CCDD 040815—Amphin Leaper

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/8/2015 - I stumbled upon the file for my first Magic set in the archives of my computer this week. This thing is 20 years old and it shows. In addition to being based off of antiquated Magic rules, templates and design standards, it also achingly demonstrates every possible mistake a new designer could make. I considered lampooning it card-by-card for you all, but it was about 700 cards, 99% of them trash, and at best 5% with any kernel of interesting design.

One remotely interesting idea I found I have reconstituted for you today:

Any time you're designing a keyword that is just a conditional version of an existing evergreen keyword, you need to seriously evaluate whether the mechanic is powerful enough to warrant putting on the number of cards you'd need to justify the keyword. Sometimes-trample and sometimes-haste are examples where the base mechanic isn't always relevant anyhow, and making a strictly worse version is unlikely to be worthwhile.

Accelerate does this with flash. Now, flash does tend to be stronger on average, helping you kill a small attacker, keep your mana open to Cancel a dangerous spell, and/or play an attacker at EOT that your opponent didn't budget her defense against. Even so, it's something to be skeptical of.

What I like about accelerate is that it rewards drafting and building your deck a certain way, and it creates more exciting moments throughout the game. Your opponent has two cards in hand and all their land untapped; is it safe to attack? Much like prowess, except only on defense. Obvious downsides include the fact that it turns off when you have just one card in hand or when you've only got a few untapped mana sources, and that it discourages attacking at a macro level.

I also like the way it feels. Play an instant to make your creature an instant. Suddenly I feel bad about not thinking harder about a name for the keyword that captures that idea better.

One upside to mechanics that are conditional evergreen abilities is they are of marginal value and so you can apply them without much additional cost, keeping the cards looking generally efficient. (Note, that's not a cureall, since you can make any efficient card look bad by adding upside text that just reads super-clunky or looks too unlikely.) In accelerate's case, since it only works when you cast a spell and that costs mana, expensive cards with accelerate are much less likely to benefit from it than cheap ones. Amphin Leaper is strictly better than Blind Phantasm (as are a number of common blue creatures nowadays), but being relative cheap while still having stats that trump 2/2s means you can 2:1 an unwary opponent on turn 4 or later.

We can potentially limit the amount accelerate exacerbates new players' fear of attacking by putting it on aggressive creatures or creatures with ETB effects that won't make great surprise blockers. It's worth noting that what accelerate costs new players, experts who enjoy bluffing gain in mind games. Even so, net negative.

There's one more big downside to accelerate. If you've got no creatures in play, you can't use a combat trick to drop your Leaper and target it with that trick. You're forced to choose targets to cast the trick and it's too late. While that's probably better in terms of mechanical balance, that wrinkle will surely leave some players high-and-dry feeling suddenly less clever than they thought, and that's never great.

So is accelerate worth it? It's certainly not a slam dunk. Might be quite a few years before we find a set that would actually benefit from it. At least it was fun to analyze. What do you think?