Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #397 - Innistrad Showdown

Episode Date: December 30, 2016

Mark pits the mechanics of the last two blocks set on Innistrad against one another.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so a little while ago I did something called the Ravnica Showdown, and you guys really liked it. So I then did the Mirrodin Showdown, and you guys liked that. Well, you haven't seen it yet, but I think you'll like it. So today I've decided to do the Innistrad Showdown. Oh! So here's how this works for those who have never heard a showdown podcast before. What I do is I take two different blocks, and I take all the mechanics of the blocks, and I compare them against each other.

And what I do is I grade each mechanic on a scale of one to three. Three means you are a superstar mechanic, an awesome mechanic that I see a rosy future for. Two means you're a good mechanic. You weren't a showstopper, but, you know, you're a good, solid mechanic. And good chance we'll see you again. One means, eh, you left something to be desired. And barring sort of the perfect circumstance, I probably don't think we'll see you again.

So what's going to happen is, I took each of the two blocks. So for Innistrad, I also counted curses as a mechanic so that we'd have eight for each. So Innistrad has eight mechanics. Shadows over Innistrad has eight mechanics. So let me recount which ones we're going to be doing today. So for Innistrad, I have Transform, Flashback, Morbid, Curses, Fateful Hour, Undying, Miracles, and Soulbond.

And for Shadows over Innistrad, I have Transform, Delirium, Investigate, Madness, Skulk, Meld, Emerge, and Escalate. And so we're going to see in the battle of Innistrad versus Shadow over Innistrad, who shall be victorious? Okay, so here's how it works. I'll go one by one. So I'll take two of them and have them against each other. I'll talk about them.

Then I will grade them. Then I will recap the score as we go along. So first off, it's Transform versus Transform. Okay, well, this one's a no-brainer. It's the one mechanic that both sets had. Double-faced cards were a big part of Innistrad. They were a big part of Shadows over Innistrad. And so the Transform mechanic came about

because we were trying to figure out how to solve what I called the werewolf problem. And what that was is when we first sat down to make Innistrad, we wrote on the board everything we thought that people would expect from a gothic horror set. And werewolves was high on the list. And werewolves hadn't been something that we had done a lot of. Magic, I think,

had done three werewolves before that, none of which were particularly memorable. And we had done vampires plenty of times. We had done spirits plenty of times. We had done zombies plenty of times. But really, werewolves, what I said to my team was, look, if we can make a werewolf shine,

if we can do werewolves right, you know, that's what this block needs. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that. We messed around a bunch of different mechanics, day, night, where you brought out this card and then sun and day, night, moon came out. But in the end, Tom Lapilli, who was on my team, mentioned that something they had done in Duel Masters,

which is another game we make, a trading card game we make for the Japanese market, had they done with double-faced cards. And so I admit I was a little skeptical at first, but it did make sense, so we tried it out. It ended up being the best choice. It was really flavorful. The neat thing about Transform is

normally when we have a card, we get to present a singular image. And not that you can't tell a story with a singular image, but it's hard. And that one of the things about having two images, essentially two cards with two images, is you really can show progression. And one of the things we realized when we started using the double-faced cards is not only can you use them for werewolves, but one of the themes of gothic horror was dark transformation of innocent things turning into dark and evil things. And then also there was transformations within the evil side of, like, you know, the vampire becoming a vampire bat, stuff like that. But anyway, we made really good use of it. The double-faced cards using Transform were really popular.

In fact, ironically, the first time in the first Innistrad block, we had Innistrad, then Dark Ascension, then Avacyn Restored. We actually did not do any double-faced cards in Avacyn Restored because there was a lot of concern. A lot of people, not me, a lot of people were worried that the double-faced cards wouldn't go over well. So we sort of hedged our bets by not putting them in the third set. It had kind of a mechanical reboot.

The funny thing is, after the sets came out, the biggest complaint about Absinthe Restored was no double-faced cards. So, they were a big hit. I will mention that double-faced cards have a lot more potential beyond just transform. Transform means you play side A, and then you do something to turn it into side B. mention that double-faced cards have a lot more potential beyond just transform. Transform means

you play side A and then you do something to turn it into side B. Sometimes you can turn it back to side A. I think there's a lot of space. Just in transform, there's a lot of space. You know, this is one of those mechanics that I think when I first made it, I had high hopes for it, but I really didn't realize the amount of depth. I i mean both it was super flavorful and then the amount of actual design depth in it is really big um the reason i know you're going to see transform again is there's just so many different things we can do with it and that's not i'm talking about things we can do with double-faced cards there's additional things beyond transform uh double-faced cards is one of the most as far as new design spaces we tapped into in the last

well i was gonna say a couple years but indestrata was like a while ago but uh since we first found cars is one of the most, as far as new design spaces we tapped into in the last, well, I was gonna say a couple years, but Industry was like a while ago, but since we first found them in Industry, it really is, it is amazing how many cool things you can do with them. Obviously, you guys saw the Planeswalkers, that was just one example of a different kind of way to use them, but anyway, it was, it's an awesome mechanic. I gave it a three for those that were in suspense. Transform got a three. Since both sets have Transform, they both get three points.

