The Shattered Realm: Mechanical

[void_nothing]

A late-night thought I had for the apex and the depths: Static effects. Every step towards the apex increases the amount of life gained for each lifegain effect by 1, plus-P/T effects by 1, and scry numbers by 1. Towards the depths increases life loss from effects by 1, minus-P/T effects by 1, and mill numbers by 1. Don't know how to word this concisely, necessarily. This just a riff on the original idea, of course.

I really like parallel/resound. It's easy to turn on without being TOO easy, it can be made to get harder for stronger effects by nature, and it's not too much tracking. It's also pretty damn flavorful. Don't know if we could use it alongside arcanum because it plays in the same space - bonus based on the exact kinds of enchantments you've got - but we can table one and use the other. Good to have options.

[slimytrout]

I like parallel/resound a lot too -- I think it would play really well with glorify and has some interesting tensions for your opponent (remove the mv 3 creature with resound, or remove a different creature that's enchanted with an mv 3 aura?) For the name, maybe resonate?

I thought about static effects, but you run into the issue where once you've gotten to the apex/depths you wouldn't have any incentive to keep climbing, which I don't feel like would be a very fun play pattern. You could fix that by having the climb meter be universal rather than individual so that there's some push/pull, but that feels more like fighting than climbing. But I agree that static effects overall would open up a lot of space, so if you have any ideas for how to avoid the climbing limit I'd love to hear them.

[void_nothing]

We're almost generating very early ideas for a Return to the Shattered Realm block

[Venedrex]

Thanks for all the feedback, I like the ideas that are being discussed a lot! I also really like the name Resonate.

[slimytrout]

Would love to take the temperature on climbing -- how do people feel about it? Let's do it as multiple choice:

A: "Definitely not a fit for the set"
B: "Maybe it could work with substantial revisions"
C: "The base idea is good but it needs some tweaking"
D: "Perfect as-is, no notes"

(Feel free to say if you're between two options.)

I have a few ideas for it and could spend some time coming up with more, but trying to decide if I should do that or instead keep generating other mechanics.

[void_nothing]

My opinion falls between C and D frankly. There's a LOT I love about it, and I think it's a fun, different, setting-appropriate incremental value effect that kind of builds on the technology of dungeons. We just have to make sure the effects associated with the "rungs" are just right.

[slimytrout]

Ok great! Basically the only things I feel strongly about are that going down causes milling (or maybe life loss) because I think it should feel a bit dangerous to go down there and stay too long, and that going up causes scrying because we need a filtering mechanic and it's flavorful that you can see farther the higher you go. I like treasure because it's also flavorful that there's cool stuff that's fallen down to the depths, but I'm not set on it. All the other stuff I just did to fill in the gaps. One thing that might help figure out the effects is if we figure out which colors are getting which aspects. It seems pretty clear that black should get down, but there's an argument for either white or blue getting up, and I think that there probably wants to be at least one color (maybe two) which can move in either direction.

[void_nothing]

Other things to consider: How many rungs on each side? I'm sure the answer is either two or three, and both approaches have their advantages, but I'm leaning towards three steps until maxed out for various design and gameplay reasons.

Are there balance concerns? You could compare this to the problematic nature of initiative in "normal" 1v1, 60-card, 20-life, 4-copies formats, but imo one of the biggest issues with initiative is the fact that it triggers for free every turn once you turn it on. The raw power of the last room in Undercity if you can get there is just gravy. If you have to keep climbing through, well, paying for cards that allow you to, then even repeatedly getting the maxed-out effect should be fine.

[slimytrout]

Yeah, my feeling is three as well, although that's more because it's the default assumption in magic (level-up, most planeswalkers, most sagas, etc.) than because of any particular detailed thinking.

I did consider having it be an upkeep trigger, but rejected that for similar balance concerns -- makes it too hard to interact with once your opponent has gotten to the highest/lowest rung. I don't think this version has balance issues per se, although I'm wary about the lifegain aspect of the highest rung in my draft, which could make it challenging to close out games if your opponent is climbing a lot.

