Inspecting Innistrad
I was recently lucky enough to get a VIP invite to the Magic: the Gathering Innistrad party at PAX. I’m not quite sure why this is, as I don’t write about Magic all that often, but I assume it’s because they hope that I will. Because I hate to disappoint after a really fun party, and also because I have some things I’d like to say from a design perspective about what was revealed, I wanted to take some time to go over Innistrad’s mechanics with you all.
If you’re looking for pictures of the cards that have been revealed, or that sort of thing, you’re not going to find it here. I know that plenty of other websites got those up long before now, and, frankly, we both know that www.necromancers-online.com is probably not anyone’s first place to go for Magic-related news. Instead, I’m going to focus on providing commentary from the perspective of a designer (albeit not a Magic designer). In fact, I’m going to assume that you’re already pretty familiar with what’s been spoiled so far, and have checked out the Innistrad Mechanics page.
So, why don’t we start by addressing the elephant in the room: double-sided cards. The Mayor of Avabruck card had actually been revealed for a while before the party, though the speculative Magic community couldn’t make heads or tails of it: the cards were clearly connected, but there was no way that could be. They couldn’t be separate cards—that’d be a pain to draft, and limited is far too important for Wizards to allow that. They clearly weren’t split-cards or flip-cards. And surely, Wizards couldn’t print a card on both sides. The logistics problems would be staggering.
It turns out that Wizards actually has a relatively elegant solution…under the circumstances, anyway. The answer, as I’m sure you know, is that they have special cards with normal backs, and a checklist of all the double-sided cards in the set. You mark which one it is supposed to represent, and put it in your deck as a sort of proxy until you actually play (or discard, or exile face-up, or reveal, or what have you) the card, at which point you switch to the real thing. Of course, if you have sleeves, you can just keep the card in there, but then you have to take it out, flip it over, and put it back any time it transforms.
If that sounds a little distasteful to you, you’re not alone. Playing with proxies in this way is definitely a hoop that Wizards is asking us to jump through, especially considering that many players have been conditioned (much to Wizards’ benefit) to have something of a disdain for proxies, and taking cards out of their sleeve to flip them over…just sounds like a hassle. So, sure, what they want us to do is a little annoying.
On the other hand, remember what it’s allowing them to do: print a card with information on both sides. Remember how we all casually dismissed the idea of double-sided cards because we knew that there was no way they could possibly make it work? Well, when you consider that they’re doing the impossible, playing with a few pseudo-proxies or doing some extra man-handling of your cards doesn’t seem like that big of a deal anymore, does it?
You’ll probably hear more from me about this mechanic in the future, because I have more to say about it, but for right now I just want to canvas all the mechanics revealed in Innistrad. I think next up is Morbid. I’m sure that the Wizards team will be the first to admit that Morbid isn’t the most innovative keyword they’ve ever come up with. Perhaps this is because they spent their innovation quota on the double-sided cards. Whatever the case, it’s important to remember that just because something isn’t particularly innovative doesn’t mean it’s not a good mechanic.
A lot of our designs here at Necromancers of the Northwest, for example, use existing and fairly well-trodden mechanics, but approaching them in new ways. Technically speaking, for example, our Marchen der Daemonwulf book probably doesn’t have anything that could be called innovative (allright, fine, maybe the lunar mechanic, but that’s not important for this), but the way that they’re presented allows players to make werewolf characters in a way that was really not available to them before.
What the Morbid ability word really means, is that Innistrad block is going to have a lot of effects that care about whether or not a creature died this turn. Death triggers are something you see a little of in every block, but with a whole ability word, we can assume that we’ll be seeing a lot of it in Innistrad, and that suits me just fine. Magic is at its best when things are going on, and that includes creatures fighting and dying (or taking a fireball to the gut and dying, or what have you). A limited environment where that will be going on a lot, and I get rewarded for it, sounds fun to me.
Then, of course, there’s flashback. Flashback’s always been a pretty fun mechanic in my book, and it certainly gets you some extra utility out of your cards. I’m not quite sure why Wizards decided that flashback was the mechanic to reprint for Innistrad, since all I’ve heard about its design is that it’s supposed to be incredibly flavor-heavy, and horror-themed, and if you were looking for graveyard mechanics that fit that bill, I’d be looking at threshold, dredge, or delve long before I started looking at flashback, which is a great mechanic, but isn’t really a horrific one that drips with flavor of…well…any kind. It’s a purely utilitarian mechanic.
I’m sure they had a reason. Perhaps those other mechanics weren’t working well with the set. Perhaps there’s just so much horror in Innistrad that they had to have something strictly mechanical like flashback just to balance things out (perhaps they were worried that the set is geared so much to Timmy and, obviously Vorthos, that they wanted to throw in something like flashback to ensure that more mechanically minded players who didn’t appreciate the set’s amazing art and cool flavor wouldn’t get bored). Certainly, I’m sure they had specific reasons for not picking threshold (Rosewater himself has said that he didn’t think that Odyssey was a success from a gameplay standpoint as threshold was unintuitive and made games very complicated), and dredge (which, last time, turned out to be really, really, really powerful, and may have left a bad taste in some people’s mouths), or delve (this I’m not sure about, but considering it allows you to circumvent mana costs, probably too powerful. Or maybe emptying your graveyard just didn’t mesh with the rest of the set, mechanically).
Then there’s the tribal element. By now you’ll be aware that Innistrad has five tribes, each in two allied colors. At this point, I don’t have a lot to say, except that so far I’ve seen three cards that are specifically anti-vampire, two of which are also anti-zombie, and one of which is also anti-werewolf. For such an oppressed and horrific plane, the humans seem to me like they’ll be in a pretty good position to fight back when the time comes.
I plan on talking more about all of this in a few days, when I have more time, and when a little more of the set has been revealed. In the meantime, I hope that my commentary has proved informative, or at least interesting, for you.