'SMALL GAMES' AND LEGACY-LITE
0) Preface
Sam Black – one of Magic’s better theorists – says in a 2021/Kaldheim article that Elvish Visionary and Elderfang Disciple are a microcosm of an important game design choice – that players, decks, and even formats can “vote for big games” or “vote for small games”. Just like voting in the real world, these are only expressed preferences and statistical trends, not the actual will of the people made manifest. Two players with decks that they believe “vote for small games” in a “big game format” (like 3xROE) may struggle to see player skill translate into improved results. I’d like to look at this idea in the context of 3xROE limited, Constructed Legacy, return to Sam Black’s two articles, and then conclude with my own thoughts on “legacy-lite” Cube design. If you haven’t read
“Elvish Visionary vs. Elderfang Disciple: The Nature of Card Advantage”, please read it before continuing in this piece – I’ll refer to its ideas and assumptions a lot and expect that you’ve also read his essay.
1) Rise of the Battlecruiser Format
Simon Goertzen writes in
a 2013 format draft primer for MTGOAcademy (spurred by Flashback Drafts):
Thanks to the Eldrazi, an army of Level Up creatures, and the Invoker cycle, ROE is one of the most mana-hungry limited formats of all time. As is the case with most expert-level sets, this challenges traditional views on Magic‘s fundamental strategic concepts. Just looking at the above mechanics and cards allows us to formulate some questions and answers to keep in mind when drafting and playing ROE limited[...]With the exception of Rebound, ROE is not a format defined by card advantage.
Or, as Laconic Smart Verygoodplayer wrote about
Glory Seeker in his set review:
Limited: 1.0
A legitimate first-pick in Onslaught draft, a solid playable in Zendikar, and borderline unplayable in Rise. This set is awesome!
And even the Mothership’s article,
”Designing Rise”, adequately written by Brian Tinsman (a bore), has this hilarious (unintentional?) diss on Ken Nagle (a boor):
[The “battlecruiser Magic”] idea came into focus after a discussion with fellow designer Ken Nagle. He had been watching some YouTube games of world-class real-time strategy players and noticed that their games looked nothing like the games he played. High-level players optimize every movement, micromanage their resources, and know in less than 10 minutes who's going to win or lose. When Ken played the same game, he and his friends would turtle up, ignore each other, and start working on battlecruisers—the biggest, most awesome units in the game.
Tinsman goes on to discuss the design principles of ROE Limited in a piece I’m sure we’ve all read before. The gist is this: the format should “lock up the ground from t3-t7 or so”, until “A 6-power creature [can] get through”. And he describes countless people in Playtesting failing to understand this, much as LSV warns his audience not to first-pick Glory Seeker:
These players had built their decks using normal Magic deckbuilding models instead of building decks for a battlecruiser world[...]It wasn't easy for them to learn the solution either. Even after repeatedly seeing five-mana Auras and giant monsters winning games, those players couldn't unlearn their old deckbuilding habits[...]Some experienced players scoffed at the spoiled cards[...]In the end, I wanted to make a set that was as fun as your first week of Magic. The point was to recapture that sense of wonder.
2) Urza's Legacy (no, not that one, no not that one either)
Ken Nagle played Legacy once, in 2005. The format doesn’t interest him. I will be polite and assume that this is because he prefers to vote for large games, and Legacy is a small games format. Legacy’s safety valves (Force, Wasteland, Thalia, Thoughtseize, Daze) prohibit Battlecruiser Magic in exactly the same way 3xROE prohibited swinging with bears.
An aside: as in Islam, Vintage is commonly understood to have “five pillars” that define devotion and adherence. You can’t be a devout Muslim without praying fajr or going on hajj, and you can't win a game of Vintage if you’ve never heard of Shops, Dredge, Oath of Druids, Fish (bears like
Lavinia,
Monastery Mentor, and
Endurance, plus walkers like Narset, Oko, and W6), and Omnath. (no, I didn’t typo ‘Oath’ of Druids twice; as far as I can tell, Omnath is now a pillar of Vintage.)
Legacy’s ‘pillars’ aren’t so much those of Islam as they are Of The Earth, of those of the Catholics in Ken Follett’s book – they came together over a very long time, support the architecture and stained glass, and keep it all from falling in on you unexpectedly during Friday Night Mass, but they’re organic, not the Word of God. You can build a nave off to the side of the cathedral and still receive the guidance of grace. I submit that today, Legacy’s key cards that keep games Small are:
While the games that go Big tended to be fueled by:
The top 6 cards are all legal in the format, and the bottom 6 have all been banned. Legacy gameplay is defined by cards that invalidate your opponent’s cards, but
legacy bans are defined by the threat that Big games pose to its existing gameplay. Actually, a lot of Legacy’s bans since 2010 have followed this ideology; the bans of Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, Top, and Astrolabe were meant to shrink Viking Funeral.dec, Omnitell, Miracles.dec, and Snowko.dec. Banning Lurrus was a response to reading the card. For extra fun, think about the differences between mana created by Deathrite Shaman and the mana created by Dark Ritual.
