Edge of Eternities Vision Design Handoff, Part 2
Last week, I started showing off the vision design handoff document for Edge of Eternities, which was written by Ethan Fleischer, the set's vision design lead. Today, I'll finish that journey. Everything you see in normal print is the vision design handoff document. Everything in the blue boxes below that is my commentary. Last week, we ended in the middle of Ethan talking about cosmic cards. Cosmic was a new supertype that went on cards that were physically twice the size of normal cards, similar to melded cards.
Now, let's return to the document.
Cosmic Cards in Limited
Each "Volleyball" booster pack will contain one cosmic card. Cosmic cards come in a variety of rarities. The technology to ensure that a card that "journeys to" a particular cosmic card and the associated cosmic card isn't practical for our purposes. We've taken steps to ensure that few cosmic cards will be unusable in Limited games.
I don't spend a lot of time talking about how practical concerns influence design. Yes, we always start with the ideal version of what we want, but it's important that we take in the feedback of the many people downstream of us that will have to make this product. Those concerns might be about the cards as game pieces (such as rules, editing, and digital) or the physical production of cards (such as collation, printing, or collectability).
Each "journeyer" appears more often in packs than the cosmic cards that they journey to. Excess journeyers in a deck are still functional game pieces because of the scry 2 "escape clause" in the journey keyword action. We will probably include a common, inefficient, colorless Prismatic Piper-style card that can journey to any cosmic card to increase the opportunities to play with rare cosmic cards that players may draft.
Our solution came in two parts. First, we made the cards that fetched the cosmic cards more plentiful so the chance that you would have a cosmic card without a journeyer would be low. Second, we added additional functionality to the journey keyword action, letting you scry 2.
Alternative Cosmic Executions
We considered a couple of other promising directions for how to execute on cosmic cards in case the above implementation doesn't work out:
- A "Lesson spell/learn mechanic" style implementation where a journeyer can journey to any cosmic card of a specified color. In this scenario, we would have to make all of the cosmic cards the same power level or introduce some kind of "power level" system that's analogous to mana value. This works better in Limited but is challenging to develop and it isn't very sustainable for Constructed.
- A checklist card could be used to represent cosmic cards in zones other than the battlefield. This is the easiest implementation, but it's a little lackluster.
We recognized that the solution we gave above to fix the pairing problem might not work, so we left a couple other suggestions about how we could accomplish it, including a basic suggestion of a way we knew would work, just not a particularly pretty way.
The lesson/learn solution demonstrates a common problem we run into. The more we broaden access to specific cards, the more we are forced to treat them similarly, and thus put them at the same power level. This makes it hard to balance and greatly reduces the design space of the cards.
The thing that stands out to me with 20/20 hindsight is that we didn't give the Set Design team a good back-up for cosmic cards. I think we were a little overconfident that it was doable. This was partly because we were told by people early on that they thought there was a solution, and partly because the Transformers trading card game had done it. We didn't really understand at the time how different the scope of asking for a giant card was in Magic in contrast to a smaller game like the Transformers trading card game.
It's interesting looking back at these handoff documents because it shines a light into what the Vision Design team was thinking. It's clear to me that we liked cosmic cards and were pretty optimistic about them working out.
Warp
Warp COST (You may cast this spell from your hand for its warp cost during your precombat main phase. If you do, exile it at the end of combat. You may cast the card for as long as it remains exiled.)
This mechanic represents creatures and spacecraft entering and exiting hyperspace or teleporting. It's intentionally a bit ambiguous to allow a variety of creative concepts.
Each warp card has an ability that makes it relevant for the brief time that it's on the battlefield; it has haste, or a triggered ability, or an enchantment-like buffing ability. In general, the mana costs, power, and toughness of warp cards should enable a splashy "battlecruiser" style of Magic.
At first glance, the timing on warp is a bit odd. It was designed this way in order to interact in a satisfying way with the void mechanic. Additional playtesting will determine whether that is a price that's worth paying.
It's interesting to note that we tried to create synergy between warp and void, but Set Design altered how the mechanics worked to increase their overlap. Set Design found the timing odd and changed it.
Lander Tokens
Create a Lander token. (It's an artifact with "{o2}, {oT}: Transform this artifact." It transforms into a Settlement artifact land token with "{oT}: Add one mana of any type that a land you control could produce.)
To help players feed the other mana-hungry cards in the set, we have Lander tokens. These are double-faced artifact tokens that can transform into lands.
While Landers appear in all colors, they belong most naturally in green for color pie reasons. Lander creation in non-green colors should be approached with caution, and incentives should push players to care about Landers for reasons other than ramping. Blue's "artifacts matter" theme and red's sacrifice outlets are good examples of this.
