Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek: Part II

Intro

A big reason I left Magic: the Gathering was the creation of the Universes Beyond brand imprint. I mean, if I have to say the phrase "brand imprint,' things aren’t going great. I should be able to buy my Magic cards and play Magic and not think about branding, intellectual property, or any of the cursed phrases I’m about to say —

Magic was going to use that brand imprint to create cross-corporate synergy with AMC's The Walking Dead franchise. It was going to be a dozen, maybe two dozen, cards representing the The Walking Dead television series. There’s a lot of reasons not to like that.

As cynics and hypemen predicted, The Walking Dead Magic product was just the beginning. It was immediately followed by Stranger Things, Street Fighter, Warhammer 40K, and, honestly, most of the The Ultimate Showdown (of ultimate destiny).

Not pictured.

And I was unhappy at the time, but I did have to ask myself, "What if they did this with an intellectual property I liked?" I couldn’t think of any at the time because the ones I thought were unthinkable, but late last year Wizards of the Coast revealed they'd broken the genre/taste barrier: Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek.

My response at the time was unenthusiastic, but in the creation of those Universes Beyond and other products in the time since I left Magic, Wizards of the Coast had done some creative work. I kept up to poo-poo the bad ones and ignore the good ones, but I'm a bitch. 

Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek: Part 1

As you know, I'm a fan of BattleTech. For a long time, BattleTech fiction was only available on sourcebooks and in a small publication of short stories called BattleCorps. It was filled with vignettes, stories too short to be worth a novel and yet still integral to the universe of BattleTech, if only in terms of tone and themes.

It's been a while since I've read "En Passant," so I don't think you need to worry about spoilers. This may not even be accurate.

It's 3065. The Federated Commonwealth's Civil War continues apace. Some noble houses, especially those on the border with the Draconis Combine, have stayed neutral. Years of enmity with the Dragon have kept them laser-focused on an external enemy, even while Loyalists and Allies tear the rest of the realm apart.

An heir of one of these small houses, Päl Wyndham-Sandoval, returns home from a failed pre-emptive strike against the Combine. Travel in BattleTech is slow; it takes a week to get to a jumpship. An instant to jump, but another week before you can jump again. War itself isn't any faster.

He's recovering from minor injuries and only wants to see his wife, Khim, and son. A son that barely knows him. His parents are interested in the political fallout of their misadventure across the border. For them, it's grim; those with actual power are working to ease tensions with the Combine.

Päl himself supports this. He is happy to be home with his wife and child. He loves his family and he's happy to be out of combat so he can wear his wedding ring again.His parents are apoplectic, trying to drum up hatred for the Combine and plunge this sliver of peace back into war as part of their own petty power plays. Perhaps they'll throw in with Katherine Steiner-Davions Loyalists so they can pursue their vendetta against their neighbors.

That evening, as the family prepares for a banquet in honor of his returning, an assassin enters his quarters. They take his wife hostage and just as Päl realizes he is the target and not Khim, he strikes.

Solo Magic: Balance of Power

I've recently collected and revised a set of solo formats for Magic: the Gathering into a reference document. I'm sharing a few excerpts over the next few weeks for folks who are interested.

Balance of Power

Balance of Power was created by Bruce Zimov and his original rules can be found here: http://www.angelfire.com/games4/magicvariants/Balance_of_Power.htm The following rules are based on those.

Introduction

Balance of Power uses four creature piles and a land pile to represent four creatures battling to create a status quo. The creature on the top of each pile will attack the other others whenever it wouldn’t result in their death. The game ends when no creature will attack.

Game Concepts

Creature piles are piles where creatures and other non-land cards are placed. A pile will always have a creature on top. If a creature is ever not on top of a pile, then all cards in that pile are put into the graveyard.

The land pile is a pile of lands that any creature pile may use to cast spells, activate abilities, or pay for any other cost. Mana abilities of lands require the land be tapped and sacrificed in order to be activated.

The four creature piles are laid out in a 2x2 grid so that each pile is adjacent to two other piles. Creatures may attack other piles, but may only attack adjacent piles.

Game Rules

Setup

Shuffle your deck and reveal the top card of your library. If it is a land, put it into the land pile. If it is a creature, put it on top of the current creature pile and the next pile becomes the current pile. Otherwise, put the revealed card on top of the current pile. Continue drawing until you have placed four creature cards, one on top of each creature pile.

Cards placed on top of creature piles this way are considered to have been cast.

Gameplay

Play proceeds counter-clockwise from the first creature pile. Each creature pile has a turn. During that turn they will not draw or have a second main phase.

