I do apologize for the long gap since my last Mystery Booster pre-review. I teach in the summer trimester here in Australia, and the schedule has been pretty rough – and not just the university stuff. As such, if you need to remind yourself what I do in these articles, you can check out the discussion of the white playtest cards. Hopefully the next one won’t take quite as long!
If you’ve been reading my content for a while, you already know that I don’t agree with some of the things that Mark Rosewater writes. He is a talented designer and he has done a lot of great things for Magic. He has also done some things that I find worthy of criticism – we don’t have space to get into all of them here, but it’s still a mystery to me how he escaped consequences for the fiasco of the Urza’s Saga block where he was a lead on both design and development, and the Mystery Booster test cards suggest that Gavin Verhey is funnier than he is. I appreciate his willingness to be a public-facing person for Wizards of the Coast, especially in recent times when we’ve seen just how nastily certain elements of the community can behave. His folksy and friendly writing style should not preclude disagreement with either him personally or Wizards of the Coast in general, as it seems to for a few readers. Still, there are also positive things that came from him cultivating an audience in this way. This is one of the things that has allowed a lot of positive ideas and influence to spread from him to the community at large. And Mark has been very right about certain things.
Case in point: his 2005 article “The Troubled One“, about the fact that designing blue cards was mishandled in Magic’s first decade, so badly that blue will most likely always be the strongest color in eternal formats. By now, many of you will be aware that there was a specific mistake made in the early years when balancing creatures against not just card-drawing effects, but also removal spells. When determining desired power levels – and thus mana costs and drawbacks, the main leverage points for setting a card’s power level – designers tended to put too much weight on a creature’s printed stats and their implication for how quickly they would reduce a player from 20 to zero in the abstract. This is why creatures like Lord of the Pit have drawbacks, because it kills in three attacks; granted, you need to sacrifice other creatures to get there, and hopefully your opponent doesn’t have Swords to Plowshares (one mana lol) – but three is just such a low number. Drawing cards doesn’t do anything in itself and countering spells is tempo-negative, yet combinations of these too often became the best strategy: statistics tell you that if you draw enough you should find something relevant sooner or later, and almost everything is on the stack at some point in the game cycle and it’s probably the most effective place to intervene. Blue is not inherently broken – blue becomes broken when designers don’t grasp that its tools overshadow other strategies when not designed correctly, more so than those of the other colors.
They’ve learned a lot more about how to properly design and develop blue cards in the past 15 years. And, of course, another strategy is to emphasize and develop new or underused elements of the color’s abilities and philosophy. This is another area where Mystery Booster‘s test cards shine. Giving blue Pacifism variants can fit if you squint, but some of their attempts have given blue too much ability to interact with the battlefield, which is supposed to be its weaker point. But some of the entirely new ones are much more philosophically fitting, and genuinely interesting to boot.
On its face, this seems like a plant for the mysterious space opera set they’ve promised us. Of course, there are countless ways you can do a space set, and this is just one of them; it is, however, hard for me to imagine that the set isn’t going to have at least one mechanic whose name references space terms (“planet”, “stellar”, etc), just because that will keep it distinctive compared to the rest of Magic. Mechanically, Alberix is a riff on the hideaway keyword and the kinds of enchantments or planeswalkers that generate value, and it’s another card that’s very close to being a mainline card (which is another reason it’s widely seen as a hint for the future). My attention is also held by the fact that it’s a World Enchantment, which it really didn’t have to be. We’ve had a couple of them in both sets of Mystery Booster playtest cards, and that really makes me wonder if there’s someone in Wizards of the Coast who’s still thinking about whether and how to bring them back. They would help represent things like moving between planets . . .
After my comments on the first Mystery Booster‘s Command the Chaff, it was brought to my attention that sideboards in limited are often cards that weren’t good enough to make the maindeck, hence “chaff”. I have a constructed player’s bias which I always have to be aware of when reviewing cards, and I wasn’t on that day. However, I don’t think any format would consider Can’t Quite Recall to be chaff. It is worth noting that its real total cost is often way more than one blue mana, as you’ll have to use a wish or similar effect. I am honestly not sure how many such effects there are in Mystery Booster 2 – hanging your hopes on getting the white-bordered version of Wish seems like a long shot. In casual play or cube, of course, even a single use might win you the game.
For the question of how it would work as a mainline mechanic, I’m not sure it would be good as a major one; it might work for a small number of cards and/or a special mini-set like the Assassin’s Creed crossover. The potential issue with having too many forbidden cards around is that if they’re good enough, a lot of people would start playing wish-type effects and the cards would soon stop feeling transgressive. Of course, you could mitigate that somewhat by having each one be along the lines of Can’t Quite Recall, and reference the Power Nine or similar cards!
