Weekend Design Challenge Review 012315—Dragons of Tarkir mechanic

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Materialize is a cantrip effect for sorceries and instants that gives you a bear instead of a card. Generally, a bear is better early and a card is better late, but you can compare Ancestral Guidance to Striped Bears. (Actually, AG is a poor signpost for comparing materialize with cantrips because the non-materialize effect is a cantrip. <Shrug>)

Being a spell effect combos with prowess, though it will be much less common in Limited when DTK replace KTK. Materialize doesn't combo with manifest or morph because it can only get spell effects face down and those can never be turned face up. But it does use the same technology and it does work with "colorless/face-down creatures get [effect]"s.

Materialize isn't amazing enough to carry the set the way morph did, but it's not bad at all, given our constraints.

Unlike morph, creatures with mask cost full-price to play and are known to your opponent. You can turn them face down from the battlefield, but you'd only do that if you had more than one masked creature, or else to trigger their turned-face-up effect. But I've got to pay {7}{R}{R}{G}{G} in order to make Atarka's Brute an 8/8 trampler once. Is it even worth making mask creatures without triggers? If they were free to turn face down, maybe. Taking the risk of down-grading your guy seems like cost enough.

Works with face down stuff. Doesn't combo as well with manifest as morph did, but it does combo. Though perhaps not the way players might expect: You can enjoy any turn-face-up triggers on your manifested creatures with mask, but you can't shuffle them up with your other masked creatures because they weren't masked, they were manifested. That confusion seems dangerous.

I would definitely codename this mechanic "shell-game" in playtesting.

A face-down card is defined as a 2/2 creature by the game rules. We can't make any other types of face-down cards that would be indistinguishable from those. Though I'm skeptical, dragonfuse might work for this reason: It never exists on its own, only attached to a creature. If players are careful not to separate their auras from their creatures (easy) and not to stack their creature cards (harder), you could keep it clear which face-down cards are 2/2 creatures and which are +2/+2 auras.

Do we need a mechanic so similar to bestow in the block following Theros? Granted, it's kind of the opposite of bestow, but it's nearly identical mindspace.

Does dragonfuse combo with manifest? Maybe you can turn a manifested card face up for its dragonfuse cost for the same reason you can with morphs? I'm less certain since dragonfuse might only work while it's a face-down aura. Going back to my first concern, imagine playing with face-down auras attached to face-down creatures.

Points for theming this mechanic around dragons, though that connection isn't super-clear, unless dragonfuse only appears on dragons, in which case I don't think it can appear enough.

First reaction: That's a lot of words for an uncommon. Let's dive in.

Coalesce needs some templating help. I try to ignore that kind of issue when judging a card, since I can usually see what was intended anyhow and that's all a designer is responsible for, but I'm not sure how coalesce is supposed to work. Where does the {1}{R}{R} come in? If you're meant to pay that when you exile Coalescing Burst, it should be repeated in that activation cost. Why are we exiling Coalescing Burst at all? If coalesce is just an alternate spell, why not discard like cycling, reinforce, etc?

Following the morph template, we don't need to say "as a Coalesced face down colorless and typeless 2/2 creature card," just "face down as a 2/2 creature." Again, I'd normally ignore that, but going out of our way to specify that it's a "creature card" directly confuses the next line that says you can turn it face up "if it's a creature card."

If I'm on track, then coalesce boils down to {1}{R}{R}, Exile ~ from your hand: Manifest another card from your hand. That wouldn't warrant a keyword (since it mostly already is one)… except then how do we trigger the last ability? It's not a problem that Coalescing Burst is basically a split card; it's modeled after cycling cards that trigger a smaller version of their main effect when you cycle them, and that's okay. (This ability is instant speed, which seems problematic for a five-color mechanic.)

My concern is that it's an evolution on manifest and not its own mechanic. Let me clarify because we use 'evolution' two different ways: Thematically, morph is supposed to be a cultural evolution of manifest in Tarkir, and so too should be the KTK mechanic. But when we talk about an 'evolution' of a mechanic from a design perspective, we only mean that we're doing something new with that mechanic. A little twist, usually. A design evolution is a small iterative development, not a thousand-year biological / cultural / technological transformation, like the difference between manifest and morph. Which is a long-winded way of saying, "needs more oomph."

