As many you have already seen, I posted Hyper Magic as a custom format and started a draftable set, Kylshin, to go with it. I was hoping for more feedback on the format and some of my initial designs/decisions. Here it is for reference:
Hyper Magic
Hyper Magic is a format that's all about speed. It plays like a normal game of magic except with two key rule changes:
During your draw step instead of drawing one card, draw cards until you have seven cards in hand.
You may play any number of lands during your turn.
Simple right? With that in mind here is Kylshin, a special set designed to take advantage and play fairly with the format. Like commander products or conspiracy, this set is designed to be Legacy/Vintage legal. Other than that, I'll let the cards speak for themselves:
Commons
Fongung Sentinals2WW
Creature — Human Monk (C)
Home (Pair this creature with a land you control when it enters the battlefield. That land is this creature’s home and it lives there.)
Fongung Sentinals gets +2/+2 as long as its home is untapped.
2/3
Valshon Grove Elemental1GW
Creature — Elemental (C)
Whenever Valshon Grove Elemental enters the battlefield, exhaust two lands you control. (Tap two lands you control. They don’t untap during your next untap step.) “Nissa, everything there has a glow and life to it like I’ve never seen. You must come see it for yourself!”
—Gideon
4/4
Blinding Gargantua5U
Creature — Mutant (C)
Blinding Gargantua can't be blocked. 9: Creatures target player controls get -4/-0 until end of turn. It's difficult to fight what you can't see. It's tougher to fight when you can't see.
4/3
Pillar of Awe6R
Creature — Elemental (C) It stirred awake after an eon in the rock. There was something new it sensed. No, not new. Forgotten. Something that must be forgotten again.
8/6
Sholtien’s Rebuff1U
Instant (C) Amass — Counter target spell with a converted mana cost equal to or less than the number of spells cast this turn. “That is no way to use magic. You lack what I have mastered... timing.”
—Sholtien, Teller of Awe
Wrecking Ball2BR
Instant (C)
Destroy target creature or land. Natives look above not for sun and stars, but for crashing rocks.
Gideons Formation2W
Instant (C)
Multikicker 1W(You may pay an additional 1W any number of times as you cast this spell.)
Choose target creature, then choose another target creature for each time Gideons Formation was kicked. Put 2 +1/+1 counters on each of them.
Blazing Surespear1R
Creature — Lizard Warrior (C)
Prowess Landfall — Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, Blazing Surespear gets +1/+1 until end of turn. “Easy prey. You move like a dimming elder!”
1/1
Naive Conclusion1UR
Sorcery (C)
Exile your hand. Then draw three cards. “These strangers speak of sky and an orb of light that bathes it. What a lesser world where there is but one glow.”
— Kazaku
Roofside Settlement
Land (C)
Roofside Settlement enters the battlefield tapped. T: Add C to your mana pool.
Whenever a creature that lives here attacks or blocks, you gain 2 life.
Uncommons
Tunneling Geopede2R
Creature — Insect (U) Landfall — Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, Tunneling Geopede deals 1 damage to each opponent. Hide your glow
— Fongung saying meaning
“watch your step”
3/2
Bakook Drainer1BB
Creature — Leech Wizard (U)
Menace
Each opponent’s maximum hand size is equal to the number of cards in your hand. Where only shade walks, a Bakook is sure to linger.
2/3
Phosphorescent Wind3UU
Enchantment (U) U, Exhaust a land you control: Tap target nonland permanent. (Tap a land you control. It doesn’t untap during your next untap step.) “I feel it, Gideon. There is something on the air. It knows we are here and it wants us gone.”
—Nissa
Rare/Mythic
Verdant Colossus6GGG
Creature — Elemental (M)
Trample Amass — At the beginning of each end step, create X 1/1 green Saproling creature tokens, where X is the number of spells cast that turn. In a world where forests trace its grounds and its ceiling, a colossus touches both.
8/8
I think this is a format I need to play with to judge these designs, a lot of these are tough for me to mentally playtest. My initial impressions, though:
Home: This doesn't seem exciting to me. When you have a lot of lands to work with, you have a lot more ability to keep Homes untapped, minimizing how interesting of a restriction it is. It is an arbitrary way to keep the increased-land-count down, so I think I get your design goal, but... I'm not sure if this is really that fun at all.
