Challenges 2016 - The Tops and Flops (Part 3: Conclusion)

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

It's Wednesday again so here comes the final part about this years' challenges! This final post will not only contain my run-down on another pair of challenges (one "Top" and one "Flop") but also my MSE-File as a download aswell as the look-out for next years' challenges.

Let's dive right in with...

Flop - Category: Wording/Design

Oh. My. God. Until the very end I hated the "As long as your commanders color identity"-thing but I never came up with a better way to:

1. Prevent the person from playing blue +
2. Prevent the person from playing black if they don't play blue +
3. Make the person play red
4. Word everything in a postive and rewarding way since I didn't want things like "Whenever you tap a land for blue or black mana, ~ deals 2 damage to you."

There just didn't seem to be a way that really shut down these two colors while leaving everything else to the deckbuilder... So I made everything as clear as possible and moved on.

The rest of the card is fine. I like AEther Rift as a card and basically used it as a basis for the whole effect. Since I still wanted the challenge to be fun I added the draw two to make up for the card you loose each turn in case someone pays 5 life. Playing mono red already is hard on you when it comes to card draw and trading a GOOD card for 5 life is just plain bad in a multiplayer format where everyone has 40 life.

I had 3 options to counteract that:

1. Return the exiled card to hand in case someone pays life.
2. Draw one card.
3. Draw two cards.

Option 1 just feels bad on the pay 5 life side since you essentially pay life to delay good card. Option 2 is the other way round where you essentially cycle good cards for random cards while the lifeloss isn't really too bad for your opponents since you're loosing the good part of your deck.

So when all is said and done, option 3 is the only option that felt rewarding for both sides of the challenge... the ones that pay life are happy to see a threatening card go while the mono-red player made card advantage AND "dealt damage".

WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:

The enchantment-in-commandzone-style challenges just don't offer the tools to really "force" certain colors. While you can encourage colors there aren't many ways (if any) to prevent people from "splashing" a second or third color.

As mentioned before, using an existing card as a basis for a new one is a good strategy (Wizards just seems to have creative people in their design team... who would've thought)... I'll definitely keep that in mind for next year.

Moving on...

Top - Category: Design

This challenge is basically the only one I've witnessed in a game as this gets posted so I can already say what it did/didn't do. What it definitely did was make the "Challenger" build mono white in order to maximize the devotion... What it definitely didn't was trigger even once for a single card! No cards were drawn that day, plain old NULL.

Let's break it down a little and look into what might've gone wrong:
First of all, as I did before, I tried to make the effect "scaling". What this means is that the "better" you fullfil the requirements the more it rewards you. In this case you could of course opt for a deck that tries to create a devotion of five as consistently as possible while also branching out in other colors... BUT if you built a deck that is stacked with devotion to white you might be able to draw 2, 3 or even 4 cards in a single combat step,... which is obviously very strong.
Also I tried to guide the "Challenger" into a certain style of deck via flavor. Might sound funny, but I'm serious... just look at the card and tell me what deck I envisioned.

Is it this deck:

Or this one:

Obviously it's not option number one but unfortunately that's exactly what he built. And as to be expected it worked out horribly because not only did everyone have bad attacks into his board when he had the devotion to draw cards (=> no trigger) but his devotion got wrathed away every now and then since either his board got to big or someone elses did (=> trigger with X <= 0).

Now I'll be honest with you, I didn't plan for the challenges to be "challenging" in a "I need to figure out how to make this card work" sort of way but I'll take it... and maybe even look to make all the future challenges like that.

WHAT DID I LEARN FOR NEXT YEAR:

Not so much learn but realize that creating the effects in a way that make them challenging to use/abuse might be a fun thing to do. Especially if I manage to start sooner and therefore have more time to figure out the little details.

My Conlusion

Since this is the first time I did this whole challenge thing and people just started to build around the challenges I can't say much about the real impact of the cards in games and powerlevels of the decks around them. I definitely got the feeling that everyone recieved their challenge well and were somewhat excited to try out this one thing they never liked building.

Of course I also got a challenge (thanks to the people who designed it btw):

I haven't really started building this deck but I can assure you that I have some very funny things in mind ... I just hope I can still compete with the other challenge-decks while durdling with as much UN-cards as possible. Of course I will keep you guys up to date and publish a post on the deck once I know more about what I want to do with it.


Regarding next years' challenges I think I'll do a legendary creature for everyone to use as a commander. Not only does this solve my problems with forcing certain colors but it also makes balancing a little easier because you can interact with a creature as an opponent. I can always use the "where X is the amount of mana payed to play ~"-clause Wizards used before if I want to reward people for still casting their commander after it died 5 times... Maybe for all of them, maybe for some of them...
Other than "creatures" there are a few person-specific things I'll maybe use but the actual design process is a long time away so nothing's set in stone yet.

What else is there to say? I don't think there's much left... I broke down the 6 most outstanding challenges over the last weeks and wrote down what I thought was especially good/bad to keep in mind for next year so all that is left is my MSE-File (the download button should be at the top... google drive seems to be a bit derpy with .mse-set files) and my goodbyes... I wish you a nice day, I hope you enjoyed this read and...

See y'all 'round!