What Aetherdrift Could Have Been…
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- Aetherdrift is the 103rd expansion for Magic: The Gathering and with it comes new cards and mechanics like, start your engines and exhaust. Join us as we discuss the design of Aetherdrift from its early days in vision design to the set that will be released February 14th 2025.
Hosts
Forrest Imel
forrestimel.com/
voidmonster.org/
Gavin Valentine
www.gavinvalen...
Join the Distraction Makers Discord
/ discord
Thumbnail Artwork
Chandra, Spark Hunter by Devin Elle Kurtz
I was trying to come up with a race mechanic that suits the flavour they were going for and fits some of the ideas you guys had. I came up with the idea that the first player to play a racing-related card would start the race "in the lead", and other cards would care about if youre in the lead or not. and other players would be able to do combat damage to "take the lead" away from them. This encourages interaction and means, even if you dont have racing cards, you still want to interact with the subgame. I thought it was cool that it worked in 1v1 and in commander...
and then i realized its literally just the monarch
and then i realized that the monach and enter the dungeon are just mario kart
Honestly a variation on the monarch could have been great. 👍
Is the Monarch kicker or horsemanship?
another mechanic where the flavor is better represented by monarch
As a player of Pauper and occasionally Legacy, Monarch and Initiative type mechanics have some real problems in 1 vs 1 play.
I feel like DRIFT, could have been such an easy mechanic and very flavorful. It would go something like when this creature becomes tapped if it deals combat damage untap it. Then through the untapping you get an inspire like effect which could be anything from drawing cards to getting counters. I feel robbed.😢
Fuel should have just been oil counters again. Or even a different counter. Then put in ways to move those counters around to allocate your fuel.
seriously, that would have been a way to refresh play for some of those ONE oil counter/proliferate cards in standard.
I approve of this idea.
It also works as a way to have vehicles require less creatures
As much as I hate this set in general and the idea of a race taking place while I'm at war with someone is a joke, this idea would've been infinitely better than what they did with the set
Hearing that the original intent was to "race" other players, why not use life as a tracker. The player with the most health is "first", the player on least is in "last"
Then you could design cards around players getting benefits for being in first or last, while adding a reason to attack or avoid certain players in commander like monarch/initiative
It's also funny hearing mtg people talking about how exhaust could get complicated and my yugioh brain is just like "oh, we doin soft OPT's now?"
Not soft opt, soft once on field @@tartfruit801
Honorable shout out to Jo Grant, the motorcyclist from the Dr Who set who is gives you an engine to turn gives all your historic cards cycling
The flavour of this set is deeply uninspiring to me, and this is coming from someone who felt people were being a bit harsh with Murders at Karlov Manor and Outlaws at Thunder Junction.
Those were a bit corny, but still felt less disjointed and had their moments in terms of art and mechanics.
@@Kaleidoscope2412 same
Same. The speed mechanic sound kinda cool in concept, but I can't bring myself to care.
It's incredibly dumb
@@eduardoserpa1682 What's weird is that I like the speed mechanic mechanically... but in flavor it fails.
I think the whole "make sure you damage your opponent each turn" thing worked best for Spectacle.
It simply meant "the show must go on"
To comment on y'all's parastic mechanics point; GB should have been oil counters. It would have been a slam dunk giving more context and support to the ONE mechanic, while handing over the greater mechanic ecosystem to Jund. Instead we got the 86th iteration of GB "graveyard".
Seeing the SAME thing over and over (golgari grave, izzet instants/sorceries) makes me really exhausted
The weird thing about their anti-parasitic stance for more generalized mechanics is that it only is parasitic if you *don't* keep exploring that space. Sprinkle it across a few sets. Maybe it won't take off as a strong mechanic or archetype in a single arc of rotations (which is what I think they really fear) but you've then established it in players' minds. Then in a future rotation cycle you can develop it further, reprint the ones that worked, and move towards making it deciduous.
I think they'll likely try that with Exhaust, and I think it can work, but they need to be more brave about trying it more often.
I think this is a consequence of no longer doing 3 set blocks. With one off sets you don’t have the ability to really fill out a mechanic with support.