I could have not counted it, but I decided to count it, so both points will get a point. So, so far, after looking at Transform, Innistrad has three. Shadows over Innistrad, also three. It has tied three to three in the Innistrad has three. Shadows over Innistrad, also three. It has died three to three in the Innistrad Showdown. Oh! Okay. We move on to the next mechanic.

Flashback versus Delirium. So these are both graveyard mechanics. Flashback is a mechanic where you get a cast of spells, goes in Instants and Sorceries, and then when it's in your graveyard, if you spend the flashback cost, which most of the time is more expensive than its mana cost, but not always, then you can cast it again. It gets exiled when you cast it. So it allows you to cast a spell essentially twice.

Once normally, and once out of your graveyard, usually at a slightly higher cost out of your graveyard, sometimes a lot higher cost. at a slightly higher cross side of your graveyard. Sometimes a lot higher cross. Flashback first came about because I used to head judge the feature match area at the Pro Tour, and so I watched a lot of matches.

And one of the things I would do, sometimes the matches would get lopsided, but one person was just winning. What I would do in my brain, just entertain myself, was I'd come up with special abilities you'd give the losing player to try to make the match more interesting and one of those abilities was okay you can now cast you can cast instance and sorcerers out of your graveyard and so that uh that idea when we were working on Innistrad you know

which is a graveyard based set and I'm like oh this might be interesting and so it was inspired by I don't know might be interesting. And so it was inspired by, I don't know, me entertaining myself. But I thought it was a neat idea for a mechanic and so I used it. And Flashback has turned out to be I don't know what to say to this. A classic mechanic. Like a mechanic that

we've used a couple times already. We will use many times more. It is one of the standard bearer of mechanics. It's just a good, solid, like, just, it's the kind of mechanic that you know it delivers. I mean, it is both clever, it's interesting gameplay, the players really like it. It has lots of design space. It's like everything you would want to ask out of a mechanic. It just, it does it all.

It's a really, really strong mechanic. I mean from a design, I mean, not that it can't be strong from a power level, but I mean from a design standpoint that it is, it does all the things you need for a design mechanic to do. And so it is, anyway, it is a cluster. So I gave it a three. I mean, it is, like I said, it worked really well in Innistrad. It worked really well in Odyssey, which is the set that I first put it in.

It did cool things in Time Spiral when it came back there. You know, it is one of those things that, like, it's not an, hmm, might we bring back Flashback? No, of course. We'll bring back Flashback many, many times. It is one of the... When I ask R&D sometimes to list the top ten mechanics of all time, Flashback always ends up near the top. And when you guys voted in the head-to-head,

Flashback... Well, it wasn't all mechanics. It was repeated mechanics. But it was of the best mechanics. These mechanics that we've brought back, it was on repeated mechanics, and it won that. So, anyway, it is... Flashback is the creme de la creme of mechanics. These are mechanics that we've brought back. We've done repeated mechanics, and it won that. So, anyway,

it is, Flashback is the creme de la creme of mechanics. Delirium. Ah, Delirium. So, Delirium is a mechanic which says that if you have four or more different card types in your graveyard, it gets

upgraded. It gets better. And, so, I had mixed feelings on this one. This mechanic is one of those things where if you know what you're doing with it, it's a really interesting mechanic. It has cool interplay. It has, you know, it definitely does do neat gameplay and it affects deck

building in a neat way. It makes you really think about deck building. It has a lot of flow and play. There's a lot of interesting things you can do. Like, we tried threshold to bring back threshold in Shadows of Innistrad. And the problem with threshold was it just doesn't

have, you know, it's just kind of like, find a way to toss your cards in the graveyard and toss your cards in the graveyard. It's a little more subtle than that with Delirium. So Delirium definitely, like for those that understand what's going on, it really is an interesting mechanic. It plays well.

There's a lot of depth there. It affects not just gameplay decisions, but also deck building decisions. So on that way, it's a really good mechanic. depth there. It affects not just gameplay decisions, but also deck building decisions. So it, on that way, it's a really good mechanic. But, oh boy, this mechanic has proven to be sort of hard for players. It's hard

for a lot of players to sort of monitor, and it's particularly hard for people to monitor their opponent. It is something that makes you, essentially the way you play opponent is, okay, where are you at? What are you at? What do you have in play?

You're constantly going, okay, where are you in threshold? And what threshold creatures do you have? And, okay, what happens if you get threshold? It's very hard to monitor. It ended up being more complex than we realized. Sometimes when you playtest stuff and you try things out,

you get shorthand you're like oh okay players will figure this out and it is proven we talk to judges and things that delirium has been a lot harder than we had hoped and so it is

I was torn I do like how it plays but it has caused a lot of complication and a lot of problems for some subset of players. So I got torn. I was originally going to say, oh, it's not a three. It's not, it's not a breakaway, you know, showstopper. So I was like, okay, should I give it a two or do I give it a one?

And I ended up giving it a one and a half, which is the only, I don't give a one and a half very often, but I ended up giving this one a one and a half. So after two mechanics, Innistrad is at six points. Shadows of Innistrad is four and a half points in the Innistrad showdown. Oh, okay. So Innistrad has taken a small lead. So let's go to the next matchup. Morbid versus Investigate.