So. I love spell morph. I've never playtested it and may be miles off, but in theory, this looks like a fun and interesting mechanic, and I don't see why it can't be possible in the rules.

Here's the problem. They released a rules update with FRF that made it explicitly clear that they are not doing spell morph anytime soon:

701.31e A face-down permanent represented by an instant or sorcery card can't be turned face up. If an effect instructs a player to turn one face up, its controller reveals it and leaves it face down. Abilities that trigger whenever a permanent is turned face up won't trigger.

I don't believe for a moment that they would add such a clarification to the rulebook in one set with the intention of completely reversing it in the very next set. Bummer. Would have played great with manifest.

I can practically guarantee they did test this possibility for DTK. Either it turned out not to be that fun, not to be what the set needed, or the rules team found an unavoidable rules complication that made it impossible. I'd love to hear everyone's speculation about what killed spell morph.

At first, it might look like incarnate is as disallowed as spell morph, but it doesn't reveal the spell on the battlefield. When any face-down creature dies, it goes to its owner's graveyard and then if it had incarnate, a trigger goes on the stack that will let you cast it then and there.

While I suspect incarnate is intended as a keyword for sorceries and instants, it could actually go on anything. It shouldn't, at least not the first time out, but it could.

There are two potential technical pitfalls. I'm not sure incarnate combos with manifest as worded, since the ability to death-cast it is tied to turning it face down initially (though so is the ability to turn a morph face up, so maybe that's fine). The larger complication is that you can cast it face down when it dies. Probably. That's obviously not the intended purpose, so most players won't even consider it an option. As long as the rulebook and FAQ are clear, it's okay if the reminder text doesn't completely disambiguate an counter-intuitive possibility. But we don't want people casting infinite 2/2s, even for {2}{R}{G}.

Incarnate is a clever solution to the many parameters of this challenge. I have no idea why Fury of the Dragon Tempests is green at all, much less multicolor when they've hinted so strongly against that, but incarnate is awesome.

Conjure is identical to spell morph, but reading it another way helped me to see that neither is forbidden by the rules, technically. That's because they both exile the face-down creature before turning it face up. Whoa.

Okay, so this is possible. That's exciting. But is it likely? Would they add rule 701.31e just to follow it up with a mechanic that skirts that very rule? It's far from inconceivable. 31e could exist purely to handle corner cases like Ixidron shenanigans or to set a tournament baseline for when players accidentally turn a spell face-up. Iiinteresting.

Also worth noting is the use of colorlessness. I'd bet a tidy sum DTK will make notable use of colorlessness (at least a vertical cycle) and there's a strong chance that will tie into manifest's descendant mechanic. Maybe a card like Ghostflare could cost {2}{R}{R} up-front and {3} to cast after it's been 'morphed' for {3}?

At 7 lines, stunt-double is going to eat up a lot of space and complexity points at common. Like coalesce, it's basically manifest wrapped in a trigger: Whenever ~ attacks, return it to your hand, then manifest a card from your hand tapped and attacking. I'd make that an ability word instead.

It's also quite swingy: On the one hand, you could turn dead cards in your hand into bears cheaply and reliably with just a couple stunt doubles, but on the other hand, they all have to attack and sometimes that'll just be suicide. That's not inherently good or bad, but it would have a big impact on the set and its gameplay. I am skeptical, though, that we want a set with this much bouncing of your own creatures.

Something totally different. I'm going to say, based on some pretty strong cues, that reap is being proposed as the mechanic to replace delve. Thematically, it's a good fit for the Sultai. Mechanically, it plays well with delve (not massively, but positively) as well as with manifest (letting you cycle away your 2/2 lands). It's simple too. Sacrificing your own stuff doesn't appeal to new players, but delve wasn't aimed at that segment either. I don't think we could see a huge amount of reap without a good amount of token-making as well (or some efficient manifest effects). Nice.

Another Sultai mechanic, mindswipe follows the Dimir path to milling as an alternate win mechanic. That combos very well with delve and we're looking pretty good so far. The trouble is: What does a mono-green mindswipe card look like? Green does get "mill N of your own cards to keep some," so half of the keyword will work swimmingly there. The other half is a definite color bleed, but perhaps not a deal-breaker.