The lesson here is simple. To achieve a desired kind of gameplay, provide the tools for a format to self-police (strong mana denial, free counterspells, targeted discard, tax effects), but make the costs
of those ‘safety valves’ real costs. The first free counterspell should be surmountable – Legacy combo decks play targeted discard like Duress, or other meta-answers like
Silence or
Xantid Swarm, and fight
through interaction, not under it – but a combination of safety valves should present exponential barriers, not additive ones. Most blue decks in Legacy now play six forces – 4 FoW, 2 FoNg. They
also play between 4-8 more cantrips than they used to. Exiling a blue card to Force is a “real cost” in Legacy’s ideal gameplay, but it’s one that you’re presumably more than willing to pay, and the additional Forces provide that exponential increase in defense during a
‘showdown turn’. The combo deck can afford to dedicate space to answering one Force, but suffers excessively if it has to be able to go off through two of them. In order to support the additional Forces, xerox decks had to play more spells, ‘see more cards’ per game. But these games remained Small, not Big, because they
condense to a critical point (losing a fight on the Stack, lethal Storm count, you ran out of answers to Snowko/Czech Pile, you got locked out by Eldrazi/D&T,
TNN beats, and so on).
3) Sam Black’s articles
The article I made you read at the top of this post, Elvish Visionary vs Elderfang Disciple, was written in 2021 for Kaldheim. It’s an excellent essay, a refining of his thoughts on the subject from the previous year’s article he wrote about Companions, and more specifically about Lurrus in Standard –
“Welcome to Haymaker Magic: Why Card Advantage Is An Outdated Concept”. In the earlier article, he writes:
When Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths was announced, many players expected a return to [battlecruiser Magic], but that’s not really what we got[...]Howling Mine leads to big games. Liliana of the Veil leads to small games. In big games, both players have a lot of resources, while in small games, players have very few resources. Card advantage matters more in small games, whereas tempo and battlefield presence matter more in big games.
The next year, as you’ve already seen, he elaborates on this idea.
[Canadian Threshold] in Legacy is a great example of a deck that’s hyper-focused on voting for small games. It plays cards like Daze that are much weaker in large games, so it wants to trade down resources at every opportunity[...]To my mind, tempo and attrition are opposite ends of a spectrum. Tempo games revolve around a mana bottleneck and attrition games revolve around a card count bottleneck. Tempo games are won by the player who doesn’t give their opponent time to use all of their resources, and attrition games are won by the player who depletes all of their opponent’s resources.
Not all games can be perfectly described as either — sometimes a game is won by an unanswered trump, like a large flying creature that the opponent can’t answer even if they can cast all of their spells. They have plenty of cards but those cards just don’t line up right[...]In small games, anything that sticks matters more than it would in a big game.
How large does that "large" flying creature have to be? Big enough that its owner can Protect the Queen long enough in an average game to ride it to victory.
4) Mordor’s essay
In
this post, Mordor discusses designing for a big or small
format.
The big games in which Synergy thrives come with increased complexity/tracking to the players, but also provide ripe opportunity for exploring novel card-wise interactions of Magic. Big games essentially improve the odds that players will witness a novel combination of cards in relevant zones. (Maybe this is one reason why EDH, famous for its ethos of "cards you've never seen before", is a 40-life, 4-player format.) [...] Moreover, even small games can turn into big games: if both aggro players have played 6 lands and traded all their creatures without killing the opponent, then we're in a big game where the player who has more mana sinks will be favored.
Pair this idea with the idea that Legacy's banlist doesn't ban cards for offending the idea of what's reasonably powerful (Legacy is full of monstrously powerful cards that produce unfun game states), but for creating BIG unfun games (Ragavan, Oko) or for threatening the dynamics that keep most games Small (Astrolabe,
the blue Delve draw spells). Legacy has Big Game decks -
control,
Lands,
8cast,
Nic Fit...but unless these decks have play in the Small games produced by Legacy's resilient combo decks, they struggle to establish the board state that they're relying on winning with.
Nic Fit uses targeted discard and hard-to-interact-with permanents. 8Cast plays
FoW and
Chalice. Moon Stompy plays Chalice and
Blood Moon. Lands uses
Wasteland,
Port, and
Tabernacle to attack on an oblique axis. In each case, the Big deck is reliant on multiple cards to fight against
Xerox.