Exhaust isn't parasitic regardless of number of cards. It's literally just a "use this once"
You can just view it as a kicker mechanic. It's upside/mana sink built into cards. It's the same as adapt, monstrosity, unearth, etc.
Magic has already printed a ton of "once per game" effects. I don't know why people without this knowledge are acting as if Exhaust is complicated or hard to track.
It feels like they may have underpowered speed for fear that it would become The Initiative 2.0. It really feels like there should be small pieces of value i.e. surveil/scry, a clue, etc. attached to each level of speed that would make it playable, but then the eternal formats would have to deal with Muraganda Raceway in vintage cube for the rest of eternity.
The Start Your Engines mechanic is pretty much just the Ascension enchantments with Quest counters again, except the quest is always “hit opponent on your turn” and the payoff is spread among other cards
The fact that they didn’t reprint Need for Speed is a huge miss
Love that card
Speed is really "City's Blessing" with extra steps. Which I don't entirely mind. I think there's something interesting there of "gain this" over a time. I'm just glad there's no super complicated rules to it.
This is actually something we were working on ourselves for a duel deck.
Basically we've debating on this "cruft" of a status. At first we thought it would be something fought over by the players, but didn't like how that was going so now we've separated it out to each player getting the status (and you can use anything you want to represent it as it has no extra rules text, you just either "have it" or you don't) and then designing cards that interact with it in different ways.
Next time wizards does "start your engines!" I bet they'll implement designs of cards causing you to lose speed.
1- You guys are really overestimating the potential complication of "Exhaust". You just put a counter or something on the card. It's easier than every type of counter and that exert, which was a fine mechanic. It's a billion times easier than anything in commander. Exhaust is the best mechanic of the set because it's honestly something we could see in the future
2- My take for the "race" feeling is that a racing mechanic should ramp you and also make you lose some control. Here's my take:
+When this creature enters, get a Speed counter. (At the beginning of your first main phase, add X mana of any color, lose X life and exile the top X cards of your library, where X is the number of speed counters you have)+
And then other cards let you do stuff with that speed such as doing a hard break or crashing into others
+As an additional cost to play this spell, remove X speed counters from you.
This spell deals X damage to each creature+
Now you are definitely going faster than your opponent if you have speed counters
I could care less about Magic Goes To Nascar/ Wacky Races. But LEGENDARY VANILLA CREATURES? Oh hell yes! They are all at Uncommon rarity, and so they can all be Commanders in Pauper EDH, btw (including the one that tutors for a vanilla creature). I'd absolutely love a set that explores Muraganda. What the heck would that look like?
The set's "racing" theme feels mechanically unsupported. The creatures lack the stats and aggressive abilities needed for a true racing playstyle, and the absence of a "Goblin Guide" archetype highlights this disconnect.
To be fair, I think it was probably a conscious choice to *not* push the flavor in the mechanics too hard, because they knew the set was going to be in standard for a while.
A race doesn't necessarily imply that it's completed quickly, for instance a marathon, but the natural line of thinking would be something like race -> fast -> aggro, and I don't think they'd want to drop a whole set like that into standard for several years.
Even though it would've been cool to have an all aggro/tempo set for draft, it was probably a good call for other formats.
That said though, they could've done *other* things that what they ended up settling on that I think would've fit better, and been more engaging. A lot of people mentioned oil counters for instance.
Ironically, this is the lowest format in ages. The vehicles are slow per se, and even slower because of the high crew cost of most vehicles.
@@SaberToothPortilla Given how much of best of 3 Standard since 2020 has been dominated by Combo and Control with Midrange decks adjacent to the other two also being prominent a _lot_ of longtime Standard players have been wanting more aggro focus in the format with significantly less Combo and Control presence. So a very fast, aggressive, set would have gone over extremely well with a large portion of the format's player base, including a significant percentage that have been sitting to the side solely due to the terrible metagame over recent years.
@@matthewkeeling886 That's fair, but bear in mind it's been a long time since 2020, and aggro has gotten some very strong support recently, I'm mainly thinking of Bloomburrow, but pretty much every set for a while has had at least one *very* strong aggro piece.