[void_nothing]

If GW climb up.dek can spam "highest rung" eight times a turn in Limited, then maybe that is just the way that archetype wins and they deserve to have this game.

To make clear what I was implying: If the only way to get the effects is to keep doing the keyword action, I think it's balanced as long as the individual cards are balanced.

[slimytrout]

Sure, but my one concern is that they need to have a way to win that isn't just gaining life and chumping with 1/1s every turn until their opponent decks. Maybe the 1/1 should be a bird instead of a soldier so that they eventually win in the air? Basically my vision is that decks that want to go up are playing for the long game, scrying a lot and accumulating value, while decks that want to go down are trying to win quickly, ramping with treasure but also dealing themselves deck damage over time, so the rungs should reflect those game plans.

[Venedrex]

OK, sorry for my absence, that darn work just keeps coming back lol. I really like the ideas that are cooking right now, and I'll chime in with my thoughts.

Have we considered making some sort of game piece like a dungeon, but mostly just representing where you are? So, you could have cards that say, if you are at the apex, effect. And then you have a card that just sits on the battlefield like Day/Night, but you don't have to do anything with it until you have a card that says, climb up/climb down, in which case you move a die or a piece to track where you are. Maybe that's dumb who knows.

I do want to once again bring a status report on the ongoing questions regarding are A+B situation. I think Resonate is cool, but I'd like to run some tests to confirm how well it holds up. At this point, I think we can realistically narrow it down to about three options:

Resonate

Pros:
Is easy to understand.
Is a new mechanic.
Works with glorify.
Encourages playing lots of enchantments

Cons:
Works with glorify. (what I mean by this is, the ability to grab the exact mana value you need every time is good, but it means the mechanic needs to take that into account, i.e it is easier to trigger than if we didn't have glorify.


Enchantmentcraft
Pros:
Is easy to understand
Is tested
Works with glorify
Encourages playing lots of enchantments

Cons:
Is an old mechanic
Might be too easy to activate.

Arcanum
Pros:
Is a new mechanic
Encourages playing lots of enchantments.
Batching is cool

Cons:
Is a little confusing.
Warps the set heavily by requiring numerous types of enchantments.
Might be the trickiest to balance.

Personally, I lean towards either Resonate or Enchantmentcraft (gosh we need a better name.)
My only real concern with Resonate or Enchantment is that they will be too synergistic with glorify, but I don't know if that is valid.

Because, we want the effect to happen, but it might take a little bit of the fun out of it if there is no challenge to it.
But on the other hand, we don't want it to be too challenging where the effect never happens. So I think playtesting is needed to see just how everything shakes out.

I can see scenarios where players have a grand time going, "Oh wow I can use glorify to get the right mana value enchantment for resonate that's so cool!" I just want to make sure we don't make it too easy, where this no quest for the players or feeling of accomplishment because the set is so synergistic that the player doesn't have to do anything. Which is good in a way, but can sometimes backfire I think. I guess what I'm trying to convey is I think we want to provide players with synergies and all the parts to have a good draft, but we don't want to make it so easy that it's the equivalent of going: Play creature with Resonate. Hmm now I need an enchantment with the same mana value.

Oh, nvm I'll just play my glorify creature and choose whichever mana value I need. So that sort of mini-game of finding the right mana value just goes right out the window. Which isn't necessarily bad thing, because of course you want the player to be able to complete the mini-game. But if they can complete it with zero effort right away, it may defeat the purpose. Whereas with something like enchantmentcraft, it might take a little longer for glorify to do it's job of helping complete the mini-game, which could be a good thing, if that makes sense.

On the other hand, maybe players would love that things are so synergistic.
I know people loved NEO for that reason, everything synergized with everything in that set. You had reconfigure to modify your creature that used to be a saga that you then bounce to retrigger with ninjutsu. So the question I have for everyone is, what is the right amount of synergy between mechanics that we want? Is this good, or do we want less. Or more?

