Key Words of Love and Friendship

On Twitter, @wrongwaygoback is making a custom card set based on twitter-submitted designs. Each weekday, he posts a card with artwork and an empty text box, and challenges tweeters to come up with a design to match it.

The set theme is Love and Hate, and this week he changed his format: He's looking for a set keyword to represent love.

There are many resonant fantasy themes for cards that form relationships with other cards, and I'd like to explore some today.

The criteria of love reminded me of a card that I designed for an art-down contest last year:

I like the card because it tells a story - a story ripped from the song Puff the Magic Dragon.

However, the text is so long that I had to put the image at maximum size for this blog. In addition, the keyword does feel somewhat clunky and weird.

The reason the keyword looks clunky must be because there's multiple elements packed into it. I tried to pull out some elements out of the reminder text and onto the main card.

(Click on image to enlarge)

With this one, it's the Wizard that gets sacrificed. Now that I left it out of the reminder text, I can have variations like that, or not have any sacrifice at all.

The +1/+1 counter is still there to help remember the creature that was chosen. Also, I want the mechanic to have the flavor that the befriended creature gets bolstered through the friendship.

But using +1/+1 counters still feels weird because placing one on a creature usually represents a reward, not a cost or condition for an alternate mode. It's possible to use a "pact counter," "love counter," or a "friend counter" instead. That would make the intent clearer and the mechanic would look less weird. 

I do want to use counters that have a natural function if able. Trying to explore a little more:

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This example shows that Befriend doesn't need to be a cost reduction effect. 

Also, Befriend can work with a wider category of things like "Human," "white creature," or just "creature."

Finally, this example shows that if the card helps the creature it befriended, the +1/+1 counter doesn't feel so weird.

(Click on image to enlarge)

What a loyal friend. You can almost hear this guy imploring you, "Become who you were born to be!"

I think Elf Mentor is pretty good as a card that represents a parenting type of love, but there could also be a variant mechanic that represents a type of relationship between equal partners like a friendship or romance.

(Click on image to enlarge)

This is a Romeo and Juliet situation where if one of them dies, the other dies of despair. But I called it Bond because if I called it Love, it might disturb some people when the mechanic creates some controversial relationships between cards. 

This mechanic has some tension. You must judge whether or not to use the counters and risk getting 2-for-1ed. 

There's some tricky uses for it as well - you can choose to put the counter on a creature an opponent controls to create some war field dilemmas and drama.

However, this kind of tension isn't enjoyable for all players. It's also swingy because it has vastly different results depending on whether your opponent has removal or not. For a more all-upside card, I designed this. 

(Click on image to enlarge)

Once you kill a man or his pet wolf (or his buddy or lover, for that matter) the remaining partner attacks you with redoubled fury.

I like this one the best for the gameplay scenarios it produces.

This doesn't really need to put a counter on itself; it could just start out as a 3/2. But I had it put a counter on itself as well as its friend, because if there are two creature cards placed side by side that are marked with the same mark (a counter), it should feel like they're a special, linked pair.

The way it's worded, you can put both counters on itself to make it a 4/3 if you want to. I think that's a neat feature, but it might cause a dispute among players who just read it as ordinary English, so I may need to find better wording.

So, these are my keyword mechanics for love. There could be many more approaches, including ones that don't use counters, and ones that don't necessarily appear on creature cards.

I hope you enjoyed it, and please tell me which version you think works best for representing the concept of love.