General Companions, Yay or nay?

[XRS]

Where do people stand on the companions? Have you tried them out in your cubes?

Stern Dismissals
I can start by sharing my thoughts on the mechanic: Not all companions are created equal. To put Lutri in your cube is uninspired for the same reasons it got banned in commander from the get go; it's just an auto-include in all decks that can cast it. Jegantha's requirement also seems trivially easy to fulfill and promotes 3-5 color "piles". Kaheera is inelegant in several ways. Mechanically one could make a cube where Kaheera is good when built around, but that is a lot of different creature types to keep track of during the (face-down) draft. Sure, Kaheera looks like a feline beast (with the creature types to boot), but I see no distinct dinosaur features. And where do nightmares and elementals fit in this (chimeric) picture? Secondly - white's creature suite relies heavily on humans, making the card essentially an honorary green card in most cubes. Third: the card is clearly meant to be a lord for creatures of aforementioned types. But in a control deck with no creatures the requirement is also met. This seems to run contrary to the design.
Umori seems narrow for cube unless it has a high density of creatures with spell-like effects. Nekrataal being the go-to example. I may be wrong about this though. The effect is powerful but it does not push in any direction synergistically other than "draft creatures, dump your hand/ramp".
Keruga has very lopsided matchups. If you can take turns 1 and 2 off and cast hay-makers from then on out you have an exellent way to replenish your hand and win the game. If you get run over because you did nothing on the first two turns your Keruga will do next to nothing. Personally I am not very interested in this card outside of the fact that is a dinosaur hippo(!)
Zirda interests me. My issue with the card (pardon me for not being a level 2 judge), is that it is not obvious what constitutes and activated ability. Intuitively I think of abilites the card has while it is on the battlefield and the ability can be activated. Examples: Merfolk Looter Sharktocrab and so on. Cycling, I learned, is also an activated ability. Flashback and Jump-start are not (they are alternate costs for casting the spell). Embalm, on the other hand IS an activated ability though it on its face seems similar to Flashback. The same is true for Unearth. The heuristic is: is there a cost and an effect separated by a colon (tap ~ : gain 2 life, Discard ~ Blast from the past: draw a card). I fear inexperienced drafters will shy away from the complexity or misdraft based on misunderstanding about magic's intricate mechanics. If the hurdle of magic rules understanding can be overcome I am open to try Zirda

This leaves


Yorion slots nicely in to blue-white's identity of blinking and reinforces the archtype - the requirement might prove too easy to accomplish with cube having more playables than retail draft. Obosh and Gyruda drastically alters decisions in-draft as does Lurrus. People have compared it to having to do a stipulation draft - a favorite excercise of streamers - but with a tangible reward.

I wonder though if R&D at WOTC follow what's going on in their competitor Hearthstone.

All of these have been controversial. Reno is very powerful, but as with the guy (not to mention names ) who picks Dream Trawler and warps their deck around it will tell you - you win the games you draw it and you are not favoured when you don't. Baku and Genn's design tried to remedy the problem with the luck of the draw, by having their effect occur at the start of every game. (Obosh and Gyruda have the exact same requirements). They introduced their own problems with all games playing out nearly the same way with players using their hero power every turn. They were eventually banned from standard after prolonged popular outcry. I see history repeating itself in magic for the companions.

Conclusion/TLDR:
Some companions can be dismissed outright. Zirda might have some interesting applications depending on the playgroup. The rest I think require testing and might introduce interesting novelty to drafting. I do fear that the mechanic inherently makes for repetitive gameplay. The effects of the mechanic are already apparent in constructed formats. I am however interested on the community's take on its implications for cube.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

I do not think these companions are good options for cube designers. The fact is, many of these cards are trivially easy to build around in cube. It's not hard to meet any of their restrictions, especially if you as a designer are thinking about making them work. Even Kaheera, The Orphanguard is usable as a free 8th card for W/Ux control decks if a couple of well-placed playable Nightmare Finishers are introduced to the cube. It isn't particularly hard to make sure every drafter has access to a companion if they so choose to take the angle of making them work.