Exhaust: Once again, Exhaust seems to be playing around with the fact that with more lands quicker, you want to find alternate ways to make them count as a resource. But again, when you're adding more lands, you're also minimizing how much of a cost this really feels like, no? It's another way to artificially constrain mana, which seems to be beside the intent of the set, in a way.
Landfall: I think this is too explosive in a set where one turn you can be playing five lands, and in the next you might be playing one. Sure, you can hold lands and trickle them out, but if on any turn this might suddenly become a 5/5 for two mana, that seems insane. It also exacerbates the aggression problem of Landfall. The other Landfall guy in red can deal a lot of damage out of nowhere, too.
Amass: Counting your opponent's spells is really problematic and going to be unintuitive to a lot of players. I see why you're doing it, but it's something avoided nowadays. Might be fine in a custom set with a higher average of skill level and comprehension, though.
Multikicker: Perfect. This is what I was hoping to see.
A lot of your mechanics very specifically call out lands, which is troubling to me. I also think Home and Exhaust basically cover the same design intent (as far a I can see) so I'd cut one of them, both to lower the complexity of the set (less mechanics is good) and because it'd lower the amount of repetition in the mechanics, in terms of theme.
Again, I'm not sure how this format plays out, and these are just initial impressions... The idea of an explosive and high-speed Magic format sounds nice though and it's something I'd like to try to playtest. It's really hard to mentally evaluate such a big change in gameplay, though.
Onto cards:
Blinding Gargantua: This feels way too swingy to me. It needs to be answered with removal, and while you're gonna be burning through cards a lot faster in this format, it's still very frustrating to fight against. With the activated ability it's even tough to outrace it. I think this would be a lot better as a flier.
Naive Conclusion: This is really neat in this format, nice idea. This is definitely very uniquely changed by the format it's present in.
Bakook Drainer: Nasty. I'm curious how this plays out. Definitely very different in this format, a lot more potent. Too potent, perhaps?
-
Lastly, a question - isn't milling yourself out way more of a possibility in this format? Do you have any ideas on how to address that?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Known as Inanimate at Goblin Artisans, and TyrRev at /r/custommagic!
Lead Tesla, a community set designed by everyone and led by me, over at Goblin Artisans. Index of articles here!
If people are seriously trying to break this format you would have to aggressively ban. As it is there are a lot of potential OTK strategies - it's probably even as simple as draw your entire deck with blue draw spells, turnabout to untap and banefire to kill your opponent.
I think this is a format I need to play with to judge these designs, a lot of these are tough for me to mentally playtest. My initial impressions, though:
Home: This doesn't seem exciting to me. When you have a lot of lands to work with, you have a lot more ability to keep Homes untapped, minimizing how interesting of a restriction it is. It is an arbitrary way to keep the increased-land-count down, so I think I get your design goal, but... I'm not sure if this is really that fun at all.
I see youre point, but my intent wasn't to keep all home effects care about the land being untapped. However I think on commons it's important to have a simple, consistent effect for something that could get really complicated i.e. when mulitkicker was introduced, al lthe commons did was add more +1/+1 counters and higher rarities did different things). Is there another baseline design space that's better?
Exhaust: Once again, Exhaust seems to be playing around with the fact that with more lands quicker, you want to find alternate ways to make them count as a resource. But again, when you're adding more lands, you're also minimizing how much of a cost this really feels like, no? It's another way to artificially constrain mana, which seems to be beside the intent of the set, in a way.
You're right that this may not be the right direction to go with land mechanics in the set since it's all about speed.
Landfall: I think this is too explosive in a set where one turn you can be playing five lands, and in the next you might be playing one. Sure, you can hold lands and trickle them out, but if on any turn this might suddenly become a 5/5 for two mana, that seems insane. It also exacerbates the aggression problem of Landfall. The other Landfall guy in red can deal a lot of damage out of nowhere, too.
this set is about being explosive though, its hyper magic! Though that's not to say the balance of the cards is right. Landfall cards would have to be a lot frailer if its kept.
