Designing Suvnica, Week One: Leaving Town

We all know that you can take the cards out of the city, but can you take the city out of the cards? Much of what defines the established guilds’ identities is a natural extension of Ravnica’s conceit of a city-plane. The guilds' goals and means were crafted to fill roles in a city setting — government and police, churches and entertainment, economy and civil engineers, etc. Once the city was established as a hook in designing the set, the guilds’ identities naturally gravitated to filling the civic roles the setting demanded.

While we’re designing Suvnica, we’re going to start by working the other way around. Let’s avoid the assumption that we’re working with a city-plane where the guilds are the crucial cogs in the civic machine. In fact, let’s not even start conceptualizing the plane. Doing that will encourage us to push guild identities in a particular direction. I think that it would be more interesting to craft the guild identities in a vacuum, and afterwards trying to figure out what kind of world demands that these guilds coexist.

As a quick aside, I’m going to continue referring to the color pairings as guilds, for lack of a more generic-yet-evocative synonym. When coming up with possible identities for the color pairings, don’t lock yourself into thinking that the groups need to be structured to the point of being a “guild”. The formality is a placeholder for the time being, and one of these weeks I’m sure we’ll find a more fitting word.

So, the game plan goes as follows. Each week for the next five weeks, I’m going to pick two guilds for us to focus on that week. I’ll give my analysis of how the guild’s component colors influence its identity on Ravnica and propose an alternative approach, along with a few sample cards. The reader challenge each week will be to do as little or as much of the same as you want: describe a new identity for the color pairing and/or submit card designs. (There are more specific parameters for submissions at the bottom of the article.)

I haven’t yet formalized a schedule of which guilds we’ll be tackling each week, but I do have some guidelines in my head. I’m going to stick with one allied- and one enemy-colored guild per week, without overlapping colors between them. This week, for instance, is not-Blue week, so Orzhov and Gruul are up to bat. Also note that while the current plan is to tackle two guilds a week, plans may change to more or less depending on the volume of reader submissions.

Rethinking Gruul: Building from the (Stomping Ground) Up

Recommended Gruul reading:

1. It's Not Easy Being Green
2. Seeing Red
3. Aaaargh!!!
4. Designing for Gruul
5. Rage Agaist the Machine

As I alluded to in yesterday’s introductory article, many (though not all) of the guilds lend themselves to a means/ends division between their colors. I’ll be discussing how I see the current guild based on this model, and then I’ll flip the roles and try to describe my vision of the new guild.

Gruul, as it exists, has a very green philosophy: they seek a return to the natural way of things. However, their methods are incredibly red: an incredibly emotional mission of revenge on the guilds that disenfranchised them, unrestrained aggression against any obstacle standing in their way. At the end of the day, they’re the underdogs of the Ravnica story, written off by the other guilds until they start to get a little too unruly.

So let’s flip it.

Instead of red means to green ends, we now have a guild whose primary purpose is to tear down any restrictions on freedom, accomplished by being bigger, stronger, and more stubborn than anyone else. Instead of the underdog, we now have the bully. This is the guild that will pick a fight with you on a whim, regardless of how much of a threat (if any) you pose to them. No matter how wide the berth you give them when passing them on the street, they’ll go out of their way to shove you because you’re still in their way. Note that they don’t do this because they want you to know they’re stronger than you; they do this because they know that they’re stronger than you. What you know or think is completely irrelevant to them. And telling them what they can or can’t do is inviting yourself to the nearest cleric.

Rethinking Orzhov: It's Gold; It Doesn't Need to Glitter

Recommended Orzhov Reading:

1. The Great White Way
2. In the Black
3. Playing by Their Own Rules
4. Designing for Orzhov
5. Precious Gold

Ravnica’s Orzhov gathers power through the trappings of a church and religion, focusing on tithes and tribute, spirits and the afterlife, community and subservience. Its goals are black and its means are white.

Suvnica’s Orzhov, on the other hand, is a group that ensures society’s and civilization’s secured existence through selective assassination and dark sorcery. The heads of this guild meet routinely to determine the individuals and groups that represent the greatest threats to their utopian ideals, and determine how best to eliminate those threats.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it...

You’ll notice I didn’t give a whole lot of info on the new identities I’m proposing for these guilds. What's there can be summarized in just a few words (Gruul: the bully for bullying’s own sake; Orzhov: assassinations for the benefit of community). That was intentional. I don’t want to pin down a very specific creative identity for our new guilds just yet. We’ll keep this pretty loose the next few weeks. What’s more, my vision isn’t the only one you’ll be designing in. Designers are encouraged to create their own unique identity for each guild and play in that space. That said, here is the design challenge for this week:

Part One – Creative

You may provide a brief (4-5 sentence max.) description for a proposed new creative identity for either Orzhov or Gruul guilds (or both, if you want). Your creative vision should be distinguishable from their Ravnican counterparts, but should still feel like each of its component colors contribute to the identity in some way.

Part Two – Design

The actual design challenge here is simple: Start designing cards that fit into one of the new proposed identities for these guilds (either mine from the article, one of the ones in the comments below, or one that you contributed yourself). The cards you submit should resonate with the new identity that you’re designing for. You can do a bunch of submissions, and unless the volume of responses is overwhelming, I’ll try to discuss them all in next week’s article. If you’re doing more than a couple submissions, I suggest trying to mix it up by designing cards in different rarities, colors and creative identities.

There are two big limitations I’m imposing for now. First, don’t design counterparts to any of the Ravnica cycles just yet. This means no legendary champions or leaders, no guild artifacts, no guildmages, no cards in one color that give a benefit if you used the second color to pay for them. We’ll be doing plenty of work with cycles after we’ve finished a round or two of reimagining the creative identities, so if you have ideas for a guild cycle, save them. We will get there.

The second limitation stems from the first. We’re not looking for guild keyword mechanics yet. We will be doing that, and it will be a lot of fun, but for now we’re just starting to explore the guilds with fresh eyes, and I want identity to inform mechanics, not the other way around.

The submission cutoff is Thursday at 12pm Eastern. Feedback on other people’s designs is encouraged. I’ll be providing feedback as well.

Next week we’ll go over the proposed creative identities, take a look at the various designs, and discuss another challenge. Good luck, and have fun with it.

- Jay