Dark Ascension prerelease has come and gone, and in a few days, it’ll be open season on our newest expansion. Articles abound regarding the set’s consequences for competitive formats, both Limited and Constructed, and you can even find a sizeable chunk of casual-centric content surrounding the new cards (hint: look at yesterday’s articles). But this is Vorthos Wednesday, and while there’s a ton to say about Dark Ascension’s flavor, we’re here to talk design. That leads me to one of my favorite exercises: evaluating somebody else’s design. Looking at an existing set and really considering every choice forces you to delve into its designers’ thought processes, and thus you have an opportunity to learn design lessons more deeply than just hearing them in a vacuum.

Let’s start generally. The biggest question for any second set is where it’s going to follow its predecessor and where it’s going to expand. Mark Rosewater and his team decided to explore new ground for flashback and double-faced cards, but they left morbid and the Werewolf triggers alone. At first, this may seem arbitrary, and in a way it is—the set only has so much room. But once you’ve decided that one mechanic can’t evolve, morbid is undoubtedly the right pick. Why? Morbid’s not as sexy as the rest of Innistrad’s mechanics, so if you’re going to disappoint whoever loves the static mechanic, you ought to pick the one with the fewest emotionally invested supporters. As for the Werewolf triggers, since other double-faced cards exist, they pretty much have to stay consistent to avoid ratcheting up the complexity of existing Werewolves a hundredfold.

Enough about the constants, let’s talk mechanical evolution.

Suppressed Memories

First up is our returning mechanic. Odyssey introduced flashback to provide simple second chance at a spell (not that the board states were simple with so many instant-speed flashback spells), and then Torment added non-mana flashback costs, and Judgment brought off-color costs. Time Spiral block didn’t evolve the mechanic at all, but true to form in its enormous complexity, it introduced all three forms right from the start. Innistrad brought back flashback with off-color costs, but up until now, the spells have always done the same thing twice.

Despite the big leap that Dark Ascension’s made in flashback design, Increasing Confusion didn’t strike me as particularly novel. After all, it looked an awful lot like Shards of Alara’s twist on cycling:

Obviously, this isn’t an issue for people who started playing really recently, but then again, neither is repeating Torment’s twist. This is somewhere Wizards could have conserved design space, but I think they made the right choice. Alternative-cost flashback would undoubtedly have pleased some Spikes, but the effect that R&D chose is much more intriguing to Timmies, and random flashback spells will already appeal to Spike just by the mechanic’s nature.

Harvey Dent and Friends

Double-faced cards, being a shock-and-awe-based mechanic, needed some extra oomph to continue being exciting after their initial introduction. Between that and the fact that Avacyn Restored won’t have any double-faced cards, they got two evolutions.

The first everybody knew was coming: transformers with new card types:

This change is pretty standard issue for this type of mechanic, but its implementation in Dark Ascension still raises a very interesting question: Should we depict a creature’s spark igniting?

It doesn’t have to be a Werewolf, but the point is that Wizards picked Garruk Relentless over a Werewolf ’walker, and having a double-faced planeswalker and an igniting planeswalker was deemed more than one block really needed. It’s not that this was a wasted opportunity since it’ll be fair game—and probably more exciting when double-faced cards make their eventual return.

The more interesting evolution is what Wizards did choose to do with their Werewolf mythic.

I’m almost positive that design handed in more than two cards with transform triggers, but development was right to cut it back. It’s insanely texty. That said, once they got down to two cards, they really ought to have replaced Ransacker with something else. At this low density, triggering from transformation feels like Huntmaster’s thing. Oh yeah, and some random uncommon has the ability, too; I guess Huntmaster isn’t that cool after all. Ransacker’s a well-made card, but its design is sufficiently more intriguing than whatever Wolf would fill its place to warrant knocking one of the set’s premier mythics down a peg.

Persistent

After making sure to follow in its predecessor’s footsteps, a second set needs to add to the drama, and the most obvious way to do this is with its new mechanics. Rosewater already gave us a bit of undying’s backstory, and I’m sure we’ll learn more when Undying Week comes around on the mothership. In the meantime, I think it’s pertinent to point out that despite the mechanic’s apparent similarity to persist, it plays much better as a monster mechanic because it’s scarier to have your opponent’s creature come back stronger than when it feels like you’re at least whittling it down.

