Amonkhet Design Review

Hey folks. Please enjoy another post from guest columnist Jake Mosby.
—Jay Treat

The release of Amonkhet is just around the corner! Since we’re focused on design here, we’ll be discussing the design philosophy and implementation used for Amonkhet based on documents published by WIzards and by reviewing the set itself.

Design Goals
The first thing I do when starting projects is identify what my design goal(s) are, so it makes sense to start there with our Amonkhet analysis. From what we’ve seen of the design process, Wizards started by considering Amonkhet a “double dip” of top-down design. Their first design goal was to deliver an Ancient Egyptian experience to players. Their second goal was to lay the groundwork for Nicol Bolas’ devastating return to the plane. If we consider Wizards’ recent failure in setting up the correct vision for Return to Zendikar, it definitely looks like the design team and Mark Rosewater learned their lessons swiftly from that block. If Battle for Zendikar took this overlapping approach, we’d likely have seen more of the adventure-world influence in the set design. While there is always room to improve on refining a game’s vision, Amonkhet’s vision clearly marks a step in the right direction for R&D. I’ve long advocated having multiple design goals, and I hope as time goes on that we see Wizards further expand their design goals in meaningful ways.

Once the design team identified these two goals, they created a venn diagram and brainstormed what iconic motifs and tropes players would expect for both Egypt and Bolas. Mark Rosewater has already written three articles about this, so I won’t focus on the contents of these lists, and instead will focus on the themes and mechanics they produced.

-1/-1 Counters
Wizards has long established that cruel unforgiving worlds are the place to use -1/-1 counters, and in their initial design they relied on the Wither mechanic originally used in Shadowmoor. Having played around with Wither in my own designs, it’s surprising just how much using it constricts your available design space. For instance, you can’t really print deathtouch in an environment with Wither. I’m a bit surprised that Wither made it through the design phase before development was forced to cut it.

That said, there are some really cool uses of -1/-1 counters implemented in Amonkhet. Having already played with custom versions of cards like Soulstinger, it’s exciting to see how such designs function in the environment. I’m particularly fascinated with how the set’s design warped around putting -1/-1 counters on your own creatures. In printing many cards that force their controller to put counters on their own creatures, Wizards created an environment where power and toughness values are artificially inflated. The consequence being that there are more creatures in the format that can live through having counters on them for several turns without dying. This has been the most inherent problem of using -1/-1 counters in a set, and I’m curious to see how well this solution plays. It’s important to note that the design space of these one-off cards wouldn’t be printable in a world with Wither—while wither forces your creatures to put -1/-1 counters on your opponents’ cards, the one-offs reward putting counters on your own creatures. The consequence is that Wither ends up being a downside some of the time, which breaks expectations in an unfun way.

Exert

The gameplay around exert is pretty intriguing. The way they’ve implemented it, it’s most useful around turns 3 and 4 (in Limited), allowing you to break through an opponent’s defenses with the power level that Landfall had in original Zendikar. But the interesting thing is that the usefulness generally decreases by turn 6 or so, once defenses have been bolstered. The net result of this looks like players will have many more opportunities to make meaningful tempo swings and gameplay will be more dynamic than we typically see. Players will likely stabilize at a lower life total than in most Limited formats because of the aggressive but fickle qualities of Exert, which I expect will make for more tense games. From a design standpoint, Exert accomplishes this unusual gameplay by impacting multiple turns. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a mechanic that naturally pushed the game into an ebb and flow pattern—arguably the werewolf mechanic promotes similar gameplay, but it still behaves differently since there’s an inevitability with werewolves that isn’t present for exert.

Embalm

Embalm variants have been tossed around in custom Magic communities for years, and it’s cool to see an official version see print. Like most value mechanics, Embalm is a great way to win grindy matchups. I’m curious to see just how worthwhile all the little exceptions are. Making three changes to a token copy is pretty extreme, and I don’t expect the differences to matter that often. The change that looks most meaningful is the addition of the subtype, since quite a few cards reward Zombie tribal. Losing their mana cost is likely entirely done because they’re printing unique tokens and don’t want to confuse players by having it look as though the tokens can be cast. This is logistics forcing change in design, which is understandable but frustrating. Finally, becoming white doesn’t look like it will ever matter. I don’t mind tossing a flavor bone to Vorthos now and then, but I prefer my mechanics to be relevant. It’s possible that some future set ends up making color matter and I’ll be eating crow, but I don’t see the odds of that being high.

Aftermath
The second value mechanic in the set, Aftermath, is an interesting twist on Flashback that is crippled by its layout. Note that it’s still very useful in gameplay and the cards all function much better than you might expect upon first glance. What I’m more frustrated by are the limitations on design space brought on by the layout of the aftermath template. There is so little space on either side of the card that the effects have to be one or two liners, which results in common effects on rare cards such as Prepare // Fight. It’s a shame that we don’t have more space to play around with. Unlike regular split cards, the aftermath keyword on the back end of these cards eats up space that split cards get to use for more elaborate effects. Overall, I don’t expect Aftermath to come back like split cards do from time to time— I don’t expect to see Aftermath come back for a long time, if ever.

