Wednesday, February 19, 2020

CCDD 021920 - Playing With Fire

Rituals (spells that generate more mana than they cost) are tricky to design. Aggressive decks getting to trade cards for tempo is a cool idea, but almost any ritual that's good at that is even better at powering broken strategies. (Storm decks are the best-known example.) On the other side of the power scale, weak or restricted ritual effects aren't consistently good enough to be worth a card in most decks. If only we could print a ritual effect that didn't take up an entire card...



A few years ago I brainstormed a bunch of ways to create balanced rituals. One approach I found that seemed useful was to make the ritual a modal option. The other mode adds value to the card by being a fallback plan in case the ritual doesn't work (or isn't needed). You can even choose the other mode so it's most valuable to the kinds of decks that you want to have access the ritual. Playing With Fire can help an aggressive creature deck get off the ground fast, or push through the last few points of damage.

The modal trick works for other not-usually-worth-a-card effects too, like combat tricks and self-bounce. Wizards seems to have figured this out recently: see Alley Evasion and Applied Biomancy. But I can't find any example of a modal ritual. Making that idea into a mechanic might be a bit of a stretch, but otherwise it's hard to justify putting it on a common.

7 comments:

  1. As you say, Wizards seems to have been making more modal spells lately (probably linked to BO1 in Arena). Personally I think it's pretty neat. Not only does it lend itself well to higher variety formats, it also means you can cover more things with one card slot in your design skeleton.

    I think adding a ritual mode is pretty neat, but you'd likely still have to restrict it in some way to prevent Storm from taking advantage (as you did with the creature rider).

    Another way of doing fixed rituals I think is Vessel of Volatility or Wild Cantor. The crux of balancing issues with rituals seems not to be that they allow tempo plays, but that they net a player mana the moment they are played. By keeping the input and output mana the same, this issue is circumvented. Both cards can still be used to invest more cards for tempo/ramp purposes however, just with a turn delay.

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    1. Yeah, Vessel of Volatility is a great example of a fixed ritual. I'm not sure how much aggressive decks would want an effect like that, though. The turn it takes to cast Vessel is a turn they'd normally spend casting a creature or other relevant spell, so it might not be a net tempo gain.

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    2. I think decks that want to have the burst of tempo without spending a turn on it have a lot of overlap with 'degenerate' decks like storm. The only way to combat that would be clear restrictions (ala your example, or Geosurge)

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  2. Also by having the ritual not being a spell cast you also are not assisting storm.

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  3. Does it warrant a keyword? It means it would be a sustantial theme in a set, and probably want to be in more than one colors...

    I would imagine it could have enablers (whenever you infuse a spell ...)

    I would let green infuse creture spells, red infuse whatever, blue infuse instants? Even though I guess that would make storm too strong again. It could go instead on a group of creatures:

    RED Infuser 1R:
    Creature - Spellshaper U
    1R, T, discard a [red instant/ red card / card]: add RRRR to your mana pool.
    1/2

    Green Infuser 1G:
    Creature - Spellshaper U
    1G, T, discard a [green creature card / green card/ card]: add GGGG to your mana pool.
    1/2


    I like, as Doug said, that it does not reinforce storm.

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    1. I really like the idea of ritual-spellshapers, since the T requirement makes them harder to abuse. In fact it turns out that there's a real Magic card that does this: Bog Witch!

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    2. Yes. I used to play it back in the day. Strange I had forgotten about it.

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