General Cross Mechanic Transparency

[FlowerSunRain]

Magic is designed by lots of different people over many years and is developed to suit a number of different formats. It might be the understatement of the year to say that because of this, many of the game elements don't work together very well. Recent comments on goblin tribal illustrate this nicely, but cards that refer to types in general have this issue.

In a rare moment of elegant design, Dungeons and Dragons (of all things) actually addressed this issue. In 3rd edition, they released an expansion that added psionics to the game, basically a new resource system for your characters powers, but realized that their were huge complications to having a totally new power system. None of the old monsters had any in-built defenses against this new system and likewise none of the old spells/items/class features interacted with it. Seeing that having a completely isolated mechanic was terrible design, they threw in a couple of pages to fix this that can be easily summed up with a sentence: anything that applies to psionics applies to magic and vice versa.

As applied to Magic, transparency can help integrate things that weren't designed to work together (but have no pressing interest NOT to work together).

Example: Myself and Mr. Stevenson are loving us some Ion Storm and its working well. I also want Fungus tribal to work, but Fungus don't make +1/+1 counters, so these elements are sort of isolated. I mean, Ion Storm only works on +1/+1 and CHARGE counters and Fungus make SPORE counters so we're boned right? Well, their is no GOOD reason why Ion Storm doesn't apply to spore counters other then they were designed for completely different formats. A transparency errata can quickly, elegantly and clearly resolve this issue without causing any undue harm to anything else in the cube.

Creature types area a huge are where transparency errata can help isolated tribal mechanics be expanded into non-poisonous ones.

Any thoughts?

 

[Tom]

Reminds me of the slightly awkward, but effective redirect-player-damage-to-planeswalker rule.

 

[James Stevenson]

FSR you're totally right, and has anyone told you have a beautiful name?

Anyway, it would be nice if there was an elegant way to fix this without feeling like we'd thrown a bunch of house rules and errata down. I know a lot of people like to have lots of house rules, but I really would rather play everything by normal current rules and play cards as written. (I can't because for one thing Pianna, Nomad Captain is a human and that's important.)

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Its an annoyance, for sure. I was thinking of taking these rules and printing them onto emblems that a player who has a card in their deck effected by the rule can place on the table to help remind both players when it doesn't fit directly on the card.

I can and do write directly on my cards when something needs to change.

 

[Laz]

I don't like dicking around with changing core rules. The closest we come is when some convoluted situation comes up and we just hand wave the rules to save the 5 minutes it would take to look up the rules and work out how they apply (Most recently this was the intersection of a Deathtouch-Trampler against a Protection blocker, for the curious, you still only have to assign 1 to the blocker).

Changing cards? Well that is something completely different. It is pretty simple to print a proxy with the errata'd text, and if it is something minor, then chances are that it isn't going to cause any confusion even amongst people who have played the cards for years. If you errata Gemstone mine to use charge counters, no one is going to be like 'You can't remove a counter from Gemstone Mine with Ion Storm, it creates mining counters, not charge counters!'.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Interesting topic. Reminiscent of Cooperfauss' Rebel errata.

I imagine the biggest barrier here is the emotional response to changing away from "official" cards. It opens up a lot of design space, and my arguments against it would have little to do with design principles and a lot to do with whether said changes actually make your players enjoy the game more, and how you affect the accessibility of the cubing experience.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

The Rebel errata is a great idea and one I've considered co-opting a version of . I think if you make these changes huge and intuitive it makes them easy to remember and emotionally satisfying, particularly when it lets people use cards that they like.

 

[Dom Harvey]

I would much rather create custom cards and treat them as such than perform plastic surgery on existing cards.

 

[Chris Taylor]

It might just be easier to erratta ion storm to say "counter" instead of "charge or +1/+1 counter"

Plus: Now incidental synergy with level up guys

 

[Jason Waddell]

It might just be easier to erratta ion storm to say "counter" instead of "charge or +1/+1 counter"

Plus: Now incidental synergy with level up guys

Ion Storm Dark Depths control.

But yeah, any counter seems fine as long as it's a controlled environment. Like, sure, in theory it's dumb with the whole Magic card pool (Wither says hello), but in a cube this errata shouldn't be so broken. As long as you don't make it broken.

 

[James Stevenson]

sweet with Makeshift Mannequin