The spacing on the flavor text is highly suspicious. They would typically put a carriage return after the comma, not left that "but" hanging out there.
Jace is the card that is finally going to make Ojutai's Command a thing. An in-color two drop that is not just good early in the game, but very good late in the game, especially when he's coming into play EoT.
When people post their results, are they cherry-picking a handful of coherent or particularly amusing examples out of thousands of sample cards? Or are these typical outputs chosen mostly at random?
The ones I posted were pretty hand-picked. I haven't spent a lot of time setting this up or tuning it properly, so the RNN is spitting out a lot of garbage. For example, the next couple, without cherry-picking them, are:
Leeking Throat 3W
Creature — Cat Warrior
Daughter you control destroyed this turn.
2/2
Wow, for a completely random output, this is pretty hilarious. I can just imagine the artwork of a cat warrior stabbing a young girl through the neck with a leek.
When people post their results, are they cherry-picking a handful of coherent or particularly amusing examples out of thousands of sample cards? Or are these typical outputs chosen mostly at random?
I wish that 1) WotC employees could look at these and 2) they still did invitationals, because this would be the best invitation limited format EVER.
And great contribution Subbak. That's an interesting point about blue/red... When Humble Defector was spoiled I was thinking there could be a cool self-bounce theme but it never really materialized.
I'm legitimately confused about whether Sarkhan is the hero or the villain here. I mean, on the one hand he's opposing Bolas, so that's got to be good, right? But restoring the dragons would seem to only make Tarkir a darker place. And if it did make humans stronger, wouldn't it just make them more warlike? With the past being so similar to the present, I wonder if Dragons of Tarkir will even be different enough for us to figure out what the point was.
Anyone have any interest in writing or reading long-form design reviews of new sets? I used to write them for a long-defunct gaming magazine and I kinda miss it. So I figured I'd write one for MTG Salvation and see if anyone cared to read it, or contribute their own.
The Middle Set, Reforged If you're looking for examples of great Magic: The Gathering design, small sets are not the best places to look, and small sets sandwiched between two large sets are pretty much the worst. Seriously—how many Worldwake and Dark Ascension mechanics can you name? (Answer at the bottom of this post—and no, Mindsculptering, Stoneforging, and Huntmastering are not "mechanics.") But WotC's marketing department promises that Fate Reforged will be different; Fate Reforged is the fulcrum of a bold new style of block design—the hottie at the heart of the torrid Khans of Tarkir/Dragons of Tarkir love triangle.
While we can't fully understand what Fate Reforged is trying to achieve until Dragons of Tarkir is revealed, WotC will probably consider it a massive failure if we all decide to hold off untill March to pick up our booster boxes. Fate Reforged may have some mysterious secret agenda, but it has to impress us now. On a design level, at least, it's done a pretty solid job of it.
MECHANICS REFORGED Manifest - After the high complexity level of Khans, I didn't anticipate much depth from the new mechanics of Fate Reforged, so I was stunned to see a new major mechanic at a morph-like level of complexity. Mark Rosewater's reasoning for adding Manifest to the mix is an interesting one—that since it piggybacks on the complexity of Morph, which is already in the environment, it will be much easier for players to grasp than if they'd printed it elsewhere. If Manifest proves sufficiently grokable to new players, it should go a long way towards dispelling fears that the game has less room for deep gameplay under New World Order.
Regardless of its complexity level, Manifest is a great mechanic. Cards like Cloudform and Ethereal Ambush work well at face value, providing reasonably efficient creatures with a random chance of a big upside. But Manifest also combines with other mechanics like self-bounce, library manipulation and the when-revealed triggers of Khans morph cards to reward clever play in unique ways.
Manifest does have some logistical issues, forcing players to keep morphs and manifested cards separate, and applying significantly different floor rules to each. But Miracle and Transform have proven that players are willing to endure some annoyances for a fun mechanic, and I'm confident Manifest will be regarded similarly.
Dash - While we've seen this mechanic before, it's a great choice for a keyword mechanic. It's obviously powerful, but it's strong in a self-limiting way, like Delve is, where the more Dash cards you put in a deck, the weaker they become. So WotC can continue to print powerful cards with Dash and it will provide players more choices, instead of combining to form a broken Dash deck. I'll be excited to see this one return.
Bolster - Hey, this is... fine. The cards seem fairly powerful, and I like that it doesn't target so you can't get 2-for-1'ed by removal. But this is a simple nuts-and-bolts mechanic that uses few complexity points and doesn't offer much excitement. I can't say I'll be thrilled to see it return, but I'm not upset about it either.