That’s half of the reason that undying apparently presented development with a lot more problems than persist did in Shadowmoor. The other half is that Innistrad block, and Dark Ascension in particular, is full of easy card advantage. Development’s done its job well, but there are only so many playable common flashback spells to make that don’t turn into two-for-ones in a long game, and undying now presents more of the same problem. Actually it’s worse—Development kept Innistrad Limited from being purely a game of attrition by increasing the format’s speed, but undying creatures make two-for-ones while staunching the bleeding, and thus undo all of the hard work that went into balancing flashback . . . Unless, that is, they can’t block.

On the other hand, it’s poor form to make a bunch of cards that look awesome but aren’t actually worthwhile. If a player can build his deck to survive into the late-game, he should get the benefits his flashback spells naturally provide. So, R&D didn’t try to marginalize the effects; they took this divide and ran with it. Dark Ascension has an unprecedented number of expensive common and uncommon card-advantage spells. I haven’t played much of this new Limited format, but if I had to make a bet, I’d say that this divide has made for a dynamic Draft environment at the expense of making sealed deck more attrition-based.

Defining Moment

And then we come to fateful hour. Two and a half years after the fact, the removal of mana burn has finally made its first big impact.

Interestingly, Wizards put this mechanic next to Phyrexian mana in Standard, which undoubtedly affected fateful hour’s development. If it were more difficult to bring yourself to 5 life, I’d expect yet a swingier effect at rare, but assuming Thraben Doomsayer excites people as is, it’s probably better to let them build around it.

On the design side, fateful hour is a perfect fit. Magic games become progressively more intense as you find yourself close to death, and fateful hour turns on right around when you feel as desperate as the people of Innistrad. The one issue is that because board states play out so differently, there will often be games in which you feel desperate, but fateful hour never turns on. From that perspective, I’d want to set the threshold at 6 or 7 life, but 5 feels a lot more natural to read. On top of that, having Brimstone Volley be lethal for those in their fateful hour probably adds more drama than those precarious games when you’re at 7 life.

Trendy Clothes

Before we get to individual cards, I wanted to mention a couple of interesting trends in the block thus far. As Mark Rosewater mentioned, Dark Ascension has a much smaller quotient of Humans than Innistrad (about two-thirds as many per Draft). But more than that, those that are in the set tend to be fighting against their own kind—yet another element that contributes to the set’s grim tones.

The trend that Rosewater neglected to mention is the abundance of multicolored and faux-multicolored cards in the block. Innistrad had ten off-color flashback cards, a cycle of allied utility lands, an inhuman cycle of multicolored mythics, Evil Twin, and Daybreak Ranger. Dark Ascension replicates Innistrad’s four cycles (though three of the lands will be in Avacyn Restored), and adds its own uncommon lord cycle alongside Sorin. On top of all that, we’ve heard that Innistrad’s dual lands weren’t part of the original design, but development insisted on them. That could all be intended to support decks in the current Standard, but I’d put my money on either Avacyn Restored or the next block having a multicolored theme of some sort.

Cards of Particular Interest

The biggest concern I have about Dark Ascension is the number of unintuitive cards.

I’m a judge, but when I first laid eyes on Hollowhenge Spirit, it took me a second to figure out whether removing a blocker from combat would allow damage to go through. It doesn’t—killing the blocker removes it from combat, too, but somehow, the strangeness of the effect keeps relevant examples from coming to mind. It was easy to observe this same effect when Innistrad released. I can’t count the number of people I’ve found confused about what Tree of Redemption’s toughness will be after activating its ability, but most of those players would have no problem telling you what happened if you activated Soul Conduit.

