[Workshop Wednesday] Off the Chain

    Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! It's the Workshop Wednesday, our weekly deep-dive into the custom Magic design process, and this week we're breaking all the rules. Well, maybe not; but we are breaking some chains:

    Unchain is an activated ability that goes on creatures, allowing them to deal combat damage equal to their toughness rather than their power. This effect has been around forever, but Unchained is my attempt to keyword it in a form that could be printed on more cards.

    I love this style of card-- it feels like you're getting away with something when your cheap walls suddenly turn into giant battlecruisers. I'm also a sucker for Wall themes, like Rise of the Eldrazi's Vent Sentinel deck or Return to Ravnica's Axebane Guardian deck. So why doesn't Unchain have anything to do with walls or defender? The short answer is, I tried that:

 

    As it turns out, the design space is pretty limited. Defenders slow down the game without directly contributing to its progress, turning a format into a grindy mess if there are too many; plus, given that most of them have 0 power, this would lead to a lot of "square" creatures that don't feel very unique. Unchain, on the other hand, works on any creature with higher toughness than power, including but not limited to defenders.

     There's plenty of room for creatures with higher toughness than power in a set-- defensive draft archetypes like WU and UB often depend on it. Being able to turn your two-mana 1/3 or three-mana 1/4 into a 3/3 or 4/4 beater later in the game could be huge for those types of decks. In my mind, this mechanic would work well as a faction mechanic-- only appearing on 4 cards or so at common, with an overall ASFAN around 0.5-0.6. Specifically, I think of it as a Sultai mechanic-- not just UBG, but explicitly the Clan of the Fang from Tarkir. 

    Mechanically, blue likes early defense and can get large creatures late game; black can lean aggresssive or defensive, and can get large creatures under-costed, with drawbacks; and green is already the color of big creatures in general. Flavor-wise, the Sultai have a penchant for opulence, and I could  see them chaining up dangerous animals for fun and profit. And inevitably, those big ol' beasts are gonna break bad.

    Despite its love of high toughness, I left white out because it doesn't typically get large creatures. Red, of course, doesn't usually care about toughness at all. Buuut, when I'm testing out a new mechanic, I like to try it in every color, so here's a few more takes on it:

    Now, yes, there's one last question that I haven't addressed. How do you remember which creatures are unchained? Why not add some sort of counter? The short answer is, again, I tried. The reminder text is already pretty chunky, and adding those factors swells it up to the point that creatures with Unchain either can't have other abilities or end up looking like Yu-Gi-Oh cards. My solution is to include a memory aid in booster packs. It's not perfect, but plenty of sets have them; preferably it would be a set with other counter mechanics, like ability counters or -1/-1 counters, so that it could utilize punch-out counter technology. Barring that, it could be a "token" that players use as a marker like Morph in Khans block. (Worst case scenario, there's nothing stopping players from putting a penny on the card as a reminder, but of course that's not optimal.) Here's the memory aid that I mocked up:

 

    That's all for this week. I really liked last week's sign-off, where I asked you to design a card and post it to r/CustomMagic, so let's do that again! This time, the prompt is Toughness Matters. You may use Unchain or Mobilize, or you can use your own mechanics. Or, you can delve into other effects that care about toughness, like Sultai Flayer or Valorous Stance. Mention me on the post (u/defyKnowing) and I'll give you my feedback!

     Check back in this Friday for the final Vision Design article for Festival of Urbestia-- the Handoff Document! If you're interested in playtesting (or prizes), check out Monday's announcement! For more custom design talk, check out last week's Workshop here, or learn more about ASFAN and the structure of faction sets with out our analysis of Innistrad: Crimson Vow here.

See you soon!