The Great TWG Draft: Keyword Analysis

On New Year’s day, The Time-Waster’s Guide had a very interesting party—we all got together and did a 13-person draft of Magic: The Gathering using fake cards we’d made up ourselves. Most of the participants created 15 cards each, while EUOL and I did around 250 each to fill out the rest of the 600 or so we needed. We decided to come up with a handful of keyword mechanics and use them liberally to give the set a more cohesive feel. This worked out pretty well, and the common keywords did in fact make it easier for people to grasp certain cards. The keywords themselves turned out to be a mixed bag, though: some were better than we expected, some were worse, and some were a little bit of both. Here’s a little hindsight analysis of the successes and failures of our first major experiment with CCG design.

Fortified (While this card is untapped, it cannot be the target of spells or abilities.)
Burrowing (While this card is tapped, it cannot be the target of spells or abilities.)

Fortified and Burrowing were abilities EUOL and I created in an attempt to simplify things: most of our keywords were pretty out there, so we made these two specifically simple so people could understand them easily and use them without feeling they had to build around them. Burrowing was the far more successful of the two, in part because it was a major part of the popular Ferret theme, and in part because it promoted action rather than inaction. Fortified was a good ability, but perhaps a little too common, and encouraged people to sit back and do nothing—no tapping, no attacking, etc.

These abilities, because they were only in effect while the creature was in a given state, were most interesting when they were on creatures that changed states often. A Fortified wall is always going to be tapped, so it may as well just say “Cannot be targeted;” by making a creature untargetable only half the time, and then encouraging it to lose it’s protection, you create a much more interesting set of choices. The best Fortified creatures were the ones who had a great tap ability—Captain America could untap other creatures, which is incredibly useful, but he had to tap and thus expose himself to danger in order to do it.

Surge X (When this card comes into play, stack the next X cards in your library face-down underneath it, one at a time. You may discard one of these cards at any time to untap this card.)

Surge was my favorite keyword, but I don’t think it worked entirely well. Most of the really good Surge effects were the ones that did something wacky (such as “discard a card to do something”). The Surge cards with tap abilities, on the other hand, just ended up feeling unfair when you discarded the whole surge stack to activate a tap ability many times in a single turn.

Surge has a lot of great design space beyond the untap ability—in fact, the untap was almost irrelevant to the coolest Surge cards. Surge can be used to:

Deal a lot of damage (Cyclops’s optic blast):
T, RRR, Discard a card in Cyclops’s Surge stack: Deal damage to target creature equal to the discarded card’s converted mana cost.

Control an alternating character state (Emma Frost’s psychic and living diamond forms):
While Emma Frost has one or more cards in her Surge stack, your opponent plays with the top card of his or her deck revealed.
While Emma Frost has no cards in her Surge stack, she gains +1/+3 and "T: Emma Frost deals damage to target creature equal to her power."

Play cards (Green Lantern’s force constructs):
T, Search Kyle Rayner’s Surge stack and reveal a card from it: Play that card without paying its mana cost. The card and all its effects become mono-green. If the card is a permanent it gains haste. Remove it from the game at the end of the turn.

Represent a shapeshifter (Mystique copying her victim’s forms):
When a creature that Mystique has dealt damage to this turn goes into the graveyard, place it in her Surge stack. Remember whose cards are whose.
UU, Search Mystique’s Surge stack and reveal a creature card from it: Mystique becomes a copy of that card.

Create a growing creature (the Hulk getting tougher):
The Incredible Hulk gets +1/+1 for each card in his Surge stack.

Create a growing effect (an anomaly that gets bigger as it sucks more things into it):
Upkeep: Pay 1 for each card in this card’s Surge stack.
Any time a spell is played with a converted mana cost less than or equal to the number of cards in this card’s Surge stack, counter it and place it beneath this card. Remember whose cards are whose.