CREATIVE REFORGED
Telling a coherent story through randomized sets of playing cards is clearly a challenge, and it's the one aspect of Magic design that has remained in an awkward experimental phase for almost the entirety of the game's existence. Before Khans, it seemed like the medium would only ever be able to render simple, three-part stories like Theros and Scars block (Ominous presence arrives > CONFLICT > Outcome) without having to produce a bunch of supplemental content that no one wanted to read. Khans block's interesting triptych (Introduce world > Show a change at a pivotal point in history > Show changed world) suggests the three-set model had more storytelling potential than I'd previously believed.
But while I love the overall structure of this block, I'm disappointed with the way Fate Reforged part of the story has been told. Yes, there are dragons in the past and dragon bones in the present, but has NOTHING ELSE changed in 1280 years? So despite being at constant war, all five factions have survived unchanged the entire time, outliving every faction in the whole of human history? Okay. I'd at least expect to see the heroes of Fate Reforged using more primitive weapons and armor, but I don't see any signs of technological differences either. Fate Reforged's vision of the past feels as lame as a sci-fi movie set in the year 3295 in which everyone is wearing contemporary fashions, living in present-day cities, fighting with modern handguns, driving gas-powered Toyota Corollas, etc., with the only difference being that humanity has refocused its efforts on battling giant mutant capybaras. (PM me if you want to see my spec script.)
The mechanics that are supposed to play into the block's alternate timelines theme have mostly just left me confused. What are the Siege-cycle cards supposed to be depicting? The difference between a world of Khans and a world of Dragons? But why are all the Khans modes providing positive effects while the Dragon modes hurt your opponent? Wasn't Khans such a bleak world of pointless war that Sarkhan had to go back in time to change it? There are a few clever nods to the block's structure, like Renowned Weaponsmith's second ability, but all in all, the "time travel" theme feels so subtle that I doubt I'd have noticed it if the set's marketing hadn't repeatedly hammered it home.
CARD DESIGN TRENDS, REFORGED Commons - Fate Reforged has the most interesting commons I've seen in a long time, thanks to the set's mechanical depth. Manifest, Dash, and even Bolster all have the power to make staple effects interesting, and even the non-keyworded cards seem to be doing more work than usual. The new mechanics, combined with the returning mechanics, have done a good job of adding new dimensions to almost every basic card effect—bounce has new utility with manifest, delve obviously loves self-discarding and mill, prowess loves simple cantrips like Pressure Point, and Ferocious effectively adds an ability to vanilla creatures like Gore Swine. I love that clan design is supported by cards like Battle Brawler and the enemy-color gold cards in a subtle, forward-compatible way. And I also love that the set doesn't waste a lot of common slots on sideboard fodder, combining things like Naturalize and Plummet into a single, maindeckable card. This is something I wish Khans had done more of, since the need to expend high draft picks on lands left players more desperate for playables than usual.
Dragons - I suppose the developers of this set didn't want to step on the toes of Dragons of Tarkir, but the much ballyhooed return of dragons is pretty disappointing. They'll be plenty bomby in limited, of course, and that should have a larger impact on draft than you typically see from a small set. But I don't hear many people clamoring to open dragons for their constructed decks, which seems like a surprising failure for one of the set's major themes.
Khans - I love the return of hybrid here, and making a cycle of cheap khans with pricy but interesting activated abilities was a great way to draw a contrast to the beefier, simpler dragons in the environment. On a card-by-card basis, these seem a lot more interesting to me than the more straightforward khans of the previous set.
Constructed Implications - Standard is in a pretty diverse place right now, and while it's hard to predict the effect of new sets, Fate Reforged seems well positioned to bolster fringe strategies without pushing any already strong decks over the top. Every clan gets a few treats, but Temur, thankfully, seems to get the most, with Frost Walker, Flamewake Phoenix, and Wild Slash potentially raising it out of the clan gutter. The already diverse Jeskai, Abzan and Mardu decks can now go in an even wider variety of directions. Control—which is somehow already surviving despite a seemingly terrible card pool—gets a better sweeper with Crux of Fate, a few spells worth testing, and some potential finishers. Mardu Woe-Reaper is a well-positioned hate card against the one strategy that didn't have a lot of effective answers. And an out-of-nowhere enchantment sub-theme could give a shot in the arm to some Theros-centric strategies, as could a few powerful cards with mana-intensive casting costs.
Fate Reforged seem to have fewer cards than usual that scream RAW POWER, but more cards than usual that just might be playable in the right meta. Again, I'm no pro and I have little confidence in my ability to predict what will happen in Standard, but sets that are full of maybe-playables seem to lead to better Standard (and Limited) environments than sets that have a clearer separation between power and filler.
Mythic Shenanigans - Fate Reforged seems to have a pretty typical power balance for mythics—one mad-money chase card (Monastery Mentor), some solid playables (Soulfire Grand Master, Warden of the First Tree) potential constructed role-players (Ugin, Brutal Hordechief), and a bunch of EDH cards. But I really don't like how the non-legend hybrid cycle is at mythic while both legend cycles are at rare. While the two hybrid cycles seem to be at pretty similar power levels, the legends will mostly be 2-ofs in the decks that want them while the non-legends will mostly be 4-ofs. Maro may claim they get more complaints about mythics being too weak than they do about them being too strong, but no one is happy when a set turns into a chase-mythic lottery. And it's pretty likely that Fate Reforged is going to be one of those sets where a few high-value mythics shove all but a few rares into the dollar bin. Having legends at mythic and non-legends at rare would have helped to even out the value curve.
CONCLUSION, uh, REFORGED! Khans of Tarkir is a set that impressed me on a variety of levels—fresh themes, interesting limited play, a well-balanced Standard environment, and some of Magic's best-ever creative work. I was a little worried that the weird nature of this block would leave Fate Reforged to abandon much of what had made its predecessor great. Fortunately, that's not the case. Mechanically, Fate Reforged builds off of Khans in clever and surprisingly complicated ways. The creative work behind Fate Reforged has left me much less impressed, delivering a time-travel story with few perceptible signs of time travel.
Of course, it's hard to write definitively about Fate Reforged when half of its tricks haven't been performed yet. New dimensions of the set will be revealed when it dumps Khans of Tarkir for its new dance partner in March, perhaps casting its tepid time travel theme, its underwhelming dragon revival, and not-very-resonant choice mechanics in a new light. But even if some of its strengths aren't immediately apparent, I'd call it a qualified success even in the short term. And if it can prove as nimble a counterpart to DTK as it has with KTK, Fate Reforged will earn a prime spot in Magic history—perhaps not as its most powerful small set, but certainly as its hardest-working one.
*Worldwake's new mechanic: Multikicker. Dark Ascension's new mechanics: Undying, Fateful Hour.
I feel like there are so many cards in this set—including this one—whose power level is completely dependent on there being some cheap cantrips like Opt or the Shadowmoor wisps. I'm unusually excited to see the common dump this time around.
I like the Phoenix, it is the most Phoenixesque Phoenix design in Magic so far I think.
It hatches from his egg (morph), dies, returns to his egg and then either dies if the egg is killed before it hatches again or returns.
Agreed, except for the weird flavor where it's beating for 2 an egg as an unhatched egg.
I think this is a pretty solid card, like a mini flying Thragtusk without the life gain. 4/1 that turns into a 2/2 post death isn't quite good enough but the morph ability, even if it's only used every other game or so, might push it over the top.
Wow, for a completely random output, this is pretty hilarious. I can just imagine the artwork of a cat warrior stabbing a young girl through the neck with a leek.
I wish that 1) WotC employees could look at these and 2) they still did invitationals, because this would be the best invitation limited format EVER.
Now we just need some sort of random art generator to give these hilarious abilities some equally hilarious flavor.
If ever there's been a cycle of cards to hide in the big Friday spoiler dump, this is it.
And great contribution Subbak. That's an interesting point about blue/red... When Humble Defector was spoiled I was thinking there could be a cool self-bounce theme but it never really materialized.
I'm legitimately confused about whether Sarkhan is the hero or the villain here. I mean, on the one hand he's opposing Bolas, so that's got to be good, right? But restoring the dragons would seem to only make Tarkir a darker place. And if it did make humans stronger, wouldn't it just make them more warlike? With the past being so similar to the present, I wonder if Dragons of Tarkir will even be different enough for us to figure out what the point was.
The Middle Set, Reforged
If you're looking for examples of great Magic: The Gathering design, small sets are not the best places to look, and small sets sandwiched between two large sets are pretty much the worst. Seriously—how many Worldwake and Dark Ascension mechanics can you name? (Answer at the bottom of this post—and no, Mindsculptering, Stoneforging, and Huntmastering are not "mechanics.") But WotC's marketing department promises that Fate Reforged will be different; Fate Reforged is the fulcrum of a bold new style of block design—the hottie at the heart of the torrid Khans of Tarkir/Dragons of Tarkir love triangle.
While we can't fully understand what Fate Reforged is trying to achieve until Dragons of Tarkir is revealed, WotC will probably consider it a massive failure if we all decide to hold off untill March to pick up our booster boxes. Fate Reforged may have some mysterious secret agenda, but it has to impress us now. On a design level, at least, it's done a pretty solid job of it.