I feel like we are getting close however, because imho we need this type of a mechanic, and we can rule out constellation, we ruled out rift, we ruled out mystical, so we are making progress. It seems like these are the only possible options, unless someone has a new idea that they would like to share. In my mind, we know this is enchantments matter, we want enchantments to matter, and we have a mechanic to increase the as-fan of enchantments. So all we need is a mechanic to hammer home that philosophy, because the set is already built that way.

To me it boils down to what ya'll think about this interaction.

Test Creature
Creature — Elf
Resonate (effect)
1/1

Test creature 2
Creature — Soltari
When this etbs, glorify.
1/1

If I play both of these, is this too synergistic, or it just good gameplay? I honestly don't know. Is it good design because the mechanics enable each other really really well, or is it an issue because it is too easy? Because if this is good gameplay, we can just run with Resonate. If not, then I think maybe we go with enchantmentcraft. I mean, how much different is this from Learn/Lesson fueling Magecraft? Is it just about the same amount of synergy? I'm just unsure.

Test creature 3
Creature — Thalakos
Enchantmentcraft
1/1

Test creature 4
Creature — Soltari
When this etbs, glorify it.
1/1


Sorry for the massive spew of words, this is what happens when I have to bottle up my wild ideas all day.

[slimytrout]

Yeah, I think for climbing there needs to be a built-in effect, otherwise it's going to be very annoying to do at common. I think that there should definitely be a game piece like a dungeon, and that you can definitely have cards that have bonus static effects for being in the heights/depths, but without a built-in effect it really limits the sorts of cards you can make -- it's very helpful to just be able to make a card like Veteran Dungeoneer and have it make sense.

To my mind, resonate needs to be easy for it to work. Imagine a version that was based on creatures instead of enchantments -- it would be pretty restrictive to build a deck devoted to naturally having two 2-drops out at once, even though a deck can have way more 2-drop creatures than 2-drop enchantments. Basically people would be constantly playing really terrible mana curves just so that they could have resonate, which would be fun when you had a draft that went really well and gave you synergistic cards but very not-fun when you had to pass a really powerful 3-drop with resonate because you were playing the 2-drop deck. With glorify, you can draft a "resonate deck" where you have a broad range of mv's in your sideboard so you can always find the right one.

Enchantmentcraft and arcanum are both fun in their own ways, but I personally am pretty sold on resonate being the right mechanic for the set.

[Venedrex]

Yeah, I think for climbing there needs to be a built-in effect, otherwise it's going to be very annoying to do at common. I think that there should definitely be a game piece like a dungeon, and that you can definitely have cards that have bonus static effects for being in the heights/depths, but without a built-in effect it really limits the sorts of cards you can make -- it's very helpful to just be able to make a card like Veteran Dungeoneer and have it make sense.

To my mind, resonate needs to be easy for it to work. Imagine a version that was based on creatures instead of enchantments -- it would be pretty restrictive to build a deck devoted to naturally having two 2-drops out at once, even though a deck can have way more 2-drop creatures than 2-drop enchantments. Basically people would be constantly playing really terrible mana curves just so that they could have resonate, which would be fun when you had a draft that went really well and gave you synergistic cards but very not-fun when you had to pass a really powerful 3-drop with resonate because you were playing the 2-drop deck. With glorify, you can draft a "resonate deck" where you have a broad range of mv's in your sideboard so you can always find the right one.

Enchantmentcraft and arcanum are both fun in their own ways, but I personally am pretty sold on resonate being the right mechanic for the set.

Awesome! Thanks for the confirmation, I felt like it was good, but I wanted to check to make sure I wasn't going crazy! In that case it's settled then. That was really helpful explanation.

I also like the idea of the Resonate deck. I was thinking kind of the same thing, because if we have roughly 12-20 cards with Resonate, coincidentally, that allows for 2 resonate cards per mana value from 1-6, with a few extra as well. Since 6 seems to be the typical upper end of a limited curve, we could have a nice suite of cards for that archetype.

