Circle of friends
September 17th 2010 03:56
I am a rock.
I am an island.
-- Simon and Garfunkel
It’s very rare that actual ideas for specific rule changes ever come up in conversations about Magic, but that’s precisely what happened earlier this week. Someone suggested that maybe you should only be able to control one planeswalker card at a time. Granted, I think the guy in question was a little bitter at just having lost hard to an Ajani-Elspeth teamup, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if there might be some merit to it.
Not for power reasons, as my sometime colleague was suggesting. Ajani, Elspeth, Bolas, Sarkhan, and the rest are movers and shakers of the multiverse. When they hit you, it is supposed to hurt. But the creative team has done such a good job of portraying them as that and as individual people that a logical next step might be to program their egos into the game, if you like.
As such, if they were to change how you play with planeswalker cards, I would actually advocate going one step beyond nebulous hand-waving like only maintaining one link at a time, and tying it into what they have established about the characters themselves. We already know that Elspeth and Ajani are friends, so make the rule so that they can be in play together. Similarly, Liliana and Garruk are enemies, so make the mechanic so that they can never be in play together. The rule might state that you can control any number of planeswalker cards as long as the characters are all friendly towards each other, plus up to one who has a neutral relationship with the others, and you might be given a table like this to help you make your deck.
This is my quick attempt at it, using Microsoft Excel’s limited number of colors and formatting options. It’s probably not perfect, and I’m reasonably sure I forgot some of the characters’ relationships and conflicts. Would such a rules change, if made official, add a new, radical dimension to Magic? Probably. Would it require a lot more bookkeeping and updating? Probably. Would it feel onerous to people who aren’t interested in flavor or the characters’ backstories, God knows why? Probably.
But would it be fun? I think it might. If you do too, feel free to try it with your friends sometime. After all, house rules have a long and venerable history in Magic – and some of them even made it into later editions of the rulebook.
I am an island.
-- Simon and Garfunkel
It’s very rare that actual ideas for specific rule changes ever come up in conversations about Magic, but that’s precisely what happened earlier this week. Someone suggested that maybe you should only be able to control one planeswalker card at a time. Granted, I think the guy in question was a little bitter at just having lost hard to an Ajani-Elspeth teamup, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if there might be some merit to it.
Not for power reasons, as my sometime colleague was suggesting. Ajani, Elspeth, Bolas, Sarkhan, and the rest are movers and shakers of the multiverse. When they hit you, it is supposed to hurt. But the creative team has done such a good job of portraying them as that and as individual people that a logical next step might be to program their egos into the game, if you like.
“Himself” indeed.
As such, if they were to change how you play with planeswalker cards, I would actually advocate going one step beyond nebulous hand-waving like only maintaining one link at a time, and tying it into what they have established about the characters themselves. We already know that Elspeth and Ajani are friends, so make the rule so that they can be in play together. Similarly, Liliana and Garruk are enemies, so make the mechanic so that they can never be in play together. The rule might state that you can control any number of planeswalker cards as long as the characters are all friendly towards each other, plus up to one who has a neutral relationship with the others, and you might be given a table like this to help you make your deck.
This is my quick attempt at it, using Microsoft Excel’s limited number of colors and formatting options. It’s probably not perfect, and I’m reasonably sure I forgot some of the characters’ relationships and conflicts. Would such a rules change, if made official, add a new, radical dimension to Magic? Probably. Would it require a lot more bookkeeping and updating? Probably. Would it feel onerous to people who aren’t interested in flavor or the characters’ backstories, God knows why? Probably.
But would it be fun? I think it might. If you do too, feel free to try it with your friends sometime. After all, house rules have a long and venerable history in Magic – and some of them even made it into later editions of the rulebook.
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