The creature cards on top of piles are considered to be on the battlefield, but their abilities that trigger when they or another permanent enter the battlefield do not trigger. All creatures have haste.

Creature piles may cast spells from their pile and activate abilities of permanents they have cast from their pile, and target creatures or any permanents or spells played by a creature pile.

If a creature pile has a spell they could cast which would not result in all of their cast creatures leaving play, but would remove other cast creatures from play, they must play that spell unless they attack this turn.

Cards in a creature pile which have not been cast can be affected by discard effects.

If a creature pile casts a spell, it may not attack or cast any other spells that turn.

Attacking

Creature piles get an attack phase, can only attack adjacent creature piles and can only attack if they would not die as a result of that attack.

Cast creatures on top of a defending creature pile must block if able.

Unblocked creatures deal no no damage and have no effect. Similarly, effects like trample have no effect. Attacking is done to force blocks and the removal of other creatures.

If a creature pile attacks on their turn, it may not cast spells that turn.

A pile may cast instants during the turn of other piles, but priority between piles favors the active pile, much like it does an active player.

Creatures Dying

When all cast creatures in a pile have been removed from the pile, all cards--cast and uncast--from the pile are put into the graveyard. Then reveal the top card of your library. If it is a land, put it into the land pile. If it is a nonland, non-creature card, put it onto that creature pile. If it is a creature, cast it and put it on top of that creature pile. Continue drawing until you have cast a creature spell or until you need to reveal a card from the top of your library, but there are no cards in your library.

Play continues until you run out of cards in your library or when no cast creatures can attack or cast a spell without leaving the battlefield.

Victory

If you achieve a balance of power--that is, no creature pile is able to cast a spell or make an attack that would not result in them being removed from the battlefield--then you win.

Otherwise, if you need to reveal a card from the top of your library, but have no cards, then you lose.

Rulings and Tips

Drawing a card does take a card from the library and add it to a creature pile as an uncast card.

Enchantments with the supertype “World” are added to a separate, world pile they are cast and are not removed when the creature pile that cast them leaves the battlefield.

There aren’t any players, so life gain has no effect and tokens which would be placed on players are ignored.

Magic: the Quiet Evening In is available as a .pdf document on Google Docs. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IY7PvM19uYzFm-waDCAIKKgt8kmUCUIY Feedback will be incorporated into Revision 1.

My shot at the holy grail of gaming: Magic the Gathering RPG

So I ran a Magic roleplaying game by straight-up tacking Magic: the Gathering onto FATE. We had a good time. 

I should've stopped at bridging the gap between FATE and Magic: the Gathering, but I didn't. This thing is a sprawling, 32-page document that creates a new set of Magic concepts and systems which absolutely do work as roleplaying background, but are fucking impenetrable. But hey, it's 17k pages so I'm gonna share it with folks.

The real conflict in creating a Magic RPG is making the cards work in a roleplaying setting. I did that by instituting a set of power tiers--called moxes--which allow spells to scale in power with the planeswalker (or creature) casting them. In the lowest mox--Mox Alpha--most spells take on a benign form. Tapping down a creature can make them drowsy, a burn spell can provide light, and a creature might become confused or addled if you make it discard a card. At Mox Unlimited, a planeswalker can cast spells which annihilate whole armies.

The FATE integration isn't that strong, but one of the options is non-combat casting. Five skills (Will, Investigation, Deceive, Rapport, and Athletics) are aligned with each of the five colors. Players may discard a card to invoke an aspect for a skill check instead of spending a Fate point. One of the colors in the card's color identity has to correspond to that skill.

The Tempest is basically a way to rationalize the randomness of a player's deck. 

Planeswalkers channel their Tempest which provides them with a channel of aether which they can shape into spells. When a planeswalker runs out of ways to turn their Tempest into spells, they must revert to Mox Alpha or die by decking out. The Primer focuses a lot on reconciling these things.

Planeswalkers have fetters, which exist to explain some planeswalkers having higher "starting life" and to give players a potential ways to connect to planes. As is, fetters are just a way for powerful NPCs to be even more powerful. It's a bit much, but it's not like anyone has to use it.

I'm especially proud of the three-page "Life, the Multiverse, and Everything" appendix at the end which conjectures on how planes are formed.

(Link)

10 Things About Eldritch Moon

Now that Eldritch Moon is fully spoiled, I want to talk about the cards.