Despite this, not all companions are created equal. Even though it's possible to design an environment where Kaheera, The Orphanguard is useable as a companion, she's still never as good as her comrades. For example, Lurrus of the Dream-Den basically allows every aggro deck playing either white or black to have access to a card advantage engine. There's a reason why Boros Burn in modern is companioning Lurrus- his opportunity cost is low and his benefits are huge! Meanwhile, Gyruda, Doom of Depths has spawned an entire archetype in many formats involving playing even-costed clone effects to create a chain of Krakens. Kaheera could never do the amount of work Lurrus or Gyruda output. The thing is, you still play Kaheera if you can. Companions all represent a "free" 8th card. Sure, you may have to sacrifice some cards you'd want in your deck to get that sweet-sweet extra creature, but the reward is usually worth the cost. A player's win rates plummet when they're forced to mulligan, because losing cards is a substantial resource loss. A player with a companion is effectively making their opponent play with the disadvantage of a mulligan even if they keep their 7. Likewise, mulliganing becomes easier with a companion because the disadvantage of losing the 7th card is mitigated- a player with a companion still starts a mulligan game with 7 cards, one of which is a "fine" creature. This is why decks like Humans in modern may sacrifice a card or two to shoehorn in a companion with a loose restriction like Jegantha, the Wellspring. Even though Jegantha is a pretty bad card, one is still perfectly happy to play it if it's a free roll every game.

Now, this leads to the biggest issue with companions- some of them are just astronomically better than others to companion. Lurrus and Gyruda are actively worth trying to make work as companions for their game-breaking abilities. After all, a Gyruda, Doom of Depths combo deck is possible in cube, wether it be by Blinking or Cloning. These cards can either immediately win the game or provide long-term value for little cost to the deckbuilder. Meanwhile, the only reason to ever jump through hoops to make Kaheera, The Orphanguard work is because having the free 8th card is good in that deck. She's not worth trying to play for her abilities. In a vacuum, this isn't an issue- you just don't play the bad companions! The problem is, cutting the bad companions creates a color-imbalance. None of the green companions make the cut. Umori, the Collector is not very good in a format where removal is extremely efficient (as is the case with most cubes), Jegantha, the Wellspring forces ramp players to cut many of their best cards for a mediocre payoff, and Kaheera the Orphanguard is bad in the majority of green decks for being too hard to enable, while only being marginally playable in some white control decks. Meanwhile, all of the blue companions are great! Lutri, the Spellchaser is a free-roll in most cubes, Yorion, Sky Nomad is a powerful enabler for a popular archetype, and Gyruda, Doom of Depths is a great combo build-around card. Even the blue-green companion and weakest of the blue bunch, Keruga, the Macrosage, is still a great card in the 40-card mainboard, even if it's companion restriction is usually not worth making work. That's really the problem. Playing the 5 best companions basically involves playing the 4 blue cards and Lurrus. The others are either too low impact or bad to be worth a precious multicolor design slot, despite the advantage of having an 8th card provides. The decks that can build around and effectively utilize their broken companions will be astronomically better than the decks that don't have a companion or sacrifice playing good cards to play a mediocre 8th starting card.


This whole post is a bit scatterbrained (it's finals week and I'm tired), so I'll just sum up my points in a little TL;DR here:
-Companions all represent a "free" 8th card, a huge advantage in a game of Magic.
-Some companions are just mediocre filler creatures, while others are potentially game winning bombs.
-The power balance of the companions is not equally distributed amongst the colors, with the Blue companions outpacing the rest of the bunch.


In conclusion, don't play the companions without power-level errata. They are not perfectly balanced, as all things for our cubes should be.* If you feel the urge to play companions in your cube, then it is best to make a house rule that the cards can't be played as companions. Play Gyruda, Doom of Depths and Keruga, the Macrosage and Lurrus of the Dream-Den to your heart's content- they're fun cards! Just don't allow the part of their rules text that causes them to be free 8th-cards break your environment. They're still fun build-arounds either way.


Thanks for reading,
-TGT

*I was making a Thanos reference. Some people may not care about perfect balance, but everyone is trying to balance their cube so it is fun to play.

 

[Brad]

Hell no.

