Looking at a Random Card: Copperhoof Vorrac

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Copperhoof Vorrac: Once again, a lot of creatures coming up randomly. So be it.

I never liked cards like these. When I say “like these”, I include stuff like Maraxus of Keld and any number of Prophecy cards with lines like ” if defending player controls an untapped land”. Basing creature stats on the tapped/untapped status of lands is just such a fidgety principle. Of course, since mana burn was eliminated, they also play a lot different than before, now that any player can just tap his lands for mana with no bigger consequences than possibly losing a few options.

A variant on this mechanic was used on Wake Thrasher – less fidgety, but still quite complicated, forcing to you remember what exactly you untapped at the beginning of your turn (something many players do without really thinking about it) – oh, and also quite powerful on a blue 3-mana creature!

You know, I’m all for encouraging players to play the game consciously. It is one of the defining differences between mediocre players and good players that the latter actively think about which land they drop on turn one, even though they cannot play anything with it either way, and that they manage each tapping of their lands carefully to maximize their options (real or bluffed). One of the things I can get quite upset about is if I use an ability from a permanent which has been on the battlefield for several turns, and my opponent THEN takes that card and reads it, because he doesn’t know it, and just ignored it so far. A game of Magic really suffers if its participants aren’t at all times aware of the game state.

However, that is actually a compelling argument for the game’s designers to keep board complexity manageable! Or it should be, at least. There has been a clear trend over the last years to reduce the game’s strategical depth in favor of increased board complexity. The customers don’t seem to care – in fact, the great success of multiplayer variants like EDH suggests strongly that they love it! Whenever I watch a multiplayer Magic game with five or more participants, I see strong indications that most of the players aren’t even aware of half the relevant permanents, let alone the tactical implications arising from them. To my lasting astonishment, they just don’t mind. (This is because most participants in multiplayer games are Timmies – read my improved definition of MaRos gamers’ psychographic here.)

So, I guess Timmies like Copperhoof Vorrac, especially in multiplayer games (probably as long as someone else takes the trouble to figure out how big exactly this beast is), since it seems to be doing things on his own, growing and shrinking all the time and being likely to reach stats in the high 2-digit area. (Funny – I just reminded a reader in a comment that I am not talking about multiplayer games in this series, and here comes a card where I just have to!) But what about regular duels?

Under old rules, Copperhoof Vorrac had an effect similar to those of Innistrad werewolves, punishing players who were unable to act on their turn and forced to keep their lands untapped to avoid mana burn. It also punished (and still does) players for keeping creatures back to block, and using non-tapping permanents (global enchantments, equipment). Even under new rules, a reactive deck might face a big Vorrac while keeping mana open for countermagic. But in the end, Copperhoof Vorrac is a 5-mana creature without evasion which will in many scenarios be of unexciting size even if the opponent plays normally, and in others just might induce an opponent to tap lands he might not have tapped otherwise, while sometimes rather randomly hosing an opponent with an already bad draw.

Johnnies might devise other ways to use the Vorrac: For example, let the opponent untap, wait until they get priority during upkeep, then Fling the Vorrac at their opponent’s face (he can respond to this by tapping lands, but since the Vorrac is already sacrificed as a cost, it won’t change his stats anymore). Even if that works, it’s not especially impressive in a duel, though. When all is said and done, Copperhoof Vorrac is a really unreliable big creature which MIGHT get REALLY big, but always at the discretion of your opponent, and which forces a lot of bookkeeping upon both players. All this is just a very detailed way to say “it plays horribly”.

Whenever you (as an amateur designer) design a big creature with variable stats, or (as a cube builder) decide if to include such a creature, ask yourself: Why not just use a generic big creature with fixed stats instead? There are a lot of good answers to this question, like encouraging players to manage their resources carefully, rewarding building around a theme, or introducing interesting minigames; but you should make sure that your answer actually IS good by analyzing what exactly happens when this creature is in play.