...and many other neat effects. If we use Surge again in the future (and I’ve got some great ideas for it), we’ll focus more on the unique things it can do and less on the “abusing tap abilities” angle.

Desperation X (You may at any time search your library and graveyard. If you find this card, you may discard X cards and put it into your hand. Shuffle your library.)

Without exception, Desperation was the most commonly misunderstood mechanic in the draft—I still don’t think we all interpret it the same way, even days later. It is essentially an ability that you can activate while it’s is still in your deck, and the only time I’ve ever seen that in real Magic is in the Un-sets (which aren’t technically “real Magic”). This level of confusion becomes a bigger problem when you consider that the purpose of the mechanic was primarily to help novice deckbuilders get the pieces they needed (land of the right color, etc.), but the mechanic was so wacky that many of the novices shied away from it. The fact that it forces you to discard your own cards is another newbie-unfriendly aspect that made people leery. For more experienced players it had the same problem as Surge, in that you could use it to reuse (and abuse) powerful effects, this time by pulling them out of your graveyard over and over, but this aspect turned out to be pretty well-balanced by the discard cost. I have to assume that there is some kind of similar mechanic in the middle ground (friendly to newbies and not abusable by experts, all while being easy to understand), and next time around we’ll see if we can find it.

One of the comments we heard, which EUOL and I instantly agreed with, was that Desperation would ideally be on permanents only—even if that permanent was just an enchantment with a “comes into play effect,” thus emulating a spell without actually being one. Staying on the table, and making you work harder to get it into your graveyard to pull out again, would balance it a little better.

Supplies!: [Effect] (If this card would be put into any graveyard from play, instead shuffle it into its owner’s library face up. When this card reaches the top of the library, discard it and add its Supplies! effect directly to the stack.)

Supplies! (don’t forget the exclamation point) was, for me, the big hit of the bunch. We didn’t implement it perfectly, but it was far more workable and interesting than we expected. The best Supplies! effects by far were the ones the went into your graveyard (and therefore back into your library) as soon as possible—instants and sorceries, in other words. In a deck with 60+ cards you’re not likely to get through enough of your library in a short game to find all of the cool Supplies! cards you’ve seeded in there, especially if it doesn’t go in until turn 10 or later, so the sooner it goes in the better. For example, one of the cards I played with was Poison Ivy, who could tap to control a creature for one turn and then put a spore counter on it; her Supplies! effect let you permanently gain control of all creatures with spore counters. This is a neat idea, and would have been awesome to see in action, but the sad truth was that she never had the time to put out a lot of counters AND die AND come back and trigger the Supplies! effect. Far better were the cheap one-shot spells that went to the library early.

Supplies! effects came in three types: cheap abilities with drawbacks, lame abilities with cool payoffs, and long term abilities that built up over time for a big finish. As we’ve discussed, the latter didn’t really work because the average game doesn’t give you enough time to build it up. The first two, on the other hand, we’re great—I had a Mistborn card called Legend of the Deepness which gave me a 1/1 regenerating token creature for ridiculously cheap, and I used it to set up an awesome early defense that my opponents usually couldn’t punch through. If the Supplies! effect came back, though, it completely destroyed me: my opponent got all of his creatures back into play for free for one turn, which was more than enough to deal a killing blow.

The best thing we did to help Supplies! was to put it in the same set as Surge. You’ll notice the wording of Surge tells you to stack the cards from the top of your library one at a time, and this is no accident—it’s a great Supplies! enabler that helps you plow through your deck and find those face-up cards as quickly as possible.

As I said above, Supplies! worked really well and I was extremely pleased with it.

Level Up (This card gets +1/+1 for every counter on it.)