So Morbid was the third mechanic, third name mechanic in Innistrad. Basically, it says, the card says, if something has died this turn, there's an upgrade. Sometimes it goes on spells or on battlefield effects that, like, oh, when you cast

a card, like, okay, it's better if something's died this turn. Sometimes it allows you to trigger certain activated abilities, or sometimes there are trigger abilities that happen if that's true. And so the idea is, the reason I made it, or the reason that the team made it

was we were trying to make death matter. We wanted death to be a thing. And so morbid was a way to sort of say, okay, like normally in a game, you have a 3-3, I have a 2-2, and I'm attacking. If I attack my 2-2 into your 3-3, the normal thing is, oh, okay, maybe they have a giant growth, you know. It's sort of like, oh, what combat trick might they have? But in Innistrad, it's sort of like he's like, well, it's 2-2, and 3-3's like, oh, do I, might not be a trick, maybe he just, maybe he wants me to kill his creature. Oh, do I want it? Did I just take the damage? Do I kill the creature? You know, that it made, one of the things we

wanted about Innistrad is we really wanted it to be suspenseful, and we wanted you to be afraid. And so, being afraid of death, of things things dying was kind of a cool thing to do um and so that's what Morbid did um so Morbid is it's a really solid mechanic I do think we'll bring it back not a showstopper so uh I ended up giving it a two um but it's very solid mechanic a mechanic that um like it's not it's another one of the mechanics that yeah we'll bring it back it's a very solid mechanic. A mechanic that... Like, it's not... It's not one of those mechanics that, yeah, we'll bring it back. In the right place, doing the right thing,

it's a cool mechanic. And its design space is a little tighter than something like Flashback, but there's still plenty of design space in it, and there's some tweaks and twists we can do with it. Okay, Investigate. So Investigate came about because the story had Jace investigating

a mystery. And when we first designed the set, really we were more about the environment. And so we were people going crazy. So, you know, delirium and madness and stuff. And we realized that we needed something to sort of match up with the mystery flavor of the story. So we decided to make a mechanic called Investigate. We like that name a lot. And so in design, we made a mechanic that kind of worked like impulsive drawing, where if you play the spell, you've got to exile a card from your library, and then until the beginning of your next turn, I think, until the beginning of your next, oh no, to the end of your next turn, I think, until the beginning of your next,

oh no, to the end of your next turn, I think it was. Anyway, you had a chance to cast a spell for a while that you exiled it and so it was a cantrip but not quite a cantrip

because you still had to cast it. So it wasn't a complete cantrip. We were trying to figure out a way to, because investigate felt like it was a good place to do some card advantage but we wanted something

that wasn't so, that didn't have so much card advantage that it was causing problems. And sometimes a cantrip of a full card is a lot, so we wanted to be able to give you less than a full card. We handed that over to the development team. I don't remember exactly. There were some developmental problems with the mechanic. Obviously, he had some memory issues. So they ended up coming with their own version of Investigate,

which is the one that got printed in the set. So Investigate, the way it works, the final version, is when you cast something with Investigate, it makes a clue token, which is an artifact token that you can spend two and sacrifice to draw a card. So the idea is it gives you access to a card, but not a full card. You still have to pay something for it. It also ends up being a token, and it's an artifact token, so that interacts with some stuff

in like Kaladesh and such. But anyway, it was a very clever thing, and it was a neat design. I think there's mysteries on MiniWorld, so I feel like Investigate could make sense in a lot of different places. And it really is a nice, clean mechanic. And it was very popular.

People liked it a lot. It was a crowd pleaser. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes we made is we stopped. We didn't put in Eldritch Moon. Mostly for story reasons because there was no more investigating. At the end of the Shadows of Innistrad story, Jace figures out what's going on. So we're like, well, he's not investigating anymore. He figured out what's going on.

But I think for gameplay reasons, for draft reasons, we really should have kept it in the set. And that's one of the mistakes of Eldritch Moon was taking it out, which all in the design team. The design team took it out. So we made a mistake. But anyway, so I decided to give this a three. I really think Investigate is a crowd pleaser.

People really like it. I think it's useful. It's super flexible. A lot of design space. Okay, so after three, we'll see. We have Innistrad is eight points, and Shadows of Innistrad is seven and a half points. Closing the gap.

Very close. So right now, eight to seven and a half in the Innistrad Showdown. Oh! Okay, so now we get to seven and a half in the Innistrad showdown. Oh! Okay, so now we get to the fourth and final mechanic, the unnamed mechanic of Innistrad, Curses. And it's going to take on Madness from Shadows of Innistrad. Okay, so Curses came about. The origin of Curses is you've got to go back to Unglued.

So in Unglued, I had a card called Volrath's motion sensor. Volrath, for those who don't know, was the villain of the original Weblight saga. The beginning part of it. The Tempest story. And anyway, the idea was

because the unsets are silly, that Volrath didn't want people stealing food from his refrigerator at night. So he made a little motion sensor. So what you had to do is you had to balance it on the back of your hand, and if it ever fell off

then something bad happened. And the idea was that I literally was putting the enchantment on you. So I came up with a fun idea. I said, well, since I'm enchanting my opponent, basically, I'm going to make an enchant player. And anyway, that tickled my funny bone. So when I was working on Odyssey, not Odyssey,

I was working on Shadows of Innistrad, we came up with the idea of curses. That's something we wrote down early on. And I said, oh, what if you, in fact, did get to enchant the opponent? And so I went and talked to the rules people and said, well, what would happen if we did enchant players? Is that a problem? And they're like, no, no, it makes sense.

