Monday, March 11, 2013

Set Design: Unanswered Question #4

Today's question is back in Frontier, our wild west world. Many of our pitches for Frontier have suggested the gameplay theme of Battlecruiser Magic. However, we don't yet know which sorts of mechanics will make this work best. We also need to avoid designing Rise of the Eldrazi 2, which makes the resemblance of gold counters to Eldrazi spawn undesirable. So tell us, readers: how can we find a fresh new take on Battlecruiser Magic for Frontier?

40 comments:

  1. my question is, where does battlecruiser magic fit in with a frontier world setting? frontier and gold counters makes sense. magics version of guns, gambling, saloons, cowboys, standoffs / high noon shootouts, etc are all themes that come to mind. Im just curious why we settled on a "battlecruiser" theme?

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    1. The original pitch way back in Autumn involved cowvoys vs Eldrazi theme and it's kinda stuck. Does battlecruiser fit?

      I think it does, even if we leave the eldrazi at home (i.e Zendikar). A frontier world should have large desert area and wilds where large things roam. Whether their wurms, eldrazi or something new we can certainly buy the plucky little cowboys vrs huge predators.

      Speaking of Zendikar though it did eat some of our design piece with native american style vampires. Is there a new way we could bring indians into magic. Could they be the ones summoning large battlecruiser style creatures into existence through rituals? How about this as a card idea:



      Earthbound Ritual

      4GG
      Sorcery

      As an additional cost tap an untapped creature you control, then sacrifice two untapped creatures you control.
      Search your library for a creature with power 9 or more and place it onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.



      All numbers in this card were plucked out of thin air so they can easily be tweaked.

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    2. I suggested a while ago that the elves in this world have a Native American inspired theme.

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    3. Apologies, there's so much discussion going on with these world that I miss loads of stuff. Elves would be a fine choice for Native Americans. Did you post any ideas for mechanics/play styles that support Native Americans?

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    4. Just a side note, but I am not sure how I feel about using non-human characters as stand-ins for Native Americans.

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    5. Agreed. If anything, I'd want to see all sorts of classic fantasy races inhabiting the western world, just to see how they'd react.

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    6. Antny, no problem! i know it can be confusing i have forgotten things that we have discussed as well. I was actually thinking that it might be helpful to create a post similar to what MTGSalvation does every time a new set is revealed, where they slowly update "known info" about the set, like known mechanics, etc. Maybe something like that would be helpful here to keep all our ideas in line?

      Havelock: I agree, if we are going to utilize native american inspirations in the designs for the frontier set, we would have to make sure it was done properly, and not just be "native american flavor stapled onto a race".

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  2. I suggested an X/X version of Wurmfood from James Bartolotti's Frontier submission because it lets player's go big and try to one-up each other to dominate the board. (Also the token pre-exists, but hasn't been printed physically yet.)

    Wurmcall (X, Sacrifice this permanent: Put an X/X green Wurm creature token onto the battlefield. X can't be less than 6.)

    I'm not sure what the mana acceleration method would be, if it's not Gold. Dig seems like the popular choice.

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    1. Giving the titans of the set different power & toughness is an absolute must. Otherwise, we're either trading 8/8s like they were anything else or the game is ending.

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  3. i just think forcing battlecruiser may not be the best option here. to me it feels like we settled on repeating a style of play, and are not trying to force flavor to fit that play-stile. Why not try and come up with a unique style of play that better fits a western setting? (maybe something having to do with gold / resource management, or bounty hunting or fight over the control of lands? something more fitting to the setting)

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    1. As much as I still love the name Cowboys Vs Eldrazi, I'm starting to think Ekkremes wants to be the battlecruiser set.

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    2. Yeah, I think "Frontier doesn't need Battlecruiser Magic" is a perfectly good way for this discussion to end up. But I also wanted to poll people for ideas first.

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    3. I love the idea of battlecruiser for ekkremes, having that as a set where the creatures are constructing these giant "Battlesuits" gundam style (but a magic twist, as they would be clockwork or something.) but the "battlecruisers" could be those huge suits, and would be a definite different feel from eldrazi, while still able to be colorless if needed. something to explore. Cool idea Jay!

