[Workshop Wednesday] Call of Gathering: Magic Warfare

     Welcome to TwistedSpoon Studio! It's Wednesday my dudes, and that means the Workshop is open. This week, we're getting into the trenches with some top-down military designs featuring the custom Backup mechanic:

    Backup is an alternate-cost mechanic that can go on any non-land card type. (Well, technically... no, we're not getting into that again.) If you played Battle for Zendikar, you might recognize this mechanic:

    Personally, I think Surge was a great mechanic. It lets you "combine" spells into a one-two punch, and you can even cooperate with your teammate in some formats. (I'm a sucker for Two-Headed Giant sealed deck, so I may be biased there.) Backup is more limited-- it only cares about creatures, and only your own-- but it's meant to allow you to break timing restrictions (like Miracle does) if you get clever with it.

    That being said, it's a pretty simple mechanic. I suspect that the feedback wouldn't have been as overwhelmingly positive if they had looked like this:

    They work, but they don't feel as flashy, do they? Cards don't live or die by mechanics alone. A powerful or quirky card will always have its fans, but resonance reaches far and wide. I think the reason these cards blew up was the marriage between their mechanics and the specific flavor. The genre of modern military warfare is new to Magic, and that novelty definitely contributed. Call of Duty is a massively popular franchise, and that definitely contributed. But I've lived and worked with soldiers my entire life, and I think that's what did it. 

    If you have a sibling in the military, or a parent, or a child, you know what I'm talking about. When they come back from basic with stories of the mischief they got up to with their battle buddy. When they reminisce to a deployment decades ago with stories of hardship, of sleeping in cots in subzero weather. When they talk about ten-mile ruck marches with forty pounds of equipment on their backs, sweating through the soles of their boots in desert climes. And yet, there's always this tone of optimism. My dad used to talk about the time he got frostbite while cutting through the top of a snow-covered tent in Korea to make a hole for the stove that they used for heat, and he would always end it with, "Those were the best days of my life." (He's still alive; he just doesn't tell the story anymore because we've heard it so many times now.)

    So my advice today is, design what you know. It doesn't all have to be far-out, high-concept stuff. Look for things in your life that you're deeply familiar with, and try to translate those experiences into your games. When you make something resonant, people will resonate with you. And that's a pretty cool feeling.

    I didn't mean for that to get so personal, but now you know a little bit more about me and where I'm coming from. It feels crass to say "That's all this week, comment below!" after that, so instead, let's do this. Find something that's important to you, and design a card around it. If you don't know where to start, you can use this website to make custom Magic cards easily, even on mobile; then go post it to r/CustomMagic. Let's all learn a little bit more about each other that way.

See you soon!