I mean, it's a little quirky since, obviously, we had done enchantments that clearly affected the opponent. But for flavor, we decided that, you know, the one thing that does matter is if your opponent has Hex Poof or Shroud, and there's at least one card in Magic that can do that, then you can't target him. But other than that, pretty much it's similar to having Enchantment that just happens to affect them. But we made Enchant Players, we made Curses. We ended up up putting curses in Innistrad.

Originally, Mark Gottlieb, who was the rules manager at the time, didn't want the subtype. And then normally the rule was we could only have a subtype if it mechanically mattered. So I actually ended up making, I think, two cards that mattered. I think we made two cards in the

first set and maybe one in the second set. The two I remember in Innistrad was we made a witch and when the witch died it cursed you. So you went through your library and got a curse

and put it on your opponent. Like, don't kill the witch it will curse you. And then we had an amulet that protected you from curses. So we definitely did some flavorful things that tied into curses.

I'm not sure whether the amulet was necessary since other curses were that strong. But anyway, we definitely wanted to do some build-around stuff with Curses. So, Curses, it was

one of those things that we didn't do, we did some with, but we didn't make it a major thing in Innistrad. But it really, the people who like Curses were big fans. And then we ended up bringing it back in a Commander product. And it's the kind of thing that's flavorful, that

we now have a way that's pretty easy, that's pretty open-ended, to do curses. All curses require an enchant player, and it does something bad to the enchanted player. Like, you can't have good curses, by the way. It's not like enchanted player gains three life every turn. Well, it's not much of a curse.

We do have a few curses where if you're clever, you can find a way to turn into a positive, but that's a little bit different than just being a positive. But anyway, curses are something where I'm pretty confident we will see curses again. It is definitely a super flavorful and pretty rich design

space. So, anyway, I gave curses a two. Not a three, not a showstopper. It wasn't like, I mean, Curses have their fans, but it wasn't, it didn't rank, you know, near the top in our market research, but it was definitely, it was well-liked, and it was very liked

by a subset of people that really enjoyed Curses. Okay, Madness. So, Madness was first invented in Torment, which was in the Odyssey block. What happened was we, because Odyssey was a graveyard set, and we had Threshold cared about having cards in your graveyard, and Flashback allowed you to cast cards out of your graveyard.

And it was a graveyard set. We had a lot of theme. We had cards that worked in your graveyard. So discarding cards was something that really enabled that theme. So we did a bunch of different things with discarding cards was something that really enabled that theme. So we did a bunch of different things with discarding cards. So the idea in Torment was, well, there's a lot of things that are discarding cards. What if we somehow rewarded you for discarding cards? Okay, so the way that madness works is that whenever you discard a card, if the card has madness, there's a cost and you can pay it.

So if you discard a card, usually for reduced cost, you can cast a Madness card. So A, you can combo with discard effects to make a cheaper version of casting the spell, but also you get to both discard a card and get the cost for discarding a card and get your spell out of it. So it allows you to sort of abuse discard. Madness, I mean, Odyssey block was pretty strong power-wise. Madness definitely ended up being both really strong power-wise and it caused both confusion among players and had a lot of rules issues. In fact, when I graded madness on my storm scale, the scale that I do in my blog and I started doing on my articles,

about how likely something's to return, one being super likely, ten being very unlikely, storm being ten, what mechanic's name I'm sure, storm mechanic. So I gave it an eight. And what an eight means is the stars have to align. I don't think we're going to see this what an 8 means is the stars have to align. I don't think we're going to see this again, well, unless the stars align. And so Odyssey, especially Torment, had a theme all about madness.

And Shadows of Innistrad had a theme about madness, about all the people of Innistrad were going crazy due to the influence of Emrakul. So it seemed like the stars were aligning. Like, oh, we have a set all about madness. We have a mechanic called madness.

We have graveyard enabling, meaning we're going to want to do discard effects. Okay. And a lot of ways, for those that didn't realize, Shadows of Innistrad, in a lot of ways,

we were joked in R&D, it was Odyssey 2.0. You know, it had a mechanic, it had a threshold-y type mechanic in Delirium, much like Threshold in Odyssey. It had Flashback, which was in, or no, it didn't have Flashback, I'm sorry. It actually didn't have Flashback. Flashback was in original Odyssey. But it had Madness, which was from Odyssey block.

So, we actually had talked about bringing back Flashback, by the way, for Shadows, but we, uh, we were a little bit worried, we didn't want to bring too many things back, we wanted new stuff in the set, so, um, but if Flashback had come back, it would have been truly, truly Odyssey 2.0. Okay, so, Madness got brought back, um, development fixed some of the power level issues, so it wasn't quite as overpowered as it had been before. And the rules people technically fixed the rules issues, but it was still confusing for people. It still, in a lot of ways, we brought it back because we thought the flavor was so

good, and it was one of those mechanics that the people who love madness love madness, but it didn't really address the stuff we wanted to. I mean, I feel like it was just as confusing the second time around. It caused the same amount of, I mean, it's what we call an A-B mechanic in that you need not over, you need two categories. A, the cards that have madness, and B, cards that let you discard cards. Those are two separate things of cards. And trying to coordinate that was problematic.

