M13 Trajectories: Balefire Phoenix

Welcome to M13 Trajectories, where I pick a card from Goblin Artisans' M13 design files and discuss how it changed over the course of design. In our work on this virtual M13, many cards were completely transformed from their original design through the contributions of multiple people. I think it would be fun to follow the different iterations they went through. Today, I'd like to talk about a card that began its life like so:

(Click on image to enlarge)

This Phoenix was submitted by Pasteur. In the vein of Shivan Phoenix, it's very hard to kill, much like the other phoenixes. This is a card where our opinions differed quite a bit —

11/28 Jay: If it’s not literally broken, I love it. 

12/5 Nich: Since Shivan Phoenix never set the world on fire (haha) I think we’ll be fine. I really like the simplicity of this design and even the size of the creature. Red’s medium sized Flier should be a firebird and its big flier a dragon. 

12/8 Chah: I think the cost range really matters. Some blunt effects aren’t fun at lower costs, even if it’s scaled down in size. 

12/8 Pasteur: To me, the lack of haste is the important thing keeping this fun-but-fair. 

12/19 Jay: Might need 3RR, but we’ll decide in Dev. 

12/31 Jay: Successfully Arrest’d or Judge Soul’d* this, but it’s probably busted against non-white players. 

1/1 Nich: It’s okay if it’s busted in limited. Rares do that. And it’s only a 3/3. 

1/1 Jay: A 3/3 _flyer_ for just 4 that _never_ dies! 

1/2 Pasteur: You bertoncini’d this to your hand, right? Not back into the battlefield?

*Judge Soul is a sorcery with "Exile target nonwhite creature" 

Those who liked it seemed to appreciate how the card reads simply and powerfully. Magic is a collectible game. Cards should be likable and read well. A card that reads as if it never dies would be very appealing to some players.

On the other hand, Magic cards need to play well. It's a game, after all. Some of us were concerned with the card's Limited implications. Most Limited decks are unequipped to deal with this.

Although we didn't go deeply into the topic, one underlying point of contention seems to be, "Are Rares allowed to be 'busted' in Limited?" My answer would be, "Yes, but it has to be the right type of 'busted.'"

It's true that many Constructed-level Rares are in fact blatantly powerful in Limited, and that's not always a bad thing. Those Constructed Rares can often double as Limited bombs, which are important because they give new players hope that they can win. They also make opening a draft pack exciting for new and experienced players alike, and due to their infrequency, they add variety to the Limited experience in many ways.

That said, some types of bombs produce more overall unfun than fun. Cards with infinite recursion ability are a troublesome category for Limited because they stagnate the board and make game play repetitive. In Magic games, the board should fluctuate over the turns. This Phoenix is an endless recursive card that is just big enough in the world of core set Limited that I can't effectively attack into it, and it's a threat that I can neither ignore nor answer. I feel that designs that make Limited miserable should be avoided, even at Rare, unless the card is special or valuable for some other purpose.

It's ok for Rares to win people games, but it's the style of doing so that matters. Creating repetition and grinding people out with something that can't be answered by most decks isn't fun overall. A proactive bomb such as a Dragon or Angel (but not necessarily limited to fatties like that) is more fun overall, even if that card is stronger than the Phoenix. Also, the feeling that it can potentially be killed or outraced with cards in your deck is important. If such a card can't be effectively killed, development should try to ensure that it generally enters play only after both players have had many turns of normal attacking.

If Balefire Phoenix did something important for Constructed (like a Planeswalker or some other format defining card), it might be worth the cost to the Limited environment, but to me it didn't seem to have enough impact for Constructed. When people are playing Titan-strength win cons, you can't grind out the opponent with a recursive 3/3 flyer.  (Later I learned from Pasteur that he envisioned this card to be used for a multicolor control deck that wins with only a few offbeat win conditions, which is interesting to consider.)

We moved it to 4R, and this is Jay's comment from that time:

1/3 Jay: The people who want this most don’t care how expensive it is.

The main appeal of the card seemed to be the simple and powerful-sounding line of text, and casual players who like that often don't care so much about costs.

I didn't think costing it at 4R was enough for core set Limited, though. I thought Magma Phoenix from M10 and M11 was a good point of comparison.

This is much clunkier to recur than Balefire Phoenix, often requiring a player to skip a turn to return it to hand before spending another turn to recast it.

In my experience, Magma Phoenix has been powerful but often outrace-able, because the 3-point damage affects the caster as well. If the caster of the Phoenix is behind in the race and just wants to repeatedly block and trade with it, it can culminate in a free Lava Axe for the aggro player. Magma Phoenix ensures that the game ends one way or another. In contrast, our Balefire Phoenix might lead to a board stall, in addition to being a threat that can come back every turn rather than every other turn.

Since I'm not averse to unfair, unanswerable things happening much later in the game, I tried proposing a humongous late-game version of Balefire Phoenix. I can't find the original card, but I think it was something like this:

(Click on image to enlarge)

It didn't fare well; someone commented that it didn't feel like a Phoenix at that size. I guess it was a purely mechanical fix with no flavor.

Another way to balance recursive cards is to set a condition or a hoop to jump through, like Vengevine, Chandra's Phoenix, or Gravecrawler.

Hoops are awesome. They allow Magic cards and Magic decks to each be good in their own way without power-creeping the heck out of each other, as it's possible for a card with a hoop to be tournament-caliber yet not be an automatic inclusion for a deck of that color due to the nature of a given hoop.

Another thing that's great about cards with hoops is that they can be powerful in Constructed where you can control the contents of your deck, without being broken in Limited where you don't have that level of control. As a bonus, they can inspire you to draft around them in Limited, and it's fun to have a direction like that in a draft.

One important aspect of these recursive creature designs is that R&D took pains so that the cards don't inspire a slow grindout strategy. These creatures make you want to use their recursion for offense, and your opponent can hit you back in a normal attacking strategy. Even abilities like haste, a pure bonus, help games move in that direction rather than towards stagnation.

I tried to think of a hoop for Balefire Phoenix, but it was difficult to come up with one that didn't outright resemble Chandra's Phoenix or a Skaab Ruinator that exiled spells instead of creatures.

However, I thought the card could be fixed by randomess:

(Click on image to enlarge)

I was inspired by the card Hanabi Blast to make the recursion luck-based. You can keep recurring the Phoenix forever if you're lucky. If you want to get clever, you could manipulate your graveyard somehow to ensure the Phoenix keeps returning. Better yet, you could form a combo to cast a Cruel Ultimatum or another powerful Red spell without mana. The RRR in the cost is to make sure it's not too easy to reduce variance by playing only a few Red cards in your deck.

Jay Treat pointed out two issues with this card, though. First of all, the Phoenix might be "reborn" into something that doesn't make flavor sense (say, a Goblin or a Faithless Looting card). More importantly, Red usually doesn't get permanent cards back from the graveyard. Arguably, this is a case where the randomness makes it ok, but I could see his point. Jay proposed a fix for those issues by changing the card concept as well as making it only work with instants and sorceries:

(Click on image to enlarge)

We ended up with a card that I think most of us are happy with. I think it's very resonant. (We still don't have a recurring Phoenix, although we do have a different Phoenix at uncommon.)

I hope you enjoyed this. I will continue this column every Monday and Friday until our fan M13 is released at the end of May. See you next Monday, when I talk about a card that ate up a lot of our brain space through flavor discussion.