void_nothing wrote: ↑4 years ago
Major Themes: Surprises, creativity, instants and sorceries matter
Splice and Prowess are natural fits for having Instants and Sorceries matter, and Prowess
has become a recurring mechanic in Blue. A variation on Morph would also work well with secrecy, maybe reuse Manifest and have separate turn-up effects, both as an alternative to Morph costs (leaving imprecise information on what's being turned face up) and as a way to set off things that are Manifested without . I could see a new cycle of Rhystic cards (perhaps a mono-color Uncommon cycle and allied-color Rare cycle?) that are modeled on
Rhystic Scrying, where the downside could actually be an upside with a small number of other cards and recoverable with a wider selection.
The point being that, in-block, they're not going to be able to be assumed to have that extra upside, such as having a Rhystic Reanimation in Black that forces a sacrifice or makes it one-turn if the opponent pays the cost (perhaps have the mechanic be altered to the extra cost being payed before your side of the effect, so you go with the least-bothersome ), but the instants/Flash-speed permanents to do this are few in number. Perhaps just two, to start with, one higher-cost and one lower-cost, so it's not an automatic assumption of which of the two is available if the mana for both is open.
And importantly, if it's going to be an Instants and Sorceries Matter set, then that mana cost becomes much more important because it's a likely assumption of design that everyone, regardless of deck archetype, is going to have Instants they'd rather play, making it an added layer of genuine decision making.
void_nothing wrote: ↑4 years ago
Minor Themes: Mini-games, alternate wins, multicolor versus colorless
...Be
very careful with how the mini-games work, because Shahrazad is one of spectacularly few cards banned in Vintage because of how hard it breaks the game. Ideally, it'd be a
part of a turn, perhaps stuff like forcing an extra, smaller, combat step that allows for bypassing the wider board state to dunk on a select number of enemy creatures.
Alternate wins can be simple, if we're allowing for decking out and Ye Olde Poison, or become exceedingly complicated, such as a rare in each color akin to
Atemsis, All Seeing, awarding victory/forcing defeat if you line up some specific subset of a major part of the color identity.
Multicolor vs. Colorless means Artifacts, Eldrazi or whatever's up with Ugin facing off against... Some kind of coalition. Could bring back Mercenaries and Rebels, spreading them throughout the color pie and using the recruit effects to replace much of the usual color-fixing, maintaining health in the wider rotational format by avoiding assistance to tri-color deck consistency outside manageable archetypes.
Hybrid-generic mana could be used to both break the recruit sequences without removing recruiter slots outright and further mitigate the need for color-fixing, while also assisting the colorless theme by allowing for "colorless matters" mechanics and generic-mana ramp to tie into more than just whatever variety of colorless is being used by being able to substitute for colors on key cards.
Tying Mercenaries and Rebels to the "Instants and Sorceries" theme is quite simple, as you can just have whatever mechanics are used for that have some presence among them, while also being able to isolate things that'd be a problem to have commonplace tutors for by both measuring the cost to delay it out to where counterplay is available and by simply not including it in the tutor-fest of Mercenaries and Rebels.
Having Mercenaries and Rebels compete could be done, in part, by varying their recruit mechanics, with Mercenaries being able to "split the budget" in recruiter-specific ways, while Rebels buff up the recruit so you're getting your mana's worth in stats regardless of what you grab, alongside Mercenaries being more versatile on a per-creature basis while Rebels settle for their recruiting of one-off solutions.
Both can tie into the other themes themselves, such as there being an Artifact-searching Mercenary recruiter and a Rebel recruiter that casts a spell onto the recruited creature, further assisting the use of them as "glue" to minimize the footprint of the more "basic" creature functions necessary for the games to play out properly, minimizing the randomness of non-games due to basic stuff like answering Flying. And also making them usable outside the tribal strategies by letting you just throw in one recruiter with the appropriate secondary recruit and a few useful-to-your-strategy recruits to target with it.