Séance isn’t confusing in the same way as Hollowhenge Spirit, but most people who read it over quickly wrongly assume that it grants haste. Similarly, I’ve heard claims that Increasing Vengeance is a strictly better Reverberate and that Ulvenwald Bear always puts counters on itself. Wizards messed around with the feeling of betrayal that cards like Exclusion Ritual create by doing the unexpected in New Phyrexia, and I have to say I’m pretty unhappy about the trend carrying over to the present day. As far as I’m concerned, Séance is no less offensive than AErathi Berserker. While both cards technically say what they do, neither ever plays the way that most players expect them to.

Admittedly, taking advantage of people’s inherent misconceptions can be an excellent tool for development. Take for instance, Chant of the Skifsang:

This card is much, much weaker than Sensory Deprivation, but unlike its 1-mana cousin, this card’s spoiling elicited claims that it would see Standard play and general respect for its power level. Why? Thirteen is a big number, and it’s not always obvious when bigger numbers have diminishing returns. Dealing 20 damage to a player is a lot more effective than dealing 7 damage to him, but dealing either amount to a creature will have the same result.

Speaking of dealing a lot of damage to a creature:

This should not be a red card. It’s existed in both white (Repentance) and black (Kiku's Shadow), and while I think white’s removal may have become a bit too strong of late, at least white’s game plan involves being able to deal with any creature. This card is very nearly “Destroy target creature” (it has a much smaller restriction than, say, Doom Blade), and red removal is different than black removal almost exclusively because it can’t deal with huge creatures. Tom LaPille wrote about Flame Slash skirting this line, but Wrack with Madness and Into the Maw of Hell are far on the other side of it.

Next up on our list of cards with important lessons seems pretty innocuous:

Why’s this card worthy of public outcry? It’s strictly worse than both Exclude and Dismiss; surely no greater insult has ever been paid to family Counterspell! So, umm, yeah. Terrible, just terrible. Except that both of those cards saw extensive Standard play, this card is probably intended primarily for Limited, and, most importantly, things can’t always get better.

If every new card were required to outdo all of its predecessors, we’d quickly fall into a never-ending chain of power creep. That’s why Wizards developed a genius pendulum method to let different effects become powerful intermittently—that way, we can have exciting cards without all of our old ones becoming useless. Counterspells have been strong in Standard since Magic 2011, so they ought to be tapering off in power now. Besides, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Bone to Ash makes it in Standard as it is.

Getting away from the first impressions of the masses for a bit, I wanted to highlight some interesting development at work on Silverclaw Griffin.

We normally don’t see 3-power first strikers at common, and with good reason. They create board stalls really easily. But what scares me more is one with flying. Not only can it stop combat, Plover Knights will often be better than Air Elemental on the offensive. After all, most Limited fliers are of the Wind Drake variety, so double-blocking could be an issue. Interestingly, while toughness is rarely relevant on first strikers, this exact situation makes Silverclaw Griffin much less oppressive than Plover Knights—or at least, it would if Innistrad wasn’t full of Kelinore Bats. Anyway, the fact that this card saw print should serve as another testament to how tempo-based this format was developed to be.

Next up, Dungeon Geists follows a proud tradition of preempting designs from Jay Treat’s faux Magic 2013 design project on Goblin Artisans; in this case:

I’m happy to see our designs showing up in real sets—it would seem to imply we have some idea what we’re doing, but I’m a bit disappointed to see Dungeon Geists. See, the reason Frigid Captor made its way into the file in the first place was that Mind Control is oppressive in Limited, and we were looking for a replacement bomb-uncommon effect. The fact that Geists uses a fairly simple execution at rare would seem to imply that this effect won’t show up on an uncommon any time soon; I’ll just hope that means that R&D found a better solution than ours.

I’ll leave you with one last curiosity: Evolving Wilds’s reprinting. In general, I think the easy and cheap color fixing provided by Terramorphic Expanse is a great thing to have in Standard, so when R&D let them rotate out, I assumed it must be in an effort to confront the problem of the loading screens—searching and shuffling. Particularly when Shimmering Grotto started to see Standard play, I thought perhaps we’d entered a new era of fewer shuffling effects, but now you can just color me confused. That’s all for this week. Last week’s Deadsands exploration provoked a lot of discussion, so I’ll look to explore that further next week unless you want something else. Let me know in the comments!

Jules Robins

julesdrobins at gmail dot com