M13 Designing Lair (4)

We saw a lot of solid arguments this last week and I greatly appreciate everyone's feedback. The Straight Plan is the most agreed-upon plan so we're going to proceed with that for now. We do have our eye on the possibility of replacing bond entirely with off-color activations (OCAs) so we're going to test the finished set as well as the finished set with those 10-15 cards swapped out. In particular, we're trying to get a sense of which mechanic looks and feels more natural and exciting and keep a close eye on board complexity. We'll go one way or another or possibly even switch to the Uncommon or Mixed Plan based on what we find.

Our subtitle will need to change, but let's wait until we know whether we're incorporating bond or excising it before we bother with that. For now, the goal is to complete the first draft of the entire set with bond on the straight plan and get playtesting. The core team should focus on that. If the rest of you are looking for an interesting design task to keep sharp on, please submit OCA cards here.

M13 Designing Lair (3)

What I've found is that there are justifications for different choices in each category but they're all interdependent on one another. Today I'm going to try to list the different groups of choices so that we can examine the pros and cons of each group rather than the individual choices.

M13 Designing Lair (2)

I want to try to summarize some of the great proposals that were suggested in part one, but first let me suggest that perhaps we are thinking too small with lair. Right now, [landtype] Lair means "As long as you control a [landtype]..." That's been working well for us, but we should at least consider the possibility of creating a more universal ability word. By replacing the [landtype] variable with the [characteristic] variable, the ability word now handles all threshold-1 scenarios. I found 23 common creatures with this set-up and 18 non-common ones, so it may be worthwhile to find one ability word that binds them all under the same verbal concept.

M13 Is Lair Good Enough?

While discussing how best to use lair in our core set, some fundamental concerns about the mechanic have been raised. That's great and I'll tell you why. First, it means people are thinking critically which is the very thing I asked them to do and the act of such thinking implies learning. We are realizing not only features (good and bad) of lair, but also of core sets, Magic and game design in general. Second, being aware of potential flaws gives us the opportunity to address them in design or—should they prove logistically insurmountable—back up and try something else entirely.

M13 Designing Lair (1)

I summarized the initial rules for the implementation of lair in Magic 2013 in this article, but I didn't get into great detail and more importantly, we didn't come up with final answers. Note that a 'final answer' can still be changed until the deadline if we discover a good enough reason to warrant making the change, considering the large ripple effect that will have on other cards. We at least need to agree to what we're doing for now or else different designers will submit (have submitted) different implementations and we're wasting energy designing in different directions.