This was probably the element of the set that got the most time in the Council of Color meetings. At the end of vision design and in middle of set design, the design lead comes to the council and walks through where the mechanics and themes of the set are at. This is to make sure that everything is in the color that it should be. Land fetching is core to green, so we're always watchful of non-green land fetching's rate. The final set has Lander tokens in all five colors, but the lion's share of it ended up in red and green, the two colors that interact the most with creating mana. The non-red, non-green cards that make Landers were designed very carefully.
Void
Void — If an artifact or creature was put into a graveyard or exile from the battlefield this turn, EFFECT.
The void mechanic was inspired by the Worldbuilding team's creation of the Zeroist black hole worshippers. We wanted a morbid variant that cares about artifacts in addition to creatures. We included caring about the exile zone to interact with the warp mechanic.
Void is concentrated in black, but it could appear in any color.
The Monoists, originally called the Zeroists, are a part of Edge of Eternities that was created by the Worldbuilding team. One of the ideas we had very early is that we wanted to use the color pie as a lens for planets. The idea was that each color had a home planet and citizens of that planet. Early on, the Worldbuilding team came across the idea that the black-mana homeworld was a black hole. Everyone really liked the idea and the Vision Design team started exploring what it might mean mechanically. That's what got us to morbid and then void, a morbid variant. Void does appear primarily in black and secondarily in red (the two sacrifice colors), with just a tiny touch in white and blue.
Modified
A creature is modified if it has one or more counters on it, if it is equipped, or if it is enchanted by an Aura that is controlled by that creature's controller.
The modified mechanic first appeared in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. It is substantially unchanged in "Volleyball."
Modified is concentrated in white but can appear in any color.
As I explained last week, the set shifted around enough during set design that modified didn't really make sense anymore, so it was removed.
Limited Gameplay
The set's thematic focus on large-scale concepts means that players will cast higher mana value spells and activate more expensive abilities than in the average Magic set. Controlling the speed for the format will be essential to achieving this goal.
During the design of Rise of the Eldrazi, R&D member Brain Tinsman coined the term "battlecruiser Magic." The core concept of the idea is that it's fun to have time to build up to large creatures then smash them into large creatures controlled by your opponent. Battlecruiser Magic is tricky to design because you don't want to invalidate other strategies, so there's a delicate balance that has to be reached. Ethan is explaining that the goals of the set, capturing the scope of the space opera genre, will require us to slow down the set.
Limited Archetypes
"Volleyball" is the introduction to space Magic, so it should be stripped down to the essentials to leave room for further expansion. This doesn't mean that the set should lack in depth, excitement, and replayability, but that it should express a conceptual clarity that aligns with Magic's built-in structures.
One of the general rules is that Magic sets can either be complex in structure and simple in execution, or simple in structure and complex in execution (simple in structure and execution is also allowed). Edge of Eternities has a lot of complexity in execution, so Ethan is saying the structure of the set wants to be on the simpler side.
"Volleyball" treats the colors of Magic as factions, similar to how they were treated in Limited Edition (Alpha). Each color has a mechanical focus, and the ten two-color Limited archetypes are the organic extrapolation of the combination of their two colors' focus.
Colors:
White: Modified
Blue: Artifacts
Black: Void
Red: Aggro and sacrifice
Green: Ramp
Set Design moved away from thinking about the set structure through monocolor themes and instead thought of it through the ten two-color archetypes. A lot of these themes, save for modified, found homes in the archetypes.
Archetypes:
This archetype completely changed. It's now focused around casting your second spell.
This archetype stayed the same.
This archetype mostly stayed the same.
The Lander component stayed, but now plays into landfall, a returning mechanic added during set design.
Modified is gone, but the core of this archetype stayed in the set. It now mostly focuses on +1/+1 counters.
This archetype stayed the same.
This archetype stayed the same.
This archetype now revolves around using the graveyard. This is the default strategy we use for black-green.
With modified gone, this archetype now synergizes with Spacecraft.
With modified gone, this archetype now synergizes with Spacecraft.
Tropes and Allusions
As a top-down, genre-inspired set, "Volleyball" wants to include cards representing a variety of science fiction tropes, as well as allusions to specific pieces of science-fiction media. However, we want to avoid eating the lunch of possible future Universes Beyond and space Magic sets.
In general, we want to explore tropes that represent concepts in common between popular space opera franchises, such as giant spaceships, space battles, faster-than-light travel, etc. We also want to allude to iconic concepts from a variety of pieces of space opera media.
However, we should avoid the following:
- Space horror tropes
- Space exploration tropes
- Space empire tropes
- Allusions to specific properties that aren't part of larger tropes
So, a card representing a space battleship is good. A card representing a more generalized trope is good. A card representing a specific allusion to a specific story is to be avoided.