I also kind of like the idea of possibly making that the archetype, as it seems fitting that green blue would like to play for the late game and ramp into possibly a four drop and then a four drop enchantment. It could also use cheap little enchantments like Wild Growth to activate the 1 mana Resonate cards and help ramp into double spelling which seems good for the archetype, as well as using glorify to grab whichever mana value you end up needing. And flavorwise, it could represent how the Thalakos are scientifically messing with/discovering the nature of the plane and connections with other planes/realities.

But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I'm getting ahead myself. I think there's plenty of time to start digging into the ten limited archetypes in the future. For now, I'm just happy that we now have three confirmed mechanics!

Glorify/Favors
Resonate
Exalted

And the climbing mechanic is prolly in here too.

[slimytrout]

I actually think that now (or at least in the near future) is a perfect time to start thinking about archetypes, because it does multiple things at once:

1) If we are going to use climbing, it helps us figure out which colors want to care about it the most, which in turn helps us figure out what the effects should be.
2) If we're not going to use climbing but we do want a "splashy" fourth mechanic, it helps us figure out what the main color identity of that mechanic should be.
3) If we're not going to use climbing and aren't sure if we want a fourth mechanic, it helps us figure out if we can cover all the color pairs with the mechanics we have.
4) It positions us well when we start designing cards so that we can be making cards that fill holes for certain archetypes and/or will be appealing to multiple drafters at a table

And yeah, I think that GU is a great fit for resonate -- it's where I initially thought rift was going to go, and it feels like a good flavor match for those colors. I'm not sure if we need multiple mv 1 cards with resonate, but we could have one each of mv 2-6 in green and in blue and then fill out probably one common and one uncommon cycle with the other colors for ~16 cards.

[void_nothing]

I actually think that now (or at least in the near future) is a perfect time to start thinking about archetypes

I'm inclined to agree. I think the five enemy-color pairs can have tribal effects for the appropriate creature type as an incidental mechanical theme, but it doesn't look like it would be appropriate to have tribal as a draft archetype for any of them. There's been the idea of UR flying matters for the Viashino bandied about?

[Venedrex]

The future is now! Yeah, lets start digging into to those draft archetypes.

Perhaps uncharacteristically, I actually don't have too much of a set idea for what the archetypes should be. I know there has been some talk of maybe having some aura matters/glorify archetypes floating around Naya colors? So there's that for thought. I kind of like the idea of having Exalted be the mirror for Resonate, with maybe it being somewhere in Mardu colors, specifically Orzhov.

I kind of feel like Exalted is the yin to Resonate's yang, with one being a fast aggressive mechanic (relatively speaking) *or at least the midrange* and the other being the slower gameplan. Also that would be a way to put a fresh spin on the mechanic from when we last saw it in Bant colors. I also love the flavor of exalted for the Dauthi or, the faction that is headed by the Dauthi.

But yeah, I'm pretty much down for anything.










Resonate?

[slimytrout]

Yeah, I think glorify probably wants to have two archetypes devoted to it -- one where the goal is to have auras on as many of your creatures as possible, and one where the goal is to have as many auras as possible on a single creature. The exact color identities of those archetypes are flexible within certain constraints -- looking at what we have, it kind of feels like a lot of the archetypes are pushing towards white, which makes some sense on an enchantment world, but we need to be mindful of balancing things out. Maybe the "go-wide glorify" archetype is GW and the "go-tall glorify" archetype is GR? Especially once we settle on a better name than glorify I think that might be a good way to color-balance things.

If we've got one archetype for exalted, one for resonate, and two for glorify, that still leaves six open, which is probably more than we want to fill using "generic" archetypes, which implies to me that we do need a fourth mechanic, either climbing or non-climbing. Grixis and jeskai are both fully open, so we should think about how to address that -- if we go with climbing, maybe BR could be the climbing-down aggro deck and RW could be the climbing-up control deck? If we're thinking of the viashino as being the travelers of the plane it makes sense that they can climb in either direction. Would definitely require rethinking the rewards though (which is maybe a good thing). Could also be UB and UW, respectively.




Glorify go-big?
Glorify go-wide?
Exalted?



Resonate?