 

[shamizy]

I think they're a design abomination, the latest failure in this era of FIRE design and development.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

After being initially hopeful that surely Wizards had tested these and they couldn't possibly be as format-warping as they seemed to be at first sight, I've completely turned around and I'm not planning to include the companions. Train explains it very well, so I haven't much to add, but the companions have had extraordinary impact on all constructed formats for a set that hasn't even been out on the (real) streets yet. Multiple companions have been making t8's in every relevant constructed format since the set was released online, and we're not talking about one or two decks, were talking about over half of the t8 decks running a companion. Under normal circumstances, if a powerful new card releases, it will affect maybe a couple of decks, and that card most likely won't affect multiple formats. I won't say it's unprecedented, but a mechanic being adopted so widely, so fast, is a strong indication that companions are in fact way more powerful than some give them credit for. Are they cool designs that tickle your imagination and guide you're draft down an interesting path? Yes they are. That bonus comes with a giant caveat of potentially breaking the power band of your cube wide open... regardless of whether you run actual power or not.

Come to think of it, I have one more thing to add to the discussion. See, a lot of players I have seen talking about companions are undervaluing the fact that you get an extra card, or that it is balanced out by having to alter your deck, and often they're looking at the companions as cards themselves. They are, however, not cards in your deck! There are actually already some existing Magic cards we can compare them to, that might give a much better understanding of just unbelievably good the companions are...



They are, of course, the conspiracies. Conspiracies are nuts! (Aside: This statement applies to both real world conspiracies and the Magic card type.) The three I mentioned here are so incredibly powerful (remember, Power Play applies to every game, not just the first each match), that a case could be made for each of them that you should take them over actual power. In an unpowered cube, only Sol Ring is a close call. However, even something as innocuous as...



is actually super powerful, because of the simple fact that it's completely free to play. People routinely undervalue Sentinel Dispatch, and I see the same thing happening with companions. The restrictions for companions may be a lot harsher than for conspiracies, but compared to Sentinel Dispatch you also get a far more powerful effect than a simple 1/1 defender.

In short, don't underestimate how powerful companions are. Constructed results since their release, as well as Conspiracies (the card type) should make us realize just how bonkers having a free extra card is in practice.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Companions tend to lead to really repetitive and kind of oppressive games, because not only will villain always have an important card that's part of their game plan (.e.g. ramp and Girguamesh as companion) but you will have to stare down the bloody card the entire game leading up to them casting it. I'd much rather sit and hope they don't draw their bomb rather than having it front and center every single game.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Yeah, variance is an inherent part of Magic, and especially Cube, because of its mostly singleton nature. Companions go against that hard.

 

[Erik Twice]

One problem with the current pool of companions, is that not only they are "free cards" is that they have very good effects that can be used immediately to get even more cards.

Lurrus is a good example. The worst case scenario is that you play it, you get a Spellbomb or urza's Bauble and it dies. You are one card up and your opponent is one card down.+2 Card Advantage or more every game is a ridiculous advantage. I'm playing Standad on Magic Arena and Yorion is often +3 or +4 card advantage on top of being a 4/5 flyer. And while Obosh doesn't get you more cards, it often wins the game on the spot as if it were Furnace of Rath.

Even in limited, the deckbuilding restrictions are very small and you should not have a problem meeting them. They are also very broad, you can slot them in a typical deck at very little cost. Not a fan.

 

[Velrun]

Yay

The beauty of cube design is that they are all unique. What might be a horrible add in most cubes might be a perfect addition for another cube. These a perfect for my cube because of the way my players draft their cards and because of the ban-system.

For a normal cube I agree with everyone above. I would probably not run these or maybe only run very, very few. Maybe only Zirda or Yorion.

 

[XRS]

Spitballing other ideas to make the companions more fair. - might elaborate later.
Most of your qualms with the companions is the inherent card advantage of the "8th card in your hand". What if it just starte in your hand like the quest mechanic from Hearthstone (https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Quest_(ability) )
How about a companion draft akin to the utility land draft? This would even the playing field. As the current companions with blue in their casting cost are arguably the stronest this solution requires that WOTC make more companions (which I don't foresee) or the community come up with custom made ones.
The third and maybe most feasible option is to include them and disregard the companion mechanic (as TGT suggests) - though this might cause some confusion mid-draft if not explicitly adressed at the outset.

