Fast and Loose Phyrexians
I recently had the good fortune to be able to attend a New Phyrexia pre-release, and, just like this time last year, it got me thinking about some game design opinions I wanted to share. Those of you who are familiar with the site, however, are no doubt wondering why this is listed here, rather than in my Dark Designs column, and before I move on to give my perspective on New Phyrexia and what it means for non-Magic game designers (an odd topic, I know), I just wanted to address that really quickly. Those of you that don’t care, feel free to skip the next paragraph.
There’re two reasons this isn’t a Dark Designs article. The first is that, really, while the article may be about game design, and therefore appropriate for Dark Designs, it’s really about me wanting to comment on the design of New Phyrexia. Though I obviously put a certain amount of stock by my own commentary skill, or you wouldn’t be reading this at all, I like to think that people coming to the website on Mondays are reading Dark Designs with certain expectations, and that those aren’t really Magic-related. I still want to write about Magic, and I imagine my coworkers want to write about other things (they grumble from time to time about not getting to tell design stories or share design philosophy), so we’ve created this space for, well, extra-curricular articles. The other reason? This article would be a lot less timely in August when my next free Dark Designs is.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this article: looking at New Phyrexia, and it’s design, what sorts of lessons can we take away that we can apply to other areas of game design, with special focus on the sort of game design that we do here at Necromancers of the Northwest? There are three basic things I’d like to cover: Phyrexian mana, Phyrexian mana (in a different way), and the responsible use of names. We’ll start with Phyrexian mana.
For those of you that don’t play Magic, Phyrexian mana is a difficult concept to explain. The (very) short version is that mana is what you use to cast spells, and you have relatively limited access to it, especially early in the game. Phyrexian mana is actually a type of cost, on a card, that allows you to substitute some or all of that precious mana with a simple down-payment of 2 life (roughly 1/10 your life, assuming you have no way to gain more). This has two effects: first, it allows you to do a whole lot more with a lot less mana, and second, at least the way that New Phyrexia is designed, it allows you to use cards with Phyrexian mana in any deck (normally you would need mana of a certain color to cast these spells, but the ability to pay life instead makes them available to everyone).
The most immediately obvious use of Phyrexian mana is the first one: the fact that you can play that spell for a lot cheaper than you could if it cost normal mana. This is a very powerful, very sexy ability, especially in more competitive games of magic, where games often consist of a sort of arms race, and tend to wrap up after about six turns or so. Getting your spells out one or two turns early (or getting two out when you should only be able to get one, etc.) can allow you to make a sort of blitzkrieg, which, as history will demonstrate, is usually pretty effective.
In fact, this sort of “fast mana” isn’t strictly new to magic. There have been plenty of spells in the past (especially the distant past) that allowed you to get a whole lot of extra mana…until the end of the turn. Cards like Dark Ritual would allow you to get out a three-mana spell on turn one. This sort of thing was very powerful, and while there have been lots of cards like it (mostly in red, these days), there aren’t any which approach its overall level of power. This is probably healthy for the game, because, well, Dark Ritual kind of warped it a little. Still, those of us who’ve played long enough to remember Dark Ritual pine for its awesome power, and though we know it’s bad for us, well…that’s what makes it so sexy, right?
Phyrexian mana pursues this same basic idea of “fast mana,” but in a more limited and less, well, broken way. It manages to capture all of the sexiness of Dark Ritual, without (hopefully, at least, time will tell for sure) warping the game in ways that Dark Ritual allowed. In fact, as a quick aside, I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed that we didn’t see a Phyrexian mana Dark Ritual variant, for example, allowing you to pay 1 colorless and one Phyrexian red (that’s one red or two life) for three red mana. I guess maybe it’d be too powerful. Oh well.
There are also a number of Phyrexian mana spells whose mana cost is comprised entirely of Phyrexian mana, meaning that you can cast those spells even when you have no mana available. This is also really sexy, because it means that you can trick your opponent, or, if nothing else, still be able to cast the spell even if you overextend yourself (or, in the case of Mental Misstep, especially in vintage games, if it’s not yet your first turn). This is generally (though, not entirely, especially in vintage games) something that you can’t do.