Note that because mindswipe is symmetrical, it won't kill your opponent for you without a little extra work. Either you need one or two more directed milling effects, or you've got to run a bigger deck (or merely be on the play if you've got zero card drawing effects and are confident your opponent isn't running 41).

Rusigar might be well-balanced for duels, but is completely broken in multiplayer. The problem being that both what it counts and what it affects scale up with the number of players. With four, we'll reveal a total of 8 cards, and my opponents will discard ~3 cards each. Every round.

Based on the phrase "noncreature spell" I'm thinking deceit is the Jeskai mechanic to replace prowess (though the name sounds rather un-Jeskai to me—partly an issue with Tarkir's overall flavor). It appears to be an aura-only mechanic (or possibly equipment too) which is quite limiting, but it clearly plays very well with prowess: It rewards balancing creatures with non-creatures the same way, it actually triggers prowess, and it leaves your opponent wondering how your creatures will actually fight in combat. Neat.

I'd cost Soulfire Infusion at {W}.

I'm already sure this is a Jeskai mechanic when I read the name jumpkick. I love that it lets you use creatures to improve your spells, much like prowess let you use spells to improve your creatures. And if you do, you get two prowess triggers. Here's where I get sad: I have to bounce my own creature's off the board? Sometimes my prowess creatures? And I lose a draw step too? That's a hefty cost!

I'd rather see a spell mechanic that cares about your creatures without undoing the tricky, tempo-based aggression Jeskai was already into. Convoke/Conspire doesn't work because those prevent attacking. Maybe "As an additional cost, untap N creatures you control…" so you just have to get enough creatures turned sideways. Or if granting your team vigilance is too much, merely "If you're attacking with at least N creatures…"

Further afield, but maybe we could flip prowess around: "If you cast a creature spell this turn, upgrade/copy this spell."

More tiny text. That's not a deal-breaker for a rare, but most of it is from the keyword and we've got to fit that on commons too. Camouflage is basically Jeskai Infiltrator (and another keyword wrapping manifest into itself). There's a reason Infiltrator is a single rare and not a cycle or a clan- or set-wide mechanic: It's fiddly to execute.

Infiltrator makes it worth your while by netting you a bear. Camouflage doesn't work if you don't have a second creature, and you take a risk making them both smaller. It's pretty good evasion for Tempest Predator since I'm not eager to block your 2/2s with my 4/4 when there's a 50% chance one of them is a 5/5, but there are a lot of situations it won't be, particularly at common.

Temur Meditation's name tells me whose clan mechanic draconic is replacing, though I was guessing Temur anyhow, given draconic's aesthetic similar to ferocious. Assuming that all dragons on Tarkir have 4+ power, draconic is strictly harder to turn on than ferocious, and by a large margin (especially since +1/+1 counters and Giant Growths won't help). Assuming we can justify that, I'd expect a bigger bonus for pulling it off. You might argue how much better Temur Meditation can be than Cultivate, but consider also that if you've got a dragon, it's not unlikely that you're already winning. Draconic effects will often be win-more (even moreso than ferocious effects). Also note that it's hard to make draconic cards that are relevant after you've cast a dragon. Temur Meditation gets you two lands immediately when you've already got a dragon… What are the chances that's better than Cultivate after you've already got six lands? What are the chances Cultivate's even worth casting at that point?

Voidgate is morph++. You can play it exactly like morph, but you can also turn any of your face down creatures into your Ugin's Herald. It's not quite as if that face down creature was the Herald all along, because no status will carry over (tapped, attacking, counters, auras, etc), but thematically it's a lot like that. Here's the bit I didn't catch at first, if you don't have a voidgate creature in your hand, you can't turn any of your face-down voidgate creatures face up (unless they got that way by being manifested).

This. This mechanic is the closest to "alternate timeline morph" that I've seen. I don't think it's perfect as-is, but it's a damn clever solution and I'm impressed.

I love that Ugin's Herald is colorless, though that's diluted by it being a standard artifact. Hexproof on a creature this size is pretty scary, especially since it only costs {5} (and drawing another voidgate card) to play. It's also a little disappointing that I can't save that face-down creature by replacing it with my hexproof creature (voidgate is sorcery-speed by default).

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I'm blown away here. You artisans knocked this challenge out cold, out of the park, outer space… err, what was I saying? Nice work, folks.

Thanks to Pasteur for rendering the cards.