This shows that Golos was not designed to intentionally fuel the explosive combo decks he ended up helming, but was instead meant to be a simple and effective commander for players trying to edge into the format. Specifically he says “As more and more players are playing Commander, we're trying to make sure that every set has some tools for the format.” and “Golos was designed as a simple five-color Commander that helps your mana, something most five-color Commander decks need.” In the 2019 article “ What Core Can I Say - Part 1” Mark Rosewater discusses the creation of Golos. So what lessons can we as designers take away from all this?įor my money, the most important lesson here is that players won’t always do what you expect them to with the pieces you give them. This isn’t to say there aren’t degenerate Sisay builds too of course, but it seems people are more willing to innovate with Sisay. Golos on the other hand tends to always be some variety of five color “Every combo piece I own” or “Good stuff”. The builds I’ve seen most often helmed by Sisay are vorthos style theme decks, shrines (Prior to Go-Shintai), and Background tribal. My working theory on this is that where Sisay guides the deck brewer in a vague direction, Golos is a blank slate on which anything can be applied. So why is that when both have similar power ceilings and support unusual strategies? Golos and Sisay are both extremely powerful commanders in a vacuum, but only one of them is currently banned in the format. To truly show the duality of utility though, let’s take our next two side by side. You’ll find a myriad of combo decks featuring tribes like Slivers and Elementals, but you’ll also find everything from Zuberas to Mercenaries. For examples of this just scroll through some Morophon decks on Moxfield. While it is undeniably a powerful card, it also supports weaker themes that are likely to never get any direct support from WotC. Morophon represents the middle of the scale here. Take our first of the three cards we’ll discus today for example Pet cards, unusual strategies, and completely janky themes are an integral part of what makes EDH the special beast that it is! But this is also where the duality of utility and intention comes into play. It’s an aspect of the game somewhat lost in more competitive, meta-driven, formats but something that thrives in EDH. This is an important part of Magic as a game, the concept of decks representing their pilots. Magic players are wild people who will make decks whether or not there is any official support for them. To start, let's get the framework established. These three cards are Morophon, Golos and Sisay from Modern Horizons To do this, let’s take a look at three different cards that are all meant to fill similar roles, and while each succeeds, they do so to varying degrees that change their reception and usage to insane degrees. This article will be using EDH as its reference point, but the lessons apply to all formats. This month I want to discuss two of the subtler parts of Magic design that highlight the tricky balance we have to strike as designers Utility and Player Intention. I hope you’ll all stick with us through that change. I’ll still write the occasional lore or general topic article, but CCC will mainly now be about design. I want to focus more on the design aspects of Magic, concepts and ideas that will help us all in our journey to create the best Magic cards we can. Before getting into this month’s article I want to quickly discuss a small change to CCC.įor most of CCC’s time it’s sort of been my place to write about whatever MTG thing caught my fancy that month, but I’d like to give it a more consistent tone starting from here forward. As always I’m East2West, and this is Coast to Coast Casual. Welcome back folks, it’s been far too long.
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