And that’s really the beautiful thing about Phyrexian mana: it feels forbidden, and a little bit dirty. Like something you know you’re not supposed to do…which is exactly why you want to do it. As long as whatever forbidden fruit you’re offering isn’t going to really warp the game in a substantial way (and, as I said, it looks like Phyrexian mana isn’t) this is really the best kind of design, in my opinion. If your players feel like they’re getting away with something, or maybe even cheating a little, but the game is actually working more or less the way it’s supposed to, well, what does that mean? It means that it’s going to be appropriately challenging (O.K., in games like Magic, “challenging” isn’t what goes away when the game gets broken, but I’m talking more about other games now. In Magic, it would need to be appropriately interactive and skill-based), but the player is going to not only feel like he’s found something powerful, he’s going to be having fun.
You see, there’s definitely a downside to cheating and playing with ridiculously powerful mechanics that bend and warp the game. It’s that the game isn’t very challenging or fun anymore. But if the game keeps all the things that make it challenging (or fun, again, Magic is different), then you get all the sexy upside without any of the boring downside.
As far as Pathfinder in specific, after playing some New Phyrexia I’m inspired to look more for places where it would be safe and appropriate to allow players access to things earlier than they would normally get them. Obviously this is a very tight and narrow path to walk, with little room for error on either side, and a long way to fall, but I think we’ve done pretty well at balancing so far, and we made spells that replaced spell slots, so I think we’re up to the task. In fact, this may have already crept a bit into our upcoming book, The Ebon Vault: Swords of Legend, as one of the major goals of the book was to find more ways to make weapons customizable (and, where possible, magical) earlier in the game, so that players could enjoy having a flaming sword before, like, 1/4 of the way to 20th level (don’t worry, we balanced it). In specific, though, I hope in the future to find more and more opportunities to allow characters limited access to spells of higher levels before they would normally be able to get it (especially in the case of spells that don’t really deserve to be such high level. Contact other plane: I’m looking at you.).
But that’s not the only thing about Phyrexian mana: it also lets you play, say, blue spells in a deck that doesn’t have any access at all to blue mana. Again, this may be difficult for non-Magic players to grasp, so, if you don’t play Magic but you’re reading this for some reason anyway, it’s sort of like letting any spellcaster have access to some of the spells that are generally only available to specific classes: a handful of sorcerer/wizard-only spells, a couple bard-only spells, two or three druid-only spells, you get the idea. In a way, this kind of dovetails in with the last point about Phyrexian mana: it lets you do something you’re not really supposed to do. At the same time, though, it does have its own unique aspects that I wanted to call out briefly.
In Magic, as well as in Pathfinder/3.5 and, really, a variety of games, a lot of the structure of the game comes from the presence of various roles, or strategies, or approaches. Each of these has its own strengths and weaknesses, and this keeps the game interesting and varied. Sometimes, for example, you’re a rogue who is good at dealing damage and handling traps, but not so great at absorbing hits. Other times, you’re a fire mage who is good at setting things on fire, and handling lots of enemies grouped together, but is toast if he gets grappled. Similarly, in Magic, some decks are good at creating lots of little creatures, others are good at having lots of big stompy guys, some are good at countering spells and killing the other guy’s creatures, etc., etc. etc. If this wasn’t the case, the game would be a lot less exciting. In the case of Magic, everyone would just use the same handful of cards, and all decks would be exactly the same, removing an entire major element (deckbuilding) from the game. In D&D, you can actually see the effects of this happening, or at least, so critics claim, by watching someone who really knows what they’re doing play a wizard: polymorph your familiar into a hydra to out-fight the fighter, use find traps and knock to out-thief the rogue, and just guzzle potions of cure light wounds to replace the cleric (of course, undeath to death is good in a pinch with undead). Personally I’m not sure I buy into the “wizard can do anything better than anyone” theory, but, certainly, if there was a class that rendered other classes obsolete, it wouldn’t be good for the game.
Still, with Phyrexian mana, though you do gain access to things you wouldn’t normally be able to do (for example, green mages can use Act of Aggression to steal creatures temporarily, now), and that’s a dangerous precedent, it’s in very controlled circumstances, and there’s always a cost (measured in life, in this case from 2 to 4). It lets you bend the color wheel a little bit, but it makes you pay for it, and if you try to bend it a lot, well, you’re going to wind up killing yourself in the process. In effect, it’s providing options to allow players in one role to dabble in a different role, without letting them completely usurp the role from the people it properly belongs to. Green is not as good at stealing creatures as red or blue, even with Act of Aggression. While black can counter spells with Mental Misstep, they can only counter spells with converted mana cost 1. You get the idea.