That said, I think most people would tend to agree midrange is over-represented, less so now, but still. The solution to that though, in theory anyway, is to support control. If you support aggro to bring midrange down, who's left to beat aggro? Probably not the control players, not to mention that control hasn't really seen serious play in the past two years.
If they gave control more support, then midrange would be less prominent and aggro would become more prominent as a counter to control.
A lot of people already feel like standard's gotten too fast. There's fairly consistent turn 3 kills already, which is exactly why control has been struggling.
@@SaberToothPortilla I am mostly thinking of Best of 3 (my normal format) where those turn 3 win decks are not as potent as in Best of 1 as they are relatively easy to prepare for in the sideboard.
Also, aggro focused metagames quickly create new midrange decks as the players are trying to parry and out-value each other. That then gives _control_ an opening. On the other hand focusing on Control does not consistently give aggro an opening as the usual problem with a very powerful control deck is its ability to lock down the board state too early. This can cause people to misidentify a control deck as midrange as has happened frequently in the last couple years, many of those "midrange" decks were actually control decks that just locked out the other player early.
Maaaaaaan, I'm sure it'll draft awesome bc they haven't really missed in that regard in a long time BUT:
During the pandemic I was stretching my game design muscle and came up with a format that was meant to be a race. The shorthand is that everyone had an emblem that was lab maniac. The goal was to self mill. Life totals would have been a multiple of the deck size. 40 cards= motorcycle, 60= car, 100= big slow truck.
Mechanic could have totally worked here. It's an actual race to the btm of the deck.
Fuel? The emblem has "spend energy to self mill" and if you wanted to include non energy decks, there maybe could be a mana cost as well. Maybe both.
the irony of yugioh having cardgames on motercycles now coming full cyrcle with magic having cards about racing on motercycles.
Exhaust is what Yugioh players call a "Soft Once". Getting the body off the field and back, or multiple copies out, was a thing we were doing in 2012.
TBF, magic players have been comparing it to Monstrous from Theros.
I don't know who said it, but they wanted to call the Exhaust mechanic "Turbo" which would be more flavorful, but way more difficult to reuse in a different context
I really like speed in a vacuum, but it's kinda wild that the central mechanic of the set barely works with the theme, and it's all downhill from there. Exhaust also bugs me in a way that hits between Monstrosity and perpetual, but we'll see if it feels as weird in practice.
It's the best version of this effect, from an "in-paper, cleanliness" standpoint. It should become close to evergreen
I think the problem with Speed is the way they designed the payoffs - only mattering when you're at Max Speed means that it ends up being kind of irrelevant unless you're in limited or playing a deck where you're playing a lot of Speed cards. If it's important for you to be at max speed you need to play a lot of cards that start your engines. I think adding a pretty minor upside that triggers when your speed goes up (Scry or Surveil 1) and then having the cards that care about speed care about it before you hit Max (eot trigger when your speed goes up or is max, care about if your speed is greater than your opponents or is max) for less dramatic payoffs would have worked better.
There's multiple cards that care about different speeds. The demon, samut, etc.
The basic cards. Commons/unc only care about max the same way threshold only cares about being on/off.
There's other cards in magic that count cards in graveyards, but having a simple A/B dynamic is easier for new players.
Speed is a threshold mechanic and people are passing poor judgment too quickly without even paying the mechanic.
@@danielolsen3514 That is true, "speed matters" being the same across almost all of the cards does make it much easier to track. I think it will be fun in limited and we'll see about constructed.
@@insidious
Yep. Which I think is the ideal spot for mechanics. Be awesome in limited. Let a few trickle into construction if the meta works out.
Would have enjoyed seing a remake of the leveler cards but instead of having body & effects related to the number of level counters it would have cared about your actual speed. More flavorful to feel the embodyment of the driving frenzy going up continuisly on your cards. The faster it goes the better they do or some double edged sword effect comes up. Cards that cares about speed would be more fun and impactful to play and less of a "all or nothing" effect.
@mallgoran
That might be. And maybe a cool addition if they revisit the mechanic.
I think it's enough for the current set. It's often easy to keep thinking of new ideas and cards. Having restraint helps. Gives more design space in future design.
