Augment and Host

Unstable introduced a new card pairing mechanic like meld in which augments can be played to modify hosts. This is an exciting area of design for players because we love creating monsters. Their execution here does something very clever. There's also a shiny veneer I'd like to pull off.

Let's discuss augment.

Because augment can only be played on a creature you already have on the battlefield, it's functionally identical to an existing card type: the aura. In fact, we can re-create augment as a black-bordered aura ...ish. Check it out:

Pretend 'effervesce' isn't an awful word for this flavor.

What makes augment different from most auras is that you can only attach it to a very limited creature type. Of course, there's a very good reason for that: Augment cards change the ETB-effect of your host with a new, repeatable trigger. Matching an effect up to a trigger is a awesome and fun idea—one that Goblin Artisans caught onto ourselves back when we were exploring the idea of combining creatures.

What we never thought of—and what makes host/augment looks so fun despite the fact that it's an A-B mechanic where the B half is literally useless without the A half—was the idea of always getting the effect from our first creature when it ETBs, and then also getting more of that effect via the new trigger our second card gives it.

While we can re-create that effect using some kind of templating (as shown above), Unstable does the very clever thing of having the augment card cover up the left portion of the host creature, over-writing the ETB trigger with the new trigger.


That's neat and visually appealing. It also solves some of the annoying little detail problems that plague card combination: What happens to the monster's name, mana cost, card type and creature types? When we augment Feisty Stegosaurus with Rhino-, we get Rhino-Stegosaurus, a rhino dino creature with a single mana cost. That's so clean!

It's not quite as clean an end-result as meld was, where the final text box and power/toughness box look just like a regularly printed card, but it's modular—which is a huuuge upgrade for gameplay—and they did it without double-faced cards—which is significant logistically.

It's odd that augment cards are creatures that you can't play by themselves and that don't have a mana cost (although it's nice how those two things go together), but that's an impressively small price to pay for the ability to combine any augment with any host to create something unique and exciting.

I have to point out one more really clever thing here. Because they made host a supertype rather than a creature type, it gets covered by the augment's type line, making the resulting monster ineligible for further augmentation, without requiring rules text to make that happen.

The messiest thing this solution brought about is that artifact hosts had to have their artifact type appear outside of the type line so that they would remain artifacts after augmentation. They could have avoided that by not making any artifact hosts, but it's vital to a five-color A-B mechanic like this to have colorless As and Bs to help make combinations possible as often players want. (Note that artifact augments don't have this problem because they are the left half of the final type line.)

I'm excited as a player to play Unstable and augment some hosts. As a game designer, I'm deeply impressed with the elegance and visual impact of their solution. And as an armchair Magic designer I'm interested to mess around (more) with the idea of cards that can trigger other cards.