As an aside, apparently, according to Aaron Forsythe, there’ve been lots of complaints about this stretching of the color pie. I believe him, because he would know, but I’m personally not concerned. In the games that I’ve played with New Phyrexia, if you spend too much life on Phyrexian mana (a tempting and addictive proposition), you quickly find yourself in trouble. To be honest, I didn’t really notice all the color wheel adjustments in the set while I was playing with it (I felt them, but I didn’t notice them). It just felt like the set had a lot of, you know, life loss, and there were some cards (namely Leeching Bite and Mind Culling) that didn’t feel so much like they were bending the color pie as they felt like they were, you know, evil and Phyrexian.
Back to the point, giving players options is good. Though it’s important that, for example, wizards not be able to cast heal and bards not be able to cast, I don’t know, shapechange, having a little bit of overlap gives players an opportunity to let their characters do something they wouldn’t normally be able to do, and allows for more customization. Besides, as we covered above, doing something you’re not generally allowed to do is fun.
We’ve already done a few things like that here at NNW, though we try to be careful about it because it can be pretty dangerous, especially in 3.5/Pathfinder where the character roles are a little hazy even at the best of times. But, those of you who are looking for such things will notice that, in Advanced Arcana volume I there’s a spell called Kabaz’s revitalizing rest which allows sorcerers and wizards a limited ability to heal the party.
To be honest, I’m not really sure how to go about applying this in particular design in any great quantity in 3.5/Pathfinder. As I said above, the roles in this game are much less well-defined than the roles in Magic, and there’s nothing new or exciting about, say, a class that had a mix of martial and spellcasting abilities (there are several, though most are prestige classes). Similarly, hybrid fighter/rogues and cleric/rangers and the like are everywhere, and in Pathfinder the Use Magic Device skill is readily available to everyone, meaning even the world’s thickest barbarian can pick up a wand of bull’s strength and use it like a pro. There’s certainly still room in a few isolated cases to bend the rules (the best example I can think of is that wizards are very limited when it comes to healing damage), but for the most part, I think 3.5/Pathfinder’s equivalent of Magic’s “color wheel” is about as bent and misshapen as it can be without flying apart in every direction.
Now that I’ve sunk nearly 2,500 words into Phyrexian mana, it’s time to move to the other thing I wanted to discuss about New Phyrexia, and, to a lesser extent the previous two sets in the block, and that has to do with names as a resource.
If you don’t spend much time on game design, this will probably be a very alien concept to you, and it’s a bit of a difficult idea in the best of circumstances, so let me back up to the beginning. In the real world, lots of different things can have the same name. Not only are there thousands of people out there with the name “Alex,” there are even some out there with the name “Alex Riggs.” At least one is much more famous than I am, if Google is any indicator. This doesn’t just apply to people, either: organizations, products, concepts, lots of different things share a name with something that may or may not actually have anything to do with it.
Not so much, in games. In games, sharing names leads to confusion, and generally speaking it just isn’t done. You don’t want to have two feats with the name “Master Alchemist,” for example, because when you need to reference that feat (say, in a stat-block, or even just if someone asks their DM “can I take the Master Alchemist feat?”) no one will know which one you’re talking about. Of course, thanks to the magic of third-party publishing, and the fact that I barely have time to pay close attention to what, say, Paizo is doing, let alone what companies like Rite Publishing or Super Genius Games are churning out, I’m sure there’s lots of naming overlap. Still, I don’t typically reference things that Rite Publishing or Super Genius Games is creating, so it’s usually more-or-less a moot point. We try not to have any name overlap with paizo.
In Magic, this issue is far more important. While you could have, say, a spell and a magic item property (or a class feature, or a feat, or something) that had the same name, it’s not the end of the world, because they can still be differentiated by the fact that one’s a spell, and one’s a class feature, or what have you. But in Magic, each card has its own unique name, and no other card can have the same exact name.