Some cards are tagged as a "trope" or "allusion" in our internal system to help make sure that we don't lose too many of these concepts as the set is iterated upon. Cards that straddled the line between trope and allusion received both tags.
A trope is narrative device that an audience will recognize across several stories. An allusion is a direct reference to one piece of entertainment. For example, Elves that live in the forest is a fantasy trope, and can be found in many fantasy stories, including Magic. Slivers, in contrast, are a specific reference to Magic. Ethan is saying that we can and should reference tropes in the set, but we need to be careful about making specific allusions. Because we want to save potential space for more Magic sets that take place in space or potential Universes Beyond properties that are set in space, we want to be careful in what cards we're making.
Subtypes
Space Magic takes place in a radically different setting from regular Magic. While it's important to have some continuity between the settings with regard to subtypes, some new subtypes are essential to expressing the space opera genre correctly. In addition to the Lander and Settlement subtypes discussed above, we have the following.
While Magic has definitely dipped its toe into science fiction in the past, Edge of Eternities is pushing into a specific science fiction sub-genre, which includes genre-specific vocabulary. That allows opportunities for new vocabulary in the game, in this particular case, subtypes.
Spacecraft
With space opera media, the need for concepts for flying creatures becomes urgent. The most obvious solution is to treat small, single-seat spacecrafts as artifact creatures rather than Vehicles. We want to establish this as a norm here in "Volleyball."
So, in "Volleyball" (and in future space Magic sets), a spacecraft controlled by a single pilot is an artifact creature, while a spacecraft that requires multiple crew members is a Vehicle, and a huge spacecraft with multiple floors is a cosmic artifact.
To tie these disparate mechanical expressions of similar creative concepts together, we're introducing the Spacecraft artifact type. It appears on artifact creatures, Vehicles, and cosmic artifacts. Perhaps controversially, we recommend avoiding adding creature types to Spacecraft artifact creatures. A space fighter doesn't want to have the Human type, for example. Our hope is that the presence of noncreature cards with the Spacecraft artifact type will reduce the confusion players experienced with the Shrine creatures from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
Space opera definitely has a huge gap in the size of its spacecrafts, so Ethan was trying to create a structure to differentiate them. In the end, Set Design decided to just focus on the larger spacecrafts, which all use the station mechanic. They didn't make any Spacecraft that were also Vehicles or that were artifact creatures without station. Set Design did follow the advice of not adding other creature types to Spacecraft.
New subtypes for cosmic permanents
We're introducing new flavorful subtypes for cosmic cards. These subtypes exist primarily for flavor in "Volleyball," but will likely become more mechanically relevant if more space sets are released. The following list isn't intended to be exhaustive.
Land types:
- Asteroid
- Black Hole
- Moon
- Planet
- Star*
*Star doesn't actually appear in this set, but it may appear in future sets.
The only subtype to make it to print was Planet. It is used as a land subtype. Each Planet land has the station mechanic.
Artifact types:
- Spacecraft
- Station
Spacecraft made it to the set. All artifacts with the Spacecraft subtype have station in Edge of Eternities. There is nothing in the rules requiring this. A future set could choose to have artifacts that are Spacecrafts (such as artifact creatures or Vehicle artifacts) without having station. Station, obviously, became a mechanic and not a subtype.
Enchantment types:
- Anomaly
- Nebula
Neither of these became subtypes.
New creature types
While creatures like elves and goblins live in this setting, we want to avoid making the setting look too similar to other space-fantasy properties, so the most common non-human creatures will look and sound more like aliens than creatures transplanted from a fantasy novel. Some of these, like Kavu and Aetherborn, are existing creature types, while others are completely new and have names like Stellari and Drix.
Kavu did make it to print while Aetherborn did not. There are some other Magic creature types like Insect, Jellyfish, and Plant that get used to represent specific alien species. Drix did make it into the set as their own subtype. Stellari became the Astelli and got the creature type Angel.
Bonus Sheet
The set's bonus sheet contains land cards with science-fiction themed art. The lands were selected for appeal, Limited gameplay, and alignment with the set's worldbuilding.
This idea did make it through set design. I'd like to think the popularity of Unfinity's space lands help make this happen.
And with that, we've finished Edge of Eternities vision design handoff document. I want to take a moment to thank Ethan for letting me post this document. I hope you enjoyed the peek behind the curtain. As always, if you have any comments on this document, my articles on it, or any related topic, you can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).
Wizards will be on vacation next week, but join me the week after that for this year's State of Design.
Until then, may you enjoy the new space carved out by this set.