And anyway, madness was a troublesome mechanic. I had labeled it as a troublesome mechanic. We said, oh, it seems like the perfect fit, and we brought it back. Still was a troublesome mechanic, so I'm giving Madness a 1. So that's the kind of thing, once again, I don't think we'll see it again. I mean, who knows? I said it once before. So we'll see. Anyway, Curses had a 2, and Madness had a 1.

So Innistrad is now at 10, and Shadows of Innistrad is at 8.5. So the score is 10 to 8.5 in the Innistrad Showdown. Oh! Okay, so now on the Innistrad side, we're moving on to the second set, to Dark Ascension, with a mechanic called Fateful Hour. And then on the Shadows of Innistrad, we'll talk about Skulk, which is the fifth mechanic from Shadows of Innistrad. Okay, so Fateful Hour, one of the things was, part of the story of

Dark Ascension was when we started in Innistrad, the humans were in trouble. They were surrounded on all sides by monsters. Their savior, Avacyn, had disappeared, and with her disappearance the angels had gotten hibernation and the angels had been the one thing protecting the humans, and so things were looking bad, and basically Dark Ascension was, and

they look even worse. The leader of the humans not only dies and becomes a zombie, like, you know, everything about them, their weapons that had been blessed by Avacyn had been protecting them, and slowly been losing their power. So like things are just at their absolute worst. And so I was trying to get a mechanic to capture

how bad things were for the humans. So we came up with an idea called Fateful Hour. So what Fateful Hour said is, it went on, I think it could go on any card type. Mostly went on Sorcerer's Instance, I think. I think it could be on Creatures with it went on, I think it could go on any card type. Mostly went on Sorcerer's Instance, I think. I think it could be on Creatures with ETB effects, I think.

But the idea of it was if you are at five or less life when you cast the spell, something extra happens. Something that's going to try to help protect you, keep you from dying. So the idea is that the humans, I think it was called desperation in playtest. So the idea is the humans are desperate. They're so desperate, you know, that in their fateful hour that they will, you know, push a little extra, get a little extra out of their spells. And one of the interesting things about it was shortly before we made this mechanic, we had finally gotten rid of

Mana Burn. Mana Burn was a mechanic, we had finally gotten rid of Mana Burn. Mana Burn was a mechanic, or I'm sorry, a rule that started with Alpha that said at the end of each phase, if you had any mana in your mana pool, you took one point of damage, you lost one life for every, or is it damage? Well, anyway, you ended up losing life for each thing.

I think maybe you took damage and then lost life. But anyway, you ended up losing a life for each mana in your pool. Now, normally that was a negative thing and try to discourage you from putting extra mana in your pool. But it allowed you to control your life. Because I could mana burn myself with unused mana, I could always sort of get my life lower if I needed to. So it didn't allow us to do a mechanic like this where life mattered. But once mana burn was gone away, now, okay, I've got to figure out ways to get it down

so that I can trigger it if I want to trigger it. But anyway, Fateful Hour was one of those mechanics that was flavorful, but it didn't really play out as well as we hoped. Most of the time you weren't at five life, and even when you were at five life, often you were so close to death that it just wasn't enough to matter. And so Faithful Hour kind of really didn't end up being much

of a player. I guess it mattered a little bit in Limited, but I don't know, it really wasn't. It was not a successful mechanic. It was not well liked by the players. It actually ended up being very narrow. There wasn't a lot of stuff to design with it.

So I give Faithful Hour a one. Skulk had a very different origin. So Skulk came about because we were trying to solve a problem of finding a blue-black mechanic, evergreen keyboard mechanic. It's the two colors that don't have an overlap. And that causes us problems a lot of times when we're trying to make cycles and things.

And so we've been on the look forever to try to find a blue-black overlap. And so we came up with the idea of Skulk. What Skulk was, is a mechanic that said I can't be blocked by any creature who's more powerful than me. So if I'm a one power creature, only another one power creature can block me.

I can't be blocked by a two power, three power, anything bigger than that can't block me. And the idea of this mechanic was, it was an invasion mechanic, which Blue and Black shared thematically, and more importantly, it had a built-in system to prevent abuse. Because a lot of the problems with unblockability is, like for example, original Innistrad had Invisible Stalker, which was a one-one creature that couldn't be blocked and had hexproof. So if I started putting things on it, and I gave it a cleaver or something,

it could start doing a lot of damage to my opponent. My opponent couldn't interact with it because they couldn't block it, and they couldn't target it because it had hexproof. And that proved to be a bit much. The nice thing about this thing is, the bigger you make it, the more things there are that can block it. So, like, if I decided to, you know, give it plus three, plus oh, well, all of a sudden, now any creature four power or more can block it. So we like the flavor of the idea that it answers some of the issues that unblockability had. The problem was, so what we did is we put in the set. Our idea now for

evergreen mechanics is we try things out first by putting them in sets. And that if we do something and it really works out, then it can go to evergreen status. So we decided to try it out. We thought it showed a lot of potential. but then what we found out was two things one was it turned out to be a little harder to sort of monitor than normal that figuring out okay I have this creature and what do you have and can you change the power

of any of your creatures and what can I do to my power and oh you know it just became a little more mathy than we expected the second thing which is probably the thing that doomed it even more, was the design space was really tight. Like, one power things with Sculpt were kind of interesting, and occasionally two power,

but beyond that, a three-part thing with Sculpt wasn't particularly interesting. Like, I can't be blocked by one or two things maybe on the board. And there are only so many combinations of things we could do with one or two power that the mechanic, we pretty much used up all the space in just the two sets we put it in. So

Skulk really proved to be not the mechanic we were looking for. Obviously not only did it not make evergreen status but I'm skeptical we'll even bring it back. So I'm giving Skulk a one. So Fifth Flower got a one. Skulk got a 1.