This makes names a precious resource, both in Magic (due primarily to the vast quantity of cards) and in 3.5/Pathfinder. The preciousness in the latter is due in part to quantity, but mostly because the various things that need to be named tend to have greater restrictions on what’s an appropriate name: for example, if Magic needs a name for a card that’s a fencing creature, they can call it Deft Duelist. I could make a feat called Deft Duelist, and it would probably sound about right, and, if I was lucky (and desperate) I might be able to get away with a prestige class called Deft Duelist. But I could never have, say, a spell, magic weapon property, or base class called Deft Duelist. It would sound weird. This is most prevalent with base classes, who need to have very catchy names that are broad enough to cover the whole archetype for the class, but also specific enough to give it a distinct flavor from other classes. Mostly, it has to feel right. For example, it’s no secret that I was more than a little disappointed with the alchemist class from the Advanced Player’s Guide. If I wanted to make a new class for alchemist characters that I felt better matched the flavor for that class, I wouldn’t be able to call it “alchemist,” because Paizo took that. I might be able to call it a “chemist,” but that sounds a little more modern than I’d care for. I could call him an elementalist (after the alchemical theory that everything in the world is comprised of different mixes of the four classical elements: air, earth, fire, and water), but we all know that that’s not right, because I needed that long parenthetical to even explain what I was talking about. I could get cutesy and call him a chymist or something like that, if Paizo hadn’t made a prestige class using that name. You get the idea.
So, while Magic has the downside of being able to basically just add a good adjective to any card in order to get a working name (“minotaur” can be “Canyon Minotaur” or “Raging Minotaur,” and so on, or, if they run out of adjectives, they can make some up, like “Talruum Minotaur,” or “Hurloon Minotaur), they also have absolutely 0 wiggle room when it comes to multiple cards having the same name, because in Magic a card’s name is actually part of the rules (as opposed to in 3.5/Pathfinder, where it isn’t. Think of it like if we tried to make a new ability score and called it “Charisma.”)
So, where am I going with all of this talk about the importance of names in Magic? Well, usually it doesn’t really matter that much if you want to use specific names. In fact, dropping a few placenames (like, say, Grixis Slavedriver) can help solidify the sense of atmosphere that Magic aims for. But, when you have something with Phyrexia, that has decades (well, okay, decade. But it’s close to two decades. Almost.) of history, and you know that it’s something you’re going to be coming back to someday, you want to be careful not to drain those precious resources too quickly.
Nomenclaturally speaking, New Phyrexia was the equivalent of massive rainforest logging. I honestly believe that the creative team had a checklist of Phyrexian concepts and card names that they wanted to make sure made it into the set somewhere. Things from old Phyrexia. Things like Glistening Oil, Birthing Pod, and, if you’re willing to look at the other sets in the block, like Phyresis. These are names that those familiar with old Phyrexia are intimately familiar with. They tie right into the nostalgia of Phyrexia, and, in a major way, that nostalgia was a major aspect of the block: naturally they’d want to use those names.
But I don’t think they put enough effort into considering how they used them. Phyresis, for example, is the process of having your organic parts replaced with mechanical ones. Last time I checked, there were a lot of Phyrexians who had undergone phyresis (re: all of them, prior to Scars of Mirrodin) that did not have infect. So why is Phyresis a black enchantment that grants infect? Why isn’t it, say, an Ashnod’s Altar effect? It would have made about three times as much sense on a card like Liquimetal Coating, for example. Glistening Oil, similarly, is the force that animates the Phyrexians, including all the pre-Mirrodin ones. There’s about a million things that it could do, but attaching it to infect, something that not all Phyrexian fans (especially the ones who were excited about getting new cards to put in existing Phyrexian-themed decks) are excited about, sends a clear message: “Phyrexia = infect. Old Phyrexia doesn’t matter, and people who remember a Phyrexia before infect are wrong.”
Like the alchemist class (above), these aren’t bad cards, it’s just that the cards don’t really match the names. And those names are prime real estate. Now no one can ever make a proper Phyresis, that does what Phyresis should have done in the first place, because that name is forever saddled with the rules it was given.
Thanks for taking the time to read through this little treatise. I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you found it interesting, if not entertaining. Be sure to check back in the future, as I hope to have lots more to put in this column.