Amass: Counting your opponent's spells is really problematic and going to be unintuitive to a lot of players. I see why you're doing it, but it's something avoided nowadays. Might be fine in a custom set with a higher average of skill level and comprehension, though.
Could always make it a threshold mechanic. Do more if three or more spells cast in turn, that way the counting is much more simplified.
A lot of your mechanics very specifically call out lands, which is troubling to me. I also think Home and Exhaust basically cover the same design intent (as far a I can see)
As pointed out, the intent of home and exhaust is quite different, just that one common with home is misleading. I'd cut exhaust before home.
Blinding Gargantua: This feels way too swingy to me. It needs to be answered with removal, and while you're gonna be burning through cards a lot faster in this format, it's still very frustrating to fight against. With the activated ability it's even tough to outrace it. I think this would be a lot better as a flier.
It might be too good, but a flying version would end up just being another frostwind invoker. I wanted to do a common set like it, but different given the mana gained here.
Bakook Drainer: Nasty. I'm curious how this plays out. Definitely very different in this format, a lot more potent. Too potent, perhaps?
It may be too strong. It might be better as a rare with a different body. Would need playtesting (as does the whole format)
Lastly, a question - isn't milling yourself out way more of a possibility in this format? Do you have any ideas on how to address that?
It certainly is. The two things I was planning to do in the sets design is make mill almsot non existant and card draw minimal so you already draw a lot naturally. Otherwise deck management would be very important in this format. But do consider by nature hyper magic games should go faster since you are playing bigger threats quicker. In theory.
If people are seriously trying to break this format you would have to aggressively ban. As it is there are a lot of potential OTK strategies - it's probably even as simple as draw your entire deck with blue draw spells, turnabout to untap and banefire to kill your opponent.
You're right that the format could easily be a combo player dream where they can consistenly go off by turn two. I'm not sure it be feasible to hard ban all the cards that casually could do this. For this format it may be best to design with Hyper magic only allowing hyper magic sets. Though that would almsot make it feel like a different game than a format. Hmph.
Moxen had to be restricted in vintage for being too powerful. Nerfing a set to the point where it's acceptable for every land to be a mox just means you're going to have a really weak set.
Bakook Drainer is too scary in commander and legacy, where he can make opponents discard their hands in fast decks. However, he's kind of worthless in hyper magic since I'm going to be vomiting my hand onto the board every turn anyways. Unless "draw until you have seven cards" is intended to be "draw until you reach your maximum hand size" in which case he is indescribably busted.
You might think Hyper Magic invalidates card advantage, but in fact it just inverts how you press that advantage. Hyper Magic gravely punishes counterspells and combat tricks, which you will never want to hold in-hand past the end of your opponent's next turn or else you lose out on your draw. It punishes pay-or-counter spells like Sholtien's Rebuff even moreso since odds are good that the opponent will have more than enough mana past the first or second turn to pay.
Bounce, however, becomes very powerful since it removes a permanent from the board and causes the opponent to draw 1 less card next turn, negating the inherent card disadvantage of typical bounce spells and making them the ideal removal (nothing is immune, after all).
Since the goal is to play your entire hand every turn without fail (and you will more than likely have the mana to do so), cards like Naive Conclusion are absurdly strong and should certainly not be common. Big fatties without trample, like Pillar of Awe, would be useless amidst the endless swarm of small dudes that they'll never muscle past, and you should probably include a lot of mass -N/-N black cards so that there's a point to being big without trample (that is, to survive soft board wipes). Evasion becomes incredibly powerful because it allows you to bypass the inevitable wall of creatures and put even more pressure on their same-old-20 starting life total.
At that point you're more or less asking "what if we remade Magic entirely, with new rules? In which case there are many more elegant answers.
Moxen had to be restricted in vintage for being too powerful. Nerfing a set to the point where it's acceptable for every land to be a mox just means you're going to have a really weak set.
Yes, the format idea may be impractical.