Let’s get to grading: Whatever fringe constructed value the Vorrac might have possessed once has likely be eradicated by the loss of mana burn; and even if it was fine powerwise, it still played in an annoying way. In Limited, it is essentially a more random version of Scourge of Geier Reach (like that card needed more randomness tacked on!), able to waltz over several blockers, but probably shrinking itself to death in the process. It could be used as a subtle punisher for (as an example) equipment-heavy decks in a cube, but I really cannot find anywhere enough good qualities in this design to make up for the randomness and the bookkeeping it brings. So, while the sheer number of possible interactions with a cube’s themes justifies an upgrade from E, at the same time its annoyance factor requires a downgrade, having it end up at a sharp E.

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Looking at a Random Card: Timber Wolves

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Timber Wolves: Okay – didn’t see that coming! Seems I have to talk about banding in the context of a non-white card. (And also, what’s up with all these cards from Magic’s earliest sets cropping up? I realize they tend to have been reprinted more often, but I feel I’m talking mostly about really old designs here.)

About banding: It just doesn’t work. I believe among all Magic players which even know about that mechanic (discounting Unhinged, it’s been out of use for nearly one-and-a-half decades, after all, although you can encounter it on MTGO via the Masters Editions), only a few understand how it works exactly, and of those even fewer are able to correctly and concisely summarize and explain it. To be entirely honest, I just had to look up myself how banding works with the new damage assignment rules – it turns out, it poses an awkward exception to those rules to preserve its original function. (To be fair, that awkwardness is as much fault of these stupid new rules as it is of banding.)

I’m all against “dumbing the game down”, which actually has become a serious concern during the last years (in contrast to the majority of Magic’s lifespan so far, where this expression was used by anyone who didn’t like any simplification or clarification of the rules) due to WotC’s conscious efforts to steer the game away from the importance of hidden information, but I’m also a big fan of elegant mechanics avoiding unnecessary complications for minor effect. These preferences actually do not really collide at all, since simple rules can allow for intricate gameplay (and let’s not forget that even Magic’s most simple rules aren’t simple at all by most other games’ standards).

Banding, however, is not a case of a mechanic featuring unnecessary complications. It is a case of a top-down design which just does not allow for elegance. WotC have been trying for many years to find a better way to implement it, but failed. I have myself dabbled in the creation of a similar mechanic. It all comes down to this: The concept of creatures fighting together, coming to each other’s help and sacrificing themselves heroically for each other is just too complex to allow for a satisfying implementation in the Magic rules. If you go with an approach which is somehow intuitive (like the original banding design), you always end up with too many separate abilities which do not seem to tie together from a mechanical point of view. If you go with an unintuitive approach, the whole point of the top-down design is moot. Banding simply doesn’t work, full stop.

Fortunately, at least in constructed, this isn’t a big loss: It never had much of an impact. Boards were seldom so complex that banding made a lot of a difference, and most of the time it was downright irrelevant, since it required at least three creatures on the board all in combat with each other, and constructed always was a lot more about removal and evasion than about complex board states and blocking. (It’s interesting to note, though, that more recently there’s been a noticeable trend towards more complex board states in standard, so cards with banding, if they were available, might actually serve a purpose today!) Actually, what I believe came up most often was the ability of a blocking creature with banding to spare its controller from trample damage (for example, Benalish Hero blocking Ball Lightning) – a consequence of this mechanic’s unwieldy rules implementation which is actually rather non-intuitive. In any case, weighing banding’s meager constructed applications against its downright obscene complexity can only lead to the realization that this mechanic is not worth it.

In limited, however, things are different! Situations for banding to matter are plenty, and it seems reasonably powerful here. I actually kept creatures with banding around for a long while in my limited pool, for the following reasons:

1. Nostalgia. Banding used to be White’s signature mechanic in the game’s beginning. Also, 50% of White’s common creatures in the original set (that is, 2 out of 4 – White and Blue were nearly creatureless in Alpha!) featured it, meaning that every effort to recreate the flair of Magic’s beginning in a cube needed to consider it.

