This Mechanic Created A New Way To Design Magic: The Gathering Cards
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ย. 2024
- In this episode, we talk about the mechanic Threshold and it's lasting impact on the design of Magic the Gathering. Threshold was released in Odyssey block in 2001 and created what are known as barometer mechanics or mechanics that measure something for an effect. From Metalcraft, Battalion, Hellbent, and may others, threshold created a new class of mechanics for designers to keep in their toolbox.
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Forrest Imel forrestimel.com/
Gavin Valentine www.gavinvalen...
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Ascend is the mechanic to bring up for a way to make a threshold mechanic that doesn’t undo itself when you lose the requirement. They’ve only done it once and it’s a little clunky, but it’s definitely something that’d help with the complexity with resources that constantly change.
I went to the comments to see if someone mentioned ascend.
I didn't like having to constantly upkeep a game state with no permanent to track
@juter1122 there's a city's blessing token. I know the game has a lot of tokens and that can kind of be a problem on its own but I think things that you only need one of like City's Blessing and Monarch are fine.
I like city's blessing as a mechanic, but as it came from a powered-down set, the vast majority have effectively disappeared after rotation, and even the ones that do show up only do so in specific commander decks, and even then very infrequently. They're just underpowered, but that has nothing to do with the mechanic itself, just the design decisions made around that time.
I would argue that Threshold is not, in fact, Kicker. Kicker is, "This card does something, but if you spend more, it does something else (usually as well, sometimes as a replacement)." Threshold is, "This card does something, but if a certain state exists, it does something else (usually as well, sometimes as a replacement)." Threshold doesn't spend an extra resource, it's not a decision you make as you cast the spell like Kicker is; it's a state based change to what the spell (or creature) does/can do.
You're right, if threshold required you to exile the cards like delve does then it would be more like kicker.
The 'crossing the threshold once' thing happened with City's Blessing. I thought that was a fun mechanic! Good video. The reference to 'Deep' from LoR made me miss that game, too.
They could have mirrored the ascend mechanics in the descend mechanics.. Say if you have 8 permanents in the GY you you gain "reached the deeps" for rest of the game.. But I guess they wanted there to be counterplays to descending - tho you could still prevent the descend by pre-emptive removal from GY..
Cephalid Coliseum, Barbarian Ring and the rest of the cycle also needed the color gating as to not allow you to activate an effect without having the requisite color in your deck. Without it you could get the activation of Cephalid Coliseum with no other blue sources/cards in your deck, which wouldn’t be a huge issue, as it is not worth playing for just that, but it would still be an issue of color pie bleeding.
Great point haha
Honestly it probably would be worth playing just for that in some decks.
Is it really bleeding if it requires you to tap the land? For instance, say Coliseum’s cost to activate was 1U, Sac. If you have no other blue sources in your deck, you are required to tap the Coliseum to pay for the cost.
In the case of requiring the land to tap, the activation cost essentially reads (for the purpose of paying for the ability) “Pay a specific cost, plus one mana of any color this land could produce, and tap this untapped land.” The tapping of the land essentially requires the payment of any color that land could produce, so is it really a bleed if the ability is within the color of the mana a land can produce?
As another example, say a non-basic mountain read “1, tap: deal 2 damage to any target.” Are you not paying a red by tapping the mountain? By tapping the land, you are removing a red mana from your resources similar to if you had just generated a red mana some other way.
cephalid coliseum would absolutely be worth playing in non-blue decks. Imagine having it in gitrog monster
@@ShakesZX yes, I believe it is. Take something like Force of Will for example, while you can cast it without a single blue source in your deck, the alternate casting cost is just meant to be a way of saying “I am playing blue” by forcing you to show that you have other blue cards in your deck. The cost on Cephalid Coliseum is the same, it makes it so you have to play some amount of blue in order to realistically activate the ability, if all it needed was to tap it might as well be a colorless land, which shows the bleediness of just requiring tapping.
I will forever refer to Richard Garfield as Richy G, PhD from now on.
The average person can hold roughly 6 items in their working memory at a time. I think that's important to remember when designing a mechanic. How much do you need to know to make the mechanic work.
Knowing if threshold is active is a simple binary, 1 item. If it wasn't a set number, it becomes 1 item per card.
That's a good tip. Thanks!
Well put for sure
Shelldock Isle has “deck-threshold” that was and still can be a pain to “crunch” 😂
Also, Ascend is an example of a barometer that once you’ve achieved once, you have it forever.
About players laying out their graveyards even when their deck doesn’t have any graveyard interaction: it helps you keep track of how many copies of your cards you’ve already used. For example, if you’re in a situation where you need a removal spell, and you’ve already used some number of them, checking your graveyard can be a way to remind yourself how many you still have in the deck that you could draw to. But picking up your graveyard to look through it could potentially be a tell and give away information to your opponent, whereas if your graveyard is fanned out, you can glance at it more easily and subtly.
That’s the thinking anyway. I think in practice it doesn’t really have a measurable impact, but it also doesn’t hurt anything, so 🤷♀️
Barometer mechanics are a good example of digital creeping into design space, if the value is tracked in the client/app, then you can make threshold have ten cards that start with different letters in your graveyard. If you’re only designing for paper, you can’t go too far off the deep end
Agreed, good point. This is one of those funny ones though - in your example the app would do all the busywork of keeping score, but for a player to engage with it strategically they’d still have to umm-and-ahh over which letters were present, or which had doubles (if you wanted to flashback but not lose “scrabble-threshold”)
Coven is an interesting example in recent magic - a client will manage it for you, but if you want to say use a trick to achieve coven, or fire a kill spell to turn off opponent’s coven, that logistical overhead is put on the player. Whether it’s worth the overhead is a different question, but I think there’s something to be said about drawing a distinction between “easy to compute if a condition is met” vs “easy to strategise around meeting a condition”
Do you have any examples of paper-tedious barometers that are still satisfying to strategise around in digital games?
Threshold is back on the Rats of Bloomburrow, can't wait to see the rest of them! :D
We saw that! Super excited!
It occurs to me that Threshold could potentially be seen as a catch-ip mechanic, like a Blue Shell in Mario Kart. If you're doing worse than your opponent, you might be able to use the more powerful version of the card more quickly than your opponent. I don't know that it succeeds or was even intended as such due to it also being open to very high-level crunchy play, but it's an interesting way to think about the mechanic.
"One and done" modes always kinda irk me. Like, I don't want to remember whether or not I have the City's Blessing or my creature is Monstrous if I no longer meet the condition at an easy visual inspection. I'd much rather these sorts of mechanic be "A player/permanent has [keyword] if [condition]" than introduce more "A player/permanent has [keyword] if [condition] at some point in the game" mechanics.
For sure. It’s hard to spot what exactly you would target for a catch up barometer. The question becomes if it’s abusable by a player who is already ahead. But it’s definitely looking in the right place. The other thing we didn’t mention is that if it’s a one and done there’s only a sub-game for it until the condition is met. I could see that as a good or bad thing.
That is one thing they tried to fix with ascending. The player gets an emblem/token of "city's blessing" so you don't have to try and remember whether you had it once. Monstrous and Renown though... yeah those are a headache sometimes.
"Threshold with different activation values" is essentially Descend, which coincidentally came out in the same block as Discover.
But, notably, only 3 different versions, 4 permanents, 8 permanents or the card scales with each permanent.
Shadowverse makes use of a lot of those barometers. The class I like playing as is Portalcraft and it makes use the resonance mechanic, where it is active if you have an even number of cards left in your deck. Then there is lots of cards that let you draw a card or create a copy of your card and add it to the deck in order to allow you to sequence cards to create strategic depth.
That seems pretty hard to track as you resolve cards and turns, you will need to count your cards and that takes time. Seems like something mostly only working in a digital space
@Chris3s Shadowverse is a digital game. It makes extensive use of things that would be too tedious to track in a physical game. It uses UI elements depending on which class of cards you are using.
I suspect part of the reason that cephalid coliseum has a mana cost is so that it can be a "blue" card. If it didn't have a mana cost, you could throw it into any deck as a "colourless" land with a threshold ability. Man-lands etc also have mana costs which mean you have to make the colours the land actually makes (afaik without exception?)
Great point!
You make a good point. When you have multiple cards with a constant effect that track the same board state, having their checks be the same is important for playability. If threshold was different numbers across multiple cards, the information input, and analysis, would increase exponentially with each variation.
Crunching comes from number crunching but also as a direct contrast to "fluff". The opposite of fluffy (cotton candy) is crunchy (potato chips).
Not "exponentially" - not even linearly really. If you had cards with treshold 5 , 7 and 9 .. would you need to check how many cards you have in GY more than 3 times as often? No - actually counting the cards once would check for all of them..
