Tuesday, February 25, 2014

A Set in Four Cards: Shadows of Lorwyn





25 comments:

  1. I'm excited that the Eventide tribes are making a comeback! Still, all ten in one set is an awful lot; RTR only did five at a time.

    Will there be some sort of tribal division in the Day/Night cards? Or are they orthogonal?

    Day has some degree of "negative parasitism": it gets stronger outside of its own block, where there are no Night cards to turn it off.

    "Affinity for elves" is definitely something they should print eventually.

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    1. Lorwyn 2.0 would still be a tribal set, obviously, but without the same saturation that ended up hurting limited the first time around. I played around with evolving the mechanical identity of the tribes from Lorwyn, and elves primary mechanical ID was "number of elves matter." Affinity seemed like a good, popular/infamous returning mechanic that would be a natural fit.

      Day/Night would be present in all colors and most tribes, but with some colors and tribes favoring one or the other. At least in the first set of the block it would mostly function as a kind of kicker, making permanents stronger temporarily and sometimes once again, but without being pushed to the point of being negatively parasitic (like shadow).

      The non-lorwyn tribes like Noggles, Spirits, Scarecrows would be present in small numbers but without much tribal support the way the lorwyn eight would have.

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  2. I'm not sure day and night really follows the flavor of lorwyn. the night version wasn't weaker it was just more mana deprived and sinister.

    helping the witch is very problematic as it is the card pacifism without any indicator. very awkward. I'm not sure what the noggle is trying to say other than. we printed a low profile johnny mill rare card which may or may not have full support in the set.

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    1. There are also cards with night (hinted to in the reminder text.) The two keywords work in tandem to catch the flavor of the Lorwyn's shift between the two states.

      Helping the witch is a top-down fairy tale card, which would be a more prevalent theme than just all-tribal-all-the-time. It's useful in limited and fantastic in multiplayer. Memory might be an issue. I could word it as an enchantment with flash, but I think that creates more problems than it solves.

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    2. I love the idea of reworking Lorwyn to be principally a top-down Fairy Tale set and secondarily tribal.

      Not convinced helping witches is a big enough trope to put at common, nor that this card feels like helping a witch.

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    3. I understand that there are night cards. but the idea of group of cards that get weaker at night doesn't fit the flavor theme of lorwyn. things get scarier at night but things were dangerous in the day too.

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    4. Lorynian (During Day, this creature gets +1/+1. During Night, it has wither.)

      Or something along those lines, where both are positive, but in different ways.

      Wither probably never shows up again, actually.

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    5. What makes you say that? Wither is an elegant and fun mechanic, probably the best thing to come out of the whole mega-block, and MaRo's stated that Infect's existence doesn't preclude the return of Wither.

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    6. On Helping the Witch, it would be easy to track as an Aura with flash and an enters the battlefield trigger.

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    7. Has he? I had assumed otherwise. Regardless, if we marry Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, only one counter type can survive and boy howdy does WotC love +1/+1 counters.

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    8. http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/68739215945/can-wither-return-or-is-it-going-to-be-infect-from-now

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  3. I'm fascinated by the day/night counters idea. It seems like a good way to do two global modes, something people have struggled with in the past. I like the idea that multiple day creatures stack up, but you might also want to save one to respond to a night creature turning them all off.

    On the other hand, having day/night counters on creatures may be confusing and annoying to keep track of. Are day counters placed on non-day permanents? I wonder, could you do something similar with +1/+1 counters (although it would probably need to be one max, rather than accumulating multiple counters, or it would be too similar to allies/slivers). Or have a central global state somehow.

    And I ackowledge the problem Havelock pointed out, it would be nice if day/night switch interacted with things outside the block (like werewolves flip back when opponent plays two spells, without them needing special cards.)

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    1. The counters could be a lot of bookkeeping (Lorwyn will be forever plagued by complex board states). It would help if there weren't a prevalence of +1/+1 counters in the set, and also if the counters didn't end up on things without the keyword, as I imagine they wouldn't.

