FUR: Vision Design, Pt I: Tribes

     Open you eyes... what do you see?

    Is it...

    A vision?

    Welcome back, beast folk! Last week, we started worldbuilding for FUR, a custom Magic set about a world of anthropomorphic creatures. We established that medieval wolf folk, Chinese fox folk, Greek dog folk, Celtic cat folk, and Arabian scale folk gather in the neutral City of the Five to partake in a cultural festival each year. This week, we're officially starting the first of the three stages of design.

    So, what is Vision Design? This is where we're going to establish the goals of the set in terms of emotional impact and gameplay feel. At the end of this stage, we'll have most of the mechanics and archetypes, as well as a set skeleton-- a rough draft of the final product. If you want to read more about vision design, check out Mark Rosewater's article here. At Wizards, this stage takes four months, and there's a lot of playtesting, with broad changes taking place in-between. With this pace in mind, I'll probably slow down to posting a FUR article every other week, focusing on the card file and the results of playtesting. (Other games might fill in the off-weeks, we'll see.)

    So, for this article, I want to take a pass at the archetypes and general structure of the set. I want to try something a little bit different. While four-color archetypes are notoriously difficult to design, the Big Five tribes could each be associated with four colors. To that end, I want to let them bleed into colors outside of their pairs at low volumes. This will hopefully increase variety and help to convey the diversity that is central to the set.

    There's a good reason for this act of mild insanity. Let me whisk you way to the far away plane of Dominaria. Released in spring 2018, Dominaria was a quirky set, full of callbacks, legendary creatures, and build-arounds. It was also one of my favorite prerelease events of all time. My LGS was holding a Two-Headed Giant sealed pool tournament, so my college roommate and I took the challenge. We ended up with a white-black grindy midrange deck and a blue-red wizards deck. The latter wound up with a handful of curve-filling goblins and a single copy of Goblin Warchief.

    Good ol' Chief put in some work. Alone, he was a 2/2 with haste for three mana-- not stellar, but there are worse things. Sometimes, though, he would just pop off, letting us dump a couple of goblins on the board and make a big swing out of nowhere. It wasn't the core of the deck, but it was fun to play with and added some variety to our games. With a goblin tribal lord like this, do you want to guess how many goblins were in the set at common?

    Two.

                                                   

    It just goes to show that some themes need very little support. Players will actively seek out the pieces that they need, especially when those pieces aren't keystone pieces for other strategies. That's the kind of approach that I'd like to take here. True tribal sets like Llorwyn and Ixalan dedicate as many slots as possible to the tribes that they care about, but we can use a lighter hand to create a more modular, less on-rails experience.

    A large set has about 52 creatures at common, counting token-generating spells. We have five tribes that we really care about, five that we care less about, and five that are mainly for one-offs. The base structure that I want to use looks like this:

• Big Five: 2 in each main color, 1 in each "bleed" color (6 per tribe across four colors, 30 cards total)
• Next five: 1 in each of two-three colors (2-3 per tribe, total 10-15 cards)
• Last five: 1 each (total 5 cards)

    This gives us 50 creatures, leaving some wiggle room and slots for artifact creatures. This also means that there's room for build-arounds that care about any of the top ten types. As a reminder, our types are Wolf, Fox, Dog, Cat, Reptile, Dragon, Rodent, Rabbit, Otter, Avian, Bear, Horse, Aquatic, Hyena, and Deer. For a quick breakdown:

• White
• Wolf x2
• Dog x2
• Fox x1
• Cat x1
• Rodent x1
• Rabbit x1
• Avian x1
• Horse x1

• Blue
• Fox x2
• Reptile x2
• Dog x1
• Cat x1
• Dragon x1
• Otter x1
• Avian x1
• Aquatic x1
• Black
• Wolf x2
• Cat x2
• Dog x1
• Reptile x1
• Rodent x1
• Avian x1
• Hyena x1
• Red
• Fox x2
• Dog x2
• Wolf x1
• Reptile x1
• Dragon x1
• Green
• Cat x2
• Reptile x2
• Wolf x1
• Fox x1
• Rodent x1
• Rabbit x1
• Otter x1
• Bear x1
• Deer x1

    Now, there are a few problems; firstly, blue has too many creatures (blue only gets 9 creatures at common), and secondly, every other color except green is short a few. For the blue problem, there's usually a zero-power creature that doesn't count towards the creature total in the set skeleton. Black and white each need one more, and wolves care the most about traditional tribal themes, so we'll bump each up a wolf. Red needs three more, so we'll add another fox and dog and throw in a hyena for good measure. That should about do it!

    I mainly showed the above thought process so that it wouldn't look like I was ignoring the structure I set up immediately before it. What are your favorite draft environments? What elements made them work? Let me know in the comments below!

 

I don't have a set skeleton for you this week, but hopefully next time I will. That's all for this week-- remember, FUR won't be back until two weeks from now. But never fear, there will still be an article next week, introducing Secrets within Secrets, a tabletop RPG powered by the Apocalypse. Until then, check out Apocalypse World by Vince and Meguey Baker or Monsterhearts by Avery Alder.

See you soon!