Hell no.

Thank you for your thoughtful answers. I really want Yorion for its effect because most blink effects in historic merely target creatures or artifact or require other triggers. Given that my cube (for the time being) is meant to be played on MTGA which enforces its own rules it is hard to convey the "don't draft around the companion mechanic" house-rule.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Zirda makes me wish these were actually gold cards instead of hybrids, as WR could use the card advantage!

 

[sigh]

I would use some of them if I sharpied off the companion text. They are still very good inclusions to the main 40 of a deck just with their normal ability text!

 

[Karn Cuberated]

Are cards like Seal of Fire or Executioner's Capsule woth running alongside Lurrus if you consider his Companion clause to be flavor text? Trinket Mage is gone, and I wonder, could anything else make me leave Capsule in the list. Perhaps, I wouldn't cube them at my power level if there wasn't any synergy with 'em.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I still run Executioner's Capsule. In my list it synergizes mainly (there are other, more minor interactions) with...

 

[Karn Cuberated]

Well, my list has less cards that care about artifacts.

And, as you see, they depened less on which exactly artifacts you play and more on the amount of those. What I mean is, for instance, your Muldrotha, Emry and Sharuum return Executioner's Capsule from the dump so that you could kill one more creature, whereas my Urza looks at Capsule just as at one of the many artifacts that enforce the Construct he creates.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Yeah, I didn't really count the cards that require the Capsule to stay on the battlefield. I run cards like Master of Etherium and Tezzeret the Schemer, but filed those under 'minor interactions'

 

[Nanonox]

I plan on playing the companions without the companion text. The cards themselves are good, but what I like the most are the hybrid mana costs.

They allow you do diversify your decks by a great amount and keep the cube fresh.

I tried to draft some decks with the companions as companions and I didn't like the results. Here are a few examples:

Yorion:

RW: https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/5eb4be0279943334c9ae64fd
BW: https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/5eb4ce1590ddd767f3122edf

Basically play every card that you draft, regardless of whether or not the cards fit the strategy or not. Boring!

Failed Keruga:

https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/5eb4b9d890ddd767f310ba4b

I saw Keruga pack 2 and tried to accommodate it, but fell short on playables. The card is still good in the deck, but because I tried to prioritize > 3 CMC cards, my curve is a wreck.

Lurrus:

WR: https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/5ea10e0b12bf071086f0531d

This one I actually like just because it doesn't look like a typical multiplayer deck. However, for 1 vs 1 cubes this seems way too powerful.

Gyruda:

RG: https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/5ea99d41730881583949a05f

Perfect example of why companions are too strong imo. I'm playing a RG deck that can splash the Gyruda and cast it whenever I get the right fixing. The cost is not playing Goblin Welder. The curve still looks good!

So I think they add good synergy and deckbuilding to the cube (hybrid mana, powerful build around abilities) IF played without the companion text.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

I think they're a design abomination, the latest failure in this era of FIRE design and development.

I think you're way overreacting. F.I.R.E philosophy is not the problem here. Rather, it's the same problem WOTC has always had: poor playtesting results.

For those of you who don't know, F.I.R.E philosophy is an acronym standing for "Fun, Inviting, Replayable, Exciting." They adopted this philosophy after the atrocious 3-year powering-down of magic that occurred between Battle for Zendikar and Core Set 2019. One of the primary shifts of F.I.R.E. was to just make commons more exciting. In fact, in the M20 design article discussing good F.I.R.E. designs, these were the two examples of "exciting commons:"

​

So, a card that was a common in M13 and a cantripping Wind Drake variant were their "Fun and Exciting" cards. These cards are both obviously good, but their not game breaking or "design abominations." They're just playables. That's it. This is not surprising, either. WOTC's goal was to return to a power level for standard somewhere between that of Return to Ravnica and Theros standard. They did not set out to create something full of broken cards- they wanted to go back to the era of Grey Merchant of Asphodel and Elspeth, Sun's Champion.

