As I write this, the full spoiler for Gatecrash isn’t available yet. Enough cards are spoiled that we do know what the new mechanics are going to be, though: extort, battalion, evolve, cipher, and bloodrush. The questions are: Which, if any, will have much impact? and, What sort of impact will they have? Will they be interesting and powerful game changers such as affinity, buyback, flashback, cycling, kicker, and so on? Or will they be annoying and forgotten such as flanking, banding, bushido, provoke, splice, clash, and friends? As both a Magic player/fan and a game designer/developer, I find the answers to these questions quite interesting, and I hope you will, too.

Battalion

Battalion is less of an ability and more a type of conditional trigger, allowing the name battalion to actually be an umbrella for several different abilities, such as: “Target creature can’t block,” “Your creature gets +2/+2,” “Creatures you control are indestructible,” and so on. Thus, there are two questions we need to ask when determining the power level of battalion. First, how easy is it to trigger the condition? Second, how powerful are the various rewards for meeting the condition?

As a general rule, being able to attack with three creatures at the same time is a pretty big deal, especially in Constructed. Part of the issue isn’t simply whether you have three creatures that you can attack with, but do you have three creatures that you want to attack with. The good news is that so far, most of the abilities that are attached to the triggers are ones that make it easier for you to be happy about attacking with most or all of your creatures on a given turn. Take “target creature can’t block” for example—perhaps the opponent has a creature that you wouldn’t want to have block your third-worst creature; well, now you can attack without worrying about it.

As a designer, I have two concerns about this ability. First, I worry that in order to avoid making it too swingy, they have to make it too lame. If they give you a powerful reward, it becomes swingy—most of the game it does nothing, but when you finally build your Voltron (getting to attack with three creatures, in this case), you just break the game wide open. If they don’t give you a powerful reward, it does nothing most of the game, and when you’ve jumped through the needed hoops to set it up, it feels anticlimactic.

My second concern is that is seems to be a win-more mechanic. If I’m attacking with three creatures, it means I’m probably already winning or at least ahead in most games. If you only give me my reward when I’m already winning, it’s not really fun for either player and/or perhaps is not that useful.

The thing I like about battalion as a designer is the way it pushes on deck design. I like that if you’re building a Limited deck and you see some creatures with good battalion rewards, it will probably affect how you build and play your deck. The R&D team at Wizards makes sure to keep Magic primarily a game about attacking with creatures and thus abilities that incentivize playing with a lot of creatures suit their purposes. Not only does battalion make you want to play with a lot of creatures, it also helps prevent creature stalemates, even if both players are packing their decks with dudes. You can only receive the reward by attacking, and if you do send a bunch of dudes, the reward will usually make it hard for your opponent to block in a way that will make you sad that you did.

Bloodrush

Mechanically, this ability is somewhat similar to cycling. You get to take an otherwise perfectly serviceable card and, for less mana, you can discard it for a cool effect that’s useful most of the time. The main way that it compares unfavorably to cycling is that it’s narrower. First, at least for now, it only appears to be attached to creature cards. Second, cycling is usually used to draw a card, which is pretty universally useful in Magic, while having an attacking creature, much less one that you want to spend a card and mana to pump, is a much less common scenario.

On the upside, I think the pluses far outweigh the minuses. It makes your creature cards with it more versatile. Now building a deck with only creatures seems more realistic. If you had a deck that only consisted of bloodrush creatures and land, it could easily be serviceable. Now you never have to worry about drawing too many or too few creatures. You also don’t have to worry about creature stall with your deck full of pump. You also don’t have to worry about being two-for-oned by permission since the pump is an ability, not a spell. Of course, now hard removal such as Terminate becomes even better, since it will give you a two-for-one against bloodrush.

Like battalion, this ability rewards you for aggression and for playing a lot of creatures; unlike battalion, you only need to be attacking with one creature, making it a more useful and more interesting ability. Like battalion, the strength of the ability will come down to the power level of the attached bonus and the creature it’s attached to. Based on the spoiled cards, it appears to be great for Limited, but too weak for Constructed. While it’s nice to have multiple modes to choose from, if both options are behind the curve in Constructed, the card typically won’t see play.