Cycling

It’s important to acknowledge your biases, and I have to admit that I have a real soft spot for Cycling since I used to play Astral Rift in Standard back during Onslaught block. It’s such a good smoothing mechanic, and I’m always happy to see it. Personally, I’d prefer if Cycling were evergreen instead of Scry. It has a really positive impact on environments because it lets players run niche cards without fear of them being totally dead. Opportunities to hedge are important to deckbuilding metagames, and I’m excited to engage with those like in the old days.

The build-around cards for Cycling all use “whenever you cycle or discard” rather than just “whenever you discard” because Wizards wants the game to be approachable for new players who might not realize cycling counts as discarding. There are two great design lessons here: The first is that clarity trumps consistency; the second is that you have to design for your audience. Sure, there are some extra words in the rules text, and some players have asked if the cards trigger twice from cycle effects, but this pales in comparison to the number of new or casual players who would completely miss that these cards interact and wouldn’t ask about it. Wizards is more interested in making the initial experience as fun as possible. If you're unlearning a misconception that cycling is different from discarding, you're enfranchised enough that Wizards doesn't mind putting you through that—it's unlikely that'll turn you off from buying product. The initial misconception is more likely to trip up someone just getting into the game and is much more likely to make them disinterested in buying what you’re selling.

New World Order (NWO)
For those not familiar with the term, NWO is the idea that a strong majority of your common cards have to follow a series of rules to limit their complexity, with intent to make the game flow more smoothly by avoiding things like reading mistakes and analysis paralysis. R&D have commented that, for several sets, they let a bit too much complexity back into the game, and they intend to be more conscious about complexity creep. We’ve seen all of Kaladesh block take on this less complex design path, and now with Amonkhet we see it pushed just one step further. Critically, many of Amonkhet’s uncommons and rares conform to the NWO restrictions intended for commons.

While I understand the noble intent here, I do worry that there are unintended consequences to this extension. Primarily, it seems like the last two blocks—those that are the lowest complexity we’ve seen in a long time—have pushed power levels up at an alarming rate. When you are forced to make your cards simple, the primary way to make the cards exciting is to make them stronger than what players have already seen. There is less opportunity for nuance or for downside mechanics when NWO principles extend into the higher rarities—like they had to for the implementation of Aftermath. This goes to show that just because a format is powerful that doesn’t mean it is complex, and sometimes simplicity can cause issues with power level. Rosewater has commented that Amonkhet is still too complex for his liking, which makes me nervous to see if future sets will have even more powerful cards or if they will simply have less appeal.

Mechanical Cycles
We’ve examined all the major named mechanics, but there are still several themes I’m interested in exploring. It’s interesting seeing the way R&D tried to merge flavor with mechanics when it comes to the Trials and Cartouches. I think Wizards found a reasonable middle ground, though I’ve seen some custom designers propose cool alternatives. There is a lot of story/lore/flavor behind these cards, and it’s a difficult task to pin down which aspects are important to showcase on cardboard. I strongly believe that if Amonkhet was a +1/+1 counter set, we would have seen Trials that looked more like Zendikar quests, but the bleakness of -1/-1 counters ended up being more important for the atmosphere of the environment.

In a similar way, I think design did a good job translating the important aspects of Gods into Amonkhet. It’s hard to tell when the story details of the Gods were sculpted around the card designs versus when the cards were molded to fit the story, but I consider the result a success. The core aspect that they took away is that these Gods are not enchantment creatures. Having the additional card type would have distracted from the set’s focus and helps distinguish that these Gods walk among the people of Amonkhet. The core functionality remains intact: Gods are powerful immoveable creatures that demand you to meet some criteria before they’ll help you. I do find it unsatisfying that the new Gods can crew vehicles, but this is more of a problem with vehicles than with Gods.

There are a large number of cards in the “build around me” space in Amonkhet, but I’m a bit disappointed all of them support the established archetypes without taking them in new or interesting directions. For example, playing a Burning Vengeance deck in Innistrad was very different from playing a Flashback deck; I don’t see any of the Cycling enablers forcing a different enough gameplay pattern to say you’re playing anything other than a Cycling deck. I suppose the mere fact that I’m comparing to Innistrad may be a good sign for the format, though.

Concluding Thoughts
Like Temmet’s token, it’s about time for me to wrap up. Overall, it seems that Amonkhet has more successes than failures when it comes to the merits of its design. I’m certain there are many more lessons to be learned from the set’s design, but these are the ones that jump out to me prior to playing with the set. As we get to experience the cards, time will tell just how accurate this assessment is.

About the Author
Jake "Piar" Mosby has been involved with various custom Magic communities since the second Great Designer Search. He's facilitated several community projects including MTGSalvation's monthly "You Make The Card" contests. Beyond several personal custom Magic projects, he recently started designing other board games as well. He hosts the custom Magic podcast Cardography, which is available on iTunes and SoundCloud.