So what's the problem, then? Well, the answer is quite simple: development issues. Look at the three biggest mistakes of the F.I.R.E. era: Teferi, Time Raveler, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and the Companions, specifically Lurrus of the Dream-Den. Of these three, only Teferi, Time Raveler is an actual design failure. Teferi is a bad design because he's a powerful control card that sort of punishes midrange decks but really punishes other control decks, to the point where some control matches are solved by "who gets to Teferi first." The problem is, there is no way to fix Teferi without completely re-vamping the card. That, in my evaluation, is a design failure.

Oko, Thief of Crowns, and the Companions are different. It's safe to say that Oko has one of the weirdest ability suites of any Planeswalker. However, all three abilities are cool and fun to play with. The reason the card is busted, therefore, is not one of design, but of development. think early Oko testing in play design showed that the card might not have been all that powerful. I mean, his final ability costs a huge amount of loyalty to only let you steal a small creature, his "removal" ability leaves behind a 3/3, and making a food token is not amazing by itself. The +2, +1, -5 cost structure was probably specifically designed to make sure that Oko could see competitive play. Sure, with 2020 hindsight he should have had a different loyalty structure. But had his costs been +1, -1, -5, or +1, 0, -5, he may have been stone cold unplayable in constructed. Do you see the issue here? Had Oko been costed more conservatively, he could have been the next Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded.

The same is true with the companions. These cards are cool, and fun to play with. The only issue is that they provide a free 8th starting card. If they didn't have the companion mechanic, they probably wouldn't even be seeing play. If companion just added them to a player's starting hand as their 7h card, it wouldn't be as big of an issue, either. The problem is that the play design team didn't realize how lax these seemingly hard restrictions were to overcome.

This brings me to the most important part of this whole post: play design has not been playing with high-power for very long. The current play design team was only founded because the previous "development" team had dropped the ball so hard on the BFZ-AKH era of magic. Play Design is a direct response to the low-powered development failures of the Mid to Late 2010s. They're still kind of learning what they're doing in terms of balancing high-powered sets. At the end of the day, every set released since Dominaria has been either good or great. The handful of development mistakes that have occurred are definitely not good for the game, but they're not as bad as another string of poor-quality sets would be. The quality of Limited in this era has increased 10-fold, and there are all sorts of great new cards for us Cube designers to use in our environments.

Stop complaining about a few play design problems. They're not abominations, they're just sound dials that have been turned up too loud. Play design is still figuring out what the heck they're doing with their current design goals, and if we keep acting like the world is ending every time they make a mistake, they'll just go right back to making more terrible sets like Battle for Zendikar and the Kaladesh block. For WOTC to make us a delicious Omelette, they're going to have to break a few eggs. I'd rather eat an Omelette than Canned Spam.

 

[shamizy]

It doesn't matter whether the problem arose in design or development; it's all encompassed within whatever their current system is in R&D. I don't know enough about specifics of how things are worked on day to day or passed between various departments, but I do know that their current workflow's ending QA is fucked. To my understanding, that's based on this new FIRE philosophy that has led to R&D giving the okay on designs that would not have been as easily approved in the past beginning from Guilds of Ravnica. Since then, there have been way too many individual cards that have slipped through the cracks in the last year. This ranges from Standard warpers like Hydroid Krasis and Nissa, Who Shakes the World to format busters like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis in Modern to Oko, Thief of Crowns everywhere.

I don't care who specifically is to blame between design and development, I just know that somewhere in the process they've lost sight of how to properly balance individually powerful cards prior to release. This may come from design sending down a stupidly powerful first draft that isn't toned down enough or development tweaking on the fifth iteration of card X, but that's irrelevant when the end product is a problem. It doesn't matter who fucked up in the pipeline, just that it wasn't caught before making an impact on the consumer end. One or two slip-ups over a period is one thing, doing this just about every set is inexcusable.