Bakook Drainer is too scary in commander and legacy, where he can make opponents discard their hands in fast decks. However, he's kind of worthless in hyper magic since I'm going to be vomiting my hand onto the board every turn anyways. Unless "draw until you have seven cards" is intended to be "draw until you reach your maximum hand size" in which case he is indescribably busted.
No, that's not the intent. But consider after you vomit a chunk of your hand, now your opponent is forced to match that on their turn or lose cards. Even with the number of lands you get to play, not every deck would be dumping its hand every turn, especially in draft. That said, it may not be good fit anyways. That's what playtesting is for and I appreciate the counter argument.
You might think Hyper Magic invalidates card advantage, but in fact it just inverts how you press that advantage. Hyper Magic gravely punishes counterspells and combat tricks, which you will never want to hold in-hand past the end of your opponent's next turn or else you lose out on your draw. It punishes pay-or-counter spells like Sholtien's Rebuff even moreso since odds are good that the opponent will have more than enough mana past the first or second turn to pay.
Sholtien's rebuff is a hard counter, there is no paying. That said, you make good points. Don't be fooled, I completely understand that card advantage is not out the window, it just has to be evaluated differently.
Since the goal is to play your entire hand every turn without fail (and you will more than likely have the mana to do so)
I think you're making a big assumption. some decks would certainly rather dump into large threats than many small ones. That said, if you throw out a bunch of smaller cards that lack the resilliencey of costly ones, your still suceptible to wipes and things that would still generate a lot of CA despite drawing up to 7.
cards like Naive Conclusion are absurdly strong and should certainly not be common. Big fatties without trample, like Pillar of Awe, would be useless amidst the endless swarm of small dudes that they'll never muscle past, and you should probably include a lot of mass -N/-N black cards so that there's a point to being big without trample (that is, to survive soft board wipes). Evasion becomes incredibly powerful because it allows you to bypass the inevitable wall of creatures and put even more pressure on their same-old-20 starting life total.
It is supposed to be faster, hence hyper magic, so cutting through an opponents life total a bit quicker than the average draft isn't automatically a bad thing. That said, you do point again to potential problems that would have to be considered if I moved forward with the format.
Thanks for the feedback. It also an option to just ditch the format idea and stick with the set idea of a battlecruiser-y set with a solid bit of acceleration CA built into it for speedy play into big/wide threats.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Hyper Magic
Hyper Magic is a format that's all about speed. It plays like a normal game of magic except with two key rule changes:
Commons
Fongung Sentinals 2WW
Creature — Human Monk (C)
Home (Pair this creature with a land you control when it enters the battlefield. That land is this creature’s home and it lives there.)
Fongung Sentinals gets +2/+2 as long as its home is untapped.
2/3
Valshon Grove Elemental 1GW
Creature — Elemental (C)
Whenever Valshon Grove Elemental enters the battlefield, exhaust two lands you control. (Tap two lands you control. They don’t untap during your next untap step.)
“Nissa, everything there has a glow and life to it like I’ve never seen. You must come see it for yourself!”
—Gideon
4/4
Blinding Gargantua 5U
Creature — Mutant (C)
Blinding Gargantua can't be blocked.
9: Creatures target player controls get -4/-0 until end of turn.
It's difficult to fight what you can't see. It's tougher to fight when you can't see.
4/3
Pillar of Awe 6R
Creature — Elemental (C)
It stirred awake after an eon in the rock. There was something new it sensed. No, not new. Forgotten. Something that must be forgotten again.
8/6
Sholtien’s Rebuff 1U
Instant (C)
Amass — Counter target spell with a converted mana cost equal to or less than the number of spells cast this turn.
“That is no way to use magic. You lack what I have mastered... timing.”
—Sholtien, Teller of Awe
Wrecking Ball 2BR
Instant (C)
Destroy target creature or land.
Natives look above not for sun and stars, but for crashing rocks.
Gideons Formation 2W
Instant (C)
Multikicker 1W (You may pay an additional 1W any number of times as you cast this spell.)
Choose target creature, then choose another target creature for each time Gideons Formation was kicked. Put 2 +1/+1 counters on each of them.