2. Hubris. My thoughts were: I’ve been playing Magic since 1994, extensively and intensively, and have written a three-digit number of articles about it, including the (in my not too humble opinion) best series to teach its strategical fundamentals, the Magic University (link leads to a German site). If anyone could understand and explain banding to others, it would be me!

3. Curiosity. It seemed clear that banding would have a relevant impact on limited play – but how exactly would it play out? When limited formats became popular, this mechanic had already gone the way of the Dodo, so I had little experience with it, and I wanted to see it in action.

Of these three reasons, only 1) is still valid for me now. I was able to satisfy my curiosity with just a little actual usage of the mechanic, and I found that, while it certainly does have an impact, that impact is not exactly desirable. On offense, it wasn’t particularly impressive – actually, Infantry Veteran does most of what Benalish Hero does here, is on average even more useful (since you can decide which attacker to pump after blockers have been declared), and several magnitudes easier to process. Worse, while using your creatures with banding on offense did improve your attack, it was usually the better play to keep them on defense, making almost all attacks from your opponent where you could apply your right to assign his creatures’ combat damage futile and leading to ground stalls. While this certainly helps recreating the feeling of playing limited with the game’s earliest base sets, it plays, of course, horribly.

I also learned that, just because I COULD explain banding to others, it didn’t mean I SHOULD (more precisely: shouldn’t need to – if I use cards with banding in a cube, of course I have to explain how they work!) Yes, players were able to grasp how banding worked, but the time this process required, and the difficulty it posed, was just not worth it. WotC R&D speaks of “complexity points” in set design – you want only so much overall complexity, and thus have to be wary where to put it. I realized that the complexity which explaining the banding rules added to my cube games would just be better spent teaching players the fundamentals of drafting, deck-building and tactics. While I do miss the flavor of banding (or a sufficiently similar mechanic), it is just not worth it.

So, banding is something you could, but really shouldn’t use when creating a cube, since it plays awkwardly on different levels. If you have to accept its existence on a card, though, Timber Wolves (just like Benalish Hero, obviously), is as elegant and adequate an execution as possible. It has the right power level, and it is a useful 1-drop (a commodity still scarce in cube design). It doesn’t even play that badly if it is used very sparingly – as a full-fledged theme, banding will drag limited games down, but a Timber Wolves here and a Mesa Pegasus there can make for interesting small creatures doing something quite unusual. Of course, using even less creatures with banding makes the complexity points needed to explain it an even worse investment, but if you play your cube exclusively with players who are familiar with this mechanic, this won’t be an issue.

Its comparative elegance and nice flavor allows for dragging this card back out of E+ -territory, where its slightly awkward gameplay and its horrendous complexity landed it (meaning two downgrades from a D for a card which you could but wouldn’t really want to use). Still, I can not bring myself to give it a better grade than D-, warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feelings aside – a better grade just wouldn’t be fair towards other cards.

To the index of all cards reviewed by me so far

Looking at a Random Card: Willow Satyr

(What am I doing here? Read here!)

Willow Satyr: Sometimes, these really old cards are flavorful in a vague, resonating way which modern topdown designs bent on implementing a concept as exact as possible within the game rules just cannot reach. Willow Satyr is such a card, a mythical creature with largely unknown whereabouts and motivation (okay, we have a general idea what a satyr is) which for some reason which neither is nor needs to be explained is able to take control of a legendary creature. Why? You use your imagination to fill in the blanks, or you just don’t care – why do you even expect to understand such a strange, magical being?