The health of the game as a whole is more important than individual jolts of fun for a player. Also, fuck that whole mentality of trying to maximize the "fun" of the player actively using certain cards. You know what's equally unfun? Being on the opposite end and realizing that you can't meaningfully interact with anything. Nowadays you need to go over the top or outdo your opponents turn with your own max-value play instead of interacting. Yeah, I guess that Hydroid Krasis with X=5 can happen, even if I counter it you just get to stabilize with a new grip full of cards. Oh wait, I couldn't do that anyway because you've got Teferi, Time Raveler out there? Nevermind, my mistake. T1 Goose into T2 Oko? Guess I can't really match that start with anything in my hand. Everything played on curve will also be invalidated. Oh man how do I even deal with Field of Dead when there are so few ways to meaningfully interact with lands? You can't cannibalize the gameplay experience trying to maximize a vague definition of "fun".

You're looking through things with rose-colored glasses if you think that every set since Dominaria has been good or great for the game. Good limited formats? Sure, but that should be the easiest thing to balance with complete control over a card pool. Other constructed formats though? I don't know how you can make that assertion with a straight face. These aren't just a few mistakes that lead to a bad Standard for a few months before the next set release, they've straight up broken long-standing formats in the last year. I've never seen so much volatility in Modern, which was my format of choice for years. It went from Hogaak to Urza variants to Oko decks to the current Companion or bust meta. We've had individual cards warp the meta with every new set. That's unheard of.

I think you're completely wrong thinking that a handful of development mistakes aren't as bad as a handful of poor quality sets. If anything, it's worse. A bad set like Journey into Nyx or any Ixalan set will deprecate interest in a given Limited or period of Standard but things can be corrected with the next release a few months down the line. If you make a card that warps a format? That can outright kill interest in that format if there is nothing that can compete at the same level until it rotates or is banned. If you do that every set with a new chase staple, you're going to lose a LOT of people as far as competitive play is concerned. I've seen this firsthand with Standard and Modern scenes dying in the LGS's around where I live. There are real consequences to fucking up as badly as they have. That can't just be brushed under a rug. There needs to be corrective action because it's obvious that there are certain people who are not very good at their current positions within R&D.

I'm absolutely going to complain about this when I'm a consumer that is not happy with where a product is going and it seems like course correction won't happen for another year or two at best. I'm not going to get giddy over a handful of designs for my cube that I get to play a handful of times a year when the tradeoff is that every other constructed format gets fucked by an arms race. Their process is broken as currently constructed.

I'd much rather have that stretch of lower-powered Standard than what we have right now if it meant all other formats are not being held hostage waiting for the next big thing to capsize stability.

 

[Dom Harvey]

Teferi would be fine if the static was something like "Opponents can only play spells during their own turns", which preserves most of the functionality but still lets them use now otherwise dead counters to force through cards on their turn and doesn't randomly hose stuff like Finale of Promise/Bloodbraid Elf

 

[TrainmasterGT]

It doesn't matter whether the problem arose in design or development.

It absolutely matters where the problem lies. Design's job isn't to make something balanced, they're job is to make something fun. They're the ideas people. They come up with cool cards and hand them off to other people to make them presentable. The development team's job is to make sure that what ends up making it to print isn't breaking every format. That's where the failures are occurring.

Think of it like a book publishing company. The design team are the people actually writing the books. They come up with ideas, jot them down, do a couple of versions, and make something that they think is good. Then, they pass an unpolished version over to the Development team: the editors. The editor's job is to make sure that the book is using proper grammar, is easy to read, marketable, etc. It's perfectly possible that the writer creates something good, but then the editor drops the ball on making the thing presentable. That's what happened with the companion mechanic, I think. Design made something cool, but development didn't do their job and make sure it was something they could reasonably print. The issue here isn't that design invented it, the problem is that development let it through.




I was going to respond to more of your points, but honestly I don't see a reason for that. That whole post of yours reads like a bitter angry rant without much substance. I get you're upset but I think your anger at WOTC is clouding your judgement. The problem here isn't that no one in R&D knows how to do their job, it's just that the development team isn't being aggressive enough in toning-down the power level of some of the more outlandish designs crossing their desks. The last two years worth of sets have been good, it's just a couple things were not nerfed as much as they should have been before being printed.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

they'll just go right back to making more terrible sets like [...] the Kaladesh block.

