Designing for Discovery: Test Your Mettle

Designing for Discovery: Test Your Mettle
By Larcent

"What an odd card," I muttered to myself when I first read Path of Mettle and Metzali, Tower of Triumph, when they were spoiled in Rivals of Ixalan.

I was not alone in that reaction. Luis Scott-Vargas called them "bizarre" in his initial set review. Melissa DeTora called it the "weirdest card in the set."

What makes Path of Mettle so unusual is that it asks players to discover a deck that resists the block's tribal theme. While three of the four tribes of Ixalan are represented within red and white, dinosaurs are the only tribe present in both colors, and the design of the set at least nudges players into focusing on the dino faction.

Path of Mettle absolutely doesn't care which tribe your creatures belong to. It wants to know what your creatures can do. This itself is a little unusual—there aren't many cards care about a creature's combat keywords with the exception of flying.

Within red and white in the block, there are 6 pirates, 8 dinosaurs, 2 vampires, and 5 non-tribal creatures that have at least one of the four abilities Path of Mettle checks for. That's doesn’t even account for noncreature cards that can grant those abilities.

Path of Mettle is not hard to understand or use. But it's a build-around card that resists tribal focus. It's not completely oblivious to it, though. It synergizes nicely with your dinos if they have enrage abilities.

Path of Mettle got me thinking of how a card designer could help somebody find a different type of deck within the bounds of a heavily tribal-oriented set like Ixalan. As a player that tends to drift toward blue and white whenever possible, I was a bit disappointed that the two colors had no tribal ties in the Ixalan set.

The decision to bring Azor, the Lawbringer into Rivals of Ixalan mandated to designers that a U/W deck needs to be viable in limited. And it is. The midrange flyers deck is showing to be pretty solid in limited with what has been added in the new set.

But there's more: There's a reason that the signpost Resplendent Griffin also uses the new ascend mechanic. Blue and white have been positioned to efficiently reach the threshold to earn the city's blessing, and they have some good payoffs for doing so. Both colors have accessible token creation (vampires or treasures). Both colors have combat auras in this block players will want to use, even with the risk of creature removal. Both colors are encouraged to rely on enchantments as a form of removal. A U/W deck in Ixalan tends to leave a lot of permanents in play as it takes control of the battlefield.

What about a creature that helped a certain type of U/W deck reach the threshold to ascend and didn't really care about the tribal battles going on in the set?

This is not nearly as powerful as Path of Mettle and Metzali—deliberately so. The white and blue cards with ascend are the payoff. Orazca Macaw is a tool to help get there if you build your deck right. And like Path of Mettle, it's not hard to know which cards you need in order to take advantage of the creature's ability. Those Waterknots and Squire's Devotions will do additional work getting you to ascend when Orazca Macaw hits the battlefield. If you've got Skymarcher Aspirants and/or Snubhorn Sentrys, the payoffs for reaching ascend very quickly can be quite strong.

I chose to count auras rather than just enchantments to nudge players specifically to focus on types of control and enhancement effects. If you've got an Orazca Macaw, perhaps you'd prefer Luminous Bonds over Baffling End?

Interested in a challenge? Green and black in the Ixalan block were in the same position as blue and white. It was the only other color pairing without a tribal identity. It did have a mechanical theme, though—these two colors were the only ones given the ability to explore with repeatable triggers and had other payoffs when creatures explored. What could be designed to help a player create a deck to take advantage of explore specifically in a B/G deck?

(Today's Guest Article comes courtesy of Larcent. If you would like to contribute a Community Spotlight article, check out Write for Goblin Artisans, then send a brief pitch of your idea to zefferal on gmail.)