Going For Gold

Ever since Devon Rule first proposed them in the Second Great Designer Search, we've seen Gold Counters pop up in all sorts of design propositions, always with implementations very close to the original. We can do better.

Get it? You spend mana and pay life. Those are verbs you can use with money! I don’t want to sound too harsh on Devon’s implementation. It’s actually a great mechanic, but I don’t want to use it because it has very similar yet inferior gameplay to Eldrazi Spawn.

Recently gold counters have been suggested for the gambling-heavy Frontier and the potentially ambition-based Ankh-Theb. Flavorfully speaking they’re great fits, but we need a new mechanical implementation. What have we got?

Well, generally you don’t just spend money, you spend it on something.

Hiring a Mercenary

That’s an awful lot of rules text for a counter, but the Act of Treason effect is pretty grokkable, so it might be doable. Every implementation comes with different gameplay implications. For this version:

1. You need to earn a lot of gold.

Just one gold generally won’t do anything, and to qualify as a real bonus effect, it shouldn't be that hard to earn six or more gold counters over the course of a game.

2. Decks that generate gold have to want an Act of Treason.

This requirement mostly consists of rewarding players for hitting their opponents and getting past blockers. One easy way to accomplish this task is by making the gold archetypes aggressive, but including a bunch of saboteur triggers á la Scroll Thief could work too.

3. It needs to fit in the color pie.

New mechanics often demand a bit of color pie stretching, but this version would never make sense with, for instance, a mono green gold generator. Red is a shoe-in, and blue and black are plausible stretches. A typical GOLD COUNTER B producer might look something like this:

Of course, there are other reasons to pay people…

Compensation

This version falls closer to Detain from a color pie perspective and leads to some more flexible gameplay. Unfortunately, allowing instant speed activation makes it pretty difficult to make stealing gold possible.

Cards that want you to keep hitting your opponent still work well—in fact, they may work too well. Having multiples likely means that your opponent is going to have an awfully hard time ever blocking again, and trying to race probably won’t work out much better. None of which means that it couldn’t work, just that we need to reconsider how gold is obtained.

A Step Back

Both of those options are reasonable things to spend gold on, and I’m sure you all can think of many more, but I’m not so sure that having gold is actually about spending it. If that’s what we wanted money for, why would millionaires spend so much of their time preoccupied with getting more of it?

Gold is really about acquiring more gold.

This version obviously falls into white and green’s domain, and maybe you could push for black just because the greed is such good flavor. Each piece of gold you have makes additional pieces more valuable, which pushes gameplay in the right direction, but also makes the mechanic fairly parasitic. In order to offset that, most gold enablers should be able to earn multiple counters over the course of the game. Of course, that level of life gain will mostly keep the mechanic out of common.

Is there a better way to represent gold as something hoardable?

Winning at Life

At the end of the day, maybe well-to-do people don’t want more money for a purpose. Maybe people want enormous quantities of money just to have it, as a measure of “winning” at life. Jack had a similar idea in one of the Frontier discussions.

The reverse poison is pretty cool, but a win condition that can’t be interacted with isn't that appealing to me. That could be solved by making the only way to get gold be through combat triggers, but at that point gaining 10 gold by attacking would play exactly the same as giving an opponent 10 poison. We need something different.

Greed isn't about having what you set out to get; it’s about having it all. How can you do that if somebody else has stuff too? This mechanic isn't really defined from a color pie perspective, which allows gold to be a major part of its environment if we let each color interact with it in different ways.

Another Way

But there’s a whole other approach I hadn't considered until recently.

The gold doesn't have to do anything on its own. Take Chah's idea for Soul Counters from the most recent Weekend Art Challenge. They could act as partial emblems generated by whatever card made them while still playing into the hoarding aspect. In fact, this setup allows everyone to spend money differently, which hits its flavor better than any one implementation could.

There are a million options I haven’t touched upon; come up with some! Gold counters can do a lot more than fill in for Eldrazi Spawn and we won’t know if we should use them until we explore the design space of beneficial player counters.