Artifical Constraints

[Wizards of the Coast safe]

When we last left Tesla a couple of weeks ago, we were discussing mechanics that encourage playing artifacts in a different way than Magic has before. You delivered a plethora of options, but I'm not going to be discussing any of them in detail just yet. Today's topic is closely related and ought to have come first.

Riddle me this: what is an artifact?

That's Easy!

They're those colorless permanents.

Okay, maybe they're defined by tapping for effects.

Or, uh, have activated abilities of some kind.

Okay, well at least they have a continuing impact on the board, right?

Okay, sure, but I'm picking and choosing my examples. Magic breaks its own rules all the time. How many of these are emblematic of real identity crises? To answer that I want to take you all the way back to the start.

In the Beginning

It used to be that artifacts came in three types:

(Or four if you count artifact creatures)

94% of them have continuing impact on the board.

72% have "activations" (they weren't clearly delineated back then).

100% of them are colorless.

And perhaps surprisingly, 100% of them care about being tapped.

Back in the day artifacts' abilities turned off when they were tapped.

Of course, most players haven't been playing since Alpha, so rather than prescribe our future decisions based on nostalgia, we should figure out where artifacts should go in the future.

One Step Forward...

That hasn't always been how the decisions were made. Back in Mirrodin design R&D was considering consolidating artifact functionality, but they decided against it because they felt there was too much precedence to lose in Howling Mine. So instead they opted for these:

Admittedly, it's easy for me to sit here and criticize this decision more than a decade later. Back then nobody had good data on who exactly played Magic and Wizards assumed the playerbase mirrored the ones they saw at tournaments.

Nowadays we know that while the average player plays for a very long time, they also haven’t been playing all that long. Magic has seen huge growth of late, and if we’re planning on more of that in the future the game needs to be the best it can be for the long term rather than adhere to precedent.

That said, giving up some varieties of artifacts would result in player backlash. As such, I think an artifact-centric set is actually the wrong time to discontinue Etherwrought Pages. We should do that years beforehand so that when Mirrodin III: Karn Does the Time Warp Again finally comes out it matches player expectations for artifacts rather than fighting them.

Of course, the good folks at Wizards know their craft. If it were trivial to give artifacts their own identity they would have by now. So let’s see what we’re up against.

What do we even want?

All this time I’ve been talking about giving artifacts more identity, but I haven’t proposed what exactly that identity should be. If we decide to make them colorless, it rules out our opportunity to return to Alara. If we make them tap, equipment look out of place. If we make them have activated abilities, we lose the ability to print simple artifact creatures like Bronze Sable. If they need to continuously impact the game, it becomes nearly impossible to print an artifact-matters set under New World Order.

And no matter how we constrain their identity, we miss out on callbacks to something players liked. Well, unless we’re particularly clever.

First, let’s see which concerns we can address.

It’s simply not worth giving up equipment to make all artifacts tap. Nor does it add much definition to do away with Spellbombs. So the real question is if we should require that artifacts activate.

Most of them (about 73% of those in Standard) do anyway. We’d mostly be giving up two classes of cards.

“Choose your own enchantment” cards that slot into a variety of decks:

And simple creatures that any drafter can play:

That’s a very real price and begs the question of how much we would gain. Will requiring activations really consolidate artifacts’ feel when we also print cards like Reckless Scholar and Barrage of Expendables?

I don’t think we get enough.

So that seems to indicate that what we really need to do in order to preserve artifact identity is draw a harder line and keep them colorless. That identity’s bound to be degraded a bit by what we have yet to see in Khans of Tarkir block and by public enemy number #2: The Eldrazi, but it seems to be the best we’ve got.

All is not Lost

Now not returning to Alara is a cost, but I’m not sure it’s a very big one. The block was popular, but that’s par for the course with a gold block, and we’ve certainly seen more popular blocks since. Magic is going to have a hard enough time finding room to return to everything popular as it is, even with the new block structure. So my stance is that we shouldn’t sacrifice the identity of artifacts for all time just to get an Alara callback once a decade.

But that’s not the only time we’ve seen colored artifacts. You’ve got Transguild Courier, Pith Driller, and Godsend. To my mind none of those applications is worth keeping colored artifacts around for, and most of the conceivable design space can be covered with implementations like Sylvok Replica.

R&D works years ahead, so I can only hope that this article is pointless because they’ve already come to the same conclusions (if not a yet better solution). But we can always look for something better, so let me know: what did I miss?