Cyberium wrote: ↑3 years ago
If you work at WotC, how would you encourage more mono-color EDH decks to be made?
More mechanics like Devotion. When original Theros was being spoiled and released, I was super excited for the devotion mechanic. Cards that had a heavy colour weight became more meaningful for things like
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. IMO, Devotion was the pinnacle of this kind of design; you couldn't cheat it because mana symbols are (typically) immutable, and it requires board investment. The Adamant mechanic in Eldraine could have been better if it was more prevalent and they weren't (usually) some trivial bonus. I mean, if we're going to pay
, please give us more than a +1/+1 counter.
I think War Room is a less interesting design for low- or mono-colour (what's the difference between paying 3 life and 1 life for a draw? 2 life, it's not that much, you'd play this in something like
Oloro, Ageless Ascetic even though there's a 3-life cost). It would have been better if the mana cost decreased by playing more colours, like if it were 1 or 2+ the number of colours you're playing; we all know life is at least somewhat negotiable in EDH, and there are already very similar cards like
Bonders' Enclave. Commander's Plate is a much better and more interesting design IMO. The fewer colours you play, the better it is, but there's another angle to it: The more your colours
diverge from your opponents, the more effective it is. So, if you're a monoblack deck at a table full of b/x decks, you're probably not dodging many removal spells, but if you're playing monored, it'll give your opponents fits.
Anyway, your real question: How would I encourage designs that make people want to play monocolour? I think there could be more cards that have very heavy costs (like
Phyrexian Obliterator's
) that are powerful, or playable cards that depend on you having a quantity of cards of a particular kind, like the cycle
Brine Seer is part of, or the
Martyr of Ashes cycle from coldsnap. I also think that demanding but powerful pitch cards like
Commandeer encourage playing fewer colours. Finally, things that see a kind of land; black has many cards like this, like
Nightmare Incursion,
Corrupt and
Tendrils of Corruption, but other colours could have more of them as well (blue has a few,
Flow of Ideas,
Engulf the Shore, etc.). Similarly, I wish
Sundering Stroke was better; it could have been at 5mv with the same stipulations (5 red mana instead of 7), and it'd have been very playable.
I do think it's a tall order to make it better because the dam is already broken in other places. Like, I can say "Phyrexian Obliterator is good design because of its extremely heavy cost" but we live in a universe that
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth,
Chromatic Lantern,
Cascading Cataracts and
The World Tree exist in. Mana fixing in eternal formats is now so trivial (well, trivially in a mechanical sense, maybe not in a monetary sense) that it's hard to design things that promote single-colour action. So, stuff like costs, Adamant, etc. are hard to truly enforce. Even things like the Seer/Martyr cycle kind of fall flat when there are multicolour cards that count for their effects.
So, I think the real future will be cards that are worded like
Niv-Mizzet Reborn, where it's very specific that the card needs to meet a very particular colour requirement. "If you spent mana only from Plains on this card" or "If that card is white and no other colours" kind of templating.
I will say that I
don't think the answer is to make exceedingly powerful mono-colour legendaries like
Urza, Lord High Artificer or
Selvala, Heart of the Wilds. People end up playing the general, rather than 'monoblue' or 'monogreen', in some sense. They pick the general in spite of it being monocolour, not because they feel rewarded for playing a monocolour.