Workshop Wednesday: Lands, and All That Entails

    Welcome to TwistedSpoon Studio! This is the first Workshop Wednesday article, where we'll be making a custom Magic card and sharing our thought process throughout the design. This week, we're kicking things off with a controversial design:

    Look familiar?

    But, would you be surprised to learn that Arbor Dryad was not the inspiration for this card? No, that humble Forest Dryad was but a vessel; the actual impetus reaches much further back, all the way to Legends.

    Legends was a Magic set released in 1994 that introduced several new features to Magic-- among them, Legendary creatures (then just called "Summon Legends") and multicolor cards.

    That's not all, though. Legends also brought us... these:

    Now, you might be making some assumptions about this card. For example, that maybe it has a hidden ability to make mana. It does not. Or that it does anything at all. It does not. Legends introduced lands that produced no mana in exchange for "strong" effects (it was 1994, Wizards was still figuring things out). You could have these abilities for free, but it would cost your land for the turn. It was unintuitive-- people wanted their mana, dammit-- so this vein of design was dropped.

    So what do these have in common with Legends' lackluster lands? First, let's talk about how lands work for a second. Playing a land is a special action that a player is allowed to take once on each of their turns, any time they could cast a sorcery. Lands are never spells, do not use the stack, and cannot be responded to. So, like Legends' lands, the designs above provide powerful, uncounterable effects, with the limitation that you can only play one per turn, and it takes your land drop. The difference is that they still produce mana, making them mechanically perform as lands. Being able to fulfill the role of a land justifies the use of the slot, rather than arbitrarily marking cards.

    The design space is simultaneously wider and narrower than it might seem. The main problem is that Magic is built around lands costing no mana, and many effects simply allow you to put them onto the battlefield from your hand or library. This can be overcome by sticking to low costs (1-2). If there's enough design space for 25 years worth of zero-cost lands, then there's got to be plenty of designs that fit the bill for one or two mana. For most of mine, I leaned on another mechanic that rarely gets the love it should-- land auras.

    The reception was... well... yikes. People were very attached to the idea that lands don't cost mana. In spite of this, the mechanic received net positive feedback, so there were definitely people who got it and enjoyed it. Don't worry, this one's put to bed; I won't belabor the point any longer.

    That's all for this workshop. How do you feel about the design space that we covered today? Is there a vein of design that you'd like to see explored? Let us know here in the comments or over on Reddit here!  

    Tune back in this Friday for our first look at Festival of Urbestia in the fresh light of the New Year, or circle back and see what we have so far here. 

See you soon!