MaRo's article today talked about adjustments made to the evergreen keywords of Magic. Evergreen is something that trips people up so I'm going to take a moment to define it the way that WotC defines it. Evergreen means that there will be an instance of the keyword in 90+% of all Magic sets. They are things that show up in every set unless there is some specific reason not to include them. This is different from things like cycling and kicker which are considered deciduous. They aren't a part of every set, but they can be used for any set they needs them. A recent example of a deciduous mechanic would be hybrid mana.
Adjusting the evergreen keywords happens relatively infrequently. In fact, we are losing essentially the only tool that has been used to define them. The core set has always been the place that changes to keyword status premiered. Not that it can't be done in a normal set, as has happened on one or two occasions. The last core set brings with it a significant change to the game's keyword actions, but they are almost all positive.
A keyword of my own for this article is going to be variance. Almost all of the keyword changes revolve around how much variance they produce. Variance is the degree of inconsistency in a thing. How divergent it is. This is not a bad thing, you want games to play out differently. Its part of Magic to have variance in the game. However the keywords in question just leaned too much on variance to be justified.
First off, let me just say that Scry being keyworded was a long time coming. Its been brought back again and again. Its simple, and reduces variance without adding card advantage. It can be a rider on the back of anything. As MaRo states in the article, they kept reinventing the wheel looking for more minor library manipulation. Scry has been the best execution of that premise since Fifth Dawn. I could go on about how cool it is to know that you're going to have a defined library manipulation mechanic in sets that you are building, but I'll shut up.
Intimidate is being replaced with Menace("This creature must be blocked by two or more creatures.") for variance reasons. Color based evasion has lots of problems. They are essentially the same problems that Landwalk brings to the table. The example used in the article is Lifebane Zombie. It was outrageous against green based decks...and virtually useless against most other decks. There wasn't some scheme to deal with it either. You just took three a turn until you died. Conditional unblockability is fine if there is some condition that is reasonable to meet. Menace makes your creature unblockable, unless they are willing to potentially lose two creatures. Intimidate's condition can't be played around.
In other words, Intimidate and Landwalk are high variance mechanics. In some games they do nothing. In other games, they are extremely powerful. There is nothing that the opponent can do in the face of these cards as beating swampwalk is a deckbuilding consideration. While I can see some argument that Landwalk in particular lends itself to smart metagaming, there are plenty of opportunities to have smart meta gaming decisions that don't necessitate high variance keywords.
The move of Protection to deciduous is perhaps the most saddening of the changes. Retiring Landwalk is historic. Its been around since the beginning. However, the game has grown beyond it. Protection will still be around, but it does have the same issues of variance that Intimidate and Landwalk have. The most used protection was protection <color>. That obviously has the same issues. The problem is almost entirely about static protections. Reactive Protection, a la God's Willing, is completely fine since its temporary and can be played around. Also, protection for other, more narrow things like Instants is largely fine since it most often leaves the card with other vulnerabilites. I'm glad that Protection wasn't removed altogether, but its probably for the best that it isn't something that they are forcing themselves to use.
Intimidate and Protection also had the problem of being confusing to newer players. Intimidate was much harder to use in a multicolor environment and also in a colorless environment. The article mentions morph, but its also bad against Eldrazi. Protection is a keyword that advanced players can still mess up since there are a lot of rules surrounding exactly what it does. Again, that's fine when there are cards out there that are worth the complexity, but not on something that you feel you have to use.
The changes are all a net positive. Magic as a game depends on variance. No two games play out exactly alike, and variance helps prevent some amount of lame duck situations since catching running draws is a very real thing. That said, too much variance and the game also starts losing fun. It becomes too swingy. The mechanics removed from the game are all high variance mechanics. They either do nothing, or blow your opponent out of the water. The addition of Scry is also anti-variance as it gives all of the colors a minor library manipulation. The only real concern here is that they don't want to overdo the reduction to variance, since it is an important part of the game. I don't think this is likely to happen, but reducing variance too much would lead to a less fun game.
Prowess is being added as a primarily blue keyword. Thus ends the long search for a blue creature based combat keyword...maybe. Wizards knows a lot more about Magic design than me, but I see a lot of problems with Prowess being slotted into Blue. First, Prowess wants you to be proactive. Blue is reactive. Prowess as a combat trick wants you to cast spells during combat. Blue has a number of instants, but most of them involve bouncing creatures, tapping creatures/etc. Essentially, Prowess works very poorly with counterspells, and only slightly better with Blue's suite of removal. All the Prowess creatures I can bring to mind and White or Red. Obviously there's a reason they thought it is good enough. It just always seemed contradictory to Blue's nature to me.
In summation, a solid selection of changes with the caveat that they are going to have to change how Blue works a bit in order to see Prowess stick.
No comments:
Post a Comment