Would love to see a video talking about how mtg players "Flavor bias" plays a role. Magic has been leaning away from "wars" & "in a world" and trying "genre" / "events" as their central themeing. I often think when im hearing critisims of mechanics... "how much of this is actually true and how much of it is... adult men upset that they are playing with "wedding cards" "space carnivals" "detective hats" "cowboy hats" "80's kids" "Go Karts".
I think part of it is that the detective hats and go carts aren't contributions to the genre/style in the same way the wizard hat stuff was, like duskmorn has cool art and themes but taken on both a case by case basis and set wide basis it's not really developing original ideas it's more just references and call backs, cards like make your choice have a place it just feels a lot more saturated than before
I don't see this kind of hate for bloomburrow though.
I agree that the flavor of max speed and "start your engines" (SYE) feels weird flavor fully. It could have been much more.
I would have really enjoyed if the SYE mechanic was like the monarch where it gives you card advantage if hit the person who had the emblem or get the emblem if you play a card that has the mechanic but weren't already in control of the emblem. You take the top spot and gets a card once during your turn. You fight for being "in first place" of the race to fit with the theme of the plane. You get bonuses if you're in first place and keeping your speed.
There could be a ton of design space for this kind of parasitic mechanic which could flavorfully tell the story of the plane and actually allow fun gameplay mechanics in multiplayer if that was a worry. But instead we got a counter that goes up to 4. So like..... cool, I guess?
Good money the Muragandan vanillas came into discussion because you can undercost a saddle / vehicle activator if it has no abilities and someone brought up the opportunity to visit a fan favorite plane. The fact that we get a 0/8 and a 9/7 is potentially reflective of someone forgetting the original intent or the celebration of Muraganda superceding the vehicle activator intentionality
As a yugioh enjoyer, exhaust feels weird, because it's asking to be broken, but not really.
Like, in yugioh, we have soft once per turns (SOPT). SOPT sounds exactly logically equivalent to exhaust. You can break yugioh by doing the analog to blinking/zombifying etc. to reuse SOPTs in unintended ways, and you are forced to respect Hard OPTs that don't retrigger if you do that. I think exhaust is trying to encourage you to do the same thing for a "go fast" feeling, but magic already has this relationship in every deck that finds ways to break out of the reliance on mana to win the game, usually by using triggered abilities to trigger triggered abilities for infinite damage/multiple draws/ ramp/ etc.
So a mechanic that tells you "Activate once only (DONT FORGET)" doesn't look or feel like "Go fast by resetting the card multiple times!" in a game where ETB's have this dynamic anyway and activated abilities are once-per-cost-paid anyway.
21:57 I believe the 'big vanilla creatures' are there to play well with vehicles and mounts (except for the octopus, but whatever).
12:40 Game designers inventing "You can only use this effect of [card name] once per turn" in real time
The funniest thing is this works in Yu-Gi-Oh, but it doesn't even work in magic. [Cardname] just means "this current permanent" in magic, and as such you literally can't do this in magic. And you can't change it without breaking all kinds of weird legacy shit- magic has legal cards that literally can change a cards name in play. You'd have to do something like "you get an [exhaust whatever] emblem, activate this if you don't already control this emblem"
"You can only activate the effect(s) of cards named "x" once per turn."
It's a good point with start your engines kind of being a flavor fail.
My first idea would be something similar to that one Chandra, maybe like "If you are at max speed, at the beginning of your first main phase exile the top card of your library. You may play that card. If you don't, add 2 colorless."
Chandra looks weird in this set. Basically the aesthetics for this whole thing feel off and I’m not sure why
Because they put a bunch of crap in a blender and thought that would be a good idea.
Because dragons and wizards have no synergy with pod racing?
@MisanthropicCurmudgeon do dragons and wizards have synergy with planes made of metal? What about techno samurais? What about 1920s gangsters?
Race could have been a battle type. Witch could have been flipped by anyone and the player that remove the last counter, the "winner" of the race could cast the other side of it.