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  4. "Get a bunch of lands" fits the feel of the Frontier perfectly -- vast open spaces, with everyone trying to claim as much as they can. This variant on Dig plays into that, but with greater risk/reward:

    Goblin Prospector 2R
    Creature - Goblin (C)
    When ~ enters the battlefield, Dig 3 (To Dig 3, reveal the top three cards of your library, put all revealed lands into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.)
    2/2

    Explore the Frontier 1G
    Sorcery (C)
    You may plan an additional land this turn.
    Dig 2 (To Dig 2, reveal the top two cards of your library, put all revealed lands into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.)

    I like Wurmcall as a way to reward accumulating lands. We could also just include the giant wurms themselves:

    Big Sandwurm 5BB
    Creature - Wurm (U)
    Sinkhole - Whenever ~ deals combat damage to an opponent (or, when it attacks?), put a -1/-1 counter on each creature that player controls.
    5/5

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    1. I want Big Sandwurm to have that as an attack trigger- part of the reason for Annihilator was to act as a "mega-trample" that made chumping more difficult.

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    2. I'll note that as discussed previously it feels bad to dig and put your awesome card on the bottom. At the same time, we don't want to force players to lleave multiple cards on top when they're looking for lands. As far as I can tell we have three options.
      1. Make Dig X better than Scry X and let players choose top or bottom.
      2. Instead of a number, always dig until you hit a nonland (a la Treasure Hunt). In a normal limited deck this would give you about 0.7 lands on average.
      3. Do something entirely different with the mechanic.

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    3. I like treasure hunt!

      Dig (Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card. Put that card into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library.)

      Honestly, it doesn't make sense to me why you would Dig to find land. If anything, you should dig THROUGH land to find stuff. The nice thing is that this still allows you to fix mana by playing more lands than usual in your deck. Especially if there is an emphasis on lands that might make you want to play more than normal in your deck, Dig allows you to not run out of gas too quickly.

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  5. Battlecruiser magic is certainly compatible with Frontier, but as MaRo stresses again and again, flavor is more flexible than mechanics. We shouldn't force Battlecruiser magic into the set just because it's about claiming land. We need to get to the essence of the design, make it play like a Western film, and build things from there.

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  6. I wrote about why I thought the Battlecruiser Magic was good after seeing the Cowboys vs. Eldrzai pitch:
    http://goblinartisans.wikidot.com/the-holy-trinity-of-duel-gold-counters-eldrazi

    The gist of it is that mechanics mesh well together.
    1) Having Gold Counters in the set means you want something big to do with the accumulated mana from Gold Counters.
    2) The Showdown/Duel mechanic wants a wide range of casting costs to exist in normal play.
    3) The mutual card draw at the beginning of Showdown/Duel lets you keep making land drops every turn so you can cast the Battlecruisers.
    4) Showdown also helps Battlecruisers be more main-deckable in another way - by giving them a secondary use as Showdown/Duels trump cards even when they can't be immediately cast.
    5) For dramatic impact, you want Battlecruisers to be revealed in hand before they are cast.
    6) The combat in this set can be characterized by Bank Robber-style guys that generate Gold counters when not blocked. If a Battlecruisers is revealed in a player's hand, that can add interesting considerations to the combat decisions around these guys.

    This is the kind of thing I'd really like to have playtests for, because I believe it will be obvious how well the mechanics play well together once we have games with them.

    I'm a big fan of having Battlecruiser magic in a set with Gold Counters and Showdown/Duel. This is like having Wither and Persist in the same set, except even better, with 3 intertwined mechanics. Flavor is more flexible than mechanics, and I think this is a case where it makes sense to try to build an intriguing flavorful Battlecruiser entity that fits the Western world.

    I think Battlecruiser Magic would be awesome for this particular set because of this great interaction between the mechanics. I also think it's really wrong to support Battlecruiser just for the sake of Battlecruiser, because it doesn't fit every Western set, it just fits the set with Gold Counters and Showdown.

    It was actually stressful for me during the earlier stages of this project, because many people kept suggesting Battlecruiser as if Western sets had to be Battlecruiser, while discarding the mechanics I thought would be a reason to go into Battlecruiser for this set. However, I do think some of the variants based on land rather than Gold might work too.

