CCDD 101618 — Making Mischief: Trick or Treat!

Like my costume?

Cool Creepy Card Design of the Day

I'm a big fan of Halloween! So today, let's begin the fiendish festivities of the spookiest season with a mechanic celebrating it!

I've been thinking about the Deceiver cycle lately, from Champions of Kamigawa. I always felt they had promise to them, but needed a lot of polishing up. At the same time, when I was working on today's CCDD, I knew I wanted to make some Halloween-y designs! Mischief-making, then, came from the crossing of those two trains of thought. 

From the beginning, I knew I wanted my mechanic to have no 'dead surprises'. Unlike Deceivers, where you sometimes just have nothing fun that turn, my goal was to have every surprise be 'live'. The binary of 'trick or treat', then, was a perfect complement to my goals for the mechanic! 

One thing I struck upon early was that I really liked the idea of all mischief-makers sharing their surprises. In a sense, it becomes like energy in that they all utilize the same ammo, but it becomes much more interesting in that all players are never quite sure what that ammo is going to be. The opponent won't know what you have up your sleeves, and you won't know what your 'surprise' is going to be until you cast the card! That sounds pretty fun to me!

The mechanic has a lot of problems, however. The big one is obvious from the start - these are texty! Even subtracting reminder text and the like, as suggested by Reuben Covington's excellent NWO and red-flagging primer, these come out to four lines of text, which is red-flagged. Besides, just aesthetically, it's clear they're jammed into the textbox, which is no good. Even the simplest abilities demand a minimum of three lines of text.

Perhaps at common, we could care about only tricks or treats on individual cards. Not only does this reduce wordiness, it also makes for interesting drafting decisions, as you ideally want to pair together 'tricksters' and 'treatsters' in your deck to ensure you're using as many of your surprises as possible.

My major concern with this approach, however, is that you can now get 'dead' surprises. If a player only drafted tricksters, they're going to have a lot of surprises that are useless to them. My first instinct would be to give each color at common one trickster, and one treatster, with this approach.

Also, this is a good spot to note that I was very deliberate about which effects I gave to 'tricks' , and which I gave to 'treats'. Decks almost always favor nonlands, so I gave the more complicated effects that change the board state to tricks, since they'll occur less often. 

Another problem with making mischief could be its new terminology. I'm not as worried because... well, most of that terminology is just to sell the spoOOooky Halloween flavor. Above, you can see one possible way this mechanic could be adapted for 'real' Magic. Once you remove the spooOOooky Halloween flavor, it looks a lot more feasible, right? However, it does get trickier to make this treatment work with the proposed alternative of tricksters and treatsters, as the nonlands no longer have a flavorful term to make them as exciting.

One last issue with 'making mischief'' is that, unlike Deceivers, these cards eat your draws. Experienced players understand that this is really no different than if the cards were on the bottom of your library, but to any player, it'll be extremely frustrating when your bomb becomes a 'surprise' and you wish it hadn't! That inspired Witching Hour, which is a way to save your stranded surprises. However, this is just one design, and a rare one at that. Ideally, we could find an iteration of making mischief that doesn't have this frustration present on most designs.

Do you think this mechanic has potential? How would you improve it, or iterate upon it? I'd love to hear what you all think!