Maximum Overdrive should have been a five mana black sorcery that brings all your vehicles to life and gives them menace. Missed opportunity if you ask me.
what you call 'flavor' me and my community have always called 'fluff'. The game might be pushing cubes and counting numbers, or drawing cards an comparing colors or whatever, but the fluff tells you that you are a wizard, that a war is happening, tries to tie the abstract mechanics to an actual thing. The adage, that I repeat often, is 'Without fluff, they are just bits of cardboard"
What a disrespectful way to consider the art of writing and storytelling. You strike me as someone who thinks being clear in communication is for losers because "it's just semantics lol"
Exhaust ain't hard to track, just mark it with a game piece of your choice. That said, the thought of playing paper MTG in general has always horrified me because there is just too much going on with some decks.
A Whole Muraganda Set would be awesome. How do you make it work? Artifacts, lands, enchantments, sorceries, instants, planeswalkers, but more importantly... BATTLES
I mean... Wouldn't it be at least funny?
One option is to lean semi-heavily into tribal-adjacent ideas: vanila creatures still have subtypes, so have a bunch of the non-creature cards care about how many of X subtype you have (probably mostly letting you pick or being dictated by the board state rather than the card specifying only one), or how many different subtypes you have, or how many other creatures have the same subtype as the target. Bonus points if at least some of them make use of the old system of counting and affecting all creatures of the subtype regardless of owner.
A big issue you run into a bit is that anything that checks for creatures without any abilities is just kind of 'always on' if there are no non-vanilla creatures, but the more non-vanilla creatures you have the more you lose the theme and any point to having cards that make the check, both in the set and in the deck.
Could have cards that add abilities to creatures (not exactly a new idea) and cards that remove abilities from creatures (also not exactly a new idea) and effects that check the current presence of absense of abilities on creatures in play, mostly rewarding absence or punishing presence... though given that creatuers with abilities tend to be more expensive for their stats, that can get a bit awkward to balance, I'd imagine.
races should been battles. Aetherdrift should have been an Un-set
The "Start Your Engine" mechanics should've been just "Speed" then you would increase speed by playing permanent spells with "Speed" & dealing damage. The way it currently works, it is such a slow mechanic (I'm looking through an EDH/CEDH & Sealed player). If it was done with "Speed" then in theory you could go really fast if you built your deck with aggressively costed creatures with the mechanic which may also have haste. Choosing to play more aggressive & almost even a bit reckless to gain speed would fit the Racing theme they wanted to go with. If they were worried about being at Max Speed as fast, then tweak the cards which have Max Speed abilities but speed the mechanic up.
Also, just an outright miss was having a legendary creature called "The Speed Demon" & not giving him Haste. Like what?
Lastly, them selecting Amonkhet & Muraganda was weird & will cause havok & a powershift lore wise on their planes due to the introduction of technology (If WotC actually still cared about their own IP's lore.). I think the better planar options would've been the plane Battlebond took place on & the restored version of Alara. One, you get to showcase the plane which loves competition & would grasp a race perfectly & two, we get to see a reformed Alara without creating a full set for it which may be hard due to Alara's old identity being the five seperate shards.
Edit: Just because you are talking about the Vanilla cards. My brother is making a 4 power matters deck with the 2 drop commander & I've been thinking about that 7/2 for 3 in black due to the old enchantment called Dauthi Embrace which gives shadow for BB.
Id love an edit of all Gavin's "Vroom Vroom Brain" Stitched together hahaha, that'd be great.
Lol, i think the only way a muraganda set could work is if they pitched it as a way for beginners to grok the game as a starter deck collection/miniset
Its the perfect inclusion for a set with multiple planes since a vanilla matters plane is very low complexity and is highly parasitic, meaning there's just a lot less design space for cards. So you can nail the "feeling" of including the plane in the set with just a few cards, like they did with this cycle of vanilla creatures.
I imagine the mystery of what a vanilla matters set could be is actually far more intriguing than if we actually got a vanilla matters set
The most interesting way I can think of to include synergy with vanilla matters is to have instants and sorceries that care about card types or supertypes, and include that on the otherwise vanilla creatures, i.e. enchantment, artifact, snow, or legendary creatures. Alternatively, you could have effects that transform into vanilla creatures
I don't think remembering if an exhaust ability was used is an issue, almost all of them put counters on the creature with the ability.
Exhaust should have put an exhaust counter on stuff which would keep the card from coming back like a finality counter does.