[Venedrex]

Yeah, I think glorify probably wants to have two archetypes devoted to it -- one where the goal is to have auras on as many of your creatures as possible, and one where the goal is to have as many auras as possible on a single creature. The exact color identities of those archetypes are flexible within certain constraints -- looking at what we have, it kind of feels like a lot of the archetypes are pushing towards white, which makes some sense on an enchantment world, but we need to be mindful of balancing things out. Maybe the "go-wide glorify" archetype is GW and the "go-tall glorify" archetype is GR? Especially once we settle on a better name than glorify I think that might be a good way to color-balance things.

If we've got one archetype for exalted, one for resonate, and two for glorify, that still leaves six open, which is probably more than we want to fill using "generic" archetypes, which implies to me that we do need a fourth mechanic, either climbing or non-climbing. Grixis and jeskai are both fully open, so we should think about how to address that -- if we go with climbing, maybe BR could be the climbing-down aggro deck and RW could be the climbing-up control deck? If we're thinking of the viashino as being the travelers of the plane it makes sense that they can climb in either direction. Would definitely require rethinking the rewards though (which is maybe a good thing). Could also be UB and UW, respectively.




Glorify go-big?
Glorify go-wide?
Exalted?



Resonate?

Yeah, it is interesting for sure. I do agree we probably want a fourth mechanic, and I'm pretty ambivalent to what that is. I think whatever we end up going with will be fine, whether it's some form of climbing, or something brand new. I'd pitch in more, but I don't really have any ideas so far. I also think we are in a good spot to start just messing with things and seeing what makes sense.

We haven't gone so far that we can't throw things into other slots if something comes up that makes more sense, like maybe we discover that we want a color pair to be something after we start thinking about it more, so we just swap things around. I think most of our mechanics right could go into a couple different options and still work out pretty well.

I also think we can really have some fun synergies that tie into each other. For instance, I think we can make a decent amount of enchantments with exalted since we have at least one mechanic that can't ever go on enchantments. Then we can tie that into a draft theme that is go-tall/voltron. So, if hypothetically, gruul was the go-tall archetype, we can use all our mechanics in a way that supports that uniquely. (Which I know you know already, but just saying because I think it is cool how many synergies we have)

So Green red decks could draft lots of cards with glorify, some of which trigger may trigger resonate effects if you drafted any, focusing on making one powerful creature, and maybe some enchantments or other permanents with exalted to help support that voltron strategy. So basically all of our mechanics can be molded to support certain archetypes. And of course not every archetype needs to utilize all of the mechanics per se. But the synergies are there if we want them which is quite neat.

And then on the flipside, the go-wide archetype uses glorify to enchant as many different creatures as possible (like you mentioned earlier) and maybe the signpost uncommon is something like, "for each enchanted creature control..."

I definitely feel that the combination of mechanics we have so far is really good at focusing players in a good direction. Play auras/spend excess mana (Glorify) Get rewarded for having lots of those enchantments (Resonate) Then begin attacking (Exalted) A nice natural progression of what to do in a limited games.

[slimytrout]

Absolutely! I think everything we have is in a really good place -- at this point, my focus is on making sure that not all of the archetypes have exactly the same play pattern. It's great to have a high-synergy environment, but I also think it's good to give people the ability to sometimes go in different directions so that every draft doesn't center around the same half-dozen high value cards. Conveniently, MaRo just published an article that provides a synthesis of how to think about crafting archetypes:

Once you have a good handle on your themes and mechanics, it's time to start thinking about your draft archetypes. If you're just starting out, I would focus on the ten two-color pairs. That's what most drafts focus on. For each color combination, you want to answer the following questions:

What mechanics does this archetype rely on? The most common tool for designing archetypes is to look at the set mechanics. It's the thing most unique about the set and tends to take up the most space. What color we put certain mechanics in will drive what archetypes will play it. (This can sometimes work in reverse, where you define two-color archetypes by a mechanic, so you focus it in those colors.) For instance, in Phyrexia: All Will Be One, we put poison in white, black, and green, so green-white, white-black, and black-green were the three archetypes that revolved around poison, each though in a different way.

