Conspiracy: Jumpstart #03: Muzzio
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
Mechanic Revision: Sway of the City
Couple updates since the revision shown in the Selvala blog post: simplification and correcting unintended gameplay design.
Simplification: I’ve now removed the last ability where sway of the city goes away if you hadn’t gained sway of the city that turn. It’s a negative reinforcement to encourage you to keep up triggering gaining sway of the city. The thing is, you already have a positive reinforcement in the form of drawing cards the first time you gain sway of the city in a turn. Thus, only need one of them. Drawing cards is the point of the mechanic for game design reasons, so the negative reinforcement was removed.
Unintended gameplay: Previously, the ability for giving +1/+1 was given only to creatures attacking your opponents. The problem is that once combat is over, those same creatures won’t get the buff but will have taken combat damage. In some cases, a creature may end up dying right after attacks due to state-based effects checking for lethal. Now, we give the buff until end of turn, making it a trigger upon attack.
Card Designs: Mana Cost Pips
I hadn’t thought about this until I was designing Selvala’s pack. I found I was designing a high ratio of cards that wanted two or more colored mana pips. I prefer to keep these mana pips to a low percentage, like they usually are in actual sets. I figured 25% (3 out of 12 cards) is a good number for indicating “low percentage” of color-dense-costed cards.
Pack Contents: 1 Reprint
Most Magic products come with reprints. Sometimes, a reprint is excited just because of the secondary market. That’s a moot point for this product. But one aspect that’s appealing to me is seeing old game pieces in interesting new contexts. I’ll aim for having 11 new designs and 1 reprint, going forward.
Templating Update: “…that isn’t one of your opponents…”
Minor update to ensure templating is consistent with existing cards that key off of opponents. This is seen on the City Connections land each pack has as well as in Muzzio’s pack below.
Muzzio
Muzzio’s mechanical theme is artifact creatures. Since I’ve coded Constructs in Conspiracy: Jumpstart as having modal ETB effects, non-Construct artifact creatures debut with this pack.
Like Selvala, Muzzio has a low Citizen count in favor of his cogwork creations. Unlike Selvala, he also has just the one conspire card, supporting that he’s the only monocolored character in the product.
UPDATE: Some cards have been updated after feedback on Beacon of Creation Discord server, from perryk and Juliet.