Every common & unc exhaust ability adds a counter. Just like monstrosity. It's there to help be a tracker.
They mentioned that the race passed through Muraganda, and that's why the vanilla creatures are there, MaRo explicitly said that Muraganda as not deep enough to have a full focused set.
Would you say that old 3-set block schedules were more open to parasitic design, because they were around for a year, and block constructed was a thing back then?
For sure, the lack of 3 set blocks has affected the number of parasitic mechanics.
Poor lore, poor aesthetics and poor mechanical support. In summary: poor design.
The only thing that saves face is the verge lands, designed in a previous set.
I don't keep up with Magic discourse but why do Aetherdrift's verge lands go in reverse? The WB one taps for B, or W if you meet the condition. The BG one taps for G, or B if you meet the condition. The Duskmourne ones went in WUBRG order. I always catch myself second-guessing the DFT ones.
Okay, these vanillas sold me. I'm in the process of building a Mr. Orfeo, the Boulder Commander deck, and creatures who are cheap for their hefty power is something I'm keeping an eye out for. I was all set to go to my LGS and be like, "It's Aetherdrift launch day? I'll take a Foundations bundle!" but now I know there might be some cheapo commons/uncommons I'm willing to spend a buck or two on...
the weirdest thing about max speed is that it gives the best value in slow games
I think it is hilarious that speed is slow and most of your cards are just bad unless you're at max. Also vehicles stink.
Are there any cards that lower speed? Like you could use it as a resource to boost the effect of a card or a spell an opponent could play to lower your speed?
Agree that Exhaust is not very flavourful, but I dont think the mechanic is too complicated.. Its a very Yu-Gi-Oh player thing to assume the "only once" claue would apply to other instances of the card ;)
Yall have to call the play mat The Tia-Mat.
Things with only one exhaust ability should easy enough to track, you already put counters on things to represent all sorts of stuff, after all, just need an 'exhaust' counter (anything you're not using for something else will do).
Cards with Multiple exhaust abilities are absolutely a problem for tracking, though.
The disconnect between flavor and mechanics is MTG has gotten worse over time, and this may be the one of the worse attempts from Maro and crew. Feels like they barely tried. On top of the overall set being bad, Exhaust is one of the most pointless and cognitive load abusing mechanics they have ever made. When WOTC does this type of lazy design, it makes me glad to not be in gaming retail any more ;)
Wait, that's NOT an edited in sound effect???
15:30
Tracking is an issue? No, just use a counter!
I know design never likes to do it within the same standard rotation, but could have repurposed “Oil Counters” for their Fuel mechanic.
Also why “Exhaust” and not just “Exert”? The flavor of drivers and vehicles being pushed to their limit and almost crashing out was right there.
Because they aren't tapped? And not once every other turn?
@ Exert to me would have interesting tension between the vehicle mechanic. There could be an exert ability that triggers when crewing. Like a white creature giving a vehicle lifelink when it exerts to crew.
It’s also a call back to going back to Amonkhet, just like how getting vehicles is a call back to Saheeli’s Plane.
Also Exhaust doesn’t seem intuitive or flavorful to me for a Roadrace set. Nothing about the mechanic relates to a race except its name.
Mark did mention one vehicle change. There's a lot less this is a vehicle first and foremost. Many of the vehicles have some other use. Cycling, ETB, ability on the battlefield and so forth. And then they also can be driven.
Also the whole concept of the set fails. I mean they now have a multivers and they use it to have a race between high tech vechiles and some dudes on fantasy horses. So forced.
Vehicle and saddle tribal is just... not a fertile idea. They didnt even do much with the only thing they have in common: tapping and untapping.
20 years ago, we might have gotten some avant garde Muraganda set in which every creature is vanilla. Like that is about as bonkers as legions or whatever, but you have to know it would flop, like that set would be horrible.
I could see some kind of “build-a-bear” like mechanics that starts with a vanilla creature. 😄
This expansion SHOULD be block. The first larger set with 3 planes, then 2 planes for the Second and third sets.