MECHANICS REFORGED
Manifest - After the high complexity level of Khans, I didn't anticipate much depth from the new mechanics of Fate Reforged, so I was stunned to see a new major mechanic at a morph-like level of complexity. Mark Rosewater's reasoning for adding Manifest to the mix is an interesting one—that since it piggybacks on the complexity of Morph, which is already in the environment, it will be much easier for players to grasp than if they'd printed it elsewhere. If Manifest proves sufficiently grokable to new players, it should go a long way towards dispelling fears that the game has less room for deep gameplay under New World Order.
Regardless of its complexity level, Manifest is a great mechanic. Cards like Cloudform and Ethereal Ambush work well at face value, providing reasonably efficient creatures with a random chance of a big upside. But Manifest also combines with other mechanics like self-bounce, library manipulation and the when-revealed triggers of Khans morph cards to reward clever play in unique ways.
Manifest does have some logistical issues, forcing players to keep morphs and manifested cards separate, and applying significantly different floor rules to each. But Miracle and Transform have proven that players are willing to endure some annoyances for a fun mechanic, and I'm confident Manifest will be regarded similarly.
Dash - While we've seen this mechanic before, it's a great choice for a keyword mechanic. It's obviously powerful, but it's strong in a self-limiting way, like Delve is, where the more Dash cards you put in a deck, the weaker they become. So WotC can continue to print powerful cards with Dash and it will provide players more choices, instead of combining to form a broken Dash deck. I'll be excited to see this one return.
Bolster - Hey, this is... fine. The cards seem fairly powerful, and I like that it doesn't target so you can't get 2-for-1'ed by removal. But this is a simple nuts-and-bolts mechanic that uses few complexity points and doesn't offer much excitement. I can't say I'll be thrilled to see it return, but I'm not upset about it either.
CREATIVE REFORGED
Telling a coherent story through randomized sets of playing cards is clearly a challenge, and it's the one aspect of Magic design that has remained in an awkward experimental phase for almost the entirety of the game's existence. Before Khans, it seemed like the medium would only ever be able to render simple, three-part stories like Theros and Scars block (Ominous presence arrives > CONFLICT > Outcome) without having to produce a bunch of supplemental content that no one wanted to read. Khans block's interesting triptych (Introduce world > Show a change at a pivotal point in history > Show changed world) suggests the three-set model had more storytelling potential than I'd previously believed.
But while I love the overall structure of this block, I'm disappointed with the way Fate Reforged part of the story has been told. Yes, there are dragons in the past and dragon bones in the present, but has NOTHING ELSE changed in 1280 years? So despite being at constant war, all five factions have survived unchanged the entire time, outliving every faction in the whole of human history? Okay. I'd at least expect to see the heroes of Fate Reforged using more primitive weapons and armor, but I don't see any signs of technological differences either. Fate Reforged's vision of the past feels as lame as a sci-fi movie set in the year 3295 in which everyone is wearing contemporary fashions, living in present-day cities, fighting with modern handguns, driving gas-powered Toyota Corollas, etc., with the only difference being that humanity has refocused its efforts on battling giant mutant capybaras. (PM me if you want to see my spec script.)
The mechanics that are supposed to play into the block's alternate timelines theme have mostly just left me confused. What are the Siege-cycle cards supposed to be depicting? The difference between a world of Khans and a world of Dragons? But why are all the Khans modes providing positive effects while the Dragon modes hurt your opponent? Wasn't Khans such a bleak world of pointless war that Sarkhan had to go back in time to change it? There are a few clever nods to the block's structure, like Renowned Weaponsmith's second ability, but all in all, the "time travel" theme feels so subtle that I doubt I'd have noticed it if the set's marketing hadn't repeatedly hammered it home.
CARD DESIGN TRENDS, REFORGED
Commons - Fate Reforged has the most interesting commons I've seen in a long time, thanks to the set's mechanical depth. Manifest, Dash, and even Bolster all have the power to make staple effects interesting, and even the non-keyworded cards seem to be doing more work than usual. The new mechanics, combined with the returning mechanics, have done a good job of adding new dimensions to almost every basic card effect—bounce has new utility with manifest, delve obviously loves self-discarding and mill, prowess loves simple cantrips like Pressure Point, and Ferocious effectively adds an ability to vanilla creatures like Gore Swine. I love that clan design is supported by cards like Battle Brawler and the enemy-color gold cards in a subtle, forward-compatible way. And I also love that the set doesn't waste a lot of common slots on sideboard fodder, combining things like Naturalize and Plummet into a single, maindeckable card. This is something I wish Khans had done more of, since the need to expend high draft picks on lands left players more desperate for playables than usual.