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  4. Day/Night counters sounds like a lot of busywork to me. It also makes Vorthos-Jay sad because it doesn't work the same way day/night work on Innistrad. More importantly "glare flare" is awkward.

    Dreglooting Noggle is weird, but I suppose any rare noggle has to be.

    Gilt-Leaf Purifier is perfect.

    Helping the Witch feels like its straight out of a multiplayer product.

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    1. Glare flare bothered me too after publishing. It was originally a warrior and named Dawnglare Warrior, but after finalizing the mechanics for the four, I started playing around with classes and changing names accordingly. That slipped through the cracks.

      I'm think the busywork can be managed through design and development, but I'm going to take a stand right now and say that a) Day/Night mechanics should not be tied to DFCs and b) DFCs should not be be flavored as day/night switches in every set they show up in.

      Re: Noggle - I wanted the shadowmoor-exclusive tribes to show up (I'm envisioning this as a standard big-small-small block, no structure shenanigans) but without too much tribal baggage. Showing off a kooky Johnny rare seemed like a good place to demonstrate.

      Helping the Witch is designed for multiplayer, useful in limited, and keeping with fifth age of design sensibilities in turning Lorwyn into more of a fairy-tale block than a tribal matters block.

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    2. I agree that DFCs shouldn't always be day/night switches. That's the big picture reason I can think of to do day/night somehow else in other places. Still, when Werewolves and Dawnglare Flarecaster appear in the same game together one day, it will be a flavor fail (at least it might be funny).

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  5. I'm not sure having cards just switch day/night back and forth is the best approach, but even if it is this seems like way more busywork than it needs to be. Make something like an emblem and flip it back and forth.

    Day (If there's no Day/Night Emblem, get one. Flip the Day/Night emblem to day.)
    As long as it's day,...

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    1. Have to disagree. Busywork > unclear board states. If I can't glance at the board and know which creatures are enhanced by nighttime (counters = modified), I'll forget what mode a given creature is in more often.

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    2. That's true insofar as it goes, but I think it's an easier issue to remedy. I'm thinking frame treatments like the enchantments in Theros to make it obvious what's Day or Night affiliated, but maybe it's too tough to make the emblem clear. There are bound to be other tokens, so we'd probably need to replace basics like the checklist card in Innistrad. Alternatively, a card that's face up for Day or face down for Night seems pretty intuitive. Regardless, point taken.

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    3. "Basics…"
      What if the basic lands came in day and night varieties (either differentiated in non-functional ways like art, frame treatment and watermarks; or in functional ways like snow lands) and we used those either to track whether we're in day/night, or to /determine/ whether we're in day/night?

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  6. Why use image renders instead of text if there aren't going to be images? It adds a nonzero amount of additional time to loading.

    I don't hate day/night aside from the parasitism issue, but alongside both tribes and hybrid mana it feels like too many variables to care about crammed into a single set.

    Having dudes with an affinity for dudes you control feels very win-more.

    The regenerate clause feels weirdly tacked-on solely for the purpose of multiplayer. In a duel, you can regenerate something and it can't attack or block...or, you could just let it die, and it still can't attack or block. It took me 3 reads before I realized you could just cast this on something with no imminent "destroy" effect and still get the Pacifism bonus, because it works completely unlike Debt of Loyalty.

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    1. The fact that you can regenerate something that isn't about to die is something new players have a terrible time with, and this card relying on that is bad juju.

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    2. "Prevent all damage that would be dealt to target creature (you don't control) this turn..." ?

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    3. @Jenesis - I like the renders better than writing it out - It's a personal preference, but a card makes more sense to me when I see all of its elements where they belong, even if it's otherwise missing art.

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    4. I assumed on the other hand that Helping the Witch was a mistemplating of a Debt of Loyalty-style effect, and assumed it should have had "When that creature regenerates this way".

      As for renders, I guess it depends on how visual a personality you have. From pure practicality there's not much difference (though it can make a difference to see a name, or some text, put into a text box to see how well it fits, and similar). A lot of people really prefer seeing their custom cards mocked up as renders though, even without art.

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