Remember that if your mechanic stretches across more than two colors, you want to figure out how each archetype is going to differentiate from the others. Using poison again, green-white was more go wide, white-black focused on corrupted, while black-green had the creatures with the largest toxic numbers.

What is this archetype's route to victory? You have to know how the archetype is going to win. Is it with creatures? A lot of little creatures? One big creature? Is it with spells? Focus on what the threats are and make sure different archetypes have different threats.

What speed is this archetype? We divide into three speeds: fast, medium, and slow. You want at least three of each speed, with one getting a fourth. We try to mix up which speed gets the fourth between sets.

What's default and what's not? You want to do something new with every set, but you don't want every archetype to be unfamiliar, so the rule of thumb is that you usually have about two archetypes that are doing something novel, four archetypes that are riffing off something they normally do but in a way that's a little different, and four archetypes that are doing something pretty familiar with what they've done before.

The final category gets some novelty in the cards, but the overall theme is familiar. We've experimented with sets pushing more away from known archetypes and have found that everyone but the most dedicated drafters tend to get lost and disinterested. Somewhat different is good. Too different is alienating. It still has to feel like Magic.

I don't think we have to adhere to these numbers exactly, but it is worth keeping in mind how to keep every archetype from having the same sort of synergy-midrange feel.

[Venedrex]

Absolutely! I think everything we have is in a really good place -- at this point, my focus is on making sure that not all of the archetypes have exactly the same play pattern. It's great to have a high-synergy environment, but I also think it's good to give people the ability to sometimes go in different directions so that every draft doesn't center around the same half-dozen high value cards. Conveniently, MaRo just published an article that provides a synthesis of how to think about crafting archetypes:

Once you have a good handle on your themes and mechanics, it's time to start thinking about your draft archetypes. If you're just starting out, I would focus on the ten two-color pairs. That's what most drafts focus on. For each color combination, you want to answer the following questions:

What mechanics does this archetype rely on? The most common tool for designing archetypes is to look at the set mechanics. It's the thing most unique about the set and tends to take up the most space. What color we put certain mechanics in will drive what archetypes will play it. (This can sometimes work in reverse, where you define two-color archetypes by a mechanic, so you focus it in those colors.) For instance, in Phyrexia: All Will Be One, we put poison in white, black, and green, so green-white, white-black, and black-green were the three archetypes that revolved around poison, each though in a different way.

Remember that if your mechanic stretches across more than two colors, you want to figure out how each archetype is going to differentiate from the others. Using poison again, green-white was more go wide, white-black focused on corrupted, while black-green had the creatures with the largest toxic numbers.

What is this archetype's route to victory? You have to know how the archetype is going to win. Is it with creatures? A lot of little creatures? One big creature? Is it with spells? Focus on what the threats are and make sure different archetypes have different threats.

What speed is this archetype? We divide into three speeds: fast, medium, and slow. You want at least three of each speed, with one getting a fourth. We try to mix up which speed gets the fourth between sets.

What's default and what's not? You want to do something new with every set, but you don't want every archetype to be unfamiliar, so the rule of thumb is that you usually have about two archetypes that are doing something novel, four archetypes that are riffing off something they normally do but in a way that's a little different, and four archetypes that are doing something pretty familiar with what they've done before.

The final category gets some novelty in the cards, but the overall theme is familiar. We've experimented with sets pushing more away from known archetypes and have found that everyone but the most dedicated drafters tend to get lost and disinterested. Somewhat different is good. Too different is alienating. It still has to feel like Magic.

I don't think we have to adhere to these numbers exactly, but it is worth keeping in mind how to keep every archetype from having the same sort of synergy-midrange feel.

For sure, that's a super helpful article!

[void_nothing]

For my money, archetypes that play distinctly from one another (within the same Limited environment) and that are unlike ones people have seen before (in general) are worthwhile goals in themselves. However, there should always be some overlap between ones that share a color, because otherwise there's... well... a paucity of synergistic cards. It's a tough balance to strike. Glorify is one of those "split this in two as an archetype" mechanics imo, so go-tall and go-wide utilizing glorify are both good with me, but if we want it to be a Soltari theme we have to put in Soltari colors for one of the two, and then the other in GW or RG is fitting.

