Monday Musings: Analyzing Crimson Vow

    Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! This week, rather than talking about designing games, we'll be deconstructing one to see how it ticks. In this case, Magic: the Gathering; more specifically, the recent set Innistrad: Crimson Vow. 

    Before we get into this, yes-- I consider Magic expansions to be independent games. Trying to analyze the entire game of Magic is a fool's errand; however, while the various sets are interconnected, they are also explicitly designed to be played individually in a format called Limited. In Limited, you get some number of booster packs-- three for drafts, or six for sealed pool-- and you build a deck on the spot. Limited is much more constrained in its scope, allowing for a more curated experience. (If you follow this blog, you probably already know all of this; if not, just know that I'm a Limited junkie and that's not changing any time soon.)

Mechanics

    To start, let's take a look at Crimson Vow's mechanics. Innistrad sets tend to take on a faction structure, and this one is no different. In these types of sets, colors are divvied up into teams, each with their own mechanical identity. In this case, there are five allied color pairs, each representing a race of classic Gothic Horror monsters, with one reserved for the humans who must face these horrors.

    Innistrad: Crimson Vow has six mechanics: Vampires have Blood tokens, Werewolves have Daybound/Nightbound, Spirits have Disturb, Zombies have Exploit, and Humans have Training. There's also a spell mechanic called Cleave floating around, but  more on that later.

    Crimson Vow is a set about a Vampire wedding, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Vampire mechanic is the most prominent. There 16  common cards that produce Blood, as well as 5 uncommons and 7 rares. This adds up to 28 cards total, with an ASFAN (the number of times you see it in a pack, as fanned out) of 1.89, meaning that you'll see on average around 2 cards per pack that create Blood. Blood serves as the structural mechanic of the set-- something that makes everything else work. It's a way to hit your lands in the early game, a mana sink in the late game, and a resource that several synergy cards care about. The obvious comparisons are Food and Clues, which do some of the same work and tread similar mechanical ground as artifact tokens. Food was originally featured in Throne of Eldraine, where it took up 13 common slots and 27 card slots overall; Clues, from Shadows Over Innistrad, occupied 10 commons and 25 cards overall. The comparisons don't end there, though-- as a means of card selection, Blood is similar to Scry, introduced in Darksteel and now evergreen. Using Theros for comparison (it's the first large set in Pioneer that used scry before it became evergreen), Scry appeared on 10 commons and 25 cards total. As a mana sink, Blood could be compared to Kicker, recently featured in Dominaria. In that outing, Kicker graced 15 commons and 25 cards total, the closest to the numbers that we see with Blood.

    The other mechanics fall more in line with what we expect to see in a faction set-- because there are more mechanics than normal, there's less room for each one. Each other faction mechanic appears 4 times at common, with ASFANs ranging from 0.51 to 0.67 (roughly one every other pack). Appropriately enough, many of these mechanics are best compared to those that have appeared in Ravnica-- for example, Disturb in this set is closest to Scavenge, as a way to use dead creatures to augment living ones; training is closest to Evolve, as it cares about creatures with greater power, or Mentor, the mechanic that inspired it. Each of those mechanics appeared on 5 commons rather than 4, due to the fact that Ravnica's structural mechanic is hybrid mana. Hybrid mana lives in the cost rather than the textbox, so it coexists more easily with other mechanics. Exploit comes from another faction set, and is also featured on 5 common cards in Dragons of Tarkir. Werewolves are an interesting case-- outside of Innistrad, we don't see a lot of creatures that oscillate quite the way the these lycanthropes do. However, in both original Innistrad and Shadows of Innistrad, Werewolves take up almost exactly the same amount of space-- 4 commons, 12 cards total (ICV has 2 more total, but the same number at common). This is probably due to their strong mechanical identity-- every Werewolf on Innistrad is tied to the transformation mechanic, in this case Daybound/Nightbound-- and a limited number of Double-Faced Card slots.

Tribes

    Other than Humans, want to guess the most common tribe in Crimson Vow?

    That's right, its... Spirits. While there are more total vampires (29 in all), their ASFAN is only 1.22. Spirits have a higher ASFAN at 1.25, because many of the additional Vampires are at higher rarities, whereas Spirits have 2 more commons and fewer cards at every other rarity. Let this be a reminder that commons have the biggest impact on ASFAN, and often Limited in general. This is why MaRo says that your theme isn't your theme, if it isn't at common. (That being said, vampires are definitely visible at common, and Blood even more so, so the theme still comes across.)

    As for the other tribes, Zombies place next with 9 commons and 21 total cards, for an ASFAN of 1.23 (also higher than vampires), and Werewolves come in last at 4 commons, 14 total cards, and an ASFAN of 0.67 (due to mechanics as explained above).

Flavor

    Innistrad is the Multiverse's top-down Gothic Horror plane; it also got to play in the space of eldritch/cosmic horror when Emrakul came to town back in Shadows Over Innistrad. This time around, it's also a wedding as Olivia Voldaren seeks to unify the vampiric houses into one monolithic bloodline to rule the eternal night. How did RnD layer in this secondary flavor to the soup of Innistrad's established identity?

    Well, remember what I said about your theme being at common? By my count, there are 12 commons that refer to wedding tropes, along with 10 uncommons,  8 rares, and 2 mythics, for a total of 32 and an ASFAN of 1.71. It takes about 10 commons to pull an ASFAN of 1, and a hearty chunk of non-common space was also dedicated to this theme; that being said, that's only just over 10% of cards in the set. If you're designing your own set, take this lesson to heart-- it doesn't take much to change the feel of an entire set. The other 90% or so of the set is your standard fare-- masses of zombies, fiery elementals, killer trees, townsfolk militias, all that jazz. You get to have your wedding cake and eat it too!

Cleave

    And now for the part I've been dreading.

    Cleave... exists. It's only on 2 commons, 4 uncommons, and 6 rares, for a total of 12 cards and an ASFAN of 0.45. The closest comparisons I could find were Sweep from Saviors of Kamigawa, which only has 3 commons; and Overload from Return to Ravnica, which only appeared on 12 cards total and also plays in the text-changing space. It's a light touch, mainly at higher rarities, that... 

    Well, I don't know what it does. I don't know what role it plays in the set. Crimson Vow already has a mana sink mechanic; Cleave doesn't add to the theme of a wedding or of Innistrad in general; and despite the novel space of removing text, it's basically Kicker-- you pay more mana for a better effect. (Okay, technically, every mechanic is Kicker, more or less. But this one is way ,way more.) I'm sure there are people who like it, and that's fine-- it isn't for me. What I don't understand is why it's here, in a set that's already packed with mechanics; maybe it'll click when it inevitably shows up in a Masters- or Horizons-style product.

Analysis Complete

    That's all for this week. I hope that my approach helped you see Innistrad: Crimson Vow from a new perspective, and I look forward to doing more of these in the future. Let me know what you think of this format (both the set and the article), as well as any sets that you'd like to see analyzed in the future!

    This Friday's FUR article will cover Cycles in the new card file, and next Monday is an exploration of design space in card games as a genre. Until then, check out last week's Monday Musings on math in game design (and just how to apply it) here, or see how I apply flavor to my own top-down custom Magic set here.

See you soon!