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    1. Yeah, I didn't follow all the development, and I was surprised to see the battlecruiser-western connection at all. There's no reason why not, but it didn't seem a better fit than any of the other potential sets.

      In fact, Zendikar's "dangerous surprises" seemed a more appropriate feel for a western than Rise's "build up something massive".

      I agree that it could work well with gold and duels, though. (In fact, I can't remember who suggested it, maybe there should be an idea that accumulating enough gold lets you win, like poison in reverse. Either written into the rules or with enough cards that get a sufficiently large beneficial effect. You would have to ensure that gold-generating cards involved some risk and were answerable. And then you can spend gold for effects, but if there's a stall, it'll eventually be broken by one player getting 20 gold, maybe...)

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    2. I agree that combat in a Western set should feel sudden, dangerous, and full of surprises, even if it is Battlecruiser Magic.

      I think that is achievable by adding high stakes to combat (such as gaining Gold counters for unblocked attacks) as well as lots of surprise tricks during combat (such as permanent cards that also act as combat tricks when you permanently reveal it from hand), rather than making the games fast and short.

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    3. I'm still concerned that playing with revealed cards in hand isn't terribly easy. If you just have the card turned backwards, the opponent still can't see it very well; they need to ask to look at it. But this is an issue we could experiment with in playtesting.

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    4. I don't think the matter of seeing the cards is so different from having multiple suspended or imprinted cards in play. Many of these "permanently reveal" cards can be paraphrased as "Exile this card from your hand. It can still be cast as if they were in your hand" which most people would say is doable. It's not the version I want but it makes me think that at least some version of the permanently reveal mechanic is doable no matter what.

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    5. Friendly player in casual games often leave once-revealed cards permanently revealed as a courtesy (to speed up the game), but putting them face-up on the table. I'm sure that's what would happen with actual permanent reveal. My only concern is how easy will it be to forget that such cards are in your hand rather than in play, either accidentally or intentionally.

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  7. If we want lands to be important, this is a Battlecruiser mechanic we could have, which I posted before:

    Ivory Dunewurm 8W
    Creature - Wurm
    9/14
    Landnom (Sacrifice two lands you control: Return ~ from the graveyard to your hand.)
    Exile a land card from your graveyard: gain 3 life.

    Primal Dunewurm 8G
    Creature - Wurm
    12/10
    Landnom (Sacrifice two lands you control: Return ~ from the graveyard to your hand.)
    Exile two land cards from your graveyard: ~ gains trample until end of turn.

    Landnom is a Commander mechanic/Jarad rip-off.

    I think this will lead to exciting game play in a way that is different from Rise of the Eldrazi.

    Rise of the Eldrazi tried to control the number of effects that could kill huge monsters. Some of them like Oust could only get rid of them temporarily. Some like Vendetta cost you dearly when used on an Eldrazi. But here you can have normal kill spells like Murder, and there will be epic long games where you kill or recast multiple 8/8+ sized creature over the course of the game, or run your monster into theirs.

    Just having recast-able fatties doesn't ensure those epic games; it merely puts spells that can interact with those creatures off limits for the set's biodome. Those games can still be swingy. But I have some ideas for how to put more effects that help games develop into these Godzilla-scale fights without turning into "Oops, I didn't draw my removal or my battlecruiser, I guess I lose."

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    1. That's an interesting idea. I don't know if it's quite right or not, but I very much agree with the idea that "recasting giant monsters" is a good replacement for "making giant monsters less vulnerable".

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    2. I like it, hopefully the act of sacrificing lands to get it back means that you can't always cast it again immediately after it dies, giving your opponent an opening to attack and limiting repetitive gameplay.

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    3. Oops, when I wrote that recastable giant monsters puts removal spells "off limits," what I really meant was that it takes the limits off of removal; removal for giant monsters can be allowed in the set's biodome. I'm glad you guys seemed to understand anyways.

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    4. I agree. This definitely has potential for a different kind of gameplay experience.

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    5. I will note that we need to do something like "Sacrifice two UNTAPPED lands" otherwise you can always have a second casting by floating mana first, which makes it really easy to just lose to one of these. We want the players to actually have time between castings since the second or third will often be the final casting.