1. The References

Innistrad is a beloved plane with beloved cards and Eldritch Moon might be the last set on Innistrad as we know it. Consequently, it's got a lot of callbacks to earlier cards in the set. From the reprint "Prey Upon" with new art altered slightly by the Eldrazi to Tree of Redemption's final fate as Tree of Perdition you physically see how Innistrad has become not just besieged as it was in Dark Ascension, but utterly corrupted.

And these are just the ones I've caught.

You were thinking, "Kris doesn't post audio/video content on Mondays"

Yes he does.

...approximately once a month.

...provided people like it.

...given we can get extras to do guest voices. I have exactly one Australian accent before that situation gets dire.

Attributions:
This program was recorded using a Blue Snowball microphone and edited using Audacity. It describes a game of Magic: the Gathering, which is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC.
Sounds were provided in exchange for attribution by freesound.com and are individually listed below:
awakening_mummy_1.wav by reinsamba 
Cartoon Laugh by JohnsonBrandE
werewolf attacck 1 by Bernuy
Angry Growl by Matvej
Deep Monster Roar.wav by MisterSegev
fire2.wav by tc630 (not recommended)
panic.wav by Erdie
Marching.wav by WebbFilmsUK
SoundScape Two_Thrill by FreddyFool
Eternity.wav by Keygenerator
None of the above endorse this podcast in any way.

Remembering Sphinx's Revelation

So Sphinx's Revelation was a top-notch card in Magic's standard scene for a while. I mean, it's a mythic rare so that should be obvious, but it also let you gain life and draw cards just...whenever.

It rotated out about six months ago, but I just found this touching video, which could honestly apply to any of the cards lost during Magic block rotations.

Edere Vir: MtG Implementation

So a few weeks ago I started talking about a monster type I made called the Edere Vir. Originally envisioned as a part of the World of Darkness, they were humans that preyed on other humans for power and advantage within society. I'm still turning the idea over, specifically for Magic.

For Magic, it's a bit tougher. They feed on the dead (mostly), improve themselves, sabotage others, and manipulate technology. They also have the preys-on-like theme. You could put them into a tribal set as a tribal hoser. Watch a single Edere Vir elf decimate an elf deck, might be a fun concept, but I don't think it does them, elf decks, or Magic any favors. 

It's the...ah crap I forget

It's the...mumu?

It's the...momo?

It's the...mudkips?

I got it, It's the Magic!

"Playing Magic Is Too Expensive" or "The Shitbirds"

A few weeks back, I covered how counterfeit Magic cards were surfacing. I then went on to conjecture about how folks would justify using those cards and what consequences might follow. Inevitably, some folks are going to justify buying high quality, fake Magic cards because it's so expensive to play.

Most of these folks are talking—well they're flapping their lipholes and flailing on their keyboards in an approximation of English. Those decipherable signals claim that it's necessary to buy counterfeits to play Magic.

Let met speak directly to you, you festering piles of animate filth. I need you to take your hand, the one with the single opposable thumb you use to manipulate the Magic cards we fucking humans use, and stick it your pie hole. You don't realize you're talking, but you are and as with every moment, from your conception until you die, it's a bad idea and you have to put your thumb into your mouth to stop it because your brain cannot be trusted to control itself.

Expanding a Bit on Magic Forgeries

So I talked a little bit about counterfeiting Magic cards a while back. In the interest of brevity I skipped informing you all about the shitbirds who will inexorably buy counterfeit Magic cards, their plaintive justifications for theft, and the consequences of their actions.

Why spend a post trashing these folks? These are not the type of people I like. These people are, to a man, moral Vincent Benedicts, intellectual omnishambles of self-sabotagingly stupid, determinedly socially-oblivious, and conditioned to be willfully ignorant of the consequences of their actions. I think they deserve some more attention.

And they're Magic players and the day I pass on taking a swing at Magic players, don't even check for a pulse; stick my body right in the incinerator and spread my ashes on an emo dude's penis.

My epitaph is going to be inscribed on the button fly of some skinny jeans.

While I was at The Academy, I was introduced to an old saying, "There's only one thief in The Marine Corps. Everyone else is just trying to get their shit back." Since you can't hear a smirking second lieutenant saying that, I'll state plainly that there doesn't even need to be an "original thief." The idea of someone cheating is enough to spur on/justify others cheating.

Counterfeiting Magic

A few weeks back, Wizards of the Coast, the folks who print Magic: the Gathering introduced a new design for their cards. They changed the border, the artist credits, and added a holographic seal to rares and mythic rares. The announcement was almost prophetic because that same week, images surfaced on reddit of high quality fakes being printed in China.