Possibly my favorite thing about this channel is that it clearly doesn’t give af about the usual TH-cam bullshit. Y’all are just here to have good game discussions
My first precon 60-card deck was the BG Morbid deck from Innistrad, so I have alays been very aware of graveyard stuff like getting something in or out, tracknig numbers of things, etc. I think I would have enjoyed playing stuff with Threshold as I like filling the graveyard and making use of those numbers. I wasn't playing Magic during the Shadows Over Innistrad block, so I missed out on Madness and Delirium there.
My introduction was similar, but with a precon from Torment 😄. Loved graveyard stuff ever since.
@@distractionmakers The funny thing is that I eventually fell in love with Naya strategies like tokens or big creatures, all stuff that has to do with a board presence. Never really messed with a combination of a big board presence with graveyard synergy though, now that I think about it...
I’m surprised that delirium wasn’t mentioned
Another good one!
Crunchy is just.. obtuse in my dictionary. Obtuse mechanics that make you think a bit more or think about more things is *crunchy*. It probably does come from crunching as mentioned, but it even feels applicable to like.. walking on egg shells. You misstep and you crunch on something. You miss count and suddenly things are weird
I play an online CCG called Shadowverse, and for quite a while now, there's a good chance that more than 50% of meta decks revolve around a "barometer" of sorts. I thought it was pretty interesting to see how a game can use "barometers" differently.
For instance, take the aggro archetype of Rally Sword. Rally(X) is a mechanic that gives you a bonus effect when you have summoned X followers (the equivalent of creatures). Most of the time, however, the thresholds you have to reach are multiples of 5. There's one main exception which is Rally 7. So I can know what my opponent is capable to doing, just by knowing his Rally count.
Most other "barometers" aren't keyworded but instead written out in full, and typically has a "small" goal that makes you stronger, and a "big" goal that enables the cards you build the deck around. Shadowverse has a history bar to allow you to recall previous plays, but it also allows you to look at various important stats in case you forget, such as a player's Rally count. It also does highlight cards if you have achieved a condition that the card requires (like reaching Rally 15) to make it more obvious.
Since the board size for Shadowverse is 5, this is pretty abusable in combination with barometers that need you to summon cards, provided the decks that use them aren't aggressive (though even if they are, like the aforementioned Rally Sword, it can definitely still be exploited). The Chess Rune archetype wants to get eight 1/1 tokens named Magic Pawn killed. It is virtually impossible for them to win before hitting this mark. In Shadowverse, the attacker can choose followers as the target for an attack, so you can always kill off your Pawns by ramming them into enemies. So the strategy for the opponent is to just tank the 5 damage from the 1/1 tokens for one, sometimes even 2 turns if you are able to advance your gameplan without playing follower.. Or, if your opponent is at 7 out of 8 pawns, you can leave just one pawn alive (remember, the barometer is counting dead pawns) and not give them any followers to trade into (most damage effects in Shadowverse can only target enemies and not allies). Meanwhile, the Chess Rune player is gonna try to not just have five 1/1s on board, or after a new set introduced a board buff, to buff their entire board as a punish. Or there was an option to play a spell that destroys allied followers for a benefit, but Chess Rune didn't really utilize what was intended to be the benefit very well, but it's still an option because the self-destruction is the benefit. If I say out of context that a deck that wants to summon 8 tokens ASAP, sometimes spends a card and mana to destroy its own board, that would sound insane.
There's another deck called Evolve Blood, which aims to evolve their followers 5 times in the match (evolving is a mechanic that you can typically only do starting on the 2nd player's 4th turn, and only once per turn, but this deck has a ton of auto-evolve cards). Their combo relies on a card that, if you've evolved 5 times, it evolves all cards with a certain subtype on your board, and allows all your evolved followers to hit face. This pairs together with a card that summons itself from your deck at the start of the turn if you've hit 5 evolves. These two cards alone bring your opponent from 20 to 7, so it's typically an OTK. But it's a very fragile OTK. Virtually any attempt at stopping the OTK will work unless you have spare mana to cast more spells. So, even if you can OTK on Turn 5, you might want to wait another turn to have more mana up to nullify any attempts your opponent makes at stopping the OTK. Some decks run two of the self-summoning follower, some run three; those that run two are more interesting. It's decently likely to draw one of them. If you do, you only have one left in deck, so the moment you decide to hit 5 evolves, you have basically hard committed into going into the combo next turn. If your opponent manages to put up an adequate defense to stop the OTK, you typically lose there and then. What's worse is that this deck's best removal and healing and defensive tools all evolve themselves or require you to reach 5 evolves; and if your opponent is setting up defensive options ahead of time, well, you can only shut them down by playing these auto-evolving cards. Whilst hitting the 5 evolve mark makes your deck stronger, and allows you to unleash an OTK the next turn, it's also a commitment that you can't back out of that could backfire and destroy your only win condition.