      As for the setup as a whole, the reason I hadn't looked back at it is because despite how well these mechanics play together I don't think we have good implementations of enough of them to actually build a strong set, and enough effort has gone into Showdown to convince me there might not be a good implementation that preserves the synergy.

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  8. This is a mechanic I posted before that enables land-based Battlecruiser Magic. It's based on James Bartolotti's Wurmfood mechanic, Jay's Gamble mechanic, and various Prospect mechanics people have suggested:

    Unassuming Wurm Bait 3G
    Creature - Ox
    2/4
    When this dies, you may prospect for Wurms. (Pay X to look at the top X cards of your library. You may reveal a Wurm card from those cards and put it into your hand. Put the remaining cards on the bottom of your library at random.)

    Land Prospector 2R
    Creature - Human Scout
    2/3
    Whenever ~ deals combat damage to an opponent, you may prospect for a Mountain. (Pay X to look at the top X cards of your library. You may reveal a Mountain card from those cards and put it into your hand. Put the remaining cards on the bottom of your library at random.)

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    1. Neat.

      Mountainous Eruption 1R
      Sorcery
      Add RRR to your mana pool.
      Prospect for a Mountain.

      Spelunking B
      Instant
      Prospect for a card.

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    2. I hate paying X to do something for X. Why can't it just be a fixed number, like 3?

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    3. The intention is that if you look harder, you are more likely to find what you're looking for. Also it's more flexible so if you have something else to cast that turn you can choose to pay only 1 or 2.

      I think it's worth looking it to lots of variations, though.

      What are some cons of using X?

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    4. The big con is that it's a nontrivial extra decision point every time you do it. How much mana do you want to spend on X? Well, it depends on what else is in your hand, but also on what else you might draw from your library. So you actually have to think about it, and that slows down the game.

      The other is complexity. Maro doesn't even endorse X spells at common; obviously that's an extreme position, but repeated X effects seems far more complicated.

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    5. Prospect for TYPE (Look at the top 3 cards of your library. You may pay 1 to look at another, as much as you like. You may reveal a TYPE card from those cards and put it into your hand. Put the remaining cards on the bottom of your library at random.)

      The problem being that this reminder text is massive.

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    6. I like this a bit better, but it still creates multiple decisions. If we want a variable, it should be the number of cards, and we should only use Prospect for a single type. Or it could let you choose a type. So:

      Prospect N (Choose a card type, then look at the top N cards of your library. You may reveal a card with that type and put it into your hand. Put the remaining cards on the bottom of your library in any order.)

      I'm still not sure this captures the flavor of prospecting. If we want it to be like hunting for gold, shouldn't it be more like:

      Prospect N (Reveal the top N cards of your library. For each land among them, gain a gold counter. Put one on top of your library and the rest on the bottom in random order.)

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    7. Actually, the pay-1-more loop is very prospect-y: You've seen three cards, but didn't get lucky. You can pay just 1 mana and maybe get that extra card. You look and it's not there. Now you've eliminated four cards, increasing the chance that paying one more will win you the prize. And so on, until you've wasted your life baking in the Arizona sun with nothing but a worthless claim and a pan to your name.

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    8. That's... not an experience I want to put players through.

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    9. I'm expecting that there are going to be lots of mechanics that create sudden surprises during combat for his set. As a Western set, it should have those. Also, I'd really love to have showdown for the set. Even though those mechanics will be strategic, some players are going to feel that the whole set is about unpredictability and luck.

      So I wouldn't want the Prospect mechanic to be just a random number generator. I'd rather have it be a way for players to calculate their odds and strategically set up their draws. (Like make sure players get to draw their battlecruiser card or their land.) If you get to control the amount of mana you pump in (and thus your odds of hitting something), you feel that it's less about luck.

      If there's a flavor mismatch with Prospecting for a Sandwurm, we could change the "Prospect for __" mechanic to "Seek for __" or something general since it might be useful in other blocks too.

      Since none of the other mechanics are locked in yet, we don't actually have to worry about an overload of luck-based mechanics, but I think it's something to watch for.

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