As we neared the day of the game and most of the cards were designed, we realized that we had a ton of cards that put counters on other cards—spore counters, brick counters, wet counters, allomantic counters, life counters, plague counters, and goodness knows what else. Juggling so many counters of so many different types ran the risk of becoming way too confusing, but the effects were cool and we didn’t want to lose them, so we came up with a different solution—make the counters desirable. Level Up was a simple mechanic with a lot of synergy with the rest of the set. Its one downside was that most of the Level Up cards gained cool tap abilities as they gained counters—yet by the time the cards were big enough to use those tap abilities, they were big enough that you’d rather just be attacking with them anyway. This wasn’t really a huge problem, but it kind of annoyed me. In the future I’d keep the abilities combat-related (gaining First Strike, Trample, etc.), counter-related (spending counters to do cool things, as on the Mistborn cards), or simply so cool that finally building up enough counters to use them is a fun, rewarding payoff.

Reverberate (This card or ability affects all players in all games within earshot.)

Reverberate was certainly our weirdest keyword, and the one that promised to cause the most chaos. We were quite surprised, then, to find that we wanted MORE reverberate effects than we actually had. These almost never triggered, and when they did they usually didn’t do much.

There were three styles of Reverberate effects: Incarnations, Fanboys, and Generic. We had five Incarnations of Chuck Norris and five of Ben Olsen (our own beloved Tage), each of which was a huge scary creature that destroyed every other related Incarnation when it came into play. So, for example, if I’m playing Ninja Chuck Norris and somebody else in the room plays Walker, Texas Ranger, my Ninja Chuck Norris would be destroyed. This is actually a very fun idea, but to make it really work we needed to have a lot of Incarnations coming into play, and we didn’t. I suspect that the cards themselves were either so expensive or so complex that most people chose not to play with them—or never got the chance to cast them. I would like to use this idea again in the future, but on simpler, cheaper cards that will prompt more people to use them.

The Fanboys were an idea that looked fun on paper but didn’t pan out. We created a fanboy card for each of the 13 people at the draft, which had some kind of wacky Reverberate effect that triggered when the related person did something. For example, Skar’s Fanboy said that while Skar was doing push-ups, everyone could put black creatures into play for free. This effect was balanced out by the fact that it could not effect the related person’s own game, so they couldn’t trigger their own ability. EUOL was smart enough to give each Fanboy “Protection from Legendary,” which in this card pool was a phenomenally useful power, thus making the fanboys desirable cards even if the Reverberate never triggered at all; despite this, they still didn’t see much play. Part of the problem was that some of the abilities triggered too often (“While Alan is talking, creatures may not block,”), while others barely triggered at all (“When somebody mentions one of Brandon’s books, all creatures get a +1/+1 counter”). Abilities such as the “while someone is talking” one were the hardest to use because they started and stopped so abruptly.

The most successful Fanboy abilities were the ones that were active rather than passive—the ones that directly invited participation. Ben’s Fangirl (of course he has a fangirl instead of a fanboy) allowed everyone to get a free creature every time Ben played a creature, but only if they complained that the game had too many rules—this was fun and funny and highly noticeable. Asking Skar to do push-ups or me to tell a joke were fun ways to get a little extra boost, but waiting around hoping that I told a joke never really worked. In the future, if we do more Reverberate effects that trigger on specific players’ actions, we will want to focus on these participatory kinds of effects.

The last category of Reverberate effects, the generic ones, were the most successful overall because they allowed your game to effect everybody else’s rather than the other way around. As we’ve discussed, it was very hard to keep track of when a certain person was doing something, and the shifting game state that resulted, but one-shot effects that you could shout out were very simple: “Tap all creatures in all games!” “Everybody gets a free 1/1 sponge creature!” “Everybody remove their graveyard from the game!” These were the simplest and most commonly played Reverberate effects, and I consider them a great success.

Conclusion (End target article.)

As a first foray into CCG design, I think our draft went well: the keywords were more successful than not, the card pool was very well-balanced (with one or two exceptions, usually designed by me, that we quickly removed once we saw what they could do), and everyone had a lot of fun. Start planning your Magic designs now, because we’re definitely doing this again.

Discuss it in our forums.

Written by Fellfrosch on January 05th, 2007