You take that back, good sir! Kaladesh block was flipping fantastic! It has super interesting and innovative mechanics, the limited format was pure gas, the flavor was fantastic and unique, and it had loads of goodies for cube! The only things wrong with it were that they failed to discover the copy-cat interaction and that they tuned up energy a bit too high for constructed purposes. If anything, these are just as much development issues that should not lead to criticism for the sets as a whole. Of course I might be a bit biased, because Kaladesh was the impetus for my cube's redesign, but I honestly think it's one of the best blocks WotC ever designed.

That said, I do feel companions are the biggest mistake since, I don't know, artifact lands? These are not just a development problem, they are a design problem as well. Multiple other cards games have tried mechanics like this. Hearthstone has Reno Jackson, Baku, and Genn, among others. Eternal has the Market. In almost every case, these mechanics/cards have had an absolutely warping effect on the meta. This should have been a cautionary sign that cards that companions should be dealt with carefully. Somehow though, they wound up only setting a deck construction restraint on each of these cards, without taking into account the fact that it's an extra card. Now, +1 card has been one of the most iconic effects in Magic, in fact, cantrips are quite common! The cost of adding this text to an existing card sits somewhere between one and two mana, depending on how useful/narrow the base card already is. Compare Remove Soul to Exlude, Unsummon to Repulse, or Dark Banishing to Annihilate. Cantrips are good, really good, and almost always worth a second look in limited, even if the effect seems a bit underwhelming. So, at the very least, we should be looking at a 1-2 mana increase for companions, compared to a version where you wouldn't be able to cast these from your sideboard. However, I'ld argue that companions are actually way better than just a cantrip, since you a) are guaranteed to draw the extra card, right at the start of the game, b) know exactly what you are getting, and c) most of the companions, while restricting your options, also offer significant build-around potential. As we've learned (and this is a lesson WotC could have learned from other games), the restrictions these companions impose on a player are actually not all that impactful. Sure you have to cut a card or two, but that guaranteed extra card far outweighs the downside of having to choose slightly suboptimal tools. If we look at how the companions are costed though, we see that they didn't even get an uptick of 1 mana. In addition to this lack of increased casting cost, they made them hybrid, instead of gold, raising the percentage of possible color combinations that each companion can be played in from 16% to 72%! (* see footnote.) This makes it that much more likely that a given companion will be able to find a good home and players actually get to abuse these incredibly pushed cards.

All in all, I think in hindsight it's pretty clear that the companions are pushed to an altogether unreasonable level. Thanks to the flexible casting cost, it's almost entirely impossible to not find a shell that best accommodates any given companion, and all of these companions are pushed to a level that is well above what would normally be considered appropriate for cantrips, let alone self-tutoring engine pieces. Wizards took a really big risk by letting these out in the wild. Though Lurrus, mainly, makes some of the "tamer" companions look bad, make no mistake. Every single one of these companions is super powerful. What we're seeing now is the upper tier companions sweep top 8's across formats, but once Lurrus gets banned, and then, I don't know, Keruga and Yorion, other companions will rise to become the new top tier, and those companions too will show that starting every game up one card is worth warping your deck around. Really, the only archetypes that can hope to escape being cannibalized by companions (either by running a companion themselves, or by falling by the wayside and fading into obscurity) are combo decks that can ignore the extra card by just... well, comboing out and killing you.

* Consider that a format usually supports decks of 1, 2, or 3 different colors, and that there's 5 possible mono-color decks, 10 possible two-color decks, and 10 possible three-color decks. A card costing can be played in 11 of those 25 decks, a card costing can be played in only 4 of those 25 decks, but a card costing can be played in a whopping 18 of the 25 possible decks!

*****

Now, let's go off on a completely unrelated tangent. F.I.R.E. That's right, I just said it, completely unrelated. Now, this is a bit of a hyperbole, since companion was undoubtedly doctored up as a "fun" mechanic, based on the fact that multiple formats that impose restrictions on deckbuilding, Commander chief among them, have proven very popular for various stretches of time. However, by far the most important aspect of the F.I.R.E. design philosophy is lowering the gap in power between rares and lower rarities. Of course I would love it if they tested their shit a bit better too, some of the mistakes of the past years have been glaringly obvious just by glancing sideways at the card in question, but F.I.R.E. is not at fault here, I believe, seeing as we have had problems with design and development mistakes escaping into Standard before War of the Spark (which was the first set fully embracing F.I.R.E.'s principles). Anyway, I applaud this direction of "raising the floor" (to quote a mothership article). Even though they were already raising the floor before F.I.R.E. was a thing in my opinion, I hope they continue to do so, so I can keep including sweet commons and uncommons in my cube.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

