Soradyne Laboratories v1.2: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Soradyne Laboratories v1.2: (Generated at 2025-08-18 17:29:17)
Moved this to uncommon. Getting three of these in a draft would have been insane, and very difficult for an opponent to contain.
I like it. It has a nice, simple effect that's reinforced by the flavor.
Feint is just a slight tweak on ninjitsu, though - so it isn't all that original either.
Still, it makes sense to highlight it as your chosen thing.
Actually, flavor is a pretty important reason why I want to really push Morph in set two — but that can wait for a few minutes.
Your (Houlding’s) assessment last week that combat scenarios involving both Feint and Morph may be intimidating to less experienced players is spot on. One of the two had to play a significantly diminished role in set 1. Between Feint and Morph, I’ll choose to let Feint shine for the simple reason that Soradyne Laboratories needs to feel like my set — an original creation, and not one based on a revisiting of known mechanics. Morph is great and will play to the flavor of the block perfectly, but it’s not original.
So the real challenge comes down to allowing the two mechanics to come together in a way that doesn’t overload players, but also doesn’t completely neutralize Morph.
One option is to push Morph off to set 2 entirely. It would simplify the build of SOR and give D47 plenty of fresh toys to play with. I thought about this for a few days, and was completely ready to go that way until this morning. Then I started wondering if I wasn’t just delaying the same combo-shock we talked about earlier.
So I found another option. I work with a game designer, Rob, who had suggested a set of utility Morphers similar to the Mirrodin/Scars Spellbombs. This got me thinking about simplifying the Morph-plus-Feint equation by simply making combat a near non-factor as far as the Morphers were concerned. In SOR, the Morphers are utility drone costructs used by Soradyne Laboratories to handle small tasks. To an untrained eye, they’re just dorky little non-specific work machines until they do their jobs. When you see one coming, you know they’ve probably got a job to do, but making combat scary isn’t high on their priority list.
They’re not the most exciting part of SOR this way, but that’s okay. I don't want them to be. They’ll serve a bigger purpose later.
Okay, fine. Here’s the plan:
The villain in the second set is the Reigsman Empire. They’re almost completely out of the picture now, but ten years ago they almost conquered the world. They’re an empire of faceless automatons, stripped of their individualism to serve some backwards ideological communal purpose. If we were to see them today...or in 1950...from the capitalist side of the world...we might have called them Commies. And we’d think they were all brainwashed into being an endless flood of social clones.
I’d been having trouble figuring out what their internal thematic connection was going to be, and then this Morph thing came up. It’s the answer to how to illustrate an Empire that Debronia and it’s allies just don’t understand (and by “understand”, I mean in a social philosophy context). From the outside, the allies fail to recognize any individual roles the Reigsmans might have until they’re face to face on the battlefield. And for me, that’s a pretty cool story piece to tie Morph to.
I also plan on blending one other existing mechanic into the mix (in small doses) as a throwback, which I think will help make the set feel like a flashback/origin story; you’ll recognize the mechanical players because you’ve seen them before, but the way you see them this time will change the way you see everything else. Like in a flashback.
And no, I’m not going to rehash Flashback. That’s just too literal.
So the Morpher drones Soradyne employs are literally faceless automatons. The Reigsman Morphers are perceived to be faceless automatons. And the Morphers in set 3, Terminus, are... nope, not dropping that one yet.
There’s probably more I can say, but this is already a mile long and I’m tired.
While I realize you might be looking at Feint as your premier mechanic and thus more appropriate for the 1st set, I think there are few good reasons that you might want to actually have Feint pushed into the 2nd set:
As I mentioned above, Morph actually requires a certain density to truly function within an environment, as there needs to be that element of mystery about what is actually face-down on the table. It'll be hard to achieve that density if you're only dedicating a portion of your utility artifacts to that role. Without the element of mystery, Morphs are little more than awful transform cards.
Though Morph has already been explored a great deal, I think there's significantly more depth to the mechanic than Feint in terms of how you can further develop it to be unique to Soradyne. Due to Feint's precise functionality within combat and it's identity as a cost-reduction mechanism, certain avenues for alteration are shut off as they would ultimately transform it into something that isn't Feint.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I feel like the flavor of Morph can be better fit to both predominant set 1 themes pertaining to Corporate Espionage and those of mutation (as per Tarkot's Cross), whereas the introduction of Feint during set two would do a great job of accenting the shift of timeline back to the military conflict that brought about Door 47.
Actually, Houlding's first design there was exactly what I'd come up with myself on the drive into the office this morning. Fits the name better too.