PS: Muraganda is here because they dont want to give It an entire set. But a 1/3 of a set is ok...
as a new player seeing all the butthurt comments how mtg is gonna die for bringing in all these new IPs into magic and what a soulless cash grab move it is. meanwhile i am over here looking at the last three sets which were a boring cowboy theme, a boring 90s cheap horror flick theme, some forest animals, and this shit. lmao even.
Maaaaaan muragandas easy.
You have mana costs 1-6, and like 3 stat variations MINIMUM. You can explore what that means.
Then, combat tricks with abilties, auras, maybe not equipment so much... Altho maybe a little. AND REMOVAL.
You take it back to old school magic, with modern magic stats. And what that looks like.
Easy peezy
Given how many of the cards with Exhaust give +1/+1 to themselves counters upon using it they knew about the memory problem in paper but instead of doing the obvious thing and having the card start with a Charge counter by rule which you then take away to activate the ability (giving you a way to "refuel" your cards in eternal formats) they kludged an extra boost to the card once activated on _some_ but not _all_ of the cards. It also creates a confusing mess if you have other sources of +1/+1 counters... like you would in Standard, where those counters are a dime a dozen at the moment.
The exhaust mechanic works almost identical to Monstrosity.
The +1/+1 is added because it's both easier to track/ use and functions better.
Your suggestion adds a lot of potentially unnecessary counters to track UNTIL an ability is used, which might never happen.
It also allows opponents to stop exhaust abilities. It also makes the "only once" feel arbitrary given the abundance of proliferate and addition counter effects.
I know you think your idea solves the issue. However, it's almost always going to be a worse play experience.
The current design is fine. It will play out fine. It won't have tracking issues. That's just a shadow problem people are creating in their own head.
@@danielolsen3514 A quarter century of experience playing multiple TCGs disagrees with you. In particular Yu-Gi-Oh has many lingering effects that are not tracked on the card in any way and they are one of the biggest hurdles for new player retention as a lot of them leave in large part because of this memory issue.
When there is only 1-2 unique effects on the field like this kind of design does not too like much but multiple copies of the same card and multiple other cards with such effects, all on the field in different states across multiple turns feels very, very, different.
Part of the advantage of the "counter until used" instead of an un-tracked state based design actually present is that it _would_ interact with older mechanics in the way you are describing. This has the effect of allowing the effects to scale in power with the format rather than risking them being overwhelmingly powerful in low-power formats and unplayable in high-power ones due to trying to shoot for the middle ground power-wise.
@matthewkeeling886
You are describing only half the impact. IE you are attaching yourself to the things YOU think are good and ignoring all other interactions.
Yes, a counter could allow proliferate to interact like you want. It could turn an otherwise unplayed card into playable. It also could turn a playable card into broken. It's much riskier to design cards that actively interact with older mechanics. More likely something is an issue. Instead of design how it is.
Which I already said: is just another Monstrosity/adapt. Mechanic.
You could say it's also like undying/persist. Those are "conceptually" once a game reanimate effects. That use counters to track. You can interact with it. But a "pre-undying" counter is more complicated.
It's also problematic for a design like Loot. Does he get 3 counters? So can he triple use Ancestral recall? This effects his design and powerlevel.
Your design asks every player to have "preexhaust" tokens available four each exhaust card. To track each one, even if you use none. (Due to deck, game state, etc. )
This adds to tracking load.
Your suggestion is a more complicated mechanic. With little upside.
Congrats on playing Yu-gi-oh? Claiming experience/knowledge is only revelant if it translates to your comment.
@danielolsen3514 That experience very much does translate. In that game the majority of lingering effects are of this type and are very much a tracking problem in paper. Not to mention once per turn effects, once per turn effects (affecting multiple copies of a card), once per game effects, and once per game effects (affecting multiple copies of a card). Heck, there are enough of these conditions that keeping track of them can be a problem for people utilizing an online client. We, the player base, really don't want Magic going there.
Also, I chose Charge Counters specifically because they are a known quantity for this kind of effect and are known to work well in actual play. I could have also chosen Depletion Counters as they have been used this way before. IE: We already know that WOtC knows that style of mechanic works very well and know how to balance it.