So we add up the scores now. Innistrad has 11 points, and Shadows of Innistrad has 9.5. In the Innistrad showdown! Okay, move on to the next mechanic. This is the other mechanic in Dark Ascension Undying, versus our first mechanic from Eldritch Moon, Meld. Okay, so when dying came about, sometimes what I do when I'm stuck on something,

is I'll talk to my wife, Laura. She's not super knowledgeable on magic. I mean, she knows how to play, but a lot of times I ask her, because she'll ask me very simple questions, and it's more, she's asking, like she just listens to what I say and sort of reflects back questions to me,

which is always very useful. So one day I've seen her, oh, so what had happened was I'd been very focused on the humans and the play of the humans and Tom Lapilli, who was the lead developer of, I don't know if it's not Elder Moon,

of Dark Ascension, said to me, you know, I think the problem is, look, we need to accentuate the positive. Like, yeah, yeah, humans are in trouble, but also there's awesome monsters. Hey, maybe the are in trouble, but also there's awesome monsters. Hey, maybe the reason to buy the set is there's awesome monsters.

You know, could we make a mechanic that plays up that there's awesome monsters? I said, you know, very good point. So I was trying to do that, and I was talking with Laura, and I said, I was having trouble solving this problem. She goes, well, what's the problem? I go, well, I need to make awesome monsters,

and I really want to play into some trope space of, you know, monsters being awesome. And so Laura says, okay, well, is there a mechanic that already exists that plays in that space? And I said, well, yeah, because the space I was interested in was the idea of monsters sort of doing something

that's monster-y. And so she asked if there's an existing mechanic. I go, yeah, there's a mechanic called Persist from Shadowmoor Block. And the idea of Persist was when the creature dies, if it doesn't have any counters on it, it comes back to play, back to the battlefield, with a minus one, minus one counter. So the idea is like it's a three, three creature dies, and it comes back. Now it's a two, two creature, but you get sort of a second life.

And the next time it dies, it's got the counter on it, so it actually dies. So it gave creatures a second life. But I love the idea of, oh, I have a monster, and it dies, but it comes back. It's not dead yet. Because that's a staple of monster movies. So Laura says, well, could you just bring back Persist? I'm like, oh, no, the problem is Persist

uses minus one, minus one counters, and you know, we have plus one, plus one counters. We're the second set. The first set already established, we're plus one, plus one counters. We're the second set. The first set already established, we're plus one, plus one counters. And then, sometimes, a lot of times when you get ideas, it is a slow, like, you mull on it for many days, and slowly an idea comes to you. And sometimes you get to the thunderbolt moment, where like, bam! Well, this was one of the thunderbolt moment times.

Because I'm saying to Laura, oh, you know, you can't use it because of minus one, minus one counters. You're like, bam! Well, this was one of the Thunderbolt moment times. Because I'm saying to Laura, oh, you know, you can't use it because of minus one, minus one counters. Like, bam! Wait! What if we just did Persist, but with plus one, plus one counters? What if the creature dies, you kill it, and then it comes back stronger? Now that's an awesome monster!

And so we came up with Undying. That was Undying. And it ended up being, I mean, it definitely was a little bit of a challenge for development persistently said the idea that they slowly get worse where Undying is they slowly get better and it makes killing them extra scary but we were able to find

some ways to do it and we carved out some space and it was a really fun mechanic and players responded to it really well so I will give Undying a two. Meld, by the way, so we get to Eldritch Moon, the second set in Shadows of Innistrad, there's a mechanic we've been trying to do for ages, which was called Link, where the idea was you had two creatures that you could put together. So imagine one was a 2-2 flyer, the other one was a 1-1 lifelinker.

Put them together, now they're a 3-3 flying lifelinker! And we try to do versions of that many, many times. Ken was just set on doing a new Phyrexia. The idea of the Phyrexians are like experimenting and putting things together. But what ended up happening was

it just didn't work out. At the last minute, like in early development or late divine, it got changed to Phyrexian mana, and it never quite worked out. So meanwhile, cut forward to Eldritch Moon, Ken was trying to figure out how Gisela and Bruzella, no, Bruzella, Gisela and Bruzella, Bruzella, Bruzellazella. Giselle and Bruzella. Bruzella. Bruzella?

Bruzella. Is that right? I gave them names. There were two angels. Yeah, Giselle and Bru... Bruzella? Okay, I'm like... Anyway, there's two angels.

