Conflicting Metaphors—Inspired VS Heroic

Games are metaphors and game designers are poets. In order to make a card feel thematic, we need to find one way to express the concept it represents through game mechanics. That's all that's needed to make a player feel, "Yeah, that is a dragon. That is a unicorn. Yup, that's dark magic."

This affords us simpler designs, since a single card that needs to represent every trope about dragons will be a bloated mess of text. It also affords us quite a lot more cards. Once you've made The Dragon, representing every dragon trope possible, you're done. You can make a couple variations if that first dragon was The Red Dragon and you want to make The Black Dragon, but those cards will be 90% the same and the second just won't have the impact the first had.

When you focus on one dragon-y thing per card, you can then make scores of dragons. Shivan Dragon breaths fires. Hoarding Dragon sleeps on his treasure. Siege Dragon eats castles for breakfast. Each one of those feels unique and draconic, not detracting from each other's value, and keeping the game fresh with flying reptilian goodness.

A week ago, I casually mused on Twitter:

Heroic and inspired were both interesting mechanics with good flavor. The problem is that their flavor is the same. They both represent determined Therosians rising to the occasion to do great deeds. By fighting to represent the same concept for the block, we've got a mixed metaphor which drops the player out of the fiction as they try to figure out the distinction between the two.

There is a distinction, in fairness. Heroic is about powerful entities—native gods and roaming planeswalkers—taking an interest in the denizens and inspiring them… er, sorry, empowering them to do amazing things. Inspired is more about those denizens realizing they don't need the gods and that they can be heroes… I mean, do great things on their own. Y'know, through violence. And that distinction actually follows the story line of the block, so it's not some random coincidence.

But heroic and inspired fit the same mindspace. "Do cool things with your creature, watch it do more cool things." That tweet was precipitated by playing some Theros while waiting for Khans of Tarkir to come online; I confused an inspired trigger for an heroic trigger. The overlap between the two mechanics is not as egregious as past mindspace mistakes (like Murder of Crows' trigger being slightly different than Falkenrath Noble's) since the triggers are distinct, but the effects they generate and the gameplay they engender (from a high level) are dangerously similar.

Monstrosity and tribute had a similar issue. Both mechanics represent the monster faction and involve +1/+1 counters. They both illustrate the daunting problem that monsters pose, one with a monster that will only get worse if you don't deal with it fast, and the other with a monster that gives you a riddle and then punches you in the face. Both of those are interesting and compelling situations fit to inspire our heroes to greatness, and highly appropriate to the greek epic theme, but they compete with each other, both mechanically and thematically.

What's the difference between making a Shivan Dragon and a Siege Dragon versus putting similar mechanics in the same block? Despite appearing on a fraction of the cards in a set, a keyword mechanic describes the whole set. Theros is a world defined by heroes and monsters (and gods). If the block had only ever used monstrosity or only ever used tribute, Wingsteed Rider would have been different. It'd be the exact same card, but its context wouldn't be the same and nothing exists without context. In contrast, Shivan Dragon is a wholly unique card to Siege Dragon, and not just because they were printed in different sets, years apart.

Does that mean mechanics can't be replaced or supplemented over the course of a block's evolution? Not at all. What comes and what stays in the subsequent sets is the primary identity for that set. It is, for some players, the only insight into the story progression for that plane. What we need to be careful about is that new mechanics are properly distinct, either representing how the old concept has changed via new gameplay (which is where inspired and tribute didn't wholly fail but neither quite succeeded), or representing a new concept entirely.

How could this have worked for Theros? We could have stuck to just heroic, but moved from triggering it primarily via auras in the first set to sorceries and instants in the second set. We could have introduced inspired (which I quite like, outside the shadow of heroic), but made sure all heroic abilities were one thing (spell-like effects or +1/+1 counters) and all inspired abilities were the other. We could have kept monstrosity and left off tribute (which, for the record, I enjoyed more than most spikes), or if it was important to the story that the monsters stopped growing over time and started demanding hard choices (it wasn't), then tribute could have made the default option life-loss instead of +1/+1 counters.

What about new mechanics? Every set needs to introduce something new and players would have rioted if Born of the Gods and Journey into Nyx kept reusing heroic and monstrosity without adding anything new. Part of the difficulty was in how each faction in Theros was defined by their behavior in the world, by their mechanics. Heroes had to hero and monsters had to monst. Once we already had mechanics to do that, what could we introduce? As I pointed out above, inspired or tribute could still have worked if they were more distinct, but the better point is that these are all creature mechanics and most of the set is not creatures. We could have made a new sorcery/instant keyword, or an enchantment keyword.

Remembering that the story is malleable, we also could have introduced another faction; perhaps the less-heroic denizens (he said, knowing a citizenry mechanic is a bit of a trap); or maybe the Eldrazi could have landed and then wrestled with the gods. We could have narrated a bigger shift in the monsters to warrant a new mechanic on them. Given that both heroes and monsters got +1/+1 counters, we could have introduced a new mechanic that cares about them, giving both existing mechanics new meaning.

It wouldn't have been easy, I'm not saying that. Nor am I saying Theros was bad by any measure. I loved the set and think it was an admirable successor to Innistrad's top-down slam-dunk. But I do think we'll improve on future sets by learning what could have been done better, even if only slightly.

Choose one mechanical metaphor per thematic concept. Stick to it.