Return to Return to Ravnica

Flavor, focus, fun. Those are some of the initial questions that designers ask when setting out on their independent set design. What's the flavor of the set? What elements of the game are going to come into focus? What makes the set fun? One of the reasons to attempt to "pre-design" Gatecrash is that Wizards has already provided us with the guidance to those questions. But to see it, we'll have to Return to Return to Ravnica.

Even with our M13 project, which had at least three well designed core sets to draw on for inspiration, Return to Ravnica actually informs our design of Gatecrash even more.

Return to Ravnica by the numbers:

• 18 multicolored cards per guild
• 29 cards per color
• Most guilds have another 8+ cards in their respective monocolors, but this is looser.
• 19 Lands, 13 artifacts
• 15 Mythics: One for each color, Two for each guild.
• 2 Planeswalkers

All of these things help to inform the set skeleton for Fakecrash. Now, it's by no means certain that the actual Gatecrash will follow these ratios exactly. One of the most surprising things is really the imbalance of "guild"  cards within the colors themselves. After all, it's obvious they followed pretty strict guidelines on everything else. However, for our convenience, the set skeleton I've created to work on Fakecrash will follow these guidelines as closely as possible. That makes it easier on multiple levels to focus more on "hole-filling" than having to create a guide from scratch. That said, to each guild their own.

Which brings us to the Guilds

If we were designing this all from scratch, one of the most difficult choices would be how to divide the guilds. Problem solved here. Let's look at the themes the original guilds brought to the table:

Azorius:

This guild is fascinating, especially because they don't have a "unique" feel from UW limited decks in traditional sets. Their guild mechanic, Detain, is basically a version of the Kor Hookmaster ability, and most of their creatures are just that: efficient tempo-style beaters backed up by flying. As Chah put it so well in his previous article, "Detain are mundane."

Detain is also interesting in that it isn't a "stand-alone" keyword. Unleash, Scavenge, and Overload all stand out on the cards; as keyword abilities, they often have costs associated with them or are immediately proceeded by reminder text. However, Populate and Detain are keyworded actions, which means they are used within the context of card or ability. But unlike Scry, Proliferate, or Populate, Detain requires a target. That buries it even more into the card text! It's an interesting choice that opens up opportunities to do something similar in Fakecrash.

Golgari:

Scavenge is interesting because it actually draws focus to two different aspects of the game: +1/+1 counters and the graveyard. The graveyard focus leads to cards like Cremate and Rest in Peace being generally useful, while the +1/+1 counters lead to actually focus the Golgari decks "away" from Rakdos. That's part of the oddity of this set, the two color push actually makes the guild mechanics want to be less synergistic rather than more. After all, scavenging onto a creature with unleash actually makes it unable to block, even if you didn't unleash it to begin with. (Strategy Tip: You can scavenge onto your opponents creatures ;) )

That isn't to say that you aren't playing Dead Revelers in your Golgari deck—you probably are, it's a very good threat—it's just that these things push you towards some decks more than others.

Izzet: 

Izzet went with Overload. Or to use the GDS nomenclature: dispersion. As Ken Nagle pointed out, this mechanic was part of his original submission in the GDS he "won". Part of the Fakecrash project is thinking about how we would design Gatecrash, but another part of it is using the hints dropped from Wizards to guess how they put it together. Why do I bring this up? Because looking at the design team can really inform what kind of mechanics appear in the set. Gatecrash was even Ethan Fletcher's first design team after winning GDS 2. GDS 2 was actually right during the design of RTR, so it's easy to think that the contest may have informed some of the choices for the block.

Selesnya: 

Selesnya's mechanic is deceptive in that it isn't actually Populate. Sure, that's the word that appears on the cards, but the true heart of Selesnya is tokens. Look at the numbers: Golgari has 5 green cards, 3 black cards. Selesnya has 3 white cards and 2(!) green cards. At least that's from the watermarks. The actual number of Selesnya cards is much higher, with 8 non-guildmarked cards producing tokens in green and white. Those cards play an important role in allowing a do-nothing mechanic be relevant. While tokens might not be as major a theme in the White/Green guilds of Gatecrash, drafters will want a few token-producers to bridge between "Sinker" and RTR once full-block drafting is in effect.

Rakdos: 

Unleash is a very clever mechanic, but one of the most important aspects is that it isn't parasitic. In Nagle's article about Scavenge and Overload, he pointed out that these mechanics will appear on maybe dozen cards or so. Detain: 9, Scavenge: 10, Populate: 11, Unleash: 11, Overload: 12. So they can't rely on having a lot of them to work. Rakdos is a poster child of this, with Unleash creatures being independently strong and having too many of them resulting in some fairly anemic blockers.

Odds and Ends

Defenders, Auras, Milling, and Gates are all other minor themes that get facetime in Return to Ravnica. Because of their "unaligned" role in the set, it doesn't seem that far fetched to believe that all of them will play a role in Gatecrash. That said, the role they play is pretty ambiguous. Sure, Dimir's going to get Milling of some kind, but what kind? (My mental jury's still out on Espionage being too parasitic.)

A lot of this is trying to put together the clues and leap to wildly unjustified conclusions. That said, I wonder if anyone in the comments can guess which mechanic I'm leaning towards for Simic based on the hints dropped in the article already.