And they ended up getting morphed into a single entity that was this horrible entity. And that was something that was put together through the world building. And it was really cool. And there was images in the world guide. And Ken was trying to figure out how to do that. How do you start with two different angels

and then have them become this morphed angel? And then he realized that transform might actually be the answer. And so Meld came about because Ken realized is, well, you can have the two angels and then they can morph together

to make the mutated angel by having on the back side of the transform to make the giant card. And so Ken finally figured out how to make it work. So we did meld. I think design handed over

four melds, ended up going to three melds. Once again, kind of like double-faced cards, we're a little bit cautious. There's a lot of debate about how it would be received by the public. Of course, in the same manner, the public's response was awesome, and their big complaint was, why only three meld cards? I think meld is really cool. It's splashy. It's fun.

It is definitely a showstopper, and I do think you'll see meld again. So I give meld a three. So Undying got a two two meld got a three that meant that Innistrad is at 13 points and Shadows of Innistrad is now at 12 and a half points so it is almost tied in the Innistrad showdown oh okay next we get to miracle and emerge miracle from Avacyn restored and emerged from Eldritch Moon. So Miracle was a mechanic. We had tried making a mechanic called Forbidden that had cards that were really powerful

that you couldn't even put in your deck. And you had to jump through a hoop to get it into your deck. That ended up getting nixed by the development team. So we replaced it with something called Miracle, which is something that we had been trying to make forever, which is the idea of spells that had an effect when you drew them. I had actually tried to do it way back in Tempest spells that had an effect when you drew them. I had actually tried to do it way back in Tempest.

Brian had tried to do it a couple times. And anyway, Brian finally said he took an axe to the Gordian Knot was our metaphor, and just did it and talked to the rules team and figured out how to make it happen. Miracle is weird in that Miracle was a showstopper. Miracle was something that really excited some players,

but it also really, really upset other players. It is, when I talk about polarizing mechanics, it is one of the ones that's way up there. It was beloved by some and really, really, what I like to say, hated by others. It was really, really disliked. And so I'm not sure. We actually talked about bringing

Miracle back for Shadows, decided that we didn't want to bring it back. So I think there's a good chance that Miracles might not come back. I never say never, so who knows. But I ended up giving Miracle a 2 because to me it's both a 3 and a 1. So I averaged that and got to 2.

Emerge was a mechanic. Sam, the lead developer of Eldritch Moon, was trying to figure out how to get more colorless creatures in. We wanted to show creatures turning into Eldrazi. That was a big flavor. Obviously, the transform, all but one, but our legendary werewolf, all of them changed into Eldrazi, transformed into Eldrazi.

But we wanted a few more cards beyond just the transform cards. Legend of Werewolf, Legend of Werewolf, all of them changed into Eldrazi, transformed into Eldrazi. But we wanted a few more cards beyond just the transform cards. So the Emerge mechanic were colorless creatures that you could spend a color cost to play them. But if you sacrificed a creature, I'm sorry, if you sacrificed a creature, you could use the Emerge cost to play it, and then you subtracted the converted mana cost of the creature you sacked.

So the bigger the creature you sacked, the quicker you could get this out. And so it became a way to get out the... The flavor was your creature, ooh, transformed into this colorless creature, this Eldrazi. So it was really flavorful. The players liked it. It wasn't a showstopping mechanic, but it definitely was

a good, solid, flavorful mechanic. Played well. Definitely some space in it. Kind of mechanic I expect to see again. And it just was a good, solid, flavorful mechanic. Played well. Definitely some space in it. Kind of mechanic I expect to see again. And it just was a good, solid mechanic. So I gave Emerge a 2. So Miracle has a 2. Emerge has a 2. That means the total is 15 for

Innistrad, 14.5 in the Innistrad Showdown! Oh! Okay. It all comes down to the final matchup. Soulbond, which was an Avacyn Restored, versus Escalate, which was an Eldritch Moon. So Soulbond was this mechanic. The idea in Avacyn Restored was Avacyn gets released from the Hell Vault,

and then all the angels come out of hibernation, and the good guys finally band together to beat back the monsters. So there's this flavor of cooperation. So we really wanted a mechanic that sort of captured creatures working together. And Soulbond, a lot of people ask if it was inspired by banding. And the answer is, well, it came from the same place banding came from, which is the idea of the flavor of creatures working together. The way Soulbond worked was was when you cast soul bond,

you could choose another player that wasn't currently bonded with somebody, or if it was in play and you hadn't chosen somebody, when another creature comes in play, you can choose to bond them to it. And then once bonded, it granted an ability to itself and the bonded creature. So for example, let's say I gave plus one plus one when soul bonded. When I entered the battlefield, I could pick another creature. And if I did, then I and that creature got plus one plus one. Or if I didn't attach to anybody and then waited and then something else came into play, I could bond with that. Or I could bond something,

my bonded thing dies, and then I could rebond. Anyway, soul bond was flavorful. The problem was it was really, really, really confusing. Once again, at pre-releases, for example, we get a lot of feedback from judges. And Soulbond, ironically, in some ways, it was the spiritual successor to Banding. Because no one understood Banding. And really, people have a problem with Soulbond. It also had a lot of memory issues. Because this card affects that card.