Blazing Surespear 1R
Creature — Lizard Warrior (C)
Prowess
Landfall — Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, Blazing Surespear gets +1/+1 until end of turn.
“Easy prey. You move like a dimming elder!”
1/1
Naive Conclusion 1UR
Sorcery (C)
Exile your hand. Then draw three cards.
“These strangers speak of sky and an orb of light that bathes it. What a lesser world where there is but one glow.”
— Kazaku
Roofside Settlement
Land (C)
Roofside Settlement enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add C to your mana pool.
Whenever a creature that lives here attacks or blocks, you gain 2 life.
Uncommons
Tunneling Geopede 2R
Creature — Insect (U)
Landfall — Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, Tunneling Geopede deals 1 damage to each opponent.
Hide your glow
— Fongung saying meaning
“watch your step”
3/2
Bakook Drainer 1BB
Creature — Leech Wizard (U)
Menace
Each opponent’s maximum hand size is equal to the number of cards in your hand.
Where only shade walks, a Bakook is sure to linger.
2/3
Phosphorescent Wind 3UU
Enchantment (U)
U, Exhaust a land you control: Tap target nonland permanent. (Tap a land you control. It doesn’t untap during your next untap step.)
“I feel it, Gideon. There is something on the air. It knows we are here and it wants us gone.”
—Nissa
Rare/Mythic
Verdant Colossus 6GGG
Creature — Elemental (M)
Trample
Amass — At the beginning of each end step, create X 1/1 green Saproling creature tokens, where X is the number of spells cast that turn.
In a world where forests trace its grounds and its ceiling, a colossus touches both.
8/8
Home: This doesn't seem exciting to me. When you have a lot of lands to work with, you have a lot more ability to keep Homes untapped, minimizing how interesting of a restriction it is. It is an arbitrary way to keep the increased-land-count down, so I think I get your design goal, but... I'm not sure if this is really that fun at all.
Exhaust: Once again, Exhaust seems to be playing around with the fact that with more lands quicker, you want to find alternate ways to make them count as a resource. But again, when you're adding more lands, you're also minimizing how much of a cost this really feels like, no? It's another way to artificially constrain mana, which seems to be beside the intent of the set, in a way.
Landfall: I think this is too explosive in a set where one turn you can be playing five lands, and in the next you might be playing one. Sure, you can hold lands and trickle them out, but if on any turn this might suddenly become a 5/5 for two mana, that seems insane. It also exacerbates the aggression problem of Landfall. The other Landfall guy in red can deal a lot of damage out of nowhere, too.
Amass: Counting your opponent's spells is really problematic and going to be unintuitive to a lot of players. I see why you're doing it, but it's something avoided nowadays. Might be fine in a custom set with a higher average of skill level and comprehension, though.
Multikicker: Perfect. This is what I was hoping to see.
A lot of your mechanics very specifically call out lands, which is troubling to me. I also think Home and Exhaust basically cover the same design intent (as far a I can see) so I'd cut one of them, both to lower the complexity of the set (less mechanics is good) and because it'd lower the amount of repetition in the mechanics, in terms of theme.
Again, I'm not sure how this format plays out, and these are just initial impressions... The idea of an explosive and high-speed Magic format sounds nice though and it's something I'd like to try to playtest. It's really hard to mentally evaluate such a big change in gameplay, though.
Onto cards:
Blinding Gargantua: This feels way too swingy to me. It needs to be answered with removal, and while you're gonna be burning through cards a lot faster in this format, it's still very frustrating to fight against. With the activated ability it's even tough to outrace it. I think this would be a lot better as a flier.
Naive Conclusion: This is really neat in this format, nice idea. This is definitely very uniquely changed by the format it's present in.
Bakook Drainer: Nasty. I'm curious how this plays out. Definitely very different in this format, a lot more potent. Too potent, perhaps?
-
Lastly, a question - isn't milling yourself out way more of a possibility in this format? Do you have any ideas on how to address that?
Lead Tesla, a community set designed by everyone and led by me, over at Goblin Artisans. Index of articles here!
