The road never taken
January 10th 2011 05:44
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.
-- Robert Frost
If you watched Mark Rosewater’s recent interview with a Star City Games journalist, you learned two things: Scars of Mirrodin is an absolutely correct story-based design decision with elements of less than ideal execution, and Lightning Bolt is most likely leaving Standard later this year.
Some will miss it, and some most certainly won’t. I remember another of Rosewater’s articles where he mentioned how hard the recent design teams found it to make direct damage spells, because the presence of Lightning Bolt in Standard meant that there was a very narrow space to walk between being terrible and being more powerful than a card that is itself often considered overpowered.
This phenomenon is usually interpreted as the card being “bad for design,” but in another sense it might make Lightning Bolt, paradoxically, good for design. When you mention a color, any color, most people immediately associate it with a certain mechanical ability. Red is the “damage color,” blue is the “counterspell color,” green is the “mana expansion” color. We know and we understand that certain effects are associated with certain colors, and this is ultimately based on their flavor or concept, but the “staple” effects have been overused to the point where you can just about build linear decks (to paraphrase a sometimes-funny satirist, “20 Mountains, 40 cards with the same game text and different names”) in singleton formats.
A card as powerful as Lightning Bolt could actually help diversify card design by its presence in a format. It’s been well established that what enables a linear, degenerate deck like the one I mentioned above is the number of similar effects available in legal sets. When Lightning Bolt is in a core set, there are two possible approaches to designing red cards for expansions: make red cards that are situationally worse than Lightning Bolt and situationally better, like Galvanic Blast and Searing Blaze; or make red cards that do something entirely different. Damage is in red's part of the color pie. So are other things. And perhaps other things that they haven't really thought of yet could be, if there was any place to squeeze into new sets among all the direct damage variants.
Lightning Bolt is leaving Standard, which further implies that Resarch and Development is probably not going to be changing the design formula of “staple effect" plus block mechanic any time soon. Even if they don’t interpret expanding design the same way I do, there is another reason to change how things are done: staple effects may help returning players re-acclimatize, or some such, but they could also make continuing players bored after a while. Some people want to play the same blue control deck or red burn deck in every format because it’s powerful, but others expect Magic to be a multiverse of “ever-changing adventures,” to quote Richard Garfield. There’s an inherent conflict between this expectation and the forty or so Rampant Growth variants that were in Zendikar and M10, and one which may yet make a difference where it matters to Hasbro.
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.
-- Robert Frost
If you watched Mark Rosewater’s recent interview with a Star City Games journalist, you learned two things: Scars of Mirrodin is an absolutely correct story-based design decision with elements of less than ideal execution, and Lightning Bolt is most likely leaving Standard later this year.
Some will miss it, and some most certainly won’t. I remember another of Rosewater’s articles where he mentioned how hard the recent design teams found it to make direct damage spells, because the presence of Lightning Bolt in Standard meant that there was a very narrow space to walk between being terrible and being more powerful than a card that is itself often considered overpowered.
This phenomenon is usually interpreted as the card being “bad for design,” but in another sense it might make Lightning Bolt, paradoxically, good for design. When you mention a color, any color, most people immediately associate it with a certain mechanical ability. Red is the “damage color,” blue is the “counterspell color,” green is the “mana expansion” color. We know and we understand that certain effects are associated with certain colors, and this is ultimately based on their flavor or concept, but the “staple” effects have been overused to the point where you can just about build linear decks (to paraphrase a sometimes-funny satirist, “20 Mountains, 40 cards with the same game text and different names”) in singleton formats.
A card as powerful as Lightning Bolt could actually help diversify card design by its presence in a format. It’s been well established that what enables a linear, degenerate deck like the one I mentioned above is the number of similar effects available in legal sets. When Lightning Bolt is in a core set, there are two possible approaches to designing red cards for expansions: make red cards that are situationally worse than Lightning Bolt and situationally better, like Galvanic Blast and Searing Blaze; or make red cards that do something entirely different. Damage is in red's part of the color pie. So are other things. And perhaps other things that they haven't really thought of yet could be, if there was any place to squeeze into new sets among all the direct damage variants.
Lightning Bolt is leaving Standard, which further implies that Resarch and Development is probably not going to be changing the design formula of “staple effect" plus block mechanic any time soon. Even if they don’t interpret expanding design the same way I do, there is another reason to change how things are done: staple effects may help returning players re-acclimatize, or some such, but they could also make continuing players bored after a while. Some people want to play the same blue control deck or red burn deck in every format because it’s powerful, but others expect Magic to be a multiverse of “ever-changing adventures,” to quote Richard Garfield. There’s an inherent conflict between this expectation and the forty or so Rampant Growth variants that were in Zendikar and M10, and one which may yet make a difference where it matters to Hasbro.
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