Overall, we have to keep in mind the RW theme is the one associated with (flavorfully, not necessarily using tribal mechanical themes) the Soltari, and likewise UR the Viashino, GU the Thalakos, BG the Elves, and WB the Dauthi. From a worldbuilding/style guide perspective the additional detail is that the BG mechanic has to at least sort of feel "spidery" - not that we would use this, but I don't think lifegain would quite fit for example.

[Venedrex]

For my money, archetypes that play distinctly from one another (within the same Limited environment) and that are unlike ones people have seen before (in general) are worthwhile goals in themselves. However, there should always be some overlap between ones that share a color, because otherwise there's... well... a paucity of synergistic cards. It's a tough balance to strike. Glorify is one of those "split this in two as an archetype" mechanics imo, so go-tall and go-wide utilizing glorify are both good with me, but if we want it to be a Soltari theme we have to put in Soltari colors for one of the two, and then the other in GW or RG is fitting.

Overall, we have to keep in mind the RW theme is the one associated with (flavorfully, not necessarily using tribal mechanical themes) the Soltari, and likewise UR the Viashino, GU the Thalakos, BG the Elves, and WB the Dauthi. From a worldbuilding/style guide perspective the additional detail is that the BG mechanic has to at least sort of feel "spidery" - not that we would use this, but I don't think lifegain would quite fit for example.

Absolutely.

I do agree about BG not being lifegain. If we were to go straight from the lore, might I suggest either (un-keyworded or otherwise) Morbid/Sacrifice. Because the elves... well Spiders got to eat We could also do self mill or something else as well. But, something about the idea of Sacrifice/Morbid makes me chuckle in a disturbing sort of way.

I also have an idea for as well. I think we definitely will still want some enchantments that give flying, to represent the Viashino becoming dragons. But, I wonder if UR could be Noncreature spells. Not particularly revolutionary I know, but I think it could fit pretty well because enchantments are noncreature spells. The flavor being that the Viashino faction use anything and everything at their disposal that they can scrounge or make do with.


So artifacts, enchantments, any spells they happen to know... It also shows that they are the pilots since it would trigger off of vehicles even if it doesn't implicitly call them out. (if we do have vehicles in the set).

However, now that I think about it, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, maybe noncreature spells would be a bit too synergistic.

Oh, random thought just popped into my head. What if the flavor of glorify was that of a creature being (initiated??) into the seams that line the world and connect it to the multiverse? And each faction has a different approach to it but it all boils down to a creature going in by themselves and coming back with an aura. Or not coming back at all *gulp*, I don't make these crazy rules lol. So a creature becomes *insert cool word to describe that process* (Empowered?) (Imbued?) That might be too outlandish lemme know.

[void_nothing]

The Viashino are accruing associations with the sky and the space between the pieces of the Realm as we talk it out, so I think either climb or flying matters would be best for them, depending of course on how we figure out the final version of the climb rewards.

The idea of glorify as representing initiation rituals is really out-there and really cool - I definitely like it.

[slimytrout]

Overall, we have to keep in mind the RW theme is the one associated with (flavorfully, not necessarily using tribal mechanical themes) the Soltari, and likewise UR the Viashino, GU the Thalakos, BG the Elves, and WB the Dauthi. From a worldbuilding/style guide perspective the additional detail is that the BG mechanic has to at least sort of feel "spidery" - not that we would use this, but I don't think lifegain would quite fit for example.

Yes, good to consider -- right now we have resonate being most associated with the Thalakos and exalted most associated with the Dauthi. Do we think we want to lean in to the fact that the factions get named mechanics -- have the Soltari be associated with glorify, and then maybe the Viashino get prowess and the Elves/spiders get TBD filtering mechanic -- or do we want to avoid that and put the other named mechanics in ally color pairs?