Just now, Magic players all over the world are going wild about new designs from Dark Ascension like Zombie Apocalypse, and I believe this is just another example of how low WotC need to shoot to make an impact with their target audience. Yes, the concept of a zombie apocalypse is cool. No, the obvious approach in designing a card using it is not, especially when it is terribly unfun to play against. Flavorwise, Willow Satyr is like a handwritten passage from a dusty old leather-bound journal with most of its pages torn out which you find in an attic as part of an inheritance from your allegedly insane great-uncle. Zombie Apocalypse, however, is like a Wikipedia entry. I love the world of Innistrad (mostly), but some of its card designs are just obvious and dull with no concern for playability. They really fail to capture the magic of early Magic expansions like Antiquities, Legends or The Dark when this game was targeted mainly at members of the roleplaying subculture. While I appreciate a lot of the world-building which the creative department of Magic has done during the last years (several of those worlds would, with minor modifications, make for excellent game worlds in roleplaying games), with those detailed descriptions and extensive storylines the glamor (I’m consciously borrowing a term from the Changeling RPG here) was lost. We no longer get glimpses of a strange, magical world when looking at cards; we see index cards from a lexicon summarizing a plane.

Well, there’s a reason I talk about Willow Satyr’s flavor so much (other than being disappointed by current topdown designs), and that is that, mechanically, it sucks. We don’t need to talk about constructed here – even if this effect would be actually useful in a match, it’s unlikely that any opponent will have problems dealing with a 4 mana toughness-1 creature he doesn’t even need to kill immediately. Even in limited, and even in an environment where you could use the Satyr somehow reliably to steal an opponent’s creature (or at least keep it stranded in his hand) it wouldn’t be great due to its vulnerability. Also, I feel that Kamigawa block taught us that the legendary supertype is just not a good mechanical focus for an environment – you cannot use too many legends at lower rarities (actually, you shouldn’t at all) because that goes against everything which “legendary” stands for; but if you don’t, you need to make practically every rare creature a legend, which, once again, takes away from their legendary status, but also means that cards referring to legendary creatures are essentially referring to rare creatures, and cards referring to rarity, even indirectly, are just awkward. If Willow Satyr effectively gave you control of a rare creature, it would (provided that it was given more durability somehow) feel a lot like Bribery does: It would punish you for playing your best creatures! This doesn’t seem right. Note that there is no general problem with cards which just destroy or otherwise neuter good creatures (like, for example, Smite the Monstrous) – it makes a large difference if your creature gets dealt with or is actually changing sides. Against an opponent using Bribery you feel compelled to sideboard your best creatures out (depending on the exact circumstances, this may or may not be the right play, but that’s not my point here). While I value a little tension making you second-guess seemingly obvious decisions in Magic, this is just too much awkwardness. I already wrote about the nature of punishing cards in my Guerilla Tactics entry: Random hosers punish players for things which shouldn’t be punished at all, and Bribery is a random hoser in limited.

This is why Willow Satyr, even with improved stats, can’t win: It will either serve as a random hoser like Bribery in an environment featuring legends as a major theme, or it will be mostly useless (and even more random) in any normal environment, either being a terribly swingy maindeck card (with good stats), or relegated to the place of a terribly swingy sideboard card.

Note that “swingy”, when I use it in a context talking about card design, does not just mean “able to swing the game strongly in a player’s favor” – this is what strong cards do, and is (up to a certain extent) fine! Sower of Temptation, for example, certainly will swing a game in your favor, but I wouldn’t call this card “swingy”, just “powerful” – since every powerful card swings a game in your favor, there is no need to coin an extra term for this. When I use “swingy”, I refer to the fact that a card makes the outcome of a game dependant on a single, largely random factor. The epitome of a “swingy” mechanic is: “Flip a coin: If you win the flip, you win the game; if you lose the flip, you lose the game.” Typically, swingy cards hide their randomness a bit better, of course. In most cases they are weak in the majority of circumstances, but unfairly strong in some. While this seems to include all punisher cards, this is not the case, since in some cases a player can be reasonably expected to play around it (like Wrath of God) – once again, note what I wrote in my Guerilla Tactics entry.

So, mechanically, Willow Satyr is a design failure. This doesn’t mean that its flavor could not be implemented, though – something like “Gain control of target creature with a mana cost of 4 or more” would work nicely, expressing that (for whatever reason) the Satyr only cares to seduce powerful creatures. Being useless both in constructed and as a tool to build a good cube means a grade of E; playing noticeably, but not catastrophically unpleasant means a downgrade to E-; but having wonderful flavor upgrades it back to a straight E.

