Flashback: You're a Designer, Harry! #7 - Fixing and Fixing

This flashback post was originally published on redsitewins.wordpress.com.

Welcome to another installment of You're a Designer, Harry! Last week, we reassembled the design skeleton because there were some corrections made that were relevant to the set's design. This week... we're once again reassembling the design skeleton! Yes, that's right, there are yet more changes to be made as we continually discuss and learn about issues pertaining to how to go about designing a four-color set. We'll also talk about the implications of mana-fixing for a "four colors matters" set. But before we go any further...

!!!

In Mark Rosewater's latest Making Magic, he revealed how R&D wrote Phyrexian mana. Here's the snippet from his column:

For those who are curious how R&D wrote Phyrexian mana in our design files, we used an exclamation point before the color. For example, Dismember's mana cost would be 1!B!B.

You know what this means, right? That's right, we're going to have to change how we write anti-mana. We previously used the exclamation mark (which was a brilliant suggestion from reader Jay Treat since it means "not" in computer programming, at least. So, "not white" or "not blue". He may or may not have gotten the idea to use that mark from someone else, though). I propose that the change be made to:

-C

As in -W-W ...which would mean two nonwhite anti-mana. The '-' symbol can still intuitively denote that there's a "minus green" or "minus black" going on here. What suggestions do you guys have? Anyway, let's move on.

Restoring Balance to the Force ...Again

NOTE: I'll be using the term "faction" again in my writing in this article to reference the four-color groupings that are the basis of this set.

As usual, here's the link to the set's design skeleton, which is constantly changed (if you're viewing this in a short amount of time since this article was first posted, then you'll notice I only corrected the commons). This means that if you're viewing the following spreadsheet a month from now, it's going to be different than from what it is today. The benefit is that you know that you're always up-to-date with the design skeleton.

Four-Color Set Design Skeleton

The first issue we'll discuss are the two-color hybrid and two-color gold cards. We'll look at the commons first, not only because that's the only part of the design skeleton we covered last time, but because commons are the meat of the set while everything else is just mashed potatoes (uncommon), gravy (rare), and a nice frosty beverage (mythic rare). The problem is in the quantities of each of the possible color-combinations chosen - for the commons at least.

The colors in this set are differently-balanced from most other sets because it, being the first set of the block, contains three - not five - factions (while the second has the remaining two). There are more blue and green cards because all three of these three factions (nonwhite, nonblack, and nonred) have blue and green in their specific four colors. The certain kinds of two-color cards needed to keep in mind this different color balance. There's ten different kinds of two-color combinations to have varying quantities of to keep the colors in balance. Last time, we used a certain combination to attain our unique color balance. Here's what it looked like:

• 2 Green-White
• 2 White-Blue
• 2 Blue-Black
• 1 Black-Red
• 2 Red-Green
• 1 White-Black
• 2 Blue-Red
• 2 Black-Green
• 1 Red-White
• 3 Green-Blue

This is color-balanced, but it's not balanced in terms of the two central colors of each faction. Black-red has one less card than green-white and white-blue! Yes, the nonwhite faction has access to blue-black and red-green cards to compensate, but emphasis on those central colors is one of the important parts of making sure this four color set sticks to being all about four colors (and not stepping into five-color land). To reinforce this, we want a strong presence from the dominant colors of each faction. So, enter the new distribution of colors:

• 2 Green-White
• 2 White-Blue
• 2 Blue-Black
• 2 Black-Red
• 2 Red-Green
• 1 White-Black
• 1 Blue-Red
• 1 Black-Green
• 1 Red-White
• 4 Green-Blue

This is the same color balance, yet, there's a balance of the dominant colors across the three factions. Yes, there are four green-blue cards, but every faction can include green-blue cards in their decks. They're highly draftable!

Now, let's talk about the dangers of including mana-fixing cards in a set where four colors is supposed to matter. Not five colors. Four.

Man, a Fixer!

When it comes to multicolor sets, including mana-fixing cards in the set is a must. Ravnica block had the signet cycle and two cycles of land. Shards of Alara saw the use of the obelisk cycle as well as its own two cycles of land.

We'll follow suit, but we have to be careful because our set is different from these other two sets, and I'm not just talking about the four-color theme. Actually, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The thing with Magic: The Gathering is that building a two-color deck is fairly easy to do. Mana fixers make it easier to build the next step up from the average amount of colors of the set they mana fixers are in. Normally, this number is two, so when you have mana fixers in a two-color set, it's easier to build three-color decks. This isn't a biggie. You can just say you're building an Izzet-Boros deck (white-blue-red).

So, going four colors in a two-color set is harder to do; let alone trying for five colors. In Shards of Alara block, going four colors became easier when the "norm" was three colors. Again, no problem. Five colors is still hard to do (though, Conflux helped with that as a cool second-set theme (domain).

That leads to a four-color set with mana-fixers in it. This makes five color (or even six colors, if Magic had such existing colors) decks easier to do. However, that's not what we want. Five colors is already a thing. It's domain. So, consistent five-color decks would make the set feel more like a domain set than a four-color set. Which means we need to design mana-fixing but in a way that restricts players from at least easily crossing over into five colors.

An easy way of doing this is to put a colored mana cost on a cycle of artifacts that produce mana, for each of their respective factions, of the remaining two colors. And then there's lands (I plan for a common and a rare cycle of them, by the way).

Oh, boy. What a toughie. And that's where you guys can come in. Design a cycle (you can just show one card for one faction since the card would be duplicated for each of the other two factions) of artifacts or lands that encourage four colors yet discourage going with five colors.

Here's a few to get you started:

Jules Robins (of Quiet Speculation) gave this design as an example:

BR Mana Rock 2
~ enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add B or R to your mana pool. Activate this ability only if you control one or more black or red permanents.

And Chah (of Goblin Artisans) threw in a couple, too:

CARDNAME enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add U, W, B, or G to your mana pool.
You can’t pay R as a cost.

CARDNAME enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add U or W to your mana pool.
T: Add B or G to your mana pool. Activate this only if you have a UW in your mana pool.

Thank you for bringing this up in the feedback of my previous two articles.

Outta This World

That's it for this week, but I'll leave you guys with this little golden nugget for the creative part of this set. The following text is quoted from Mark Rosewater's "Mana with All the Fixin's" from March 23, 2009 (It's also a good read for designing mana-fixing cards, incidentally!):

The next step up is to lands that can produce any color mana. (Yes, I understand I've skipped right past quad lands but until we go to the home plane of the Nephilim I think you're out of luck; you heard me, I don't think the Nephilim were from Ravnica—discuss)

Cheers,

Bradley