Great info on shadowverse! I feel like it’s gone under the radar a bit, at least in the US, but it has some really interesting ideas. We’ll add it to the list of games to discuss!
@@distractionmakers Perhaps not so soon. It would be interesting to see your takes on their upcoming Throwback Rotation whilst we cry about the sudden long delay to its successor
Ah Shadowverse... I wish I could give it up...
Did you see it went analog too here recently? I got a few of its decks.
'Cross it once' was "The City's Blessing"
Threshold as a mechanic is a part of progressing the game as a whole. Each time you do something in MTG you set some kind of counter. Each starting point of them you can count as "threshold 1" then each effect checking the game state for something is essentially looking for some kind threshold. :) Setting this numer high enough to make it difficult to achieve is the reason to give player an award. After all it's just another knob to give to developers by designers.
You guys have the most epic T-shirts
it may be worth bringing up descend as a threshold variant that was recently introduced
Or Collect Evidence. You need a specific amount, in a specific game space, that grows over time. It’s just mana value instead of number of cards.
resource systems are very interesting to me and i would love to hear your thoughts on how the digimon card game (the current iteration, released in 2020) approaches resources.
threshold has been mentioned by wizards to be somewhat difficult to include in sets in that threshold is very specifically 1 attached to graveyard decks and two considered too easy of a condition to fulfill in terms of both deckbuilding costs and gameplay
threshold is easiest of all the graveyard barometer mechanics as your deck just needs to play some sort of discard or self mill with no other costs
vs
delirium which prices you into playing bad cards to fulfill the 4 types
descend which is permenants
I also like the use of barometers in paper as opposed to some sort of turn count system, just much easier to manage. I dont think magic has any turn based things besides turn one, or if you didnt go first stuff.
Threshold happens to be one of my more favorite non-evergreen mechanics in MTG, however one thing that had always struck me as a little odd is that the threshold is always 7. This feels like something that could naturally have a number attached to increase design space, like Threshold 10 for abilities that unlock at 10 cards in grave or Threshold 5 for 5 etc. secondly 7 specifically always seemed a bit arbitrary and random. Why 7? Why not 6 or 8?
That being said, you do actually have a good point in that having variable threshold numbers would give a lot more to track and make for even more needlessly complex board states. However, it still doesn't answer that curious question of why 7 exactly 🤔. Perhaps it has something to do with the maximum starting hand size being 7, or perhaps they simply just did loads and loads of play testing at numerous variables and 7 just seemed perfect. 7 also just seems like such a ubiquitous number in general, so maybe it was intuition to make it 7 due to that. Does make me curious, but love the mechanic nonetheless!
It's not hard to keep track of graveyards. A die will do it. Layering them such that relevant cards are turned sideways in the graveyard or some other such thing helps a lot.
*Threshold? That's just kicker.*
Descent from LCI was basically threshold with a variable.
With the caveat that there were only 3 different variables, 4 permanents, 8 permanents, or the card scales with each permanent.
Me before video: ooh something that isn't Kicker?
Shelldock isle is one of the few cards that cares about tracking cards in deck.
Its awkward enough online, in paper its even worse. Fun card though
So Tarmogoyf is a Barometer. Or is it a Tarmometer ?
Not necessarily related, but Threshold-likes feel horrible with those old cards that care about the order of your graveyard, and both of those were relevant in some Pauper decks I played years ago.
Having to go through the graveyard every now and then while keeping the order intact is so annoying IRL.
hi guys, we like you, no thershold, we don't need 7 cards in the graveyard
La Mort T-shirt. Nice nice.
If I'm baked my fast math is wonky so keeping the gy displayed let's me count cards and %s faster. 😅
12:32 And I was wondering why this guy looked so overly handsome today... it's like this movie trope with the wallflower girl 🤣
Man, metelcraft could have been a great mechanic. Too bad it was sabotaged by only ever triggering +2/+2 on colourless artifact creatures in a set that had infect and proliferate.
to bad mtg threw out good card design like this a long time ago. threshold totally sucks now.
Genuine question. What’s the point of having a sneak peak intro of a 12 minute video? Especially when the preview shows something that is two minutes in? It just seems really pointless and annoying like “yeah you had just said that”
It’s just a hook. A funny moment or something we want to highlight about the conversation.
Yeah a lot of content creators are doing it now. Supposedly it is good? But I tend to not care for it.
@@distractionmakers I don’t think it has the effect you think it does. All it does is increase the video length by 10%.