at the "sanity" of the player - and when the player is so far gone that he or she tries to draw from an empty library, dementia will have triumphed!

In addition to the keyword, there are a few other effects (many in blue) that will directly exile cards from the library. While perhaps not affiliated with the Nightmares in flavor, these will surely help in whittling the library down to that last fatal card!

Note that to emphasize the permanence of the sanity loss cause by the dreambane, I chose to have the cards exiled instead of "milled" into the graveyard. This also means no graveyard shenanigans causing dementia to backfire (or making self-mill profitable)!

Rifts

Rifts are a small "tribal" set of enchantments. As Zaberoth slowly unravels at the edges of reality, rips in the Æther manifest themselves in these cards.

In addition to some sort of effect, each Rift will cause future Rifts you cast to cost drastically less. That is, existant Rifts will further eat away at the fabric of the Æther, making it much easier for more destabilizations to appear. Eventually, given enough Rifts on board, you might be able to cast an immensely powerful Rift for just one mana!