M13 Designing Terrain Part 2

The last post is pretty long on comments and I think it's time I checked in with you, so here are all the things the team has learned since Wednesday. I will be paraphrasing the contributors heavily as most of this gold is from their beautiful alchemy (as are the cards on the right).

Terrain should either be a plain ability word or presented without a label. I was pushing for the ability word so it would be easy to talk about and sell the mechanic, but if we're going to have variations on it (which may or may not be a good idea) then the ability word will lose meaning and value. Another alternative is to name cards with terrain similarly. This doesn't impact anything else so we can decide at the end of the project.

The quantity and distribution of terrain in the set is still up in the air. These are the options:

• A CCW cycle at common and a CW cycle at uncommon. This is my original proposal and is nice in that it requires only ten cards, covers each of the color-to-allied-land-type pairs once, lets us show simple and not-so-simple uses of terrain and the cycles are symmetrical.
• As above, except we don't force a consistent direction, putting some CW cards at common and some at uncommon. This breaks the symmetry, but allows us to print at least one cool idea (Champion of Purity and his nemesis) that we couldn't do otherwise. It also allows us to demonstrate that even though the color pair alliances are reciprocal, they aren't necessarily even. For example: Common — Wu Uw Bu Rb Gr; Uncommon — Wg Ub Br Rg Gw
• A CW cycle and a CCW cycle at common. Going the other direction, we could be even more symmetrical by weighing all ten cards evenly. One version of this proposal suggests half the cards are creatures and half are not.
• Not making a cycle at all, but selecting two enemy land types and putting terrain in the adjacent colors. Specifically, white has Terrain—Forest, blue has Terrain—Swamp and red has both. this allows us to show off ally color pairs with a minimum of cards. It also means we're not forced to design 10 terrain cards 'just because.'

None of those options exclude additional out of cycle cards at higher rarities, but set the expectation for the main contingent at common. Based on the work I've seen so far, I'm guessing the second option could win out, but I expect we'll try a few different tactics before we find what's best. Ultimately, the decision requires a more holistic picture than we have so far.

What about the actual execution of terrain? There's a compelling argument to make green cards that care about plains ideal for a different strategy than white cards that care about forests. That's the child of two ideas: if we make terrain cards strong in certain contexts, but not universally strong, the players who need them most will have a better chance of drafting them. We also want to enable enough different draft archetypes to keep things interesting. We can do that by giving white-splash-green a different focus than green-splash-white. That sounds like a lot of work, but most of it is already done for us simply because we're following the basic skeleton that's been carefully crafted over the last three core sets. For example, Wg tends to focus on winning in the air with white fliers while locking up the ground with green's champion blockers, whereas Gw is more inclined to drop meaty green bodies and close the deal with some help from white's tempo cards.

We don't want to muddy the allied-color-pair waters by printing bi-directional terrain cards, but we don't want to prevent three-color decks. As the core set lead-in to Ravnica 2, players should be able to play more colors slightly easier than usual in 2013, but the message of the set is about the way the colors view each other; we're not trying to rehash Shards of Alara which basically came with a sign that read "play three colors."

Two-color support possibly includes X spells that allow only two colors of mana (like Balduvian Fallen), land-count spells that count two types of land (think Corrupt meets Jaws of Stone) and double-terrain spells that require two lands of the specified type. I'm not in love with any of these yet, but we should definitely try them out.

We are considering enters-the-battlefield-tapped dual lands (with both land types) at uncommon. (I'd even like to test them at common just to see what happens.) There are a number of fancier alternatives as well, ranging from reprinting the Ravnica shock lands or the allied fetch lands to some more... creative solutions.

To capitalize on the feature of terrain that allows it to be turned on after the spell has been cast, permanents should either have static terrain abilities (like Kird Ape), triggered abilities (whenever ~ attacks) or "dies" abilities, but not ETB abilities (except for late game cards, where you're more likely to have found your splashed land). Spells with terrain are still an option but must account for the difficulty, timing and psychology (the Kavu Titan effect) involved.

We'll also be trying out Kird Ape at common, at least briefly. It really doesn't help to be conservative during the design stage. We won't find as many problems if we don't push some boundaries, but we also would guarantee mediocrity. Let's be bold.

Brilliant support cards include Awakener Druid (animating specific land types), Convincing Mirage (giving blue land-type fixing to compete with green), Evil Presence (to combat splashes), Path to Exile (now less good) and landwalking. We're also basing popular cycles like the enemy color hosers and the charms off of basic land types to further the basic-lands-matter theme.

Overall, I've seen more than enough potential to warrant moving forward with terrain. The next step in the plan is to complete a first draft of the white commons (and uncommons?) and actually playtest it to get a real feel for the deck. We'll see how that goes before working our way around the color wheel.