Goblin Lore: Red Looting

Welcome to Goblin Lore! In the spirit of the namesake card, each column of Goblin Lore will focus on a particular design question, and offer four (approximately) possible answers to address that question. Unlike the card, you get to choose which ideas to keep and which to discard!

The recent Great Designer Search 2 directed competitors to write several essays on Magic design, one of which was, “Choose a mechanic to move from its current color to a new one.” A number of the contestants, including finalist Shawn Main, suggested that “looting” be moved from Blue, a color with many supporting mechanics, to Red, a color with relatively few. Looting, which originated with Antiquities' Jalum Tome, moved into Blue with Weatherlight’s Merfolk Traders, and is now present on many Blue cards including the iconic Merfolk Looter, is the act of drawing a card and then discarding one. Unlike other Blue card draw abilities, looting does not provide card advantage, but the ability to filter through unwanted cards does improve card quality. Magic R&D has responded that they are indeed considering the shift from Blue to Red. The question, then, is how should looting function in Red? Here are four possible approaches.

The first implementation for looting in Red already exists: draw and then random discard, in the proud tradition of Goblin Lore. Although it’s been reprinted, Goblin Lore is actually the only card with the ability. Fortunately, Red has also has tutors that also use the random discard effect, such as Gamble and Wild Research, so there is precedent. However, randomly discarding your own stuff has two problems, which probably explain why the effect isn’t used more. First, random discard has fiddly little actions – you can’t resolve it yourself, you need to roll a die or get help from your opponent to ensure it’s random. Second, getting the card you want and then having to immediately discard it isn’t fun. Making such a play “right” from an expected value perspective might lead to unhappy players too often.

The next possibility is to use looting in Red exactly the same as in Blue: draw a card, then discard a card. This has the advantage of being simple and card advantage-neutral, which gives Development a lot of freedom on power level. The mechanic has also been extensively tried, tested, and proven to work well on cards such as Merfolk Looter, Probe, and many others. The biggest downside of this approach is that drawing a card, then choosing the least useful one to discard, is a very logical and calculating action. It makes a lot of sense in rational Blue, but not as much in wild and gambling Red.

A way to put the gamble back into looting is to discard first, then draw a card. Now you don’t know if the card you’re going to draw is better or worse than the card you’re discarding! This slightly weakens the ability in most situations, since you have fewer choices on which card to get rid of. However, if you happened to have no cards in hand when you used the looting ability, you’ll have nothing to discard, and you draw a free card! Although drawing extra cards isn’t in Red’s slice of the color pie, drawing one card is just a cantrip, and this effect functions similarly to Red’s popular “Hellbent” mechanic, which operates when the player has zero cards in his or her hand. Furthermore, this type of mechanic has precedent in Red – Classic Red card Wheel of Fortune caused all players to discard their hands, then draw seven new cards, and variants have been printed as recently as Chandra Ablaze in Zendikar. Blue has used this type of looting before, but only in very old cards, such as Windfall, or cards where the discard is a cost, such as Compulsion, which make the Hellbent effect impossible.

A final form of looting that makes sense in Red is to discard more cards than are drawn. The best known example of this mechanic is Bazaar of Baghdad: draw two cards, then discard three. Although this mechanic involves the same sort of optimality calculations as the second type of looting described above, and might seem Blue, the sacrifice of long-term card advantage in exchange for getting better cards now is very Red. Only Attunement, Magus of the Bazaar, and Wistful Thinking have done this in Blue.

Overall, each of these approaches to Red looting has some merit, but prior to playtesting, I favor the third option: discard a card, then draw a card. This implementation keeps the main function of looting in Limited, card selection, but gives it a characteristically Red feel. Most of the time players will simply trade a bad card for a chance at a good one, but occasionally receive the Red Hellbent benefit from living on the edge. The third and fourth options could also combine to create Red card draw spells (discard four cards, then draw three), or provide a downside on a fat Red creature reminiscent of Balduvian Hordes (when this enters the battlefield, discard two cards, then draw a card).

For next week: looting is one mechanic that could be interesting if moved from one color to another. If another mechanic were to be moved to a new color, which mechanic should it be, and why?