You take that back, good sir! Kaladesh block was flipping fantastic! It has super interesting and innovative mechanics, the limited format was pure gas, the flavor was fantastic and unique, and it had loads of goodies for cube! The only things wrong with it were that they failed to discover the copy-cat interaction and that they tuned up energy a bit too high for constructed purposes. If anything, these are just as much development issues that should not lead to criticism for the sets as a whole. Of course I might be a bit biased, because Kaladesh was the impetus for my cube's redesign, but I honestly think it's one of the best blocks WotC ever designed.

I probably shouldn't have used Kaladesh as an example. The set caused a -lot- of problems in standard, but those were all development issues and not design issues. I just remember Magic not being particularly fun to listen too or talk about during that period of time, largely because of the massive negative impact of Kaladesh on standard and the lack of impact of newer sets on eternal formats.

Now, let's go off on a completely unrelated tangent. F.I.R.E. That's right, I just said it, completely unrelated. Now, this is a bit of a hyperbole, since companion was undoubtedly doctored up as a "fun" mechanic, based on the fact that multiple formats that impose restrictions on deckbuilding, Commander chief among them, have proven very popular for various stretches of time. However, by far the most important aspect of the F.I.R.E. design philosophy is lowering the gap in power between rares and lower rarities. Of course I would love it if they tested their shit a bit better too, some of the mistakes of the past years have been glaringly obvious just by glancing sideways at the card in question, but F.I.R.E. is not at fault here, I believe, seeing as we have had problems with design and development mistakes escaping into Standard before War of the Spark (which was the first set fully embracing F.I.R.E.'s principles). Anyway, I applaud this direction of "raising the floor" (to quote a mothership article). Even though they were already raising the floor before F.I.R.E. was a thing in my opinion, I hope they continue to do so, so I can keep including sweet commons and uncommons in my cube.

Wow, Onderzeeboot once again communicating I was trying to say better and in fewer words . F.I.R.E. making cards of lower rarities less bad is not the reason why Oko and the Companions are off breaking things.

 

[shamizy]

It absolutely matters where the problem lies. Design's job isn't to make something balanced, they're job is to make something fun. They're the ideas people. They come up with cool cards and hand them off to other people to make them presentable. The development team's job is to make sure that what ends up making it to print isn't breaking every format. That's where the failures are occurring.

Sure, I'll give you that. Development needs to be fixed because their play design team has been terrible at identifying problem cards and at making the necessary adjustments. However, I'm not willing to give Design a free pass and move blame to the 2nd team since they're the ones that pushed Companion through in the first place. It's probably the most egregious fuck-up I've seen in this game since I've been playing.

I was going to respond to more of your points, but honestly I don't see a reason for that. That whole post of yours reads like a bitter angry rant without much substance. I get you're upset but I think your anger at WOTC is clouding your judgement. The problem here isn't that no one in R&D knows how to do their job, it's just that the development team isn't being aggressive enough in toning-down the power level of some of the more outlandish designs crossing their desks. The last two years worth of sets have been good, it's just a couple things were not nerfed as much as they should have been before being printed.

Oh great, you got the gist of it. Good to know.

I never said that no one is R&D knows how to do their job, just that their process is broken. Whether that be developmental testing or design's initial drafts I can't say because I'm not privy to R&D, but I'm not willing to just shift all blame to one part of the department. Sets as a whole being good isn't something to celebrate if it means that formats as a whole suffer due to oversight. As a cube designer I can just ignore cards that aren't good for my environment. But if I'm interested in any other formats? Those oversights do matter and they kill the gameplay experience.

 

[ravnic]

I'm just leaving some likes here and a short form of my opinion:

Companions are the worst mistake in the history of Magic, worse than Affinity and Dredge even. For my Cube, I'd consider them if they were just french vanillas with okay bodies. Like Lurrus without his recursion ability.