To the index of all cards reviewed by me so far

Looking at a Random Card: Blinking Spirit

(What am I doing here? Read here!)

Thrull Token: Will Thrulls come back? Will they again use absurd counters like +1/+2? Okay, let’s get to a real card…

Blinking Sprit: Ah, an old favorite of mine! Those of you really new to the game might not immediately understand why this card once was cool enough to even see some fringe constructed play. Yes, young guns, combat damage once went on the stack and could be responded to. Those were the days… (edit: But then again, the card is so old that combat damage did not use the stack yet when it came out! I mixed these things up in my memory.)

Under current rules, however, the Spirit is somehow lackluster. True, it can still dodge creature removal like no other creature (even Progenitus can be made to feel the Wrath of God, and even Darksteel Colossus can fall to a Diabolic Edict), but then again – why would your opponent even care about a 2/2 creature for 4 mana with no evasion ability which can not even kill other 2/2s in combat and survive anymore? You tap 4 mana to play a nearly unkillable, yet inconsequent creature; I tap 4 mana to cast my favorite planeswalker. Fine!

Don’t misunderstand me, Blinking Spirit never was a tier-anything-card in the first place. Even in the days when Savannah Lions were considered too powerful a 1-drop to stay in the core set, and Kird Ape & Juggernaut got banned in Extended, while Swords to Plowshares, Lightning Bolt, Wrath of God and Nevinyrral’s Disk were everywhere, Blinky was little more than a gimmick some probably not really perfectly tuned decks used, but at least it didn’t embarrass its players, as it would do today. I’d like to think that in a perfect Magic world, where constructed decks have a reasonable power level (and where combat damage, of course, still goes on the stack!), Blinking Spirit might rightly find its way into a few constructed decks, but when I’m honest about it, it still wouldn’t happen – it would still be overcosted by at least 1 mana.

I like the concept, though. There is no other card in Magic you can bounce at will, without paying any mana or otherwise using a resource. Also, I find it really cute that it is a spirit – whenever I design a cube with an element of spiritcraft in it, Blinky is very likely to show up in it. You don’t need to use that Kamigawa block mechanic, though, to find nice synergies for this card: It can trigger all kinds of “Whenever you cast…” or “Whenever a creature enters the battlefield…” abilities repeatedly, but not too cheaply (I’m not saying Shrieking Drake plus Glimpse of Nature is a major problem in a cube, but it is the kind of interaction you want to watch out for). Oh, and in the context of the current set, Innistrad, it is probably really helpful against werewolves. There’s just so much you can do with this card in addition to stop a big groundbound creature for effectively 4 mana!

I’m really not sure what the “perfect” cost for this effect would be if combat damage still went on the stack. It would probably have to be in the ballpark of 1W, since most 2-drops and even several 1-drops are strong enough that they would survive combat with it. That, however, would make it incredibly annoying in limited. And without combat damage on the stack? It might have to become a 1-drop to be of real use in constructed! Then, however, it would be completely over the top as a blocker in control decks. I guess I must admit that the perceived constructed applications of that card I thought to see date back to a time where creature decks were almost unplayable due to the availability of plentiful and powerful removal and the weakness of creatures in general. In such an environment, it would be useful at 3 mana – but then again, such an environment would be horrible! So I’ll concede that this concept does not lend itself well to constructed play and get back to talking about limited.

Here, Blinking Spirit is a fine, but sadly a little underwhelming card. While it is perfectly usable as is, the sweet spot for its mana cost is probably 2W, so that it would be a bit more useful in aggressive decks. However, the uniqueness of its concept, and its excellent flavor (stemming mainly from the mechanic itself), as well as its unexpected and intriguing synergies with an evergrowing variety of mechanics from all eras of Magic, convince me to upgrade it significantly, all the way up from a D for a useful, but not quite satisfyingly playing card to a C- for a card you actively want in some environments, although always with a bit of disappointment for its slightly flawed execution.

To the index of all cards reviewed by me so far