Dragons - I suppose the developers of this set didn't want to step on the toes of Dragons of Tarkir, but the much ballyhooed return of dragons is pretty disappointing. They'll be plenty bomby in limited, of course, and that should have a larger impact on draft than you typically see from a small set. But I don't hear many people clamoring to open dragons for their constructed decks, which seems like a surprising failure for one of the set's major themes.
Khans - I love the return of hybrid here, and making a cycle of cheap khans with pricy but interesting activated abilities was a great way to draw a contrast to the beefier, simpler dragons in the environment. On a card-by-card basis, these seem a lot more interesting to me than the more straightforward khans of the previous set.
Constructed Implications - Standard is in a pretty diverse place right now, and while it's hard to predict the effect of new sets, Fate Reforged seems well positioned to bolster fringe strategies without pushing any already strong decks over the top. Every clan gets a few treats, but Temur, thankfully, seems to get the most, with Frost Walker, Flamewake Phoenix, and Wild Slash potentially raising it out of the clan gutter. The already diverse Jeskai, Abzan and Mardu decks can now go in an even wider variety of directions. Control—which is somehow already surviving despite a seemingly terrible card pool—gets a better sweeper with Crux of Fate, a few spells worth testing, and some potential finishers. Mardu Woe-Reaper is a well-positioned hate card against the one strategy that didn't have a lot of effective answers. And an out-of-nowhere enchantment sub-theme could give a shot in the arm to some Theros-centric strategies, as could a few powerful cards with mana-intensive casting costs.
Fate Reforged seem to have fewer cards than usual that scream RAW POWER, but more cards than usual that just might be playable in the right meta. Again, I'm no pro and I have little confidence in my ability to predict what will happen in Standard, but sets that are full of maybe-playables seem to lead to better Standard (and Limited) environments than sets that have a clearer separation between power and filler.
Mythic Shenanigans - Fate Reforged seems to have a pretty typical power balance for mythics—one mad-money chase card (Monastery Mentor), some solid playables (Soulfire Grand Master, Warden of the First Tree) potential constructed role-players (Ugin, Brutal Hordechief), and a bunch of EDH cards. But I really don't like how the non-legend hybrid cycle is at mythic while both legend cycles are at rare. While the two hybrid cycles seem to be at pretty similar power levels, the legends will mostly be 2-ofs in the decks that want them while the non-legends will mostly be 4-ofs. Maro may claim they get more complaints about mythics being too weak than they do about them being too strong, but no one is happy when a set turns into a chase-mythic lottery. And it's pretty likely that Fate Reforged is going to be one of those sets where a few high-value mythics shove all but a few rares into the dollar bin. Having legends at mythic and non-legends at rare would have helped to even out the value curve.
CONCLUSION, uh, REFORGED!
Khans of Tarkir is a set that impressed me on a variety of levels—fresh themes, interesting limited play, a well-balanced Standard environment, and some of Magic's best-ever creative work. I was a little worried that the weird nature of this block would leave Fate Reforged to abandon much of what had made its predecessor great. Fortunately, that's not the case. Mechanically, Fate Reforged builds off of Khans in clever and surprisingly complicated ways. The creative work behind Fate Reforged has left me much less impressed, delivering a time-travel story with few perceptible signs of time travel.
Of course, it's hard to write definitively about Fate Reforged when half of its tricks haven't been performed yet. New dimensions of the set will be revealed when it dumps Khans of Tarkir for its new dance partner in March, perhaps casting its tepid time travel theme, its underwhelming dragon revival, and not-very-resonant choice mechanics in a new light. But even if some of its strengths aren't immediately apparent, I'd call it a qualified success even in the short term. And if it can prove as nimble a counterpart to DTK as it has with KTK, Fate Reforged will earn a prime spot in Magic history—perhaps not as its most powerful small set, but certainly as its hardest-working one.
*Worldwake's new mechanic: Multikicker. Dark Ascension's new mechanics: Undying, Fateful Hour.
Interesting... This quadruples the damage, right? So one swing with a Polukranos would be lethal for the attacker?
That's sort of a thing.
Agreed, except for the weird flavor where it's beating for 2 an egg as an unhatched egg.
I think this is a pretty solid card, like a mini flying Thragtusk without the life gain. 4/1 that turns into a 2/2 post death isn't quite good enough but the morph ability, even if it's only used every other game or so, might push it over the top.