Conspiracy: Jumpstart #01: Brago
Conspiracy: Jumpstart is a National Game Design Month project, where a game (or, in this case, a Magic: The Gathering product) is designed in one month, during November 2020.
Previous Devlog Updates:
Product Updates
Some new developments since last time!
Star Format
Conspiracy: Jumpstart will be a star format product. This means, instead of eight character packs, there will be ten character packs.
New Mechanic: Convene the Council
This is an ability word that follows in the footsteps of Will of the Council and Council’s Dilemma. The twist is that each player votes secretly. Then the votes are revealed simultaneously and anonymously.
With the star format, the secret votes aim to create an interesting tension. To further add a twist and meaningful tension to voting, if a vote is tied, both effects happen, unlike how Will of the Council cards has previously handled ties.
New Mechanic: Sway of the City
Conspiracy: Take the Crown had monarch. This won’t be returned for Conspiracy: Jumpstart. Rather, sway of the city is yet another attribute a player may gain. Here’s what the marker looks like:
Dethrone and melee were good mechanics for rewarding attacking. And monarch was good for incentivizing attacking in the first place. However, I found it was a bad-feeling dilemma if your left or right ally had the monarch, and you really needed cards.
Sway of the City hopes to both encourage attacking but also enable you to draw cards. This was also an opportunity to design toward star format specifically. Your allies’ creatures will be boosted as long as they are attacking your opponents. And you get to draw a card right away when taking sway of the city away from an ally.
UPDATE: The updated version of sway of the city you see here is thanks to my friend Phi Huynh for pointing out issues with the original wording.
Nonbasic Land: City Connections
Each pack will have one nonbasic land called City Connections.
The Treasure token provides color smoothing but also lets you do a turn of ramp where you need it. This can be helpful since 40-card decks are usually 17 lands, and most of the decks will end up being 16 lands. Further ramp will come from your allies playing their own City Connections, to design toward the star format. Lastly, one of the character packs will care about tokens.
UPDATE: Juliet Louis (“mousewifegames” on Twitter) helped update the City Connections card to the version you see now.
Comprehensive Rules Update: Conspire
Nothing changes about the conspire mechanic itself. However, as you’ll see with the card Interrogation below, there is a shorthand to refer to creatures that are tapped as part of casting a spell with conspire. When a creature is tapped for a conspire spell, it is considered to have conspired. You’ll see mention of conspiring creatures in future packs.
Pack Contents: “becomes tapped” & big mana sink
In addition to the general pack contents outlined in the previous blog post, each pack will ensure one of its hybrid creatures has an effect when it becomes tapped. This is to give a reward for conspiring with that creature, as a trade-off for it missing out on attacking.
Next, each pack will contain a card that has a big mana sink that helps push the game toward an end. For Brago’s pack, this evokes the invoker style of creature, where you pay eight mana to get a benefit. This is to help break up any potential board stalls in the endgame.
With that out of the way, here are some Brago cards:
Brago
Brago’s mechanical theme is gaining sway of the city. Each pack will have one card to gain sway of the city. Brago has two cards that allow you to gain sway of the city with Brago himself not letting you lose sway of the city.
UPDATE: djemba & perryk from Beacon of Creation Discord servers gave feedback that led to updating a few of the cards to the versions you see here.
