The holidays are over and I'm putting out content again (as you might have seen) so... yeeiii I guess! If you were listening to my first podcast, which I posted a few weeks ago, you might be aware of the so-called "challenges" I designed for everyone in my playgroup. For those of you who didn't I'll explain them in a few sentences:
A "challenge" is basically an enchantment providing its effect from the command zone. The player still has his commander in the command zone, and can only play the colors in that commanders color identity. It is "good sportsmanship" to try and build around the challenge as heavily as possible.
What makes them "challenging" is that their player-specific design is oriented towards rewarding the player for things he's normally NOT DOING. What that means exactly will get clearer once you see what the challenges did this year.
The idea behind them was that as a "new years resolution", so to speak, the people in my playgroup had to broaden the deckbuilding horizons. And while I am very happy with some of my designs, some of the Challenges got a bit wonky/bad/don't really do what I intended.
So here they are, my personal tops and flops of this years challenges:
Flop - Category: Design
I'll call this challenge a flop not because I'm unhappy with the design, it just potentially fails to force the person it is supposed to be challenging - let's call him Mr. Ramp for now - into unknown territory.
As one might have guessed by now the goal was to make land-ramp of any kind unappealing while also creating benefits for low cost creatures and a proper (aggressive) curve. The first idea was buffing low-cost creatures but that really didn't fell too great since you can still ramp and use high-costed noncreature spells while reaping the benefits with a low curve creature-wise (*cough* Karametra *cough*).
Therefore the challenge ended up having this "6 or less lands" conditional. Not only does it limit the mana costs of the cards you can play but will also make landramp rather bad because after one ramp spell you're practically at you "sweet spot" if you count in regular land drops.
Now to make use of the redundant lands you'll eventually draw I added an additional ability that let's you dispose of said extra lands to make sure to stay at 6 lands while providing some additional Bloodthirst-counters.
And that's where I messed up big time. I could've done discard, I could've increased the activation cost but noooo I essentially make land ramp viable again since you can always sacrifice the lands out of your Explosive Vegetation + the land drop for the turn for a whopping 6 damage and still play a cmc 6 creature... I mean wtf?! What did I think when I designed that ability?!
Basically the only thing that keeps me from crying every night is that the player is still going down a card and invests a ton of time into it so nothing insanely OP happening... hopefully.
WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:
I still think strictly "positive" abilities as in "rewarding people for things you want" are the way to go, but next year I'll make sure to think things through to the end. Also this year, I had the idea to make the challenges pretty late and ran out of time for number crunching which explains the little slip up with the activation cost - it definitely should've been 2 mana instead of 1.
Now I need something positive...
Top - Category: Design
Finding deckbuilding patterns isn't always easy, especially if you don't have exact decklists but only the cards you get to see while facing the player.
At first nothing really stood out to me: Narset Superfriends, Yeva, Norin, Progenitus Landfall,... but after I had finished rough drafts of the other challenges I finally realized that while Progenitus contains black, the theme and cards in the deck have very little to do with black. This, and the fact that all above mentioned decks heavily center around permanents, made me think of the challenge you see above... after a long circle of idea, dismiss, idea, dismiss,...
This time around though both parts of the ability were designed in one go. I wanted to encourage playing heavy black but not rule out splashing for a second or even third color (although that might be ambitious) since the second focus of the card were instants and sorceries. After a while I was sure I wanted to do something that involved "equal the number of swamps you control" that triggered when something happened with instants and sorceries. But things like "whenever you cast" just felt too strong considering that might lead to a very oppressive Bx Control-build that just never went out of gas.
That's when I came up with those manifest-shenanigans. Giving the player the opportunity to manifest cards from his or her library at the price of some mana and a little life (how very black) gave the challenge a really great feel to it. The manifest ability is a modification of Qarsi High Priest where I took away the "sacrifice a creature" part and traded it for "pay 1 life" - history shows that one card is worth one life in black. I strapped on a second "pay 1 life" because you can activate the ability more than once each turn (provided you have the mana) so that if you wanted to get greedy you'll have to pay a fair price.
The triggered ability then is where the "magic" happens: The trigger wants you to have as many instants and sorceries in your library as possible - and in your graveyard aswell, hello "nonpermanent" - so the manifest-ability provides you with a way to generate creatures without the need for a single creature in your deck while also being the main, if not only, way of getting said trigger to go on the stack. This trigger also adds a little mini-game to the table since opponents will never know which manifest is "save to kill" and which isn't especially if you act like you'd want certain manifests to die.
WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:
Again I wish I had had more time to make the wording a little smoother and 100% rule-proof - as I'm not entirely sure if the ability does what I think it does... - but even if it wouldn't do what I envisioned we'll just act like it did and move on.
Still not having played any actual games against it, I can't say much about its atual behavior in-game. What I do know is that "scaling" abilities - since the later the game the more swamps you'll have -definitely have a great feel to them and I hope this feeling sticks around as we get to play against "The Dark Side"... maybe he even brings some cookies...
With this I'd like to end part 1 of this three-part series where I recap the design process of this years challenges. I hope you liked the read and look forward to the next part which will come out next Wednesday.
See y'all 'round!
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