I see youre point, but my intent wasn't to keep all home effects care about the land being untapped. However I think on commons it's important to have a simple, consistent effect for something that could get really complicated i.e. when mulitkicker was introduced, al lthe commons did was add more +1/+1 counters and higher rarities did different things). Is there another baseline design space that's better?
You're right that this may not be the right direction to go with land mechanics in the set since it's all about speed.
this set is about being explosive though, its hyper magic! Though that's not to say the balance of the cards is right. Landfall cards would have to be a lot frailer if its kept.
Could always make it a threshold mechanic. Do more if three or more spells cast in turn, that way the counting is much more simplified.
As pointed out, the intent of home and exhaust is quite different, just that one common with home is misleading. I'd cut exhaust before home.
It might be too good, but a flying version would end up just being another frostwind invoker. I wanted to do a common set like it, but different given the mana gained here.
It may be too strong. It might be better as a rare with a different body. Would need playtesting (as does the whole format)
It certainly is. The two things I was planning to do in the sets design is make mill almsot non existant and card draw minimal so you already draw a lot naturally. Otherwise deck management would be very important in this format. But do consider by nature hyper magic games should go faster since you are playing bigger threats quicker. In theory.
You're right that the format could easily be a combo player dream where they can consistenly go off by turn two. I'm not sure it be feasible to hard ban all the cards that casually could do this. For this format it may be best to design with Hyper magic only allowing hyper magic sets. Though that would almsot make it feel like a different game than a format. Hmph.
Bakook Drainer is too scary in commander and legacy, where he can make opponents discard their hands in fast decks. However, he's kind of worthless in hyper magic since I'm going to be vomiting my hand onto the board every turn anyways. Unless "draw until you have seven cards" is intended to be "draw until you reach your maximum hand size" in which case he is indescribably busted.
You might think Hyper Magic invalidates card advantage, but in fact it just inverts how you press that advantage. Hyper Magic gravely punishes counterspells and combat tricks, which you will never want to hold in-hand past the end of your opponent's next turn or else you lose out on your draw. It punishes pay-or-counter spells like Sholtien's Rebuff even moreso since odds are good that the opponent will have more than enough mana past the first or second turn to pay.
Bounce, however, becomes very powerful since it removes a permanent from the board and causes the opponent to draw 1 less card next turn, negating the inherent card disadvantage of typical bounce spells and making them the ideal removal (nothing is immune, after all).
Since the goal is to play your entire hand every turn without fail (and you will more than likely have the mana to do so), cards like Naive Conclusion are absurdly strong and should certainly not be common. Big fatties without trample, like Pillar of Awe, would be useless amidst the endless swarm of small dudes that they'll never muscle past, and you should probably include a lot of mass -N/-N black cards so that there's a point to being big without trample (that is, to survive soft board wipes). Evasion becomes incredibly powerful because it allows you to bypass the inevitable wall of creatures and put even more pressure on their same-old-20 starting life total.
At that point you're more or less asking "what if we remade Magic entirely, with new rules? In which case there are many more elegant answers.
- Rabid Wombat
No, that's not the intent. But consider after you vomit a chunk of your hand, now your opponent is forced to match that on their turn or lose cards. Even with the number of lands you get to play, not every deck would be dumping its hand every turn, especially in draft. That said, it may not be good fit anyways. That's what playtesting is for and I appreciate the counter argument.
Sholtien's rebuff is a hard counter, there is no paying. That said, you make good points. Don't be fooled, I completely understand that card advantage is not out the window, it just has to be evaluated differently.
I think you're making a big assumption. some decks would certainly rather dump into large threats than many small ones. That said, if you throw out a bunch of smaller cards that lack the resilliencey of costly ones, your still suceptible to wipes and things that would still generate a lot of CA despite drawing up to 7.
It is supposed to be faster, hence hyper magic, so cutting through an opponents life total a bit quicker than the average draft isn't automatically a bad thing. That said, you do point again to potential problems that would have to be considered if I moved forward with the format.
Thanks for the feedback. It also an option to just ditch the format idea and stick with the set idea of a battlecruiser-y set with a solid bit of acceleration CA built into it for speedy play into big/wide threats.