Theros Review (Part 1—Multicolor)

The problem with reviewing a set when it first comes out is that all your opinions are speculation. No matter how talented or experienced you are at dissecting new sets and predicting card value, deck archetypes and how much fun it'll all be, you don't have the perspective born from playing with those actual cards in the actual environment and that will limit the value of your writing.

The flipside is that no one will care what you think if you write about it after everyone knows the environment. Unless you're not writing strategy tips, but instead analyzing the set for game design nuggets. Let's do that now, with a season of perspective under our belts.

Multicolor

Agent of Horizons and 9 more cards comprise a double cycle of common creatures with off-color activated abilities. These cards push players toward two-color combinations and help give direction in a draft without hurting a player's chance of casting her spells like gold cards do. For that reason, all five ally color pairs and all five enemy color pairs are represented—to keep the format interesting, we want at least those 10 decks to exist and have unique identities. Some of these cards are better than others (which is inevitable for a large cycle) and that might be an indication that Development thought the {B}{G} deck needed less help than the {U}{B} deck, for instance.


Along similar lines, Akroan Hoplite and friends form a 10-card gold cycle at uncommon. (Destructive Revelry stands out as the only non-creature—presumably Development thought {R}{G} had enough creatures, or just really liked what Naturalize-Spike was doing for the format.) Like the commons, these cards support a type of playstyle for a particular color pair. Unlike them, these uncommons are strong enough and focused enough to promote a more specific strategy. Chronicler of Heroes isn't just a dangerous flyer that can go in any {G}{W} deck like Setessan Griffin; while it is efficient enough, it's at its very best in a deck with lots of monsters, ordeals and the kinds of heroic creatures green and white specialize in.

We've got 10 more two-color cards at rare and 5 more at mythic. (Curiously, these rares are more open-ended than the uncommons, working at full power in almost any deck of their colors.) That's 35 cards across every rarity supporting multicolor play (not to mention the scry lands), which is a huge proportion of the set to dedicate to a theme. Why? Modern Design demands that adjacent blocks contain mechanical links to keep Standard evolving and interesting rather than devolving into Block v. Block as it has in the past. But Scars of Mirrodin only had four gold cards in the entire block. What gives? As an artifact set, most of its cards were colorless, making multicolor decks easy to build and making specific cards applicable to decks regardless of their colors. Innistrad block had 4 gold uncommons (one for each of the monster factions), 1 gold rare and 11 gold mythics between its three sets. Given that it had five two-color tribes, that's not a lot at all. Theros is clearly putting a much larger effort into playing with its neighbor.

I imagine that some combination of these things happened. The Ravnica team had a bunch of really sweet gold designs left that they wanted to follow up with; The design/creative/dev team was still subconsciously in gold mode and wasn't able to reset entirely; The idea of supporting deck archetypes with a few two-color-oriented cards got a little out of hand; and/or it turned out that Theros really needed gold cards—Perhaps WotC wasn't confident the set's mechanics were enough to excite people. If so, I think that was a bit of a mistake. Having so many golds cards in Theros makes Return to Ravnica less special in retrospect and hurts the set's own identity as it bleeds into last year's.

Were you surprised how much gold there was in Theros? Would you have used as much? What else strikes you about the use of multicolor in this set/block?