Logic: the Processing: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Logic: the Processing: (Generated at 2026-02-03 13:48:59)
| Logic: the Processing: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics | Foreword |
Recent updates to Logic: the Processing: (Generated at 2026-02-03 13:48:59)
Kinda odd comparing vanishing and suspend - high skill is good for one, and low for the other.
This is another idea that'd make more sense if being introduced from scratch in a reimagining of Magic, or an alternate-universe Magic being designed from the ground up knowing what we know now. That'd mean we could also apply it to flanking, battle cry and exalted, as well as those where it fits more naturally like some or all of fading, vanishing, amplify, soulshift, dredge, bloodthirst, graft, ripple, reinforce and modular. (Hm, although some of those can be on auras like Reality Acid or instants like Darkblast and Surging Flame.)
Chunk of complexity; and hard to back-port, would cause a chunk of short-term pain.
But it's an interesting knob to twiddle. Are there cards (many cards) with multiple skills of different sizes?
It's also a really obvious nice target for nerf spells. "Target creature has 0 skill"
That's... actually a really interesting idea. We brainstormed a few possible ideas for what could be the "third number" in the P/T box back when Challenge # 019 happened. But none of the ideas were as interesting as this one.
So the idea is that, say, Battle-Mad Ronin would be a 1/1/2 with "Bushido [S]"; Craw Giant would be a 6/4/2 with "Rampage [S]"; Mycoloth is a 4/4/2 with "Devour [S]"; Kozilek, Butcher of Truth is a 12/12/4 with "Annihilator [S]" (and maybe also "cantrip [S]"), and so on? Probably most creatures without an ability that cares about skill would have default skill 1 (maybe tokens have default skill 0). Granting bushido and other skill abilities becomes more interesting because creatures with a high skill for some ability are also good targets for granting other skill abilities. And once you have enough cards that grant skill abilities, you can have "vanilla skilled" creatures like a vanilla 3/3/3 for
, just begging to be taught bushido, or absorb, or frenzy, or one of the as-yet-undesigned keyword abilities that would naturally emerge once you had the skill symbol [S] to use in them...
Yeah, I really like this!
"Hearthstone is nowhere as deep as Magic."
Certainly true. Alpha is nowhere as deep as Magic currently is, too.
"Magic would not be as deep and interesting if they didn't recognize fast spells..."
I doubt that. If we assume an equal amount of spells, with an equal amount of variance, then we can assume the game would be just as 'deep'. Adding instant speed adds a certain type of complexity, but there's a limit to the amount of complexity the game can have before players are turned off. We'd just trade all the complexity in instant speed for a different complexity that the game doesn't currently indulge in. A tech tree, for example.
Just to be clear, I like Instants, and I like what they add to the game. I just don't think they're all that sacred. The vast majority of games do no involve interrupting people on the opponent's turn, and many of those games are very interactive. For many new players, instants are a turn off, since they stop the action (and all this casting at end of turn stuff just looks weird.) To us, it's no big deal, since we've been playing the game so long. It's a problem when learning to play the game, though, since the stack isn't intuitive. When I talk about rules complications, I'm talking about things like "When can I respond to what you did, and what happens when you want to respond back." That's hard to nail down for new players. "What does being a blue creature mean?" isn't hard.
"How does combat work?" certainly is hard, though. That and how instants work are the two big boogeymen of the game. They're also what makes Magic, Magic. I wouldn't remove either of them, since that would cut out the identity of the game. If I was to make Magic from scratch, though? I don't know. Maybe I'd keep it, and maybe I wouldn't. I'd probably be playing with a lot of different designs, so it's kind of hard to say that I wouldn't find something else I liked better. It is a very 1990s design. A lot of 21st century games don't do that.
As for your last point, I agree. I think it would be more annoying than useful. That said, I don't like "Enchantment - Aura" preferring the type "Enchant Creature". Wotc seems to disagree with us on this point, at least on some level.
i havent tried hearthstone, but i read some opinions that hearthstone is nowhere as deep as magic. not surprising if it means easier to program AI opponents.
every game needs reactive effects. whether that entails a whole type is arguable. but magic would not be as deep and interesting if they didn't recognize fast spells as its own category.
as for rules issues, everything has rules issues. name one type or mechanic that has no issues. should we dumb down just because of that? creatures probably cause the most issues. the power/toughness layers is a huge issue. do we remove P/T, too? color has issues, mana has issues, land has issues, i could go on and on and nitpick. but at the end of the day, having instant spells are a greater boon than not. those games without instant effects almost always seem so uninteractive and less strategic overall.
the errata is what causes the most confusion, mainly because the text on physical still exists in the old form. regardless, there is not much benefit to replace instant with sorcery with flash. on the contrary, it would be worse. wasting valuable rules text, massive errata. and not just one or two cards per set, it's 15% of all cards every set. that space would better used for the main effect or reminder text of new keywords.
'Hex' or 'Glam' (as in short for Glamour) work for me. You kind of want the word to be short, to infer the speed of the spell. Though, I got to admit that "I glam that" doesn't sound so great. "Hex in response?" sounds fine, though.
As for "you cant make a set without instants", I'd argue that. I think Magic is better for including instants, but only by a small margin. Truth is, it really chunks up the game, and causes no end of rules issues. I think Hearthstone does a good job showing that a game without instants can be, if not better, then at least much faster.
As for the concept of removing "Instant" and just making everything with Instant become a sorcery with Flash... it's an idea. It's not even hard to make backwards compatible. Just errata all cards that currently say 'Instant' to now read 'Sorcery with Flash'. Future cards would probably only care about Flash or Sorceries. Some cards would end up better/worse, like Blood Oath, but it isn't like we haven't seen rules updates do that before.
