Double-Faced Fun
Now that Innistrad has been out for a little while, and everyone’s had a chance to play it a bit and try it out, I wanted to take the opportunity to share my thoughts and opinions on the set, based on some of my experiences with it.
The big sexy new mechanic in Innistrad is the double-faced card. It’s easy to forget now, for most of us, that when these cards were first announced, they seemed like a bad idea. At best, they looked like they were going to be a hassle to play with, and as always there were quite a few cries that this, truly, was the death of the game. I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical, though I had a certain amount of faith that the mechanic couldn’t be that difficult to live with, or else it would never have made it through playtesting.
It took me all of about five minutes at the prerelease to realize that my faith had not been misplaced. Playing transform cards in sleeves was painless and easy. Most people would simply take them out of the sleeve as soon as they were played, to more easily facilitate flipping, but others would leave them in and manually take them out again. I didn’t actually get a chance to transform anything at the prerelease, but I saw no complaints from anyone, and when it came time for the release, I wound up running a dedicated werewolf deck (five werewolves in my sealed pool, including a Mayor of Avabruck, who singlehandedly won nearly every game he was involved in), and that gave me plenty of experience playing with transform cards in sleeves.
Just to be sure though, I also tried playing some games with transform cards out of sleeves, and that was quite easy too. The inserts are very plentiful, and you won’t have any problem finding spares at your draft/sealed event. Sadly, they don’t take pencil very well, so you’ll probably need to mark them in pen. They feel a little bit like proxies at first, and that made me a bit uncomfortable, but once play started I was too worried about playing the game to concern myself about the fact that they didn’t look all that pretty sitting in my hand.
A lot of talk was made about other ways to approach double-faced cards, the most common of which being that “anything you can do with a double-faced card you can do with a flip card.” Mechanically, this is completely true (assuming you don’t mind tiny, tiny font). As Magic designers will tell you, though, flip cards are ugly, and they don’t leave much room for things like flavor text (let alone enough space for more complicated cards like, say, Mayor of Avabruck). Personally, I sort of skipped Kamigawa block, so I’m not much of an expert on flip cards, but I’ve never been a fan (specifically because they’re ugly), and I definitely agree that few, if any, of the double-faced cards would be half as cool if they were flip cards (screeching bat/stalking vampire seems like it might have been good this way, but I can’t think of any others).
A lot of people also talked about making the second side a token. Mark Rosewater said that this was looked into, and was deemed logistically impossible to guarantee that each double-faced card would have the correct transform token. I can definitely agree with him (and the rest of Magic R&D, I’m sure) that it’s better to have double-faced cards than to have transforming cards that players can’t use because they don’t have the other half. Personally, I’m a little skeptical that they, in fact, couldn’t have managed this by making the token an additional card, rather than replacing the existing token slot, but I know far less about Magic packaging than I do about Magic design (and that much less than, say, 3.5/Pathfinder game design), so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Before double-faced cards were first announced, way back when people were speculating about whether Mayor of Avabruck/Howlpack Alpha could, in fact, be a split card, there was talk about the possibility that the werewolf side was some sort of champion-esque card, which could be applied to any werewolf. I have no idea whether or not a champion variant was explored for Innistrad, but I think that that would be a neat idea (champion, in case you aren’t aware, is a mechanic from Lorwynn/Morningtide where a card requires that a card of a specific creature type be exiled, and the new card “replaces” that card, and when the new card dies the old card comes back).
Obviously champion itself wouldn’t work (both because the block already has a returning mechanic, and because champion doesn’t easily facilitate a back-and-forth-and-back-again style transformation), but I definitely think that a tweak on champion would have created an interesting take on the transformation elements that double-faced cards are getting at.
On the other hand, it would also have dramatically changed the way the set worked, I’m sure, and doesn’t really address the question of whether or not the double-faced cards are worth the hassle, or if they’re just gimmicky for the sake of being gimmicky.
The answer, though, has really been there from the beginning, to anyone who’s bothered to play with them: double-faced cards aren’t nearly as much hassle as they seem to be, and frankly they’re a lot of fun. If you wanted the cards as printed (and I do, I very much enjoy the set), and you accept that tokens were logistically impossible, this was the only way to do it. And, again, it’s really far easier to live with than it looks. As far as being gimmicky, well, that sort of depends on your definition of “gimmicky.”
When I hear “gimmicky” applied to a Magic mechanic, I assume they mean “doing something new and different just for the sake of being new and different,” with the implication that this is a “cheap trick” to get people to buy more cards. If this is your definition, I don’t think that double-faced cards are gimmicky at all. As Mark Rosewater will tell you, transformations are a major part of horror, the theme of the set. Look at all the horror tropes that wound up on transform cards: demon-possessed child, dr. Jekyll/mr. Hyde, the fly (as in, the movie), vampires shapechanging, and werewolves. Some of these could probably have been done without the transformation (especially Delver of Secrets/Insectile Aberration), but they’re all far cooler for it, and a number of them really couldn’t have been done nearly as well any other way (the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde one, in specific).
So, in short, if your question is “are double-faced cards a necessary evil,” the only answer I can find, after having a chance to play with the set, is that no, they’re not evil at all.