I am fairly confident that “modal” creatures are something they have been considering inside Wizards of the Coast, seeing as the Mystery Booster 2 playtest cards – and Festival in a Box in general – have more than one take on them. I’d be interested to see more of the concept, whether it be test cards or mainline sets. There are memory issues that would need to be solved; I doubt anyone is going to intentionally misrepresent their Catch of the Day in the current context, but it’s easy to forget several turns later, and not everyone is used to writing things like that down. More broadly, you could question whether creatures need even more versatility than they already have. As I was saying above, creatures were too much weaker than spells in the early days of Magic, but that imbalance has been addressed for some time now. Some people are starting to feel like there are creatures that do everything and have nothing but value, which makes playing with them less about strategy and more about who gets their creature that does everything on the table first. I fear that modal creatures might make that worse – modality inherently means there are more situations where the spell is relevant.
Mystery Booster 2‘s playtest cards have a couple of references to other trading card games, and Heart of a Duelist is the reference to Yu-Gi-Oh!. “Heart of the cards” is part of a famous line from the anime series. I admit to having used both it, as well as “I play one card, face down, and end my turn” during games of Magic. Heart of a Duelist often does surprisingly little for something you spent two mana playing, though I will note that it lets you basically tutor for things you sent to the bottom of your library with scry as long as you remember where you put them. That’s the weird sort of legalized cheating we’re used to with Magic, and I’m sorry to say that it has historically come up particularly often with blue.
I’ve been working on an Un-set themed cube with Panglacial Wurm in it. It’s not the only black-bordered card in the cube – Unstable and Unfinity play better on their own than Unglued and Unhinged, but they both have major gaps in their gameplay which can really only be filled in with mainline sets. But I’ve limited myself to cards that I find amusing because of flavor text or concept (Hot Soup) or that have unique mechanical effects or rulings, and it doesn’t get more unique than Panglacial Wurm. It’s an actual rules nightmare that can cause you to accidentally cheat, so of course I welcome a variant of it for a test card. Ninjutsu can already do weird things at the best of times – note, for example, that you get priority at least once after a ninja has entered but before it deals damage, and when you do, the new ninja is considered attacking and unblocked. This means you can send in a regular ninja, find some way to shuffle your library, and replace it with a Panglacial Shinobi. It also means you can shuffle your library and ninjutsu a Panglacial Shinobi into play, then shuffle it again and replace it with a second Panglacial Shinobi. It seems like a perfect card for an Un-set cube.
Apart from the keyword being named Scryfall after the website, this could already be a mainline card. The only rules thing to keep in mind is the timing of when you scry compared to when you search – you actually scry after you finish searching, which makes it more useful. This way, you’ll know if you need to search again, as well as being able to plan what to do with the card you just searched for. And on the topic of what abilities blue can get, I tend to make it and green the best late-game colors in my cube. This can take the form of defensive decks, of ramping into the late-game early, or having early-game creatures that grow over time. I feel that last one fits well with blue’s concepts: you can grow physically or by gaining knowledge.
The Mystery Booster 2 playtest cards have a few references to the old Invitational cards. This was a Magic tournament where, as the name implies, you got in by being invited by the DCI on the basis of your tournament achievements over the past year. They usually played unsual or offbeat formats like Choose Your Own Standard or Rochester draft (where the whole set is face-up at once on a table and you pick one at a time). The prize for winning was the chance to work with Wizards of the Coast to design a Magic card that would be in a future set, where the illustration would have your face on it. This is why the original Dark Confidant looks so very mundane compared to the rest of its illustration, much less the rest of Ravnica: City of Guilds.
Wisedrafter’s Will was an early Invitational design submitted by the legendary Kai Budde, before he and the designers landed on Voidmage Prodigy. This card, to me, illustrates the problem with blue design in the 2000s. There’s nothing really wrong with it; it’d probably have been one of the most powerful cards in Standard back then, in that quiet way that a lot of cantrips and information cards are, but probably not to the extent of something like Ponder (still banned in Modern, don’t forget). But it’s not interesting. I find it hard to believe it’d be exciting, even to blue players. It seems superficially like a chance to test your skill, but it actually makes the game too easy – and you don’t always realize that’s what it’s doing. It reminds me of one of the problems I have with Arkham City, both its combat and predator sections. The game gives you so many gadgets and abilities to “make you feel like the Batman”. But when used in concert, these abilities trivialize many of the encounters. Batman overcomes challenges. He struggles, adapts, and learns from mistakes. You expect him to breeze through low-level street thugs, but supervillains, metahumans, specialized enemies, and those who know him best (Joker, Catwoman, etc) can seriously challenge him or push him in one area or another. A Batman game shouldn’t be frustrating, because it’s still a game, but it should be challenging. You could say the same for being a planeswalker.
Next time, we’ll be in the black cards section. I will probably have more to say about color design then, because black’s history is almost as wild as blue’s!