The problem with Loot is simpler than the Exhaust mechanic: the Dark Ritual and Ancestral Recall effects are overpowered for the cost no matter how many restrictions you put on them as a _single_ activation is usually all you need. And Loot provides plenty of abusable ways to get the effects multiple times.
@@matthewkeeling886
You are taking an issue in one game and conflating it with another. I already gave examples and showed how Mtg handles tracking. This isn't new. This hasn't been a problem. You creating a problem in your head doesn't translate.
You didn't address why exhaust is problematic when Monstrosity wasn't. You are ignoring points that dismantles your pov.
If you going to use Yu-gi-oh. You also have to address the lack of keywords. The "legacy" only format and the lack of a resource system like mana means games are much more compressed. Tracking IS an issue when you play many more cards in a singular turn.
These are factors and elements you ignored. Magic & Yu-Gi-Oh are not the same game. You can't just say: "oh Yu-Gi-Oh has this issue so mtg will also."
However that is what you are doing. So no, your "experience" doesn't translate. I've also played mtg & card games for 25+ years. Do you want to meet up at the boomer convention to brag about our card game authority?
Loot is not an issue. He's a completely reasonable design. 6cmc for a recall and a 2/4 DS creature isn't a broken card. He's part Arcanis, part somberwald sage.
A ritual on t6 isn't t1. I understand edh players are hype to break him. Most 5+ cards with 3 card combos are silly.
Recall & ritual are busted because they cost 1 mana. This is understanding design. Which you seem to lack.
Great video.
Exhaust feels like a great mechanic for Alchemy (where the game's interface tracks everything for you), and a prohibitively clunky one for tabletop.
💯
I was waiting for someone to mention this. I wonder when the first argument in a tournament over whether exhaust has already triggered will be.
No. It's not.
It's literally just a new spin on Monstrosity. It's not a complicated mechanic. People are jumping at ghosts to call it a problem.
It's clear who understands design and who acts like they understand design by their reaction to Exhaust.
It will probably be the most popular mechanic of the set and one that gets reused. It's an easy name and allows for new design space on abilities.
It's a Kicker ability. Those are almost all universally successful.
Best thing for Exhaust is to put a token or unique dice on the card.
Yeah because having to keep up and take part of an additional minigame is what players love. You know, like Dungeons, Initiative, Day and Night, Monarch, Call of the Ring... all loved mechanics
In casual play that likely works fine. In tournaments you don’t want to track anything this way because the board state can become incorrect if the counter is knocked off. It creates opportunities for cheaters.
@distractionmakers
Every common and Unc adds counters. Just like monstrosity. To help the tracking.
It's unlikely many, if any, see competitive play, because most cards don't.
It absolutely won't be an issue in comp play. I'm disappointed at this video and y'alls understanding of the mechanic.
The cycling joke was pretty Dad like as well.
thanks for the video
Agonasur Rex is the opposite of Whippoorwill
WHY IS MAX SPEED A SLOW MECHANIC!!!!! THIS SET IS A FAILURE!
I'm just most pissed off they didn't bring back living metal.
sacrificing permanents would have mechanically operated more like fuel does, without any misleading reminder text
landfall is now evergreen 16:03
Outlaws are a batch! A baaaaatch!
Haha thank you…
Exhaust should have been called Nitro, change my mind
They haven’t been back to Ahmonkhet or Kaladesh properly in ten years, so instead of giving each one their own set they combined them with a mishmash of tons of random stuff. They took a bunch of random crap no one had seen before in magic and put it into a blender and thought that was a good idea. Unbelievably disappointing.
Nice finish line joke...Dad.
You’re grounded
@ sweet you have to listen to me flick cards for a week...
That set is way too race-ist.
Funnily enough, I initially read Exhaust as Exert, and I didn't even blink at the flavor, like "yeah I get it, they're going into overdrive for a turn but have to refuel the next turn, very nice spin on the Amonkhet callback theme".
Then I reread the cards and was disappointed.
*Then* they revealed Basri, Tomorrow's Champion, and, well, *that's* not going to cause any confusion whatsoever at the prerelease, huh?
Are their sets getting dumber, or it just me? I regret buying my box of duskmourn. Now i have a $100+ box of useless one-off garbage.
A good set without sucky art?
I want muraganda
Tia^play^mat