Cipher

Cipher continues the trend of abilities that reward you for playing a lot of creatures, for attacking with them, and for playing with a lot of removal. Unfortunately, it also has many of the same problems as battalion. First, it’s swingy. If your opponent kills the creature before cipher can trigger or you’re never in a position to attack, it does nothing. If you’re able to push the cipher creature through to deal damage, not only does your opponent take damage, but you receive your cipher reward. Like battalion, this is a conditional trigger with various potential rewards attached. With a difficult condition to meet, it’s hard to find a balanced reward that won’t be either too lame or too powerful when you do are able to trigger it.

Like bloodrush, I think cipher will be cool and somewhat powerful in Limited, but I think it will see little play in Constructed. It will be risky and hard to trigger the cipher in Constructed, and if you can’t trigger it, your card will just be overcosted—you paid for an ability that effectively wasn’t there.

Evolve

As with most sets, the mechanics in this one have a theme. In this case, the theme continues to be incentivizing players to play with a lot of creatures without it leading to a lot of creature stalemates. The cool wrinkle of evolve is that is gives you incentive to play with creatures of a variety of sizes. You want small creatures with evolve and then a bunch of big creatures to pump them up.

I like that playing with a bunch of creatures with evolve can lead to interesting play decisions. The first one is whether to play all of you evolve creatures in your hand before playing any big creatures or to play your big creatures as soon as possible. The second one is whether to make trades with evolve creatures or to keep them out of action in hopes of making them bigger.

Based on the spoiled cards, I don’t expect them to see much Constructed play, but I think this will be another powerful and interesting ability in Limited. The key to making creatures with this ability is to make them cheap and small and to give them good abilities for their costs. Also, be sure to remember that you only need the power or the toughness to be bigger, which increases your deck-building and play options with the ability.

Extort

Whenever you cast a spell, you may pay . If you do, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain that much life.

People say things like this are “the exception that proves the rule.” I don’t really know what that means, but extort is the one new mechanic in this set that doesn’t really intrinsically have anything to do with creatures and aggression. The important thing from the R&D perspective is that it fits the flavor wheel for white and black perfectly from a mechanical perspective, much as the other four abilities nicely fit their guilds.

As my friend Rada mentioned to me, many people will probably overrate this ability because they will just think of it as a bonus for every time they cast a spell instead of fully processing how big a drawback it is to pay an extra mana for a spell. In the early game and midgame, it will often be the wrong play not to use all your mana on your spells instead of playing cheaper ones so you can use this ability. When that’s the case, that will make your card with extort overcosted. If you can’t use a card’s ability, it effectively doesn’t have that ability, which means that you paid more than the card’s worth for it.

I do like the play tension this ability can cause. Not only is there the decision of whether to play off-curve, but the decision of when to play the card with extort is also interesting. Should you play it early to receive the trigger with more of the cards in your hand or should you curve out and play it later when you have fewer cards left to trigger it with?

Extort is my favorite new mechanic of the set because it’s a mana sink. Mana flood is among the biggest mechanical problems with Magic, so having abilities to sink mana into a good thing. Of course if you’re really flooded, that means you don’t have any spells to trigger extort with, but at that point, you have bigger problems than extort being weak.

From a mechanics standpoint, bloodrush is my second favorite because it can help prevent creature flood and creature drought. Wizards and I are big fans of mechanics that help keep games fun and help prevent bad games such as ones in which a player has a really frustrating draw. This is also evident in the other mechanics in this set because while they encourage playing a lot of creatures (which makes for fun games), they also are trying to avoid big stalemates, which are less fun.

Based on these mechanics, I expect Gatecrash to be a fun, interesting, and fast-paced set for Limited. On the other hand, while it might be a decent set for Constructed, I don’t think these mechanics will be a big part of the reason if that ends up being the case.