5) Legacy Lite
I’ve written a lot of nonsense over the years about my attempts to design what I landed on calling a ‘Legacy-Lite’ format. I’m not beholden to the particularities of Legacy’s Constructed Banlist, but I’m now able to articulate that I was, have been, trying to ape its desire for Small games. When people who don’t play Magic ask me, Saf, is this MTG thing genuinely that good to justify how much you think about it, I laugh and say no, but then, I say this: I think Magic is up there with chess as far as having a theoretical ‘perfect’ state of thrilling gameplay (“sequence of interesting decisions” cf Meier). I then say that I think chess is a remarkably beautiful game with emergent complexity, whereas Magic is a game of emergent simplicity, as the game eventually condenses to a single question(*), and ‘studying for the test’ (knowing what Question might finally be asked, choosing lines of play that keep you able to answer a variety of Questions) is the mark of a good Limited player.
(* this is why the all-in Legacy Storm deck was once called “Pact – Spanish Inquisition” – it went door to door and asked a single question, but unlike those red-smocked murderers, it asked “Did you keep Force of Will”?).
The first format design safety valve is one both Sam Black and Mordor identify.
In small games, typically a lot of cards trade and both players are left with relatively few remaining resources. Because modern design sensibilities discourage land destruction as a form of resource denial, we don’t typically see land destruction as a source of small games outside of Legacy.
-Mana chokepoints (players can't play their resources because their lands are destroyed or taxed, or they're killed before playing their lands)
Wasteland is a harsh mistress. As
Dom Harvey writes in his design thread in 2020:
Modern Magic design is about accumulating resources and using as much of your mana as possible every turn - this formula is a recipe for success in any format younger than Legacy, where cards like Daze and Wasteland that would be unprintable today place severe constraints on what you can do. The result is that most midrange or control decks (it's easier than ever before to slide between those labels) are great at amassing resources and competing in longer games but also at operating on few resources on the rare occasion that happens. I think this trend is fantastic for Magic in general and Cube in particular but it does encourage an arms race where you always have to be doing the biggest thing. In Standard, this has meant Fires of Invention or Wilderness Reclamation effectively bypassing the entire mana system. In every format, this has meant
Uro. The contrast between
these two giants is the perfect illustration of this. Uro is the best card in Standard, Pioneer, Modern, and Historic and has prompted calls to delete it from Constructed Magic altogether; Kroxa has seen modest success with zero complaints at all, as far as I can tell. Kroxa attempts to downsize the game in colours that are best at doing that - if we trade resources (with the ample discard and removal in black or burn in red), Kroxa can facilitate those trades while also being the biggest thing on a sparse board. In most Constructed formats, one key plank of that - cheap mana disruption - is off-limits and it's tough to effectively downsize the game in this new world.
Blood Moon, Back to Basics, Hymn, Vindicate, tax effects – these broaden the scope of cheap mana disruption enough to make it a feature of a holistic environment, not just a random ‘there’s one Wasteland deck per Cube night’ screw-job.
Let’s put it all together.
AXIOM 1: If you want Small Games, you need mana denial in your format.
AXIOM 2: Small Games are less likely to result in board stalls. This means they are often resolved by an “unanswered trump”, whether that’s a creature hitting in for lethal sans relevant blockers, a Walker’s Ultimate or snowballing value, or a combo kill that doesn’t get discarded or countered.
COROLLARY: Flying threats condense a stalled battlefield into a much smaller set of relevant game pieces, for threats as well as answers. The prototypical ‘unanswered trump’ in Legacy was once
Insectile Aberration; in my format, I’d like Large games to condense down to the fight over a 4/4 with Flying.
AXIOM 3: Just like those playtesters struggling with their Glory Seekers against a field of Ulamog’s Crushers and levelers, having one’s expectations of ‘how Magic works’ dashed by a format’s unique assumptions and safety valves is not fun, and players can struggle to figure out that they’ve even made an (obvious, visible) mistake. Any format that seeks to change ‘the rules of Magic’ will alienate initial playtesters, but you can regain those players and even enthrall them, within the right social context.
COROLLARY: As Dom also writes, perhaps a way to defang this tension is to encourage a context wherein either Uro OR Kroxa is a viable premiere threat. This means that the ‘safety valves’ of the format must have a puncher’s chance at whatever your format’s Uro is doing.
AXIOM 4: Small games trend towards the ‘attrition’ side of Sam Black’s tempo-attrition scale. To support small games, support attrition gameplay. Run fewer Mulldrifters and more Baneslayers; make your combo decks more resilient; match powerful answers to your format’s threats.
As Tinsman wrote in 2010: "The point [of ROE] was to recapture that sense of wonder [of your first week learning
Magic]." I guess we really are all chasing that Shivan Dragon. saf out[/c][/c]
and possibly something else as well. I think the Eldrazi are one of Magic's most interesting creature types, something not found elsewhere in generic high fantasy, and I like that they are part of not only the game but, since Eldrazi Winter, very strong Constructed formats as well.