Designing Suvnica, Week 3: Birth, School, Work, Death

(5/16 Update: Something went kahblewy when I tried to check in on the blog from my phone this evening, and this page reverted to a very old draft. I'm reconstructing it from my RSS feed, and I'm hoping that the comments and the post stayed intact. If you see that your comment was lost, please repost.)
Alright. Four guilds down, six to go. Before we talk this week's guilds though, I wanted to start discussing something that came up in last week's design challenge.

So far, everyone has been pretty good about designing across different rarities. Out of the 70 cards sitting in the Suvnica file on my computer so far, we have about 25 commons, another 25 uncommons, 16 rares and 4 mythics. While a few of the submitted commons should probably be bumped up to uncommon, by and large everyone has been doing a phenomenal job with them.

At least when I'm designing cards, whether for Suvnica or Jay Treat's Weekend Design Challenge or for something else, I have to fight a compulsion to cram a ton of random cool ideas onto the card, which always pushes it to rare because NWO. Making commons that appeal to various psychographics, are evocative of flavor, are simple enough for New World Order, and aren't boring is not an easy task. It's especially challenging in this context, since the primary element of the design challenge is to demonstrate your vision of the color pairing, while differentiating it from Ravnica and other people's re-visions.

So here's my advice when designing commons for this challenge: don't make your mechanic carry all the burden for telling your card's story. Maro has talked about the concept of piggybacking in design. We can do that on a small scale within our visions. The description of the vision you're working in (whether it's your own or someone else's) tells a lot of the story of your card before it has any text whatsoever. Don't try to reiterate that entire story into your common spell's mechanics. Capture one aspect of it. If you feel like the result is too generic for the vision, try to get the cardname or the flavor text to pick up some of the slack.

I normally don't comment on my own sample designs, but this week for my two commons I'm going to walk through the thought process I have when getting my commons down on paper.

Rethinking Azorius: Light, Liberty, and Learning

Azorius Recommended Reading:

• The Great White Way
• True Blue
• Slow and Steady
• Designing for Azorius
• Makin' the Law, Makin' the Law

The Azorius are pretty much the entirety of the bureaucratic government on Ravnica. They are very white philosophically, using governmental trappings for the betterment and continuance of society. Their means are pretty blue -knowledge of the nuances of the law, using delay and control magic to effect their will, and empowering themselves through superior knowledge, mostly through obfuscation in their legalese.

Let's flip it. Suvnican Azorius (Suiroza isn't as catchy as some of the other guild mirror-names) are all about gaining knowledge. They do this communally, recognizing that group discussion and study increase their net gain of knowledge exponentially.

This is the guild of the Academy, where any who seek to better their minds are welcome. Mechanically, this is a guild that's going to care about accumulation of creatures (large groups of researchers and students delving into all manners of knowledge) and/or artifacts (relics for the study of magic, anthropology, art, history, etc.).

Common Design Process: Because of the combat-oriented nature of the game, I always start thinking about my Suvnican designs from a combat perspective: the vision I put forward has to have some element that lends itself to combat. The academics are not likely to go out looking for a fight, but in a world where the Dimir have a dangerous obsession with gaining access to their knowledge, they'll definitely be ready to defend themselves. I decided that students in the academy have to take shifts as guards to the walls of the academy and its archives. Since the students themselves are probably not the most reliable fighters, I settled on an enchantment that helps them with their guard duty. The magic that keeps them awake and aware throughout the night is represented by vigilance, and the untap is them sounding the alarm when intruders show up. I originally had a +1/+1 PT boost on there as well, but the other mechanics were already eating up a bit of space. I then used the cardname (Guard Duty was taken) and the flavor text to finish telling this cards story, showing one facet of the Azorius through the card.

(You'll see my rare Azorius card after we're done with the next guild)

Rethinking Golgari: Get it Faster

Golgari Recommended Reading:

• In the Black
• It's Not Easy Being Green
• Life and Death
• Designing for Golgari
• Green Thumb, Black Heart

Ravnica's Golgari are a philosophically green guild. They are very much about growth and expansion. They also see death as part of the lifecycle and something very natural, which is a very green outlook. They stray into black when they incorporate the death aspects of nature and lifecycles into they desire for growth.

For the Suvnican switch, we're looking for a guild that is philosophically Black ("get ALL the power") that uses green's tools to get it. Instead of playing in their obvious common ground (graveyard), let's look at green's more prominent tools. Green's biggest asset is accelerating natural processes. It gets bigger creatures for less mana. It gets mana faster.

I think that when we combine these concepts, we end up with a guild that recognizes and values the long-term power of nature and uses magic to accelerate so it's not so long-term. The guild harnesses the wilds, taking its resources (lumber, game, minerals, etc.) and undermines any competition to their exploitation by causing the organizational structures backing that competition (governments, corporations, alliances) to accelerate into their natural entropic/self-destruct stages much earlier than would normally occur (various means of ecoterrorism and corporate sabotage). I'm imagining the fantasy equivalent of a ruthless corporation that has an eco-friendly front.

I know I was only going to talk about the common design, but I did want to highlight these two cards. When I started thinking about accelerating natural processes, I immediately thought of how magically induced old-age could be done in both black and green. In black it's easy: kill the creature or saddle it with -1/-1 counters. But for the green element, I thought what if you immediately hit your physical peak, but quickly started aging. That lead to the Jack card, which is a nice (if slightly modified) parallel to Unstable Mutation. Unfortunately, I want to steer away from -1/-1 counters, so then I thought about reversing it, which is how Age Reversal came about.

Common Design Process: I designed the three previous cards before a common design came to me, and those were all enchantments. I knew I had to design a creature and I wanted it to be monogreen. I started looking through my vision description, trying to pinpoint what aspects green would care about more than black, and the ecoterrorism angle stuck out. I decided naturalize on a body would be right up Iraglog's (uchh) alley, so I gave him some appealing stats, a NWO-friendly mechanic, and called it a day.

Championship Round

So I didn't post my third Azorius design above. Here it is:

Yes, I know that's an absurd amount of words. Shut up. Academics are prone to being a little wordy. I'm posting it down here because for this week, we're expanding the design rules a little bit. This week, in addition to the normal design challenge guidelines, you're encouraged to design up to two guild champions/leaders. At least one of the two should be for someone else's vision of a guild, and you are allowed to design for any of the guilds we've covered so far (Azorius, Orzhov, Dimir, Golgari, Gruul, and Boros). When designing for someone else's vision, please let me know whose it is (the list of Gruul and Orzhov visions are here; Dimir is here; Boros is here; and this week's you'll have to read through the comments to see).

Here's the champion I designed for Chah's Gruul, because I am hopelessly in love with Wurm Druids:

Remember, we still haven't given any guilds keywords, so look try to play into the philosophy and/or mechanical themes that are already on cards or visions described.

I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.

-zefferal