So if I get in combat, you've got to remember that I have this card and this card is bonded to that card. There was a lot of sort of memory processing issues. It was a lot harder, you know, when you were trying to look at the board, especially on your opponent's side, remembering what was connected to what. I know, I mean, originally the mechanic, you only bonded when you entered the battlefield. It got changed, I think, during development, so it went both directions. That proved to be extra confusing. So, Slowbond was neat in flavor, but it just didn't end up actually playing nearly as well as the flavor would hopefully hint at.

It just made for a very complex board state. Escalade. So Escalade was basically when I way, way back when in I mean, Alpha had modal spells all the time. Then in Mirage, Bill and company made

the charms, which gave you three small choices when you cast it. And charms are very popular. So much so, we've done charms many, many times. That led to Aaron making commands, which were four choices. He chose two of them. And then in Mirrodin, I made...

Actually, Mirrodin is before commands. But anyway, Mirrodin I made Entwine, where there are modal cards where you could pay a cost to get both of the modal things. So anyway, Escalade was kind of a combination of Entwine and Charms. And the idea was

what if you could pay as many times as you want, like you got a menu of things to choose from, and then you could pay, so let's say for example there were three effects. You could, for free, you get one of the effects like a charm then you could pay a cost and get a second effect like like entwined but then you can continue to pay another cost and get um the third one so the idea is you could pay the entwined cost as many times as you wanted to do as many uh choices that had not yet been chosen. At common, sometimes there are only two choices, so there's more entwiny, but at higher rarities

there were more choices, and you could choose to choose them all. Escalade was meant to demonstrate, I guess, the good guys working together, the gate crash came, and the people of Innistrad and Tamio and a bunch of people all banded together to sort of stop Emrakul. and Tamio and a bunch of people all band together to sort of stop Emrakul. Escalate was weird in that it kind of was a mechanic out of place. It didn't, the flavor it was supposed to capture didn't really come through. The idea of it being cooperation, I can choose multiple modes, didn't really capture that.

I mean, Soulbond at least captured working together. I mean, it had a lot of complication issues, but it did convey working together. So Escalade's one of those mechanics that's in a weird space, which is, I don't dislike the mechanic, and I feel that maybe in the right place at the right time, it would make more sense. But it was a mechanic that just didn't fit in thematically. It didn't really fit in mechanically. It didn't make a lot of sense. The players were not particularly fond of it. I like to believe it's more because it didn't make sense, rather than in a vacuum it wasn't, there wasn't something there. But anyway,

it really, the big mistake, I think, in retrospect was we should have not put Escalade in the set, and instead carried over Investigate, and Eldritch Moon just would have been more popular for it. So in the end, when I grade it, I give Soulbound a 1. I give Escalate a 1.

So that means the final totals is Innistrad, 16 points. And Shadows over Innistrad, 15 and a half. So in the Innistrad showdown, Innistrad wins by half a point. 16 to

15 and a half. So once again, let's recap. So it was Transform with three points, Flashback for three points, Morbid for two, Curses for two, Fateful Hour for one, Undying for two,

Miracle for two, and Soulbond for one. You'll notice that the block starts really strong and gets weaker as it goes along. This is something I anticipated, that I knew that Innistrad had the edge early on, but would it slowly, you know, would it manage to make it across the line, defeating Shadows?

Shadows on Innistrad had Transform 3, Delirium 1.5, Investigate 3, Madness 1, Skulk 1, Meld 3, Emerge 2, Escalate 1, for a total of 15.5. So it was really, really close between the two. It's funny, by the way.

One of the ways that I do this is I will sit down and roughly map it out. And then I go back and I review and sort of rethink my things. And the thumbnail sketch of it, I actually had Shadows of Innistrad beating Innistrad. But then when I went back and sort of re-evaluated things, and one of the things I tried to do is

I mean, these grades are obviously subjective, in my opinion. But I really sort of wanted to think and look at all the factors of where things stood. Obviously, by the way, oh, so hopefully you guys will enjoy this. I mean, the Ravnica Showdown went really, really well.

So much so that I've recorded two of them. Like, I recorded the third one before you heard the second one. So I'm guessing you guys will like this. The plan for the next showdown is I'm probably going to do a Zendikar Showdown. That's the remaining set we have where we've had two blocks set on the same setting. Well, I take it back. Dominaria. I might be able to pull off a Dominaria on Dominaria 1,

although many, many blocks were on Dominaria. I am also looking forward to finding other neat and interesting ways. I have a few ideas of blocks that thematically go together, because I like the idea of pitting blocks that are somehow connected in some way, rather than just two random blocks against each other. But anyway, so that wraps up the Innistrad showdown. Awoo! If, by the way,

you are less familiar with some of the older mechanics, I always like to say that you can go to Gatherer on our website and look them up. There are a lot of

cool things that Magic did back in the day, although it saddens me a little bit or weirds me a little bit to say Innistrad was back in the day, although I think

that was eight years ago, so that is a while ago. Or eight years? Six years? Seven years? Anyway, it was a while ago. I'm now driving up to Rachel's school, so I want to thank you all before I quickly sign off. So I'm always happy when I find new things that I can do, and the showdowns are fun for me to do,

and you guys seem to like them, so I will continue. But anyway, as I drive up to Rachel's school, well, we all know that means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Well, see you guys all next time. Bye-bye.