I kind of wish there was an appealing way to do it in reverse, where Instants would be made 'sorcery speed'. I know no one would like that, and I'm not really suggesting it, but it would help stop people from looking at cards like Divine Light and making the obvious mistake.
Ability kinda works; Power? Mystic? Gift?
All already kinda overloaded, though.
Incidentally, the drive to unify flash to remove a card type is just part of a natural desire to categorise and orthogonalise. If flash-creatures means creatures at instant speed; well, flash-sorcery should mean sorceries at instant speed. And yes, I'm aware that 'at instant speed' becomes a very silly term in that case :)
Humm, here's a very non-magical suggestion: Use the ":" symbol, which is what intrinsically means "Whenever you like"
Or how about just flat use the word "Magic"? Leaving "Sorcery" to take on the baggage of slow. (Or rename that ritual or something)
I point out that ArsMagica never came up with anything better than "Spontaneous" for fast magic. And they tried really hard to steal words from both real magical traditions and fake ones alike.
comparing fewer than 200 cards with flash versus over 1700 instants is a joke. flash is a bonus thus dont need a supertype. you can make a set without flash permanents. but you cant make a set without instants. even portals proved that with a very clunky workaround. instant speed one-time effects is a crucial part of any good card game. hence the original creators had the forethought to separate slow and fast effects into their own card types. consolidating them would be a bad idea.
you shouldnt consolidate card types just for the sake of it. technically one only needs 2 card types: permanent and effect. would that make the game better? just because theyre similar doesnt mean they should share the same type or supertype. else we could have a supertype for cards that make mana. after all, mana-making creatures and artifacts should share a supertype with lands because they share a similar ability.
actually there was another original card type for one-time effects that was later consolidated when timing rules were streamlined. now i wonder if we could reintroduce a third type, not necessarily of the same kind as the obsolete type. mana source was interesting; at one point they were interrupts. perhaps a new type that doesnt use the stack and cant be responded to (removes all interaction)? oh yea i was also thinking of an Ability type that is not a spell, but does go on the stack.
i scanned through several thesauruses, but really cant find a good replacement for instant. strategy and tactic are perfect for modern or space setting. but there's no similar pairing for magic. cantrip sounds okay but not very familiar. maybe just "trick" would do.
More suggestions then:
Folkcraft, Witchcraft, Ceremonial (for the slow side)... Gnosis? Isn't quite right; but suposedly captures 'instinctual' which can be levered into meaning speed.
You say "permanent types rarely need to be cast at instant speed", but there's a long history of creatures and other permanents that do have flash, for good reasons: the original King Cheetah was interesting enough, but there've been plenty more compelling ones since then, from Celestial Crusader to Grifter's Blade, from Leonin Bladetrap to Guardian's Magemark, Cho-Manno's Blessing to Sulfur Elemental, and so on and so on.
So you claim that instant-speed sorceries "is in fact its own category" and "smooth gameplay and templating demands it"; I'm with you on that. But I don't see why you don't think that instant-speed creatures, artifacts or enchantments aren't also "their own category".
I agree with Link: If Magic was being redesigned from the ground up, then I think Flash (or some other name) should clearly be a supertype. In real Magic, I don't think there's much that can be done. "Instant speed" and "whenever you could cast an instant" are sufficiently much part of the game's terminology that I suspect any change to the word "instant" now would be even less likely to stick than the renaming of EDH.
Magical terminology is somewhat lacking in terms for fast magic. The word 'Cantrip' is already overloaded in mtg.
Could go the other way, and have sorcery for instant, and sorceries become rituals, chants, or one of the other many words for long preparation magic.
In no way do I think that in real Magic Flash should become a supertype. I was saying that if Magic was built from scratch, I could see myself supporting making Flash a supertype instead of an ability. There's no reason for there to be more than one type of "spell." There are different permanent types because the flavorful and mechanical difference is relevant. Instants could easily be sorceries with flash with little mechanical relevance and perhaps even with improved "flavor."
as i explained already, it's useful for card games to have separate categories of one-time effects. just as there are many types of permanents. moreover, the removal of flash is irrelevant. it shows that lack of such a a supertype doesn't prevent permanents to be cast at instant speed. it also takes up too much space on the type line, which is more restricted in text than rules text box.
changing instant into supertype doesn't reinvent magic one bit. on the contrary, it would more likely hurt the long established flavor and mechanics built on the distinction of sorceries and instants. not to mention the huge errata and confusion that would come about for negligible benefits.
Why are you against Instant being a supertype? It means that Flash could be removed from the game. I'd actually be for it in a reinvention of Magic.
those are still too functional and too specific and don't give the magical feel. like Space: the Convergence article used Strategy and Tactics to replace Sorcery and Instant, respectively. So the new name for Instant should be a magical counterpart to Sorcery.
Interrupt?
Reaction
Spontaneous
my first choice was "Signature", but that seemed too long and didn't sound right when put together with Plane or Land. Tagged is like the PW saying "I was here" or "This is my spell". also sounds like a game of tag by planeswalking.
Sparked implies the object gains the spark? and somehow gets the same subtype as another planeswalker, and somehow invokes planeswalker uniqueness rule (actually only planeswakers are affected by that rule.)
assume that a universal type actually works in the rules as we intend it. what's a good name for it? how often would they/you use it?
Hmm. I do like 'Sparked' better than 'Tagged'. Really, though, this mostly points out to me is that 'Tribal' was short-sighted. It might be better to create a Type that allows any sub-type to be attached to any type, as opposed to have one for Planeswalkers, Creatures, Enchantments, Lands, etc., etc.. I'm all up for retiring Tribal in favor of that.
Ah yes, SadisticMystic's Sparked.
Maybe, theoretically. haven't tested them. For now I'll err on the side of playability.