NaGaDeMon #03 — Archetypes

Bradley Rose
Nov 3 · 4 min read

For National Game Design Month, I’m designing a Magic: The Gathering Core Set in a month! This devlog chronicles that journey.

Previous NaGaDeMon 2019 Devlogs:
#01 — Scope
#02 — Tribal

With Pirates and Werewolves lightly sprinkled across Grixis and Jund colors, respectively — and with a legendary mythic rare creature cycle defined, it’s time to flesh out what that means for constraints on card slots.

To help me keep track of card slots, I created a Google Sheet. It’s the set design skeleton that will change over time as I fill in more of the slots and change things as necessary. Here’s a read-only link!

Mythic Rare Legendary Creature Cycle

With last devlog update’s “Captain Awoooo” (that’s four o’s)’s theming of tribal for Werewolves and Pirates out of the way, we need to find the themes across the other cards.

Here’s a first brush:

The first two sentences eats up a lot of text box space. To be considered for cutting later.

For the “Sorcery or Instant” card, the decision made here was based on a poll on Twitter asking what folks would like to focus on in terms of creature keywords after Core Set 2020 had done flying. Flash won out.

For as long as it still works for the set, I’ll incorporate designs of some kinds that reward flash, whether specifically calling out flash or just caring about casting thing during an opponent’s turn.

The thematic strategies of these cards don’t have to be figured out right now. But doing some work earlier in this area with constraints helped figure out a couple things for the color pair archetypes, the real meat of the next step to take.

With that said…

Color Pair Archetypes

Here are the slots and what details I’ve thought about so far:

  • White-Blue — Not artifacts (M19) or flying (M20). But, if it must be one of these, choose artifacts.
  • Blue-Black — Pirates?
  • Black-Red — A lord for having two prominent creature types? Or perhaps your choice of one creature type? Or maybe rewarding gameplay here that can be found for both Pirates and Werewolves.
  • Red-Green — Werewolves / Wolves? As long as it’s not Elementals (M20) or ramp (M19). But if it must be one of these latter two, choose ramp.
  • Green-White — As long as it’s not a go-wide strategy (M19) or enchantments (M20). But if it must be one of these, choose “go wide.”
  • White-Black — As long as it doesn’t have anything to do with losing (M19) or gaining (M20) life. But if it must be one of these, choose losing life.
  • Blue-Red — Stealing permanents? (Feels pirate-y, but also clears blockers for attacking, if having cards strongly in both of these colors might be able to help out each of the Pirate and Werewolf tribes.) As long as it’s not a fast flier (M20) or cares about instants/sorceries (M19).
  • Black-Green — Please, anything but caring about dead creatures.
  • Red-White — Auras & Equipment (Ever since Dominaria prominently had red cards that cared about having attached permanents, I wanted to explore this red-white design space. Now’s a good chance.)
  • Green-Blue — Flash & Instants / Cast during opponent’s turn (Whatever the execution here is, it needs to be slightly different but still basically the same gameplay being rewarded as the Tortoise/Hare mythic rare, when Hare is chosen.)

Since red-white’s theme is pretty straightforward, I decided to go ahead and take a stab at a signpost:

The CMC isn’t actually two — just signifying the colors.

Tiana is here for comparison. Tiana’s ability to return destroyed Auras and Equipment make a lot of sense for an Angel mechanic. But besides the flavor, this helps the gameplay of going with a strategy involving Auras/Equipment. A weakness of Auras is losing out on card advantage (“getting two-for-one’d”) when someone destroys your creature. In this case, your boons now no longer will cost your cards.

So I wanted to also solve the same problem. Normally, I’d avoid searching the library to lessen the number of shuffle effects. But I didn’t want to enroach on Tiana’s design space yet DID want to combat the card disadvantage problem. The NaGaDeMon card here puts you UP a card, but only once. But the benefit it gives to enchanted/equipped creatures also helps to lessen the amount of card disadvantage that can happen (no combat trades).

Haste helps to speed up attacks and possibly catch the opponent off-guard, when you’re setting up your creature plus attachment strategy (it can take a lot of mana across multiple turns, sometimes).

And that’s it for today. Looking at the themes I have above, it looks like red commons are the strongest place to start with designing.

But before I design cards to fit themes, I look to …reprints!

Stay tuned.

Milling for 53

Bradley Rose

Written by

Magic: The Gathering and card game design.

Milling for 53

Magic: The Gathering game design

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