GDS3 Reflections: Ryan Siegel-Stechler, Challenge 3: Mechanical Engineering

Ryan is back today to discuss the mechanics he came up with for the Third Design Challenge. Click on through to read how he approached this challenge. The judge comments for Ryan's submission can be found here.


By Ryan Siegel-Stechler

When I got the mechanic challenge, I knew immediately that the judges were going to expect to see something with a significant amount of polish. As amateur designers, it would be insane not to have come up with ones’ own mechanics, and I knew that the expectations would be sky-high.

I had two trains of thought when it came to this challenge. One was that I wanted to make sure that I really knocked the socks off the judges. I’d had one terrible challenge and one good result in an uneven week of judging, and I really wanted to make sure that I stood out. The other was that MaRo had specifically given me one point of advice – to find a vein of flavor and milk it, because that had led to productive designs from my last challenge. That really resonated with me, as I thought that being too cute in the tribal challenge had led me to put silly playtest names onto my Imps, robbing me of the opportunity to tie mechanics into flavor and really make my overall cards shine.

I had two choices of mechanics in my pocket. The first was Bully:

Bully (When this creature deals combat damage to an opponent, you have the upper hand on that player until a source they control damages you.)

Bully was a creature-only Mardu mechanic that I’d toyed around with for years. Many designs on GA that I’d made were adaptations of Bully cards from my personal file.

My Bully submission would have looked something like the below:

I had a couple of concerns, however. One was that I’d already done a black/red tribe – putting myself in the Mardu colors would represent a pretty big overlap. Second, the noncreature cards in my submission mentioned “the upper hand” without having a good way to define it in reminder text. Lastly, some of the cards pulled in different directions vis-à-vis whether you had the upper hand on one opponent or several. Finally, despite the flavor being nice, it didn’t feel like “real Magic”. I decided to set this mechanic aside, even though I liked the cards I had for it.

My other option was a mechanic that I’d toyed around with since the very first set I ever designed, Heatwave, with a buddy of mine, David Conrad. He and I had designed an entire set, with several mechanics. One was battalion-before-battalion, one was a terribly wonky self-blink mechanic that counted attacking creatures and spells cast (yikes), one was a keyworded version of saboteur abilities that prevented the combat damage the creature would have dealt (double yikes), and the last was a neat little loose grouping of cards that cared about which spell they were cast as.

This unnamed, unkeyworded mechanic struck me as a really rich design space. We had basically only used it as an escalation mechanic in the set, but it was open ended enough to be used as a kicker mechanic for more or less any ability. It also scaled really well – casting one spell first let you do small to medium sized bonuses, but it got exponentially harder to cast two or more spells, letting you do really big, splashy rewards.

I decided that this mechanic would be my best bet. Initially I called the mechanic “Tempo N”, and the spells were cast “on beat”. However, since Tempo is already a game term for a type of deck, and due to confusion about “tempo” and “beat” being different words, I made a switch to “Rhythm N” and “in rhythm”, which I think made a huge difference.

I also really loved the musical theme. I made cards I didn’t submit based off of all kinds of top-down music tropes.

Here’s Also Sprach Zarathustra:

Here’s a bugle wake-up call (pre-Rhythm change, as you can see):

And the John Cena walk-up theme (also pre-Rhythm change):

Among the cards I submitted, Ominous Music and Raindrops on Rooftops were other top-down designs, specifically “DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNN” and “the exact nature sounds that I put on in the background when designing to help me think”.

I was super proud to win this challenge. Mechanical design has a ton of moving pieces to execute just right, and I really thought that I knocked both the gameplay and the flavor out of the park.

The biggest disagreement I had with the judges concerned higher tempos. I think that setting up your plays so that you can cast cards on Tempo 3, 4 or 5 at higher rarities leads to more “can you BELIEVE what I just did?!” stories, the type that Magic thrives on. Having those cards not always work might sometimes feel bad, but the Legendary Sorceries from Dominaria prove that the epic moments are worth working for.

The biggest point that I thought the judges were spot-on in making was that color-limiting the mechanic probably would’ve been smart. This mechanic couldn’t hold up an entire set, and suggesting it could by putting it in all five colors was perhaps a little overambitious on my part. I think that I would have made the mechanic Bant if I’d thought about it that way (especially since my Imps were Rakdos), but I’d be open to other interpretations for sure.

For homework, come up with a music trope of your own and represent it in a card (with or without Rhythm).