Newer Magic cards will be safe because the fakes aren't perfect and the holographic seal is going to harder to spoof. The most expensive cards in Magic were printed in 1993 though. It was a dark time, when both Wizard's budget and printing technology were far less impressive.

64 Deck Bag: Round 01

	Hello, and welcome to The 64 Deck Bag, I'm Sivitri Scarzam, and this is the steward of valeron, um...
	Stewart.
	Really?
	Really.
	Wow. I guess we know what colors creativity comes in. Well, Stewart and I are your hosts for today's entertainment. Stewart?
	Our dark masters, manipulators on an inconceivable scale of evil—
	—hail them—
	—have arranged matches to the death between sixty-four cosmic beings of inconceivable power: planeswalkers. All for your entertainment.
	And mine. Today's bout takes place on the plane of Yarikama, amidst a war between the encroaching forces of industry and the abandoned descendants of ancient angels.
	Indeed, like many this place is woefully torn by strife.
	Well, it's about it be.

Zah-ham-baye, zah-ham-baye

So, Terry and I have been playing Magic lately. Amidst a lot of other games, I finally got my zombie deck, "Zompocalypse Now" off:

Click through for the full-size image.

Every D10 represents that many zombies. Because of my Undead Alchemist (blue card on the far right), in lieu of damage my zombies caused Terry to put a card from his library into his graveyard. For every creature card put into his graveyard that way, I got another 2/2 zombie (with +3/+3 from my Zombie lords).

I just want to say that even though Terry was losing, he didn't scoop so I could run up my zombies and win legitimately. He's a good friend.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 4, Part II of II

For the past few weeks, I've been idly speaking about artifacts (and lands) in Magic's history that give mana of any color. Some of those colorless cards give you mana, but attach a high cost to each of their uses. Some are more forgiving. In this final installment, I get to talk about some of my favorites.

Forbidden Orchard straight-up gives an opponent a 1/1 creature. A creature with a strong tribal type no less. Is one mana worth giving your opponent another body? As someone who's died to a 1/2 Hunted Ghoul, I have my doubts. Those who've never suffered that fate may disagree.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 4, Part I of II

For the past few weeks, I've been idly speaking about artifacts (and lands) in Magic's history that give mana of any color. Some give a few mana up and then sacrifice themselves, some convert generic mana or life into the color of mana you need, and others can produce mana of any color, but usually don't, or restrict how you can spend it.

Because generating mana of any color is so powerful and because lands are so cheap, the drawbacks and conditions for those types of lands are widely varied and quite unpredictable. Almost wild, really. 

In each Magic game, you have a total amount of mana you generate between each of your untap steps. If there's a land that isn't tapped when you start your turn, it's wasted potential (mostly). The goal is to have a progression of mana that you've used every turn until you've won. If you stall at four lands, that total for the first five turns looks like 1+2+3+4+4. By that fifth turn, your first land has given you five mana.

If you have Undiscovered Paradise in your hand, you're going to have to decide at some point whether to play a land that's going to churn out mana every turn or play UP again to cast a spell now and face the same dilemma next turn. Undiscovered Paradise doesn't cost you one land drop or one mana, but one mana every turn you have to replay it. If you tap it for a color of mana you can already produce, it's even more futile.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 3

For the past few weeks, I've been idly speaking about artifacts (and lands) in Magic's history that give mana of any color. Some give a few mana up and then sacrifice themselves, some convert generic mana or life into the color of mana you need, and others can produce mana of any color, but usually don't, or restrict how you can spend it.

Though it really is just a restriction, making the production of colored mana finite has been explored enough to warrant its own category. Sure, Black Lotus and Lion's Eye Diamond are powerful one-shot, bursts of mana, but Magic eventually dialed it down to one mana, or even just filtering. Weatherlight gave us Gemstone Mine and Tempest gave Lotus Petal. The mine was pretty popular, but you only got three uses out of it. The lotus also had finite uses—well use—but managed to break its format.

The concept stuck though. Invasion had Archaeological Dig, which produced generic mana until you sacrificed it for a mana of any color. It also had Chromatic Sphere, which was essentially a two-mana Lotus Petal. What Chromatic Sphere had that the petal didn't was a card draw attached; now you weren't discarding cards to get the mana you needed, you were cycling them.

Then you have Ravnica's Terrarion, which is the Magic card equivalent to Sin City's Marv. Terrarion is ugly, slow, and clunky, but it's a hell of a nice card. Like Kalhni Gem, it's almost too niche to include, but it swings us neatly back to our one-shot mana filters perfectly. Time Spiral's Chromatic Star is an obvious descendant of both the Terrarion and Chromatic Sphere. It saddens me that Star vs Sphere is a real and concrete point of contention in some parts of the Magic community, a fact that is one of many reasons I'll shed a single tear when World War III starts, but only because I know humanity will find a way to survive.

Strangely, these sorts of artifacts taper off after Chromatic Star. I'm not sure why. What I've seen more of are things like Sphere of Suns and Pentad Prism, which use counters to make a finite amount of colored mana before the artifact becomes useless.

To lapse into pure hyperbole, I can conjecture about why they stopped. Pentad Prism.

Oh, sure, it gives you a set amount of colorless mana. It ends up filtering and floating mana at a 1:1 rate in a two-color deck. Pentad Prism, like Mox Opal, is the right card in the right set. It's a simple, flawless piece of design that makes Magic hum like a perpetual motion machine^[1]. Chromatic Sphere? Cute. Chromatic Star? Adorable. Lotus Petal? Nope. Implements of Sacrifice? Fuuuuuuuuuck you! :) Pentad Prism is a reason to shut down the store and retire.

Swinging back to the land side, Tendo Ice Bridge in Betrayers of Kamigawa took the same aproach. It lessened the more finite elements of the Gemstone Mine by allowing giving a one-time multicolored land use and providing colorless mana indefinitely. It was a hybrid of the mine and less successful filters like the Henge and School, but still popular.

The vivid cycle (illustrated here by Vivid Creek) would be a straightforward upgrade of Gemstone Mine, but it enters play tapped, essentially costing its own mana to play. The change allows something that lasts longer than Tendo Ice Bridge, while being more useful in the long term than the mine. The short term tradeoff is something for professional players to talk about, but using time to balance multicolored mana generation is--in my opinion--the maximum extent of complexity for lands that generate finite mana of any color. I am going to talk about it next week though.

---
[1] Which I don't think would actually hum because of the energy loss due to emitted sound.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 2

Last week I talked about getting mana of any color from colorless sources, namely artifacts and lands. Black Lotus was too strong. Mana Prism and Standing Stones were awful, but the work moved on. I laid out three major avenues Wizards seemed to pursue to get the balance just right; artifacts that can only be used once, repeatable artifacts that required a cost (usually filters that turn one type of mana into another), and artifacts that placed conditions on the type or use of the mana they generated.

Let's start with the exception: Lion's Eye Diamond from the Mirage set. It almost looks like Lion's Eye Diamond was an attempt by the folks at Magic to tame Black Lotus. After all, lotus proved three mana was worth more than a single card. Lion's Eye Diamond took it to the next step; what if the cost of all that mana was every card? Lion's Eye Diamond was never a Black Lotus, but its "drawback" added a lot of fuel to graveyard-based dredge decks and keeps it in the just-under-$100 range in the secondary market these days. Until Lotus Bloom got it right in Time Spiral, it was also the final attempt at the three-mana-for-none-artifact.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 1

So, last week I talked about an artifact that let other artifacts made colored mana, on the condition that they had that color. There are over 100 artifacts that are colored (most of them White, Blue, and Black because colored artifacts were released as the mechanic for the white, blue, and black faction in Alara), so it's a workable niche.

I often research my designs so I can understand templating and power levels. I ended up looking at the interesting methods that lands and artifacts have used to give players mana throughout the history of Magic.

Hated as they are, these cards have seen more nerdboners than anything should ever have to.

The grandaddy of them wall was the Black Lotus. The Moxes were up there too. The theory behind the lotus, based on conjecture, is that it's only one-use, so it's not that bad. However, dropping a four-mana anything on turn one is a really big benefit. It might be a card advantage issue, where you're effectively discarding a card for three mana (even Dark Ritual makes you pay B for that), but it's still a bargain. I can't even begin to defend the moxes, which are basically lands you can play all at once that hate Nevinyrral's Disk and Shatter.

It's the Magic: Hungry Eyes

So, last weekend, Jay Treat over at Goblin Artisans put up this Weekend Art Challenge. It was based around an image by keepwalking07. In case you can't/won't click over to see the image yourself, it's a massive silhouetted mecha standing amidst a ruined landscape.

Jay's challenge was to create a common or uncommon colored artifact based on that image. Bonus points were offered for a card whose color and status as an artifact were made more relevant by its rules text.

My first thought was to create a piece of equipment because it seems every submission I make to Goblin Artisans has the desperate, sweaty need to be recognized as a unique snowflake. Despite the fact that it came from TMI